On 1 December 2019, over one hundred Aboriginal nations performed ancestral and creation dances in synchrony across the Australian continent. One of the communities that danced was the Anaiwan nation from the north-eastern region of New South Wales, Australia. Since 2014 I have been working with Anaiwan people in a collaborative activist research project, creating and maintaining an Aboriginal community garden on the fringes of my hometown of Armidale as a site for land reclamation and decolonising, multispecies research. The community (...) garden is adjacent to the site of the old East Armidale Aboriginal Reserve, where over one hundred dispossessed Aboriginal people were forced to live on the municipal town garbage depot in the mid-twentieth century. This paper positions both the Nation Dance 2019 movement, and the Armidale Aboriginal Community Garden, as rhythmic events that activate Aboriginal Law and sovereignty that is held enduring in the land but that has been buried alive by the settler-colonial state. Focusing on the tensions between deep Indigenous ancestral temporality and colonial territoriality, I argue that the emergence of the Anthropocene reveals a dangerous dissonance between the rhythms of Aboriginal Law patterned through present-day Australian environments and the grid-based structures of colonial governance imposed upon them. (shrink)

In the text we approach the trajectory of the Peruvian thinker Aníbal Quijano and how he came to the formulation by which he is known, the explanatory pair modernity / coloniality. We propose a problematizing reading of his intellectual itinerary, recovering a recurrent and highly suggestive metaphor in his approach, the explanatory allegory of the knot. We consider that this figure has multiple potentialities, both in the epistemic-philosophical and political-cultural dimension.

This article critically engages with debates on uneven and combined development and particularly the lack of attention given in this literature to accounts of spatial diversity in capitalism’s outward expansion as well as issues of Eurocentrism. Through interlocutions with Antonio Gramsci on his theorising of state formation and capitalist modernity and the notion of passive revolution, we draw out the internal relationship between the structuring condition of uneven and combined development and the class agency of passive revolution. Interlocuting with passive (...) revolution places Antonio Gramsci firmly within a stream of classic social theory shaping considerations of capitalist modernity. As a result, by building on cognate theorising elsewhere, passive revolution can then be established as a lateral field of causality that necessarily grasps spatio-temporal dynamics linked to both state and subaltern class practices of transformation in social property relations, situated within the structuring conditions of uneven and combined development. (shrink)

With the 50th anniversary of the journal, this special issue takes stock of the progress that has been made within sociology to become a more globally oriented discipline and discusses the new challenges for the future that emerge as a consequence. From its inception, classical sociology was primarily concerned with the European origins of processes of modernity that were to become global. There was little discussion of how the global might be understood in terms of structures, processes and social movements (...) not directly identified as European but nonetheless contributing to modernity. The challenge for sociology has been to take into account these other phenomena and to rethink its core categories and concepts in light of newly understood alternative formations of the global and the social movements that bring them about. (shrink)

This essay examines the process by which tea, a plant and product introduced into the Indian subcontinent in the early 19th century as a colonial cash crop, became indigenized and popularized as chai, often regarded today as India’s ‘national drink’. This process mainly occurred during the 20th century and involved aggressive and innovative marketing by both British and Indian commercial interests, advances in the technology of processing Assam tea, and changes in social space and practice, especially in urban areas.

In this article, I argue that Peter Fitzpatrick provides a unique contribution to international studies, most especially to contemporary interdisciplinary studies of International Law (IL) and International Relations (IR). Peter provides a significant theoretical contribution to the interdisciplinary study of IL and IR not only as a critical thinker of modern law, but also as a critical thinker of the modern international. On the one hand, his supplementary critical legal thinking contributes to a ‘decolonial deconstructionist’ rethinking of the politics of (...) international law. His close reading of how modern international law (auto)grounds ‘itself’, for instance, offers a strident critique of the racist, imperial, and colonial lines of discrimination involved in the negative (auto)constitution of this (supposedly) universal legal being. On the other hand, he provides a conception of the ‘(inter)national’ which displaces conventional, modern understandings of the legal and political organization of ‘humanity’ and ‘the world’, problematizing their foundational assumptions and spatialized geometrical frames as being based on oppositional dualisms (‘inside/outside’, ‘national/international’, ‘empire/modernity’, ‘theological/secular’, etc.), while offering a deconstructionist engagement with the ‘constitutive outside’ of the modern (inter)national. As a form of postcolonial counter-archive, Peter’s work enacts a decolonial deconstruction of ‘our’ (inter)national ‘selves’, including the (inter)national commonality ‘itself’. Before an incalculable, quasi-ontological heteronomy, a dissymmetrical Law of originary sociability which I (re)articulate here with/as the ‘and’ of the world(s), Peter’s supplementary critical thinking of the (inter)national contributes to imagining the world, humanity, and our social being(s), including law and language, otherwise. (shrink)

How might science and technology studies and science, technology and society studies learn from its studies of other knowledge traditions? This article explores this question by looking at Chinese medicine. The latter has been under pressure from modernization and “scientization” for a century, and the dynamics of these pressures have been explored “symmetrically” within STS and related disciplines. But in this work, CM has been the “the case” and STS theory has held stable. This article uses a CM term, reasoning-as-propensity, (...) to look at contemporary practices of cancer care in a hospital in Taiwan. It describes how shi informed the design of a new decoction, Kuan Sin Yin, while also relating to the production of scientific knowledge, biomedical interventions, Buddhist practices, and the patients living with cancer themselves. Does CM’s use of shi simply confirm the essential and incompatible otherness of CM? Looked at from outside the answer seems to be yes. However, this article explores how STS might change itself—and the theory–practice division in STS—by thinking through shi in dialogue with its othered object. This opens the possibility of an STS for CM. (shrink)

This paper explores the reception of Gellner’s historical sociology among students of pre-modern societies and the Greco-Roman world in particular and asks how his thought is still relevant to the field. This involves discussion of recent trends in world history as well as new comparative work on ancient state and elite formation. A main contention of the paper is that Gellner’s sociological reading of Plato and his politics may be one of the most interesting modern interpretations of the ancient Greek (...) thinker on offer and one which can serve as a fruitful framework for the comparative study of complex, pre-industrial societies. (shrink)

Feminist theory needs both explanatory-diagnostic and anticipatory-utopian moments in order to be truly critical and truly feminist. However, the explanatory-diagnostic task of analyzing the workings of gendered power relations in all of their depth and complexity seems to undercut the very possibility of emancipation on which the anticipatory-utopian task relies. In this paper, I take this looming paradox as an invitation to rethink our understanding of emancipation and its relation to the anticipatory-utopian dimensions of critique, asking what conception of emancipation (...) is compatible with a complex explanatory-diagnostic analysis of contemporary gender domination as it is intertwined and entangled with race, class, sexuality, and empire. I explore this question through an analysis of two specific debates in which the paradoxical relationship between power and emancipation emerges in particularly salient and seemingly intractable forms: debates over subjection and modernity. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, I argue that a negativistic conception of emancipation offers the best way for feminist critical theory to transform the paradox of power and emancipation into a productive tension that can fuel critique. (shrink)

This article presents current philosophical reflections on religious diversity and concomitant attitudes towards the interreligious situation. The motive behind this presentation is to show that in order to deal more efficiently with the phenomenon of religious plurality, there is a need for a development of the philosophy of religion, where new perspectives are opened up and explored. The very concept of religion as a belief system is put into question, since it has caused philosophical reflections on religious diversity to be (...) confined to certain metaphysical and epistemological concerns. Instead of focusing on the noun ‘religion’, the article suggests a way to understand the adjective ‘religious’ and view religious plurality as a plurality of ways of being religious. This opens up a certain context of interreligious relations and interreligious dialogue, where this very dialogue itself can contribute to the development of philosophical tools, concepts and categories for dealing with the fact of plurality. I call this context constructive dialogical pluralism. (shrink)

This paper asks the following question: can an atheist reader fully taste the aesthetic meaning of poetry written by a theist author? This question is discussed with specific reference to the devotional poetry of Tagore. The paper discusses forms of pre-modern religious thinking which influenced Tagore’s conceptions of God, his relation to Nature, human society, and the human self. But it stresses that Tagore’s time was different from those of pre-modern believers. Tagore, as a modern thinker, had to fashion a (...) response to the ‘problem’ of disenchantment. He constructed a philosophic vision that embraced modern science, but argued that it did not dispel the sense of living in an enchanted universe. Consequently, it is argued that a nastika can enjoy his poetry. This requires the nastika to view the idea of God not as a failure of cognition, but as a triumph of the imagination. I can continue to enjoy Tagore’s poetry without unease. (shrink)

This paper theorizes and historicizes the ideas of modern language and translation and challenges the imperialist and nationalistic mode of worlding with the notion of ‘untranslatability’ that is embedded in the linguistic and cultural practices of colonial Taiwan and Korea. I redefine the notion of translation as a bordering system – the knowledge-production of boundaries, discrimination, and classification – that simultaneously creates the translatable and the untranslatable in asymmetrical power relations. With this, I discuss how this ambivalence is embodied in (...) the experiences of colonial writers Wu Yung-fu and Pak T’aewŏn and their novellas ‘Head and Body’ and ‘A Day in the life of Kubo the Novelist’. I illustrate two characteristics of the ambivalent untranslatability embedded in their novellas: the linguistic untranslatability and the experience of ‘unhomeness’. The linguistic untranslatability and unhomeness, I argue, result in the colonized’s dislocation in homogeneous time-space relationships, resulting to the incompletion of the modernization project through colonialism. At the same time untranslatability offers a site to explore the transnational space that crosses linguistic boundaries, and to caution against the legacy of colonialism. (shrink)

This article identifies civilizational analysis as one response to a recent crisis in the sociology of large-scale social configurations and explores how far the concept of civilization can go in analyzing the contemporary global social constellation. The reasoning proceeds in four steps. First, a brief review of the recent conceptual debate in social theory and historical sociology leads to the conclusion that concepts such as ‘civilization’ and ‘modernity’ still work with too strong presuppositions about continuity and commonality of patterns of (...) world interpretation. Second, a proposal is made to distinguish several basic problématiques that all human collectivities need to address and to suggest that such a distinction lends itself to research-oriented disentangling of various aspects of social phenomena. In an explorative manner, third, this approach will be applied to South Africa and Brazil, two social configurations that can fruitfully be studied as collectivities but lend themselves much less to civilizational analysis. By way of conclusion, finally, the trajectories of these non-European modernities will briefly be compared to the European one to illustrate the potential of this approach for a global sociology of plural trajectories of modernity. (shrink)

The claim that we are entering a “postsecular” age supposedly marks a new openness toward public religion, which was expected to wither as societies modernized. Similarly, postcolonial theory has attempted to think through the public resurgence of indigenous culture after the collapse of “Western” political regimes, which also predicted and prescribed its privatization. Drawing on the work of Partha Chatterjee, this paper argues that the “postsecular,” particularly as it is deployed by Jürgen Habermas and Alasdair MacIntyre, seeks to seduce religious (...) believers and practitioners into just this same logic of self-colonization so that they might be recognized as defenders of an increasingly insecure, liberal nation-state against those who might seek to take advantage of its vulnerability. (shrink)

In the academic debate on infrastructures in the Global South, there is a broad consensus that (post)colonial legacies present a major challenge for a transition towards more inclusive, sustainable and adapted modes of providing services. Yet, relatively little is known about the emergence and evolution of infrastructures in former colonies. Until a decade ago, most historical studies followed Daniel Headrick’s (1981) “tools of empire” thesis, painting—with broad brush strokes—a picture of infrastructures as instruments for advancing the colonial project of exploitation (...) and subordination of non-European peoples and environments. This paper explores new research perspectives beyond this straightforward, ‘diffusionist’ perspective on technology transfer. In order to do so, it presents and discusses more recent studies which focus on interactive transfer processes as well as mechanisms of appropriation, and which increasingly combine approaches from imperial history, environmental history, and history of technology.There is much to gain from unpacking the changing motives and ideologies behind technology transfer; tracing the often contested and negotiated flows of ideas, technologies and knowledge within multilayered global networks; investigating the manifold ways in which infrastructures reflected and (re)produced colonial spaces and identities; critically reflecting on the utility of large (socio)technical systems (LTS) for the Global South; and approaching infrastructures in the (post)colonial world through entangled histories of technology and the environment. Following David Arnold’s (2005) plea for a “more interactive, culturally-nuanced, multi-sited debate” on technology in the non-Western world, the paper offers fresh insights for a broader debate about how infrastructures work within specific parameters of time, place and culture. (shrink)

This article discusses the implications of the idea of Asia as method, a discursive strategy in Asian studies popularised by Kuan-Hsing Chen, in the context of Korean education. Chen has pointed to the one-way flow of knowledge into Asia from the West and has urged using ‘Asia as method’ in the production of post-colonial and anti-imperialist knowledge. The research interests of this article are twofold. First, I analyse ‘Asia as method’ as a strategy to de-universalise the West, particularly given the (...) historical complexity in East Asia. I trace the historical context of the word ‘Asia’, beginning with the traditional Sino-centric period and continuing to the Japanese colonial occupation. Second, I explore the possibility of using ‘Asia as method’ in the sense that Chen proposes, particularly in the context of Korean education. This article examines the ‘East Asian style of education’ as a platform for discussion of the potential for constructing ‘Asia as method’ in educational studies. In conclusion, I argue that for Asia as method to be viable as a strategy for change, Asia itself must be conceived as an ongoing construction based on the inter-referencing of multiple histories and cultural imaginaries. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn diesem Beitrag diskutiere ich Whitehouses Theorie der Modi der Religiosität, die den imagistischen Modus, basierend auf dem episodischen Gedächtnis, dem doktrinalen Modus, basierend auf dem semantischen Gedächtnis, gegenüber stellt. Anhand von drei Beispielen aus der religiösen Praxis und der Geschichte einer südafrikanischen Kirche – dem sakralen Tanz, dem öffentlichen Zeugnis von persönlichen Heilungserlebnissen sowie der Spaltung der Kirche – zeige ich die Begrenztheit von Whitehouses kognitivem Erklärungsmodell. Dennoch ist Whitehouses Theorie für die säkulare Religionswissenschaft von Nutzen, da er ihren (...) von postkolonialer Kritik in Frage gestellten vergleichenden Ansatz naturalistisch untermauert. Wünschenswert ist dabei die verstärkte Aufmerksamkeit für die vielfältigen Wechselwirkungen zwischen kognitiven, sozialen und kulturellen Faktoren, auch unter Preisgabe der einfachen Klarheit von Whitehouses bipolarem Erklärungsmodell. (shrink)

This paper explores pedagogic strategies for resisting the racism of contemporary populism and age-old coloniality through challenging secularism in the academy, especially in social theory. Secularism sustains racism and imperialism in the contemporary academy and is inscribed, in part, through the norms of social theory. Post-secular social theory has been positioned by some as the decolonial answer, but often replicates the most problematic aspects of secularism. Whereas post-secularism affirms the previously denigrated side of the secular vs religious dualism, I am (...) more interested in unworking those classificatory schemas, setting the critical thought of religious teachers in relation with ‘secular’ social and political theorists such that boundaries erode. The ambition in this is to resist the hierarchical orderings of knowledge that pit Islamic, indigenous, and feminised subjectivity as backwards, dangerous or intrinsically inferior to secular, Christian, rational knowledge. It is also to disenchant the secular Gods and hold open space for critical play in relation to the transcendental - to create a permissive, legitimising, space for students’ spiritual dimension, conocimiento, or the cultivation of soul. The paper draws theoretical inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Sylvia Wynter. It also draws on a practical experiment in disenchanting secularism through teaching an undergraduate module in social theory called Capitalism and Religion. (shrink)

The article explores the location of Central and Eastern Europe in transnational feminist studies. Despite the acknowledgement of the situatedness of knowledge, feminist theorising nevertheless seems to continue to be organised around a limited number of central axes and internalised progress narratives. The authors argue that there is a pressing need for theories which can approach the near absence of Central and Eastern European perspectives from transnational feminist theorising, and challenge the limited number of discursive tropes associated with post-socialist Central (...) and Eastern Europe – especially that of a ‘lag’, where difference is translated into a temporal distance. Instead, the authors suggest that a more inclusive vision of transnational feminist studies can be achieved by applying the decolonial framework to the post-socialist context, as explicated in the work of Madina Tlostanova. (shrink)

The mind-body problem in philosophy is typically understood as a discourse concerning the relation of mental states to physical states, and the experience of sensation. On this level it seems to transcend issues of race and racism, but Another Mind-Body Problem demonstrates that racial distinctions have been an integral part of the discourse since the Modern period in philosophy. Reading figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant in their historical contexts, John Harfouch uncovers discussions of mind and body that engaged (...) closely with philosophical and scientific notions of race in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, in particular in understanding how the mind unites with the body at birth and is then passed on through sexual reproduction. Kant argued that a person’s exterior body and interior psyche are bound together, that non-White people lacked reason, and that this lack of reason was carried on through reproduction such that non-Whites were an example of a union of mind and body without full being. Charting the development of this phenomenon from sixteenth-century medical literature to modern-day race discourse, Harfouch argues for new understandings of Descartes’s mind-body problem, Fanon’s experience of being ‘not-yet human,’ and the place of racism in relation to one of philosophy’s most enduring and canonical problems. -/- “Harfouch has written an important book on the intersection of race and the Western construction of the mind-body problem … This book is a significant resource for theorists dealing with race and decolonization issues, but it is more significant for the critique of philosophy itself and the continued teaching of mind-body issues. Readers will need some knowledge of philosophy, but the volume is in general accessible. It should be required reading for scholars of philosophy. Harfouch establishes a logically strong argument and makes a unique contribution to the field.” — CHOICE. (shrink)

The proposed list of 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals sets out to reframe development according to a more holistic perspective. Yet, drawing on the example of the need for sustainable, resilient and biodiverse agriculture, it is argued here that the SDGs remain essentially grounded within one cultural understanding of how to address poverty. At least with regard to agriculture, the SDGs thus remain mono-cultural, one-dimensional, overly technocratic, and are far from universal as they fail to acknowledge the stipulated alternative pluriverse, (...) frequently understood in the Global South. The problem outlined is neither a technical nor political one: being essentially related to knowledge production it calls for the pluralization of approaches to both global ethics and sustainability. (shrink)

Despite the prevalence of post-colonial theory in the humanities and social sciences, why is it that the two main secular formations in the study of religion(s), as philosophy of religion and history of religions, continue to deploy very similar mechanisms that reconstitute past imperialisms such as the hegemony of theory as specifically Western and/or the division of labor between universal and particular knowledge formations? To answer this question this paper stages an oblique engagement between the seemingly divergent discourses: (i) philosophy (...) of religion, (ii) history of religion—more specifically the area specialism called South Asian religions, and (iii) post-colonial theory especially where these discourses intersect with the discipline of Indology and the representation of Indic phenomena. A different version of this engagement occurs in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (LPR). A post-colonial reading of the LPR reveals closer and often unacknowledged connections between the birth of these two disciplines. More importantly the LPR anticipates the auto-immunizing mechanism that underpins the continued lack of engagement between the various disciplines of contemporary religions. Ironically, this mechanism, it will be argued, is located in the very heart of the comparative enterprise itself. (shrink)

This article examines the moral, political and pedagogical tensions that are created from the entanglement of patriotism and human rights, and sketches a response to these tensions in the context of critical education. The article begins with a brief review of different forms of patriotism, especially as those relate to human rights, and explains why some of these forms may be morally or politically valuable. Then, it offers a brief overview of human rights critiques, especially from the perspectives of Foucault, (...) critical legal studies and postcolonial theory, and emphasizes that foundationalist perspectives of human rights need to be constantly contested. The next part of the article discusses how to overcome issues of incompatibility between patriotism and human rights. The final part proposes that a ‘rapprochement’ between patriotism and human rights in the context of critical education has to take into consideration that patriotic feelings (as a form of love for one’s country) constitute a particular form of ‘emotional education’. As such, the teaching of both patriotism and human rights would benefit from the notion of ‘critical pedagogies of emotion’ that interrogates the emotional commitments of patriotism and human rights and the consequences of these commitments. (shrink)

Critical race theory guides the analysis of the nature of a white epistemology in psychological science, the consequences for the study of race, and how scientific racism has been possible in the pursuit of knowledge. The article argues that race has not only been misused in the politics of psychology but misappropriated because of the logic of psychological science. The epistemic process is divided into four components to argue that naïve empiricist approaches in psychology, centered on scientific method, prevent an (...) intricate understanding of race. Reasons for privileging method in psychology and the consequences of a white epistemology are discussed, including a narrow epistemic horizon and an inability to account for the temporality and contextuality of psychological phenomena. Ignorance, failure, or unwillingness to account for epistemic complexity when studying race are identified as problems. Questions about who benefits from narrow epistemologies are answered and suggestions for a broader practice of knowledge and education are provided. (shrink)

The article focuses on the politics of representation in Kosova since the United Nations took over ‘peace management’ in 1999. It uses UN propaganda posters (political pedagogy) and local nationalist political advertising as a way to read the multiple gendered discourses of representation. It shows how gender is used relationally between competing forces – the ‘international community’ and nationalists – as a tool to ensure UN's imposition of Western policies and norms and as a mechanism for local politicians to consolidate (...) their domination of the domestic/private sphere. Moreover, it discusses the price paid to mimic the West: how Kosovar politicians have sought to ‘undo’ national identity in favour of a Western self-representation through a gendered abnegation of Islam. Thus, as an intrinsic part of the discourse of ‘peace-building’, these images represent the site of power production, domination, negotiation, and rejection, involving the collaboration of different actors, institutions, and individuals. Three specific points will be made: first, the article seeks to show that a Western political modernization discourse has, paradoxically, reinforced patriarchal relations of power and traditional gender roles in Kosova through the subjugation of women. Second, it explains the inability to resolve competing Albanian narratives – one relying on the legacy of peaceful resistance and the other on the armed struggle against Serbian domination during the 1990s. Third, through the intermeshing of international peace-keepers and local nationalist patriarchs, it will show how the militarization of culture is perpetuated through, and in relationship to, gender. (shrink)

While the coffee house as a space of political deliberation has been a common feature across the globe, there are few historical cases in which one can analyze the role of such face-to-face political deliberation under totalitarian moments in heretofore democratic states. Of the analogous cases of democratic reversal, India is one of the most important and under-researched. In 1975, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was convicted of corrupt election practices. Rather than concede to the high court ruling, she suspended (...) the constitution and installed herself as India’s sole political authority. The Indian Coffee House in New Delhi became the key site of resistance to the Emergency. The totalitarian moment pushed contentious politics into the Coffee House, initially galvanizing it: even the older members of Indira Gandhi's Congress Party, who were active participants in India's Freedom Movement, were key participants in coffee house deliberations. Eventually, however, Indian Coffee House was bulldozed and political deliberation crushed. The space of the coffee house may foster political deliberation among different viewpoints, but when interaction is concentrated in one such space, it becomes easier for the state and its agents to suppress oppositional politics and more difficult for both establishment and oppositional politics themselves to retain a diversified public sphere character. While coffee houses and analogous institutions are not adequate substitutes for other forms of democratic politics, therefore, they can encourage expression when other avenues are closed off and nourish the memory of a democratic political culture for the future. (shrink)

Since the mid-twentieth century, the ‘Scientific Revolution’ has arguably occupied centre stage in most Westerners’, and many non-Westerners’, conceptions of science history. Yet among history of science specialists that position has been profoundly contested. Most radically, historians Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams in 1993 proposed to demolish the prevailing ‘big picture’ which posited that the Scientific Revolution marked the origin of modern science. They proposed a new big picture in which science is seen as a distinctly modern, western phenomenon rather (...) than a human universal, that it was invented in the Age of Revolutions 1760–1848, and that science be de-centred within the new big picture: treated as just one of many forms of human knowledge-seeking activity. Their paper is one of the most highly cited in the history of science field, and has the potential to transform the way that science educators, science communicators, science policy-makers and scientists view science. Yet the paper and historians’ scholarly response to it are not well-known outside the history discipline. Here I attempt to bridge that disciplinary gap with a review of scholarly papers published 1994–2014 that cited Cunningham and Williams or otherwise discussed the Scientific Revolution, to gauge the extent of support for the old and new big pictures. I find that the old big picture is disintegrating and lacks active defenders, while many scholars support aspects of the new big picture. I discuss the significance of this for scholars in ‘applied’ fields of science studies such as education, communication and policy. (shrink)

There is growing global consensus that inequality is making sustainable development goals unattainable. Social inclusion of the historically marginalized and equality of opportunity is crucial for sustainable development. Inclusive quality education for all is therefore considered as one of the three main targets for sustainable development according to UNESCO’s Incheon declaration in 2015. This paper draws on an institutional ethnography of a globally interconnected old colonial school’s inclusive pedagogic work in postcolonial India. The school’s work has been much celebrated in (...) existing research by academics, global donor agencies and also by the Indian government’s Sarva Shikshya Abhiyan office. This paper analyses how the school conceptualized a distinct inclusive pedagogy to educate the hearts and the minds of children driven by local community needs for social inclusion within a context of extreme inequality. This paper argues that the school’s conception of inclusive education addressing the diverse learning needs of children developed as a syncretic cultural formation drawing on its institutional mission for social justice, as well as indigenous history of educational reform and philosophy of community engagement. In doing so, this paper engages with the ‘philosophy of context’ and draws on the ‘southern theory’ of inclusive education as envisioned by Rabindranath Tagore, indigenous education reformer and Nobel Laureate poet activist during early twentieth-century colonial British India, who challenged both local and global inequality through his creative and educational work. (shrink)

In the post-Soviet context, various cyclical models of recurrent Russian “Times of Troubles” have become increasingly popular. This perspective emerged first in Soviet dissident circles, who used it as a means to expose as mistaken the Soviet belief in continual historical progress on Russian soil. In post-Soviet Russia this critical approach has been continued by members of the “Akhezier circle,” the economist Egor Gaidar, and others. Meanwhile it was given an affirmative, conservative reinterpretation by Aleksandr Panarin, according to whom Russia (...) has always managed to overcome its phases of devastating Westernization and state collapse. This idea of Russian history has become influential; even Vladimir Putin has talked about Russia as a strong state able to survive various “Times of Troubles” from the early seventeenth century to the early post-Soviet period. It also figures prominently among members of the neoconservative Izborsk Club. This article analyzes different conceptions of Russian history as cyclical and their prominent place in the prevailing civilizational discourse of post-Soviet Russia. By means of postcolonial perspectives, this discourse is seen on the one hand as an attempt to question and reject Western hegemony, attempts that on the other hand nevertheless seem unable to liberate themselves from a normative dependence on the West. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung In der Debatte um die Integrität der Religionswissenschaft verteidigen einige Autoren angesichts der Dominanz metatheoretischer Reflexionen und diskursanalytischer Genealogien des Religionsbegriffs die außereuropäische Religionsgeschichte als Kerngeschäft der Disziplin. Statt die Bedeutung der Religionsgeschichte für die Theoriebildung hervorzuheben, stellt der Artikel die umgekehrte Frage: Welchen Nutzen haben neuere theoretische Ansätze wie Postkolonialismus, Diskurstheorie und Religionsästhetik für die konkrete religionshistorische Arbeit? Der aus diesen Ansätzen resultierende Perspektivwechsel wird am Beispiel aztekischer Göttervorstellungen diskutiert, konkret an León-Portillas dominanter Rekonstruktion eines aztekischen philosophischen Monotheismus. (...) Seine Interpretation wird postkolonial und diskursiv dekonstruiert und eine religionsästhetisch inspirierte Neuinterpretation eines Teilaspekts, dem Göttertitel Yohualli Ehecatl, vorgeschlagen. (shrink)

This study is concerned with current images of Science Studies travelling to places outside Western Europe and North America. These images focus on the movement of Science Studies’ formative concepts and ideas. They eclipse other formative aspects specific to the context in which this field was established. For example, Science Studies has analysed science within the conceptual architecture of modernity. Michel-Rolph Trouillot has proposed the notion of “Elsewhere” as analytical lens to analyse the constitution of modernity. The paper claims that (...) modern science, too, can be studied through this analytical lens to call attention to characteristics of science that remain systematically eclipsed. Trouillot’s notion of Elsewhere is applied to a paradigmatic case study from the field of Science Studies—Leviathan and the Air-Pump by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer—to test and demonstrate its analytical potential. By proposing a Programme in Science Studies Elsewhere, this paper refers to David Bloor’s four ten.. (shrink)

Criticism of ‘the West’ and of ‘Western civilization’ in Germany in the early 20th century is generally most familiar today as a conservative force of the age. It is well-known that at the outbreak of war in August 1914 a longstanding German complex of resentment of the Western European powers exploded in a call to arms. Yet it needs to be stressed that not all prominent German bourgeois writers endorsed a wholly militant reading of the motif of German national-cultural ‘protest (...) at the West’. By 1918 an array of voices could come to discern another kind of salient work of contention that refused apology for any kind of violent Kulturkrieg. The thesis defended in this article is that in sophisticated humanistic writing of the era, a German mood of antagonism with the West represents not a regressive ideology but the productive and intelligent outcome of a longstanding preeminence of philosophical questioning in German academic life since the later 19th century about European world pictures and their claims to universal validity on the stage of world history. A range of statements are shown here to anticipate debates of the present day about ‘late’, ‘reflexive’ or ‘post-Eurocentric’ conditions of Western modernity. (shrink)

Recently, indigenous struggles against ongoing colonial violence have become prominent in the context of growing environmental destruction and the ascendancy of the far right in the United States and parts of South America. This article suggests that European radical theory is not always equipped to provide normative frameworks of allyship with such struggles. Exploring the ‘messianic tone’ in European radical theory, and in particular the works of Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, the article argues that the analytical tendency to render (...) the subject entirely dissolute acts against indigenous demands for justice built around the latter’s sovereignty. In an effort to excavate a ‘European’ tradition that might enable relations of allyship between those in relatively privileged positions and indigenous peoples, the article foregrounds the life and thought of Gustav Landauer, a German, Jewish, anarchist revolutionary who lost his life during the 1919 German revolution. Landauer’s anarchism was suffused with his reading of his Jewishness, and as such, although he prefigures Derrida and Agamben in many ways, he ultimately refused to completely reject the sovereignty of the subject, providing a means by which to engage European political theory with indigenous struggles in the world today. (shrink)