This book is an invitation to academic administrators, at every level, to engage in reflection on the ethical dimensions of their working lives.

This paper uses a study of the life story narratives of former classmates of Dutch and Moluccan descent to argue that the constructionist approach to intersectionality, with its account of identity as a narrative construction rather than a practice of naming, offers better tools for answering questions concerning intersectional identity formation than a more systemic intersectional approach. The case study also highlights the importance of the quest for origins in narratives. It demonstrates that theories of intersectionality are unjustified in subsuming (...) the issue of belonging under the identity marker of ethnicity, when all identities are performatively produced in and through narrative enactments that include belonging. Belongingness is a precarious achievement. The case study illustrates that if narrative accounts of a life fail to achieve narrative closure regarding roots, attempts to trace routes are seriously hampered. (shrink)

This article explores the everyday emotional attachments to martial discourses through the embodiment of popular culture representations of war bodies in cosplay. In cosplay – the creatio...

While popular debate grapples with the legality of gay marriage, networks of medical, political, and juridical discourses produce and situate sexuality in a field of knowledge that is constantly under examination and administration. The rationalization of sexuality, and its dispersion into multiple fields of knowledge, has become part of a system of power relations that produces identities and manages them. Within this context, this paper places Horkheimer and Adorno's excursus on Sade's Juliette in conversation with Foucault's first volume of the (...) History of Sexuality. It explores how instrumental reason and power/knowledge relationships produce discourses of sexuality, which have come to dominate Western society. It also explores possible sites of resistance, through the notion of performativity, that exist within these modes of rationalization and power. I argue that this interlocution of Horkheimer and Adorno with Foucault helps us see sexuality as a site of both domination and resistance. It also shows how sexuality is produced in a field of contestation where possibilities of practices of freedom are always circumscribed by modes of rationalization and networks of power. (shrink)

This article analyses representations of Conservative Laestadianism in contemporary Finnish and Finnish-American popular culture. Drawing from political studies, religious studies and cultural studies, the article sheds light on the ways in which Conservative Laestadianism is present in societal debate and in the cultural imagination. Focusing on religious corporeality, the article scrutinises the embodied practices of Conservative Laestadianism and the ways in which the representations participate in making sense of gender, sexuality, and power in religious communities. Contemporary understandings in popular culture (...) are revealed through the detailed analysis of four cultural products of different genres depicting Conservative Laestadianism: a film entitled Kielletty hedelmä, a novel entitled We Sinners, a reality television show entitled Iholla, and a play entitled Taivaslaulu. As a synthesis of the representations of Conservative Laestadianism, the article presents a dynamic triad of care, longing, and control. Furthermore, the article raises questions about the potential of popular culture in calling for a dialogue between Conservative Laestadianism and society at large. (shrink)

This article is about recent attempts by scholars, database practitioners, and curators to experiment in theoretically interesting ways with the conceptual design and the building of databases, archives, and other information systems. This article uses the term ‘‘archive’’ as an overarching category to include a diversity of technologies used to inventory objects and knowledge, to commit them to memory and for future use. The category of ‘‘archive’’ might include forms as diverse as the simple spreadsheet, the species inventory, the computerized (...) database, and the museum. Using this protean concept, this study suggests that we are currently witnessing a time where close convergences are occurring between social theory and archive construction. It identifies a ‘‘move’’ toward exposure of the guts of our archives and databases, toward exposing the contingencies, the framing, the reflexivity, and the politics embedded within them. Within this move, the study examines ways in which theories of performance and emergence have begun to influence the way that archives of different kinds are conceived and reflects on the role of Science and Technology Studies scholars in their construction. (shrink)

Si en Gender Trouble Butler presentaba una propuesta de la teoría de la performatividad de los actos de habla aplicada a la construcción del género, en su último libro, Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, articula una teoría de la performatividad aplicada a la acción colectiva de minorías o poblaciones que son estimadas como “desechables”. El interés de la propuesta que presentamos es analizar cómo la teoría de la performatividad de género se ha ido ampliando a las formas de (...) acción democrática; pasando así de ser una explicación centrada en las posibilidades identitarias de género a explicar las posibilidades para una vida vivible. Es lo que aquí llamamos la ampliación de la performatividad, del caso especial de género al caso general de una vida vivible. (shrink)

While popular debate grapples with the legality of gay marriage, networks of medical, political, and juridical discourses produce and situate sexuality in a field of knowledge that is constantly under examination and administration. The rationalization of sexuality, and its dispersion into multiple fields of knowledge, has become part of a system of power relations that produces identities and manages them. Within this context, this paper places Horkheimer and Adorno's excursus on Sade's Juliette in conversation with Foucault's first volume of the (...) History of Sexuality. It explores how instrumental reason and power/knowledge relationships produce discourses of sexuality, which have come to dominate Western society. It also explores possible sites of resistance, through the notion of performativity, that exist within these modes of rationalization and power. I argue that this interlocution of Horkheimer and Adorno with Foucault helps us see sexuality as a site of both domination and resistance. It also shows how sexuality is produced in a field of contestation where possibilities of practices of freedom are always circumscribed by modes of rationalization and networks of power. (shrink)

Social researchers have extensively addressed the immigration of one million Russian speakers to Israel/palestine over the past twenty-five years. However, the immigrants’ incorporation into the Israeli occupation regime and the ongoing colonisation of Palestine have rarely been questioned as such. In the interviews informing this article, Russian-speaking immigrant women living in Arab-Palestinian communities discuss their complex relations with Palestinian, Jewish-Israeli and Russian-Israeli communities. Sharing a background with Russian-speaking Jewish Israelis on the one hand, and marital kinship ties to Palestinians on (...) the other, these women encounter multiple boundaries of territory and identity in their everyday lives. Drawing on feminist border thinking, I explore these encounters as a navigation through geopolitical and epistemic borderlands in a dense colonial reality. I am particularly interested in the potential of such an exploration to question essentialism and destabilise binary ethno-national categories of identity, such as Arab/jew and Israeli/palestinian, that dominate not only hegemonic but also emancipatory discourses. These binary divisions are not a straightforward outcome of political regimes but rather the result of ongoing border-making processes, which are vulnerable to disorder and disruption. This perspective aims to enrich understandings of the roles that gendered ethno-national identities play in sustaining the colonial relations of power in Israel/palestine. (shrink)

This study explores the possibilities of identification and belonging in a socio-religious space that contains multiple communal boundaries. It is based on narrated accounts of White Christian German women living in Berlin, Germany, who have converted to Islam. Their shared cultural background with other White German women, their new Islamic religion, and, for some, their intermarriage affiliation with Muslims, position these women in a complex relation to the multiple communities within this space. This intersectional positioning opens up possibilities for constructing, (...) negotiating and articulating religious, cultural, and gender identification and belonging. This study aims to investigate how these women construct notions of gender, Islam and Muslimness, and how they position themselves in relation to communal boundaries of identification and belonging. It also explores the sense they make of their positionings, and how these are expressed in their daily lives. To this end, the research describes their encounters in the spheres of the community and the family. The research aims to contribute to an enhanced understanding of gutes Leben, the human flourishing, of White German women who have converted to Islam. (shrink)

Just as the nation is imagined and produced through everyday rhetoric and maps and flags, it is also constructed on the skin, and through bodies, by different types of corporeal `flagging'. In this article, I use two examples of contemporary surgical procedures to explore these dynamics. Aesthetic surgeries on `white' subjects are not often interrogated for their racializing effects, but I use the concept of `flagging' to explore how these surgeries work in the UK to align `white' bodies with a (...) white nation. US media coverage of Iraq invasion veterans with prosthetic limbs circulates narratives of heroism and patriotism, and I explore how the apparent `visibility' of these limbs works to re-embed notions of the US as a transcendent Christian nation. In these two examples of corporeal modification, the nation is `flagged' on the skin, reiterating relationships of belonging that echo practical and conceptual links with property. Propertied belonging — possessive and constitutive — unfolds through bodies, producing whiteness not only as property itself, but also as unmarked, habitual terrain. (shrink)