El sujeto migrante, por su condición intermedia de traductor cultural, presenta una perspectiva ambiguasobre los clichés del humanitarismo. El origen de las protagonistas de We Need New Names y Americanah les permite relatar la experiencia vivida con la ayuda humanitaria, a la vez que la migración y la distancia de esta condición, adquiriendo una voz crítica e irónicamente denunciatoria sobre las paradojas de la piedad. No obstante, en el mismo movimiento, su asentamiento en el país de recepción las desorienta y (...) les hace perder progresivamente su reflexión mordaz, convirtiéndolas en consumidoras del sufrimiento a la distancia y reforzando la colonialidad del poder. Primero, veremos el desarraigo de los sujetos migrantes, Ifemelu y Darling; luego, la evolución de las políticas y paradojas de la piedad y su influencia en el espectáculo del sufrimiento desde la mirada del sujeto migrante; finalmente, el artificio del humanitarismo cliché de los medios de comunicación, de la fotografía y su relación con las ong. (shrink)

My paper argues that Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology makes an important contribution to two central concerns of critical theory: the empirical analysis of the contradictions and conflicts of capitalist societies and the reflexive clarification of the epistemological and normative grounds of critique. I show how Boltanski’s assessment of the limitations of Bourdieu’s critical sociology significantly influenced his pragmatic sociology of critique and explication of the political philosophies present in actors’ practices of dispute and justification. Although pragmatism has revealed how social (...) life involves considerable uncertainty, Boltanski contends that critique needs to take into account how institutions generate semantic security, as well as symbolic violence. Boltanski’s endeavour to reformulate critique is compared with influential alternative conceptions, notably those of Habermas, Castoriadis, and Honneth. Despite its potential deficiencies and weaknesses, Boltanski’s reformulation of critique is found to be of considerable theoretical significance. In particular, Boltanski’s analysis of the role critique has played in the reorganization of capitalism can be extended, and his work is suggestive of how some of the intentions of critical theory can be pursued in new ways. (shrink)

In this discussion with Craig Browne, Luc Boltanski comments on how his recent work reconsiders the questions of agency and the nature of social explanation. Boltanski reflects on the connections between his investigations of grammars of justifications and his later work with Eve Chiapello on the historical transition to a new spirit of capitalism. The significance of politics, conflict and critique to Boltanski’s sociology are highlighted. Bolanski explains why he regards May 1968 as a major disruption of the capitalist social (...) order and how the conservative response to this contestation subsequently prevailed in France. The reorganisation of capitalism in recent decades has increased social division, yet Boltanski believes that the recent recession and existing discontent could lead to unexpected outcomes. (shrink)

Human rights are both a means for the ideological justification of the status quo and for its utopian subversion. In order to account for this paradox we need to consider the role that our capacity to form images plays in human rights discourses. I will first discuss how best to conceptualise the capacity to produce images, which is the focus of this paper. In order to go beyond the impasse generated by philosophical approaches to imagination as an individual faculty, and (...) by sociological approaches to the imaginary understood as a social context, I propose to use the category of the ‘imaginal’, understood simply as that which is made of images and can therefore be both the product of an individual faculty and a social context. Second, I show how the imaginal enters the three major strategies of justifications of human rights, when we think of them as ‘human’, as ‘rights’ and as ‘rational’. Finally, I will show that the imaginal is also the force that compels us to enforce human rights, to put ourselves in the shoes of others and imagine a world that is different from the one in which we are currently living. (shrink)

Este texto recoge parte de las reflexiones y del desarrollo del capítulo 5 del libro La barbarie que no vimos: Fotografía y memoria en Colombia. Aquí algunas preguntas que se intentan responder en este ensayo: ¿son las tecnologías las únicas responsables de la imposibilidad de ejercer una contemplación activa frente al infortunio de los demás? A propósito de la Parábola del Buen Samaritano, ¿este habría sido reemplazado por el espectador distante o implicado? ¿Qué sucede cuando ese espectador, de tanto ver (...) naufragios, termina fatigado? ¿Y de tanta fatiga, se vuelve indiferente? ¿Qué significa ser espectadores de naufragios en una época en la que la catástrofe no es ocasionada exclusivamente por fuerzas naturales sino por los propios seres humanos? ¿Es posible hallar hoy alguna orilla segura para reconocernos distanciados y salvados de las catástrofes ajenas? (shrink)

This article engages the French pragmatism of Laurent Thévenot, Luc Boltanski and Bruno Latour in debates on how to forge a moral-political sociology of ecological valuation, justification and critique. Picking up the debate initiated by Thévenot on the possible emergence of a novel ‘green’ order of worth, the article juxtaposes the sociology of critical capacity of Boltanski and Thévenot with the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. In doing so, the article suggests that each of these three pragmatic sociologists succeeds, in (...) characteristically different ways, in theoretically articulating an important but partial socio-political grammar of ecological worth. This claim is substantiated by invoking three case studies into environmental critique and compromise, on transnational carbon markets, urban sustainability projects, and Japanese whaling, respectively. Against this backdrop, the article concludes that – when read together as grammarians of the ecological bond – pragmatic sociology provides important insights into the bounded multiplicity of nature’s worth in political modernity. (shrink)

Axel Honneth’s development of the Frankfurt School’s Critical Social Theory has increased the amount of attention that is paid to the dimension of political praxis by emphasizing the social struggle for recognition. Nevertheless, the political-sociological axis of this tradition remains relatively unexplored and unclear. Taking this as a starting point, I investigate the contribution that the pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot could make to the fortification of this political dimension. I do this by tracing a line of (...) argument through several of Boltanski’s studies in the direction of a political-sociological axis. I show that this aspect of Boltanski’s sociology can be understood as a very fruitful analysis of processes of political articulation that may help Critical Theory overcome a political deficiency. (shrink)

News texts about war are clear manifestations of moral meanings, and the analysis of these texts usually centers on the ideal of neutral and fair representation of the war operations without undermining the audience's pity towards the victims of such violence. One aim of this article is to show through a concrete example how war correspondents bridge their moral task as eyewitnesses to disasters and calamities with their professional duty as objective observers, and how they manage, or indeed fail, to (...) bridge a proper distance between the audience and the distant Other. The illustrative example is taken from the Danish broadsheet Jyllands Posten, and it shows how the correspondents managed to, despite their proximity to the Iraqis, mitigate the suffering of war victims. Central to the analysis of proper distance are the journalistic practices that constrain the production of war texts, i.e. the role of war correspondents as eyewitnesses, and the need to adhere to the news value of identification. Finally, I argue for the need to supplement recent studies with cross-cultural comparative analysis of news as a class of texts contingent to a specific production process. (shrink)

This paper addresses one of the challenges in human rights education concerning the conceptualization of a pedagogical orientation that avoids both the pitfalls of a purely juridical address and a ‘cheap sentimental’ approach. The paper uses as its point of departure Richard Rorty’s key intervention on human rights discourse and argues that a more critical orientation of Rorty’s proposal on ‘sentimental education’ has important implications for HRE. This orientation is not limited to perspectives such as Rorty’s voyeuristic approach to sentimentality, (...) but rather focuses explicitly on the emotional and political consequences of various manifestations of sentimentality. Such an orientation in HRE will not only encourage learners to become more sympathetic to the living realities of those who suffer, but it will also interrogate the conditions of hearing narratives of suffering so that possibilities for cheap sentimentality are minimized as much as possible. (shrink)

This article provides a critical review of literature on ‘social suffering’. Analytical attention is focused upon the ways in which writers struggle to bring ‘meaning’ to this topic. All sense that there is always something in events of extreme suffering that resists conceptualisation and defies analysis. This problem of establishing a language for ‘thinking with suffering’ is explored with reference to the works of Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur and Max Weber. An agenda for sociological research is proposed which focuses on (...) the struggle to make sense out of the phenomenon of suffering as a force of cultural innovation. In this context, it is suggested that what is most interesting here is the evidence to suggest that, when faced with the ‘brute fact’ of a world where there appears to be too much suffering, people are always moved to make this phenomenon productive for thought and action. (shrink)

Etiske spørsmål knyttet til krise- og katastrofenyheter diskuteres som regel i forhold til personvern og journalistiske overtramp. Det er journalistenes utøvelse av sin profesjon i en katastrofesituasjon, og spesielt konsekvensene for ofre og pårørende, som har vært i fokus i den etiske debatten i Norge. Denne artikkelen ser nærmere på to etisk utfordrende forhold med eksempler fra utvalgte katastrofenyheter. På den ene sidendrøftes dethvordan økt personfokusering og nærhetskravet som journalistisk nyhetskriterium bidrar til at mennesket kan bli misbrukt for å øke (...) seertallene. Økt kommersialisering tvinger mediebedriftene til å ta i bruk dramaturgiske midler som kan true integriteten til de involverte i nyhetssendinger. På den andre siden diskuteres det, på grunnlag av resepsjonsforskningen, på hvilken måte publikum kan oppleve den journalistiske dramaturgien krenkende i katastrofenyhetene. Som teoretisk grunnlag vurderes Levinas og Løgstrups nærhetsetikk, som medieforskerne i Norge har brukt som en etisk rettesnor for å ivareta enkeltmenneskets krav på respekt i katastrofenyheter. I denne artikkelen hevdes det at nærhetsetikken kommer til kort i en kommersiell, fiksjonalisert og teknisk avansert nyhetsproduksjon. Det foreslås også hvordan enkeltmennesker kan presenteres mer etisk ansvarlig i katastrofenyheter. (shrink)

The article investigates the implications of mediatization for the legitimation strategies of humanitarian organizations. Based on a corpus of ~400 pages of brochure material from 1970 to 2007, the micro-textual processes involved in humanitarian organizations’ efforts to legitimate themselves and their moral claim were examined. A time trend analysis of the prioritization of actors in the material indicates that marked shifts in legitimation loci have taken place during the past 40 years. A discourse analysis unfolds the three dominant discourses behind (...) these shifts, namely legitimation by accountancy, legitimation by institutionalization, and legitimation by compensation. The analysis relates these changes to a problem of trust associated with mediatization through processes of mediation. (shrink)

This article makes a contribution to the on-going debates about universalism and cultural relativism from the perspective of sociology. We argue that bioethics has a universal range because it relates to three shared human characteristics,—human vulnerability, institutional precariousness and scarcity of resources. These three components of our argument provide support for a related notion of ‘weak foundationalism’ that emphasizes the universality and interrelatedness of human experience, rather than their cultural differences. After presenting a theoretical position on vulnerability and human rights, (...) we draw on recent criticism of this approach in order to paint a more nuanced picture. We conclude that the dichotomy between universalism and cultural relativism has some conceptual merit, but it also has obvious limitations when we consider the political economy of health and its impact on social inequality. (shrink)

The prevailing normative model of contemporary journalism, drawn primarily from a liberal enlightenment tradition emphasizing universal notions of rights, contributes to what many perceive as a crisis in contemporary journalism; at the least, Kantian models are too "thin" to provide an adequate ethical standard. We consider the extent to which an ethic of care, reconceived to address weaknesses identified in recent scholarly critiques, provides journalists with an alternative framework for moral decision making. We use the concept of unequal ethical pull (...) to rework caring and to promote caring for distant others because caring that remains at the personal level is inadequate as a moral value. We conclude by noting that public journalism and our retooled ethic of care share several important ideals. We suggest a program of mutually beneficial exploration, one that might help today's journalists cultivate the virtue of care as they work toward justice. (shrink)

Storm surges, flooding, heatwaves, and prolonged drought, as ever more regular features of life under deteriorating climate conditions, are unmistakably violent. Their effects on the lives of vulnerable human populations and ecosystems across the world are widely known to be devastating. Yet a legal order that denies the victims of such ecological persecution safe haven, no matter how great its use of force (e.g., detention, arrest, forced return) cannot, by definition, be violent. The power of law, used to protect states’ (...) rights to exclude from their jurisdictions growing numbers displaced involuntarily by global climate harms, in being a source of ‘legitimate right’, is never the same as violence. This article challenges the ongoing validity of this assumption. It points to some of the ways in which legal instruments are used today to deny those displaced by climatic conditions sufficient normative status to guarantee their safety. What is needed instead is a new critical normative understanding of the evolving relationship between climate change, violence, justice, and law, one that re-assesses the democratic justificatory grounds for the current positions of non-responsibility for the climate displaced whilst re-affirming such people’s legal and political status as equal co-members of the politically constituted international community of humanity. (shrink)

This article aims at grounding critical theories with the help of psy discourses. Even if the relationship between the two disciplines has always been a controversial one, the article argues that therapeutic knowledge that accesses empirical forms of social suffering may offer important insights for critical theory. This general argument is demonstrated by complementing the theories of Bourdieu and Habermas with a clinical description of depression. First, the limitations of the capabilities of these influential theories in terms of how they (...) can be used to conceptualize the variety of social suffering are introduced. Second, the psy discourses on depression are reviewed to identify and highlight latent references to the social. Third, by combining models of depressive suffering and various distortions of integration, an extended normative basis is elaborated. Instead of solely criticizing inequalities or distortions of communication, those social constellations are criticized that trap actors by producing a homogenous pattern of suffering. (shrink)

The ironic spectator: solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism, by Lilie Chouliaraki, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013, 238 pp., £16.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-7456-4210-6 The previous work of Li...

This article examines historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by utilizing a theoretical framework that combines a model of reiterated problem solving and a theory of cultural trauma. I illustrate how the event of the nuclear fallout in March 1954 allowed actors to consolidate previously fragmented commemorative practices into a master frame to define the postwar Japanese identity in terms of transnational commemoration of "Hiroshima." I also show that nationalization of trauma of "Hiroshima" involved (...) a shift from pity to sympathy in structures of feeling about the event. This historical study suggests that a reiterated problem-solving approach can be efficacious in analyzing how construction of national memory of a traumatic event connects with the recurrent reworking of national identity, on the one hand, and how a theory of cultural trauma can be helpful in exploring a synthesis of psychological and sociological approaches to commemoration of a traumatic event, on the other. (shrink)

This article addresses the question of what it is that visual depictions of illness portray, particularly images executed by or on behalf of people who have suffered serious illness. It takes up two lines of inquiry, both to do with the work that such pictures might perform. On the one hand, as works of art, there are questions about the form of signification in visual representations of this kind. On the other, as works of illness, there are issues concerning the (...) role of image-making for sufferers bearing witness to their situation. The article examines the issue of what it is to look at pictures of bodies scarred by treatment for serious disease, and follows this into questions about what it is possible and necessary to show in order to render illness experience tangible. By examining, as exemplars, two particular images of sufferers, it is argued that such portrayals work not just through making visible certain objects for scrutiny, but by figuratively instantiating persons so as to produce a `vision of the non-visual'. In this way picturing illness finds its place in what might be called a politics of care. (shrink)

The importance of emotions is supported by many authors of the ethics of care in contrast to the rationalistic paradigm of justice. However, the reference to the emotions remains generic. By focusing on three paradigmatic typologies, I propose to investigate this aspect further, and distinguish between the different emotions that motivate care. I will try, first, to offer a reflection on which emotions are likely to motivate ethical action within an ethics of care; second, to survey different potential obstacles to (...) these emotions and propose how they might be overcome to more successfully achieve good care and ethical action. (shrink)

This article explores the elective affinities between Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and the sociology of critical capacities. It argues that these two research programmes can be understood as symmetrical twins. We show the extent to which the exchange between Bruno Latour and Luc Boltanski has influenced their respective theoretical developments. Three strong encounters between the twin research programmes may be distinguished. The first encounter concerns explanations for social change. The second encounter focuses on the status of objects and their relationship to (...) places. The third encounter is about the concept of critique. Drawing on their long-term mutual readings, we gain insight into how pleas for symmetrical analysis raised in response to Bourdieu’s theory of fields have evolved within both ANT and the sociology of critical capacity. We conclude by relating the development of the respective research programmes to the issue of disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

Affective self-transformation premised on empathy has been understood within feminist and anti-racist literatures as central to achieving social justice. Through juxtaposing debates about empathy within feminist and anti-racist theory with rhetorics of empathy in international development, and particularly writing about ‘immersions’, this article explores how the workings of empathy might be reconceptualised when relations of postcoloniality and neoliberalism are placed in the foreground. I argue that in the neoliberal economy in which the international aid apparatus operates, empathetic self-transformation can become (...) commodified in ways that fix unequal affective subjects. Empathy may function here less to produce more intersubjective relations and ways of knowing than it does to augment the moral and affective capacities of development professionals. Yet, I suggest, it is in the ambivalences, tensions and contradictions of both emotion and neoliberalism that spaces for thinking and feeling transnational encounters differently might be cultivated. (shrink)

This article makes both a more general and a more specific argument, and while the latter relies upon the former, the inverse does not apply. The more general argument proposes that empirical disciplines such as sociology are better suited to the production of ethical knowledge than more characteristically abstract and legalistic disciplines such as philosophy and theology. The more specific argument, which is made through a critique of Bauman’s Levinasian articulation of ethics, proposes what it calls ‘pragmatic humanism’ as a (...) viable alternative model for sociological ethics to follow. This model rejects the abstract notion of some innate and universally distributed moral impulse, and instead turns to acknowledgement of the precariousness of life as a strategic resource in the construction, rather than revelation, of ethical solidarity. (shrink)

Context is a pivotal concept for social scientists in their attempt to weave singularities or universals to moral codes and political orders. However, in this, social scientists might be neglecting the ways in which individuals or groups who are excluded from the collective production of knowledge want to politicize their concerns also by claiming their uniqueness and singularity. In this article, drawing on the public controversy about access to dementia drugs on the U.K. National Health Service and on the work (...) of pioneering sociologist Helen McGill Hughes on “human interest stories,” the author argues that the “politics of singularities” can be articulated in two related ways within technical controversies. First, it expresses the unraveling of sociotechnical ties caused by institutional failure to take concerns into account. Second, it expresses the concrete uniqueness of persons caught by standardized, “universal” and impersonal implements and/or policies. Both these effects are underpinned by resourcing to allegorical expression, a literary form that while fostering political imagination in technological democracies might weaken Science and Technology Studies' ambitions to influence decision making. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the issue of the death of migrants and invites us to recognise bodily vulnerability and precariousness when confronted with the faceless and nameless dead migrant. It explores...

‘If it bleeds, it leads’, events characterised by fatalities, are likely to attract high levels of media coverage. This study adopts a multidisciplinary approach to investigate public discourses on the MH17 tragedy in Malaysia and the United Kingdom. First, corpus-based discourse analysis was employed to explore the construction of the Malaysian Airlines tragedy MH17 in four selected Malaysian and British newspapers. In addition, an attitudinal study examining 50 Malaysian and 50 UK nationals’ perceptions of the tragedy was conducted. Keywords analysis (...) revealed an overall tendency for the news media to construct the air tragedy through classifications between ‘us’ and ‘others’. Specifically, important ‘Us’ and non-important ‘Other’ in the Malaysian newspapers, versus good ‘Us’ and evil ‘Others’ in the British newspapers. The attitudinal analysis shows, for both the Malaysian and the UK respondents, the most salient associations with the MH17 tragedy related to ‘conflicts’. (shrink)

Packaging messages from different times and places, combining cognitive stimuli that would not otherwise be found together, journalists work discursively on various dimensions of distance to make the reality they construct and present more relevant and emotionally engaging for the audience. The present article makes a claim that such journalistic ‘work on distance’ and the resulting impression of ‘co-presence’ are central to the potential of television news discourse to affect cognitive–affective attitudes of the audience. The process of reducing the distance (...) is discussed under the term proximization and linked to the semiotic properties of the medium itself and to the news, understood both as a process and as a product. The data analysed come from the CNN news coverage of the Horn of Africa crisis in 2011. (shrink)

The bodies of non-White girls are hyper-visible in humanitarian discourses. This article engages in theoretical reflections around the articulation of Whiteness through the body of the third world girl. I curate and examine an archive of texts and visuals from menstrual hygiene and female genital mutilation (FGM) awareness campaigns to show how the figure of the third world girl is materialised simultaneously as deserving of care/protection and as a contaminant/imperfection. These apparently contradictory registers of legibility are possible due to the (...) reiteration of the non-White female body as ontologically dirty, incomplete and an imperfect representation of full humanity. The third world girl then is the constitutive outside of Whiteness, and her production as such conjoins humanitarian protection codes with penalising political regimes. The latter is reflected by new border patrolling initiatives in the US and UK, launched specifically to identify victims of FGM. Such exercises of state power craft racialised bodies for constant interrogation, prodding and, ultimately, ejection. These bodies then become the loci of benevolent necropower and experience slow social death. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article argues that Malthusianism as a series of discursive regimes, developed in the Victorian-era, serves in times of austerity to reproduce an elite understanding of social exclusion in which those in a state of poverty are to blame for their own situation. It highlights that Malthusianism is present in the public discourse, becoming an underlining feature in news coverage of the so-called ‘underclass’. Our findings broadly contradict the normative claim that journalism ‘speaks truth to power’, and suggest instead that (...) overall as a political practice, journalism tends to reproduce and reinforce hegemonic discourses of power. The piece is based on critical discourse analysis, which has been applied to a significant sample of news articles published by tabloid newspapers in Britain which focussed on the concept of the ‘underclass’. By looking at the evidence, the authors argue that the ‘underclass’ is a concept used by some journalists to cast people living in poverty as ‘undeserving’ of public and state support. In so doing, these journalists help create a narrative which supports cuts in welfare provisions and additional punitive measures against some of the most vulnerable members of society. (shrink)

“Brave the Shave”, a campaign by the UK charity Macmillan Cancer Support, encourages people to seek sponsorship to shave off all their hair and share the event on social media. Brave the Shave has...

I argue for a broad education in narratives as a way to address several problems found in moral psychology and social cognition. First, an education in narratives will address a common problem of narrowness or lack of diversity, shared by virtue ethics and the simulation theory of social cognition. Secondly, it also solves the ?starting problem? involved in the simulation approach. These discussions also relate directly to theories of empathy with special significance given to situational empathy.

Sociology requires a robust theory of how local circumstances create social order. When we analyze social structures not recognizing that they depend on groups with collective pasts and futures that are spatially situated and that are based on personal relations, we avoid a core sociological dimension: the importance of local context in constituting social worlds. Too often this has been the sociological stance, both in micro-sociological studies that examine interaction as untethered from local traditions and in research that treats culture (...) as autonomous from action and choice. Building on theories of action, group dynamics, and micro-cultures, I argue that a sociology of the local solves critical theoretical problems. The local is a stage on which social order gets produced and a lens for understanding how particular forms of action are selected. Treating ethnographic studies as readings of ongoing cultures, I examine how the continuing and referential features of group life (spatial arenas, relations, shared pasts) generate action and argue that local practices provide the basis for cultural extension, influencing societal expectations through the linkages among groups. (shrink)

Research on ethical issues within food systems is often human-centric. As a consequence, animal-centric policy debates where regulatory decisions about food are being made tend to be overlooked by food scholars and activists. This absence was notable in the recent debates around Australia’s animal live export industry. Using Foucault’s tools, we explore how ‘food security’ is conceptualised and governed within animal cruelty policy debates about the live export trade. The problem of food security produced in these debates shaped Indonesians as (...) ‘victims’ of food insecurity due to the nation’s inability to produce sufficient quantities of protein. This understanding of the problem reproduced the dominant framing of food security as a problem for developing countries addressed by increasing global food production. The underlying premise uncritically accepted in Australia’s debates on live export trade was that intensive animal agriculture, and Australia’s live export trade specifically, were essential to alleviating global food insecurity. Drawing on our findings, we show how dominant representations of ‘food security’, and related regulatory and technological trajectories, flourish where alliances between animal and food activists, scholarship, and movements are weak. Accordingly, we argue for agri-food scholars to take up opportunities to contribute to the policy discussions about the treatment of animals to effectively expand the kinds of problems, solutions, and strategies of resistance produced in the discourses surrounding food system issues. (shrink)