The focus on the everyday in this Special Issue reveals different kinds of emotional practices, their political effects and their political contestation within both micro- and macro-politics in int...

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...

This article contends that Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic understanding of corporeality is central to his interpretation of intellectual emancipation. Concretely, I will argue that Rancière’s aesthetic understanding can be viewed as a torsion of a body that affects its vital arrangements, which thereby open paths for political emancipation. I will support my claim with Rancière’s reading of the plebeian philosopher Gauny, as well as works that have not been sufficiently considered in secondary literature, such as The Nights of Labor and The (...) Ignorant Schoolmaster. My reading will, I maintain, help to question common interpretations of emancipation in Rancière that tend to read this notion either in dichotomous terms or as a merely ephemeral, evental practice with no concrete conditions of possibility and without long-lasting or verifiable effects in the world. (shrink)

Inspired by Adriana Cavarero’s recent work on maternal inclinations as a postural term, the overall purpose of this article is to seek out a geometry of the educational relation that is alien to the masculine myth of the ‘economic man’. Drawing on Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons’s critique of the marketization of education, reading their giving ‘shape and form’ to the scholastic school through the geometry of Cavarero’s ‘maternal inclinations’, the article shows how images and metaphors associated with the posture (...) of rectitude infuse the scholastic model of the school. At the same time, we argue, it testifies to a geometry of an inclined subject and, in doing so, it offers an opening for recovering the significance of the feminine and maternal to educational theory. Affirming this opening, the paper makes a shift of emphasis from scholastic techniques to educational postures. (shrink)

In May 2017, yet another South African university became a site of hate speech. Three students chose to display Nazi-inspired posters, which advertised an ‘Anglo-Afrikaner student’ event, under the motto ‘Fight for Stellenbosch’. That the posters provoked the response which it so obviously sought, was evident in the student outrage, and the swift condemnation from university management. Neither the prevalence of hate speech, nor its predictable responses, is new. The central concern of this article is to consider the extent to (...) which tolerance can offer a plausible response to hate speech. The questions which arise, however, are: Does the right to divergent viewpoints hold the same legitimacy as antagonistic ones? When is the boundary between legitimate and hate speech breached? Does a democracy imply the tolerance of all forms of speech? Or, are there limits to the forms of speech that a democracy ought to tolerate? (shrink)

This thesis examines the desire and efforts to ‘do something’ about what is variously called ‘modern slavery’ or ‘human trafficking’. Neoabolitionist efforts to fight such phenomena are typically wedded to a simplistic and essentialist ontology, unaware of or rejecting their own performativity. The thesis is not about slavery: it is about the ethico-political problem of responsibility and hospitality toward the other in the context of contemporary anti-slavery. What constitutes an ethical response to modern slavery? I explore the often violent effects (...) of particular answers to this question but ultimately argue that the focus on doing something threatens the very possibility of hospitality – of an ethical response. Through a conceptual vocabulary of ‘scenes’ I explore the performative interrelation of ontology and ethics. It is intended to help resist the metaphysical seductions of ontology and moral urgency. Scenes bundle specific ontologies, frames, conjured histories and futures, roles and narrative structures, distributions of concern, desire and enjoyment. Response begins with the discursive and affective co-constitution of the self, the one to whom we respond, and the scene in which it takes place. Scene-specific forms of responsibility can operate as a defence against the full force of responsibility to the other. Chapters 1 and 2 develop the notion of scenes and explore how neoabolitionism sets its scenes and locates favoured solutions. The remaining chapters explore those solution areas. Chapter 3 looks at how a US movement against ‘sex trafficking’ in internet advertising reproduces a Manichean world of simplicity by a game of Whac-A-Mole™ with websites, ritualistic repetition of baseless ‘facts’, silencing of sex workers, and aggressive demonization of those who disagree or argue for greater complexity; Chapters 4 and 5 draw on time I spent in San Francisco with two very different organisations. One, Not For Sale, makes a product of experiencing neoabolitionism, joining together charity, capitalism, consumer enjoyment, technology and the excitement of a movement of ‘true believers’, producing innovative approaches but in the process reinforcing problematic gendered and colonial stereotypes. The other, Anti-trafficking Collaborative of the Bay Area, works quietly and tactically in a messy immigration system, aware of the political and performative nature of their work. They actively take responsibility for their own preconceptions and desires to ground a profoundly hospitable client-centred approach avoiding many pitfalls identified in earlier chapters. The thesis has a performative element woven through it – the ethos of the work is one of unsettling both existing practices and literatures, and the writer and reader. The concluding chapter explores the impossibility of hospitality, its interrelation with juridical subjectivity and the ethics demanding and giving accounts in light of the preceding chapters, suggesting a performative approach toward the other is possible. (shrink)

If we regard discursive practice as constitutive for the way we relate to the world, ourselves and others, then it is vitally important to ask how this practice can be formed or cultivated. For this reason, rhetoric has always been closely connected to ethics. This article attempts to explicate this relationship. It revolves around ancient conceptions of rhetoric that do not aim at establishing a system or a theory of speech, but at cultivating speech as a practice of good life. (...) This “rhetorical ethics” of antiquity remains instructive for contemporary thinking, since it points to a way of reflecting discourse that accounts not only for the content of speech but also for how it shapes human life. In particular, it is instructive for modern ethics, since it reveals that moral discourse can be regarded as a rhetorical practice too: it is not ethically neutral but has to be reflected upon as a practice of life. (shrink)

Because no single person or group holds knowledge about all aspects of research, mechanisms are needed to support knowledge exchange and engagement. Expertise in the research setting necessarily includes scientific and methodological expertise, but also expertise gained through the experience of participating in research and/or being a recipient of research outcomes. Engagement is, by its nature, reciprocal and relational: the process of engaging research participants, patients, citizens and others brings them closer to the research but also brings the research closer (...) to them. When translating research into practice, engaging the public and other stakeholders is explicitly intended to make the outcomes of translation relevant to its constituency of users. In practice, engagement faces numerous challenges and is often time-consuming, expensive and ‘thorny’ work. We explore the epistemic and ontological considerations and implications of four common critiques of engagement methodologies that contest: representativeness, communication and articulation, impacts and outcome, and democracy. The ECOUTER methodology addresses problems of representation and epistemic foundationalism using a methodology that asks, “How could it be otherwise?” ECOUTER affords the possibility of engagement where spatial and temporal constraints are present, relying on saturation as a method of ‘keeping open’ the possible considerations that might emerge and including reflexive use of qualitative analytic methods. This paper describes the ECOUTER process, focusing on one worked example and detailing lessons learned from four other pilots. ECOUTER uses mind-mapping techniques to ‘open up’ engagement, iteratively and organically. ECOUTER aims to balance the breadth, accessibility and user-determination of the scope of engagement. An ECOUTER exercise comprises four stages: engagement and knowledge exchange; analysis of mindmap contributions; development of a conceptual schema ; and feedback, refinement and development of recommendations. ECOUTER refuses fixed truths but also refuses a fixed nature. Its promise lies in its flexibility, adaptability and openness. ECOUTER will be formed and re-formed by the needs and creativity of those who use it. (shrink)

Within the digital workforce, women are disappearing. While there are many factors that could be ‘blamed’ for this phenomenon, this article takes issue with the sexist and patriarchal discourses that are deployed within the digital workforce. In many ways, sexist discourses are taken for granted within the digital workplace; and in that way, the discourses themselves are rendered invisible through a lack of concerted uncovering of the ways that these sexist discourses produce—and reproduce—women as sexual objects and outsiders in this (...) field of work. The sexist and patriarchal discourses I address in this article validate the gender binary even as there is gendered play. It is this ‘play’ that also makes counter-hegemonic discourse and discursive acts productive, as I argue toward the end of the paper. Schools are a place where counter-hegemonic discourses and acts can be nurtured and, hopefully, affect and counteract the disappearance of women in digital fields. (shrink)

Judith Butler's contribution to feminist political thought is usually approached in terms of her concept of performativity, according to which gender exists only insofar as it is ritualistically and repetitively performed, creating permanent possibilities for performing gender in new and transgressive ways. In this paper, I argue that Butler's politics of performativity is more fundamentally grounded in the concept of genealogy, which she adapts from Foucault and, ultimately, Nietzsche. Butler understands women to have a genealogy: to be located within a (...) history of overlapping practices and reinterpretations of femininity. This genealogical understanding of femininity allows Butler to propose a coalitional feminist politics, which requires no unity among women but only loosely overlapping connections. For Butler, feminist coalitions should aim to subvert, not consolidate, entrenched norms concerning femininity. Butler has been criticized, however, for failing to explain either how subversive agency is possible or why the subversion of gender norms is desirable. Reviewing these criticisms, I argue that Butler offers a convincing explanation of the possibility of subversive agency, but that the normative dimension of her political thought remains relatively underdeveloped. I explore how the normative aspect of Butler's thought could be strengthened by recasting her notion of genealogy along more thoroughly Nietzschean and materialist lines, in terms of an idea of active and multiple bodily forces. (shrink)

This article analyzes the structure of the “we relation” drawing on Alfred Schütz's theoretical framework. It argues for a flexibilization of the initial framework in order to capture not only the tension, but also the variations in the relation between the lived experience of the other in lived duration and the reflection upon the other, through which meaning is constructed. In order to do so, it revisits Schütz’s claims about immersion into togetherness as part of the experience of copresence and (...) it bridges them with the apparently opposite Sartrian view of the other as either objectifying or being objectified. This leads to certain shifts in the distinction between consociates and contemporaries and sheds light upon the ways in which the process of constructing the other as meaningful is not an added layer, but a co-constitutive element in the vivid experience of copresence and of absence. (shrink)

The words we call slurs are just plain vanilla descriptions like ‘cowboy’ and ‘coat hanger’. They don't semantically convey any disparagement of their referents, whether as content, conventional implicature, presupposition, “coloring” or mode of presentation. What distinguishes 'kraut' and 'German' is metadata rather than meaning: the former is the conventional description for Germans among Germanophobes when they are speaking in that capacity, in the same way 'mad' is the conventional expression that some teenagers use as an intensifier when they’re emphasizing (...) that social identity. That is, racists don’t use slurs because they’re derogatory; slurs are derogatory because they’re the words that racists use. To use a slur is to exploit the Maxim of Manner (or Levinson’s M-Principle) to signal one’s affiliation with a group that has a disparaging attitude towards the slur’s referent. This account is sufficient to explain all the familiar properties of slurs, such as their speaker orientation and “nondetachability,” with no need of additional linguistic mechanisms. It also explains some features of slurs that are rarely if ever explored; for example the variation in tone and strength among the different slurs for a particular group, the existence of words we count as slurs, such as 'redskin', which almost all of their users consider to be respectful, and the curious absence in Standard English of any commonly used slurs—by which I mean words used to express a negative attitude toward an entire group—for Muslims and women. (shrink)

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

There is now an increasing body of knowledge on creative practice-based doctorates especially in Australia and the United Kingdom. A particular focus in recent years has been on the written examinable component or exegesis, and a number of studies have provided important information about change and stability in the form and nature of the exegesis and its relationship to the creative project. However, we still know relatively little about the pedagogical practices that supervisors use to support these students’ development as (...) scholarly writers, nor of how supervisors view ‘writing’ in relation to the creative practice components of the degree endeavour. This paper draws on data from a recent study of supervision in creative practice higher research degrees and it highlights the transformative nature of writing for the development of creative practice research scholars in the context of competing discourses on research writing. In contrast to institutional silencing of writing, the study relates numerous examples of effective writing-rich supervisory pedagogies illustrating how successful supervisors work with their students to bring their creative projects into articulation. (shrink)

This article addresses the notions of gender performativity and temporality in Butler’s early work on gender. The paper is articulated in four steps. First it gives an account of the role and nature of temporality in Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Second, it shows some similarities and connections between the role played by temporality in Butler’s theory of gender performativity and its role in Marx’s analysis of capital. Third, it raises some criticisms of Butler’s understanding of temporality and historicity, focusing (...) in particular on the lack of historicisation of her own categories in bothGender TroubleandBodies that Matter. This deficit is a consequence of the epistemological framework within which she is operating, in particular of her understanding of social practices and relations through the lens of linguistic concepts extrapolated from their theoretical context. The article concludes by referring to Floyd’s and Hennessy’s analyses of the formation of sexual identities as examples of the fruitful historicisation of gender performativity, which also sheds some light on the ‘the abstract character’ of the temporality of gender performativity. (shrink)

Quality of care is a prominent discourse in modern health‐care and has previously been conceptualised in terms of ethics. In addition, the role of knowledge has been suggested as being particularly influential with regard to the nurse–patient–carer relationship. However, to date, no analyses have examined how knowledge (as an ethical concept) impinges on quality of care. Qualitative semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 26 patients with palliative and supportive care needs receiving district nursing care and thirteen of their lay carers. Poststructural (...) discourse analysis techniques were utilised to take an ethical perspective on the current way in which quality of care is assessed and produced in health‐care. It is argued that if quality of care is to be achieved, patients and carers need to be able to redistribute and redevelop the knowledge of their services in a collaborative way that goes beyond the current ways of working. Theoretical works and extant research are then used to produce tentative suggestions about how this may be achieved. (shrink)

In this article I discuss how Jacques Rancière’s thought invites us to re-conceptualize the education–emancipation nexus. The primary goal of traditional approaches to emancipatory and anti-oppressive education has been to empower the oppressed so that the latter can (re)gain their voice and transform their situations. Building on Rancière’s ideas, I argue that the processes of empowering the oppressed imply that one has the power to empower the other, and thus start with an assumption of inequality. I conclude the article with (...) a call for a pedagogy of ignorance. Grounded in Rancière’s thought, this pedagogy is ignorant of any division and hierarchy of intelligence. (shrink)

This essay considers the ethical implications of engaging in a pedagogy of discomfort, using as a point of departure Butler's reflections on ethical violence and norms. The author shows how this attempt is full of tensions that cannot, if ever, be easily resolved. To address these tensions, the author first offers a brief overview of the notion of pedagogy of discomfort and discusses its relevance with Foucault's idea of ‘ethic of discomfort’ and the promise of ‘safe classroom.’ Then, he focuses (...) on Butler's account of ethical violence and norms to show how the subject's constitution and regulation are inextricably linked to violence in several ways. In the final part of the paper, the author turns more specifically to the ways in which a pedagogy of discomfort might entail ethical violence, suggesting how the turn to a nonviolent ethics might become possible or whether the ethical resonances of that challenge will always entail a degree of ambivalence. (shrink)

In recent years, the debate on emotions has been influenced by postconstructionist research, particularly the use of performativity as a key concept. According to Judith Butler (1993, 1997) the construction of emotions is a process open to constant change and redefinition. The final result of emotionlanguage “natural” development is what is known as technoscience. New ways of naming emotions have emerged within technoscience. In our research on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) by cyber-café and call shop users, (...) we came to understand how these technologies are significant in those users’ daily life. The emphasis will be on analyzing emotions related to the use of ICT in the aforementioned settings. Using the concept of performance (Butler, 1990), we will explore how narratives create a need for particular emotions, which did not exist before they were performed. To understand this performance, we use an ad hoc tool called Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) as it is used by the Manchester School. Analysis has revealed the existence of a membership category in which velocity is salient as performance. This ‘velocity’ seems to follow the evolution of technoscience in the social sciences. We will observe velocity in the context created by two concepts, Donna Haraway’s (1990) cyborg and Alessandro Baricco’s (2007) mutant. (shrink)

Judith Butler’s influential work in feminist theory is significant for its insight that sexist discourse in popular culture affects the agency and consciousness of individuals, but offers an inadequate account of how such discourse might be said to touch, shape, or affect selves. Supplementing Butler’s account of signification with a Deweyan pragmatic account of meaning-making and selective emphasis enables a consistent account of the relationship between discourse and subjectivity with a robust conception of the bodily organism. An analysis of the (...) popular discourse surrounding Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Presidential campaign demonstrates why this hybrid pragmatic/poststructuralist account is necessary. (shrink)

In an effort to delineate a more plausible account of political change, this paper reads Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory as a corrective to exaggerated enthusiasm about the emancipatory force of reflection. This revised account valorizes both Bourdieu’s insights into the acquired, embodied, durable nature of the political habitus and judgment theorists’ trust in individuals’ reflection as a perpetual force of novelty and spontaneity in the public sphere of democratic societies. The main purpose of this exercise is to reveal the mix (...) of continuity and discontinuity that is characteristic of most transformations in the political common sense of democratic societies. In other words, this paper seeks to offer a more complex understanding of the inertial character of reflective judgment and of the difficulty of shifting the categories that define the political common sense. By cross-pollinating the ever-growing literature on reflective judgment and Bourdieu’s sombre theory of politics, we can better calibrate our expectations regarding the possibilities of significant democratic transformation in late capitalist societies. (shrink)

This article explores the ways in which naturism articulates a set of relationships between the body and nature. We begin by sketching the histories of some Western naturist movements, tracing their lineage back to 19th-century life reform movements and through into inter-war reorientations of citizenship and morality. We consider the problematic of the naked body's relationship to the erotic (and specifically to the erotics of nature), drawing on some materials on outdoor sex; set alongside this is a discussion of the (...) regenerative use of wilderness in the mythopoetic men's movement. These strands are finally drawn together in order to consider the complex negotiation of discourses of nature, human nature, the natural body and the natural landscape - a negotiation embodied in naturism. (shrink)

This article examines the historically embedded relations of three 19th-century phenomena in which the non-consuming body is constituted as a spectacle of admiration. These three phenomena, known as Fasting Women, Living Skeletons and Hunger Artists, all emerged and disappeared in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Viewing the emergence and disappearance of the three phenomena as embedded in the historical crossroads of pre-modern and modern ethics, the article argues that each of these phenomena corresponds differently to the clash between (...) modern `rationality' and the pre-modern celebration of `miracles'. The article maintains that while Fasting Women epitomized that clash by becoming (a highly contested) spectacle of `the miraculous', the Living Skeletons transcended the clash by portraying a spectacle of liminal corporeality (the `living dead') and the Hunger Artists announced the dissolution of that very clash by performing a spectacle of `the controlled self'. Through a focus on the spectacle of fasting (i.e. the appeared, performed, `gazed at' act of fasting), a phenomenological typology of the three phenomena is outlined. I suggest that while Fasting Women and Living Skeletons embodied a spectacle of a lean body, which does not require suffering, the Hunger Artists embodied a spectacle of hunger centred on suffering and pain. The phenomenological `mapping' of these phenomena is then considered in the context of `performativity theory' and proposed as a frame of reference for a sociological study of anorexia nervosa. (shrink)

Leading scholars challenge and reinvigorate the pragmatic method of John Dewey.

In the article the author reflects on the meaning of politics in a newmaterialist framework. She concentrates predominantly on two political dimentions – space and time. With reference to that, the author develops the concept of politics of squatting. Its spatial aspect is investigated along the lines of the notion of heterotopia, coined by Michel Foucault, and its temporal aspect is analyzed through the concept of heterochrony and Darwinian evolution as interpreted by Elizabeth Grosz. The concept of politics of squatting (...) is then juxtaposed with nomadism. Finally, the author provides a case study by elaborating on the anti-gender campaign that began in 2012-2013 in Poland from the perspective of politics of squatting. (shrink)

What are we to make of the fact that world leaders, such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau, have, within the last few decades, offered official apologies for a whole host of past injustices? Scholars have largely dealt with this phenomenon as a moral question, seeing in these expressions of contrition a radical disruption of contemporary neoliberal individualism, a promise of a more humane world. Focusing on Canadian apology politics, this essay instead proposes a nonideal approach to state apologies, sidestepping questions of (...) what they ought to do and focusing instead on their actual functioning as political acts. Through a sociologically informed speech act theory and Foucault’s work on power, apology is conceptualized as a speech act with an essentially relational nature. The state, through apologizing, reaffirms the norms governing its relationship to its subjects at a moment when a past transgression threatens to destabilize this relation. From a Foucauldian point of view, the state’s power inheres in the very stability of the state–citizen relation, and we should therefore see apologies as defensive moves to protect state hegemony. In the context of Western liberal democracies, such as Canada, apologies embody, rather than challenge, the logic of neoliberal governmentality by suggesting that everything, including resentment against the state, can be managed within the current status quo. Nevertheless, total cynicism about apology politics is not warranted. In many indigenous apology campaigners’ demands for contrition we see another side of apologies: their potential to bring about change by enacting counterhegemonic relations to the state. (shrink)

Verbal derogation is not only a linguistic but also, and perhaps more importantly, a political phenomenon. In this paper, I argue that to do justice to the political relevance of derogatory terms, we must not neglect the social practices and structures in which the use of these terms is embedded. I aim to show that inferentialist semantics is especially helpful to account for this social embeddedness and, consequently, the political relevance of derogatory terms. I am concerned with specifying the linguistic (...) and political aspects of terms that are at the core of derogatory language use. I explain them with the help of Brandomian inferentialism which tends to be quickly dismissed or ignored in discussions about the meaning of derogatory terms. My inferentialist account is in line with Lynne Tirrell’s broader inferentialist framework for understanding derogatory communicative practices. I provide the semantic details of her broader inferentialist view and thereby aim to show that inferentialist semantics is a promising theory which cannot be neglected in further discussion of meaning and politics in derogatory language use. (shrink)

It is common today to see the world as increasingly unpredictable, and to see that unpredictability as a major source of anxiety. Many of the proposed cures for that anxiety, such as systems like Memex and MyLifeBits, have sought solutions in systems that collect and store a thorough record of events, at a scale from the personal to the global. There the solution to anxiety lies in the ability to play back the record, to turn back the clock and be (...) there then. Both this anxiety and its solution are best seen not simply as remedies for an immediate problem-of terrorism, for example-but rather as evidence of a more deep-seated set of cultural changes, which emerged early in the twentieth century. Paradoxically, the technological solutions offered, whatever the scale, embody the very thing, a lack of a connection to a community, that is both the source of the anxiety and a fundamental impediment to its elimination. (shrink)

The evaluation of new theories and pedagogical approaches to business ethics is an essential task for ethicists. This is true not only for empirical and applied evaluation but also for metatheoretical evaluation. However, while there is increasing interest in the practical utility and empirical testing of ethical theories, there has been little systematic evaluation of how new theories relate to existing ones or what novel conceptual characteristics they might contribute. This paper aims to address this lack by discussing the role (...) of metatheorising in assessing new approaches to ethics. The approach is illustrated through evaluating a new pedagogy and curriculum for ethics education called Giving Voice to Values (GVV). Our method involves identifying a number of metatheoretical lenses from existing reviews of ethical theories and applying these to examine GVV’s conceptual elements. Although GVV has been explicitly presented as a pedagogy and teaching curriculum, we argue that it has the potential to contribute significantly to the development of ethical theory. We discuss the general implications of this metatheoretical method of evaluation for new approaches to business ethics and for GVV and its future development. (shrink)

The Policing and Crime Act 2009 introduced radical reforms relating to the regulation of sex work. In particular, section 14 criminalised paying for sexual services of a prostitute subjected to force. This article will provide a close and critical reading of the official texts relating to this new offence through a discourse theory developed from the work of Judith Butler. Drawing upon Butler’s insights, it will be argued that the official texts relating to section 14 problematically construct the subject of (...) prostitution in a way which maintains and perpetuates certain partial and idealised identities. However, it will be argued that the law will inevitably fail and that more inclusive and productive measures need to be adopted in order to deal effectively with prostitution. (shrink)

We explore briefly Foucault's ideas about the care of the self, creating ourselves and what he meant by ethics. We then examine the work of five artists–Mark Rothko, Cindy Sherman, Helena Hietanen, Samuel Beckett, and Betty Goodwin–to help us begin to think very differently about illness and human suffering. Taking our lead from Beckett, we regard reason as being given too much responsibility for the work of a caring knowledge, and that it is through the arts that new ideas about (...) bioethics can emerge. (shrink)

The article is the author’s endeavor to reconstruct the semiotic conflict in the transatlantic legal appraisal of hate speech (between the USA and Europe) through Ancient Greek concepts of παρρησία (parrhēsia) and ισηγορία (isēgoria). The US Supreme Court case law on the First Amendment to American Constitution is, therefore, counter-balanced vis-à-vis la jurisprudence de Strasbourg on Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights. The author suggests that an adequate comprehension of the contemporary constitutional concepts of the right to (...) free speech in Western democracies is deceptive without a thorough analysis of its genealogy in the Ancient rhetorical cradle. (shrink)

The SlutWalk campaigns around the world have triggered a furious debate on whether they advance or limit feminist legal politics. This article examines the location of campaigns such as the SlutWalk marches in the context of feminist legal advocacy in postcolonial India, and discusses whether their emergence signifies the demise of feminism or its incarnation in a different guise. The author argues that the SlutWalks, much like the Pink Chaddi (panty) campaign in India, provide an important normative and discursive challenge (...) to a specific strand of feminism based on male domination and female subordination in the area of sexuality and also speaks to the emergence of consumer agency in the very heart of pleasure in the neo-liberal moment. It serves as a space clearing gesture, a form of feminism ‘lite’, rather than offering a transformative or revolutionary politics, and thus enables the possibility of feminist theoretical positions in a postcolonial context that have hitherto been marginalised or ignored in feminist legal advocacy in India to emerge. (shrink)

In this chapter, I bring insights from the social sciences, about the role of time in exclusionary practices, into debates around the under-representation of women in philosophy. I will suggest that part of what supports the exclusionary culture of philosophy is a particular approach to time, and thus that changing this culture requires that we also change its time.

Water values serve as an entry point into the intricacies of public policies and management approaches. Values are contingent assessments that emerge out of socio-ecological relations and reflect particular demands, legacies and opportunities. The concept of value positionality is introduced as the synthesis of multiple expressions of worthiness cherished by a social group. Positionality is a metaphor that connects the phenomenological understanding of water value with the politics of everyday life and the broader politico-institutional framework. It entails a cluster of (...) meanings expressed through territorialised interactions across time, locations and scales. Positionalities converge or depart according to value praxis, that is, the clash of competing valuation approaches seeking legitimisation. (shrink)

Este trabajo parte de la noción filosófica de alteridad, que se puede complementar con las aportaciones de la teoría feminista y su reflexión sobre la diferencia sexual. Hay, al menos, tres aspectos del pensamiento feminista que interesa destacar a propósito de la alteridad: en primer lugar, la crítica a la construcción de lo femenino como alteridad con respecto a lo masculino; en segundo lugar, y de la mano del feminismo de la diferencia, es interesante reflexionar sobre las experiencias físicas y (...) simbólicas de la maternidad, que proporcionan un nuevo modelo de ‘alteridad irreductible’ y nuevos contenidos para una ética del cuidado; en tercer lugar, y partiendo de las consideraciones de Ricoeur sobre la dialéctica entre identidad y mismidad, la alteridad sexual puede ser reformulada como una construcción dinámica articulada a partir de la tensión entre las dimensiones discursivas y performativas. (shrink)

A communitarian perspective, which is characteristic of African normative thought, accords some kind of primacy to society or a group, whereas human rights are by definition duties that others have to treat individuals in certain ways, even when not doing so would be better for others. Is there any place for human rights in an Afro-communitarian political and legal philosophy, and, if so, what is it? I seek to answer these questions, in part by critically exploring one of the most (...) influential theoretical works on human rights in a sub-Saharan setting, namely, Claude Ake’s ‘The African Context of Human Rights’. Ake famously maintains that a typically Western approach to rights is inappropriate in the sub-Saharan region, in two major respects. First, Ake contends that although a human rights legal framework might be suitable for an ‘individualistic’ society, it is not for one of the sort common among traditional black peoples, for whom group rights are alone apt. Second, Ake maintains that, insofar as rights are relevant, rights to socio-economic goods are of much more importance in an African context than rights to civil liberties, due process and the like. Using Ake’s article as a foil, I draw on values salient in sub-Saharan moral worldviews to construct a unified philosophy of rights that not only provides reason to doubt his two claims, but also offers a promising way to reconcile a communitarian framework with a robust prizing of human rights alongside ones that are more collectively oriented. In short, I aim to provide a principled foundation for the core elements of the African Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights. (shrink)

In this article, I attempt to bring some colour to a discussion of fraught topics in education. Though the scenes and stories (from education and elsewhere) that feature here deal with racism, the discussion aims to say something to such topics more generally. The philosophers whose work I draw on here are Stanley Cavell and Judith Butler. Both Butler and Cavell develop (or depart from) J.L. Austin's theory of the performative utterance. Butler, following Derrida, argues that in concentrating on the (...) illocutionary force of utterances (their capacity to do things), Austin fails to account for the force of words themselves. The iterability of language means that words are never at one with themselves. They carry their old contexts with them as they enter into new ones. This has important consequences for ethical issues that pertain to what Butler calls the ?performativity? of gender and race. Though we are performed by language, this performance has a dynamic quality that leads to the reshaping of identity. In contrast, for Cavell, the disappointing aspect of Austin's thought relates to the latter's neglect of the perlocutionary effect of language ? what is done ?by words?. By taking on this project, Cavell embraces the unconventional aspects of language characterised by ?passionate? expression and exchange. Butler and Cavell approach the performative utterance from different directions. In the last part of this article, the significance of this difference is discussed in relation to the provision of a moral education with regard to tackling issues surrounding racism. (shrink)

After reviewing current opinions about the social function of literature in second-century BCE Rome, I focus on two controversial fragments assigned to Cato the Censor's Origines. In the first, Cato portrays the ancestors in a convivial setting as they sing the praises and the manly deeds of famous men; in the second, he gestures towards the pontifex maximus' specialized use of writing and the functioning of the tabula as a locus of memory. By drawing on the field of performance studies, (...) I identify the performative features inherent in both of these fragments and map out how these features inform the positioning of Cato in relation to the identity politics of his time, professionalism, and writing. The aim of this study is to return the Origines to its immediate socio-cultural purview, but working towards this aim will also entail a shift in perspective and a reassessment of our notions of “poetry” and “prose.” In fact, by stressing the performance dimension that underlies the genesis of the Origines as a text, this article will also expose the shortcomings inherent in the hyper-literary approaches that have been so far adopted. (shrink)

Much has been written on Michel Foucault's reluctance to clearly delineate a research method, particularly with respect to genealogy (Harwood, 2000; Meadmore, Hatcher & McWilliam, 2000; Tamboukou, 1999). Foucault (1994, p. 288) himself disliked prescription stating, ‘I take care not to dictate how things should be’ and wrote provocatively to disrupt equilibrium and certainty, so that ‘all those who speak for others or to others’ no longer know what to do. It is doubtful, however, that Foucault ever intended for researchers (...) to be stricken by that malaise to the point of being unwilling to make an intellectual commitment to methodological possibilities. Taking criticism of ‘Foucauldian’ discourse analysis as a convenient point of departure to discuss the objectives of poststructural analyses of language, this paper develops what might be called a discursive analytic; a methodological plan to approach the analysis of discourses through the location of statements that function with constitutive effects. (shrink)

Performativity and performance of language are the subject of this re-writing of Derrida's position on the gift. Here the source of performativity is Althusser's while the source of the gift is not only Marcel Mauss, but also both the opening of Derrida's Given Time: I, Counterfeit Money and the signing through letters of Madame de Maintenon, wife of Louis XIV and founder of a school for girls. A third writing plays a role, that of a 1910 biography of Madame. The (...) paper is a ‘relay,’ a ‘re-play’ of the positions of the central ‘characters,’ -- Derrida and Maintenon -- and a semiology of their writings. Out of this a new ‘gift of pedagogy’ is evoked in a conception of ‘pedagogical retreat.’. (shrink)

Building from J.L. Austin's concept of ‘performative,’ this essay explores the production of subjectivity and of educational subjects by applying important work from Judith Butler on Foucault, Derrida, and as centrally illustrative, through an analysis of sex and gender. Given this analytical framework, the turn is then to queer performativity and the possibility of performative power in pedagogy. The last draws assistance from Valerie Walkerdine, Homi Bhabha and especially James Donald.

I here present two different models of oppressive speech. My interest is not in how speech can cause oppression, but in how speech can actually be an act of oppression. As we shall see, a particular type of speech act, the exercitive, enacts permissibility facts. Since oppressive speech enacts permissibility facts that oppress, speech must be exercitive in order for it to be an act of oppression. In what follows, I distinguish between two sorts of exercitive speech acts (the standard (...) exercitive and the covert exercitive) and I argue that each such exercitive affords a distinct model of oppressive speech. (shrink)

Working in the tradition of Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912), Benjamin Tucker (1854-1939), and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), the Molinari Society is a philosophical society dedicated to promoting critical discussion and innovative research in radical libertarian theory.