Since Gayle Salamon’s 2018 article “What is Critical about Critical Phenomenology?”, phenomenologists and critical theorists have offered various responses to the question this title poses. In doing this, they articulated the following considerations: is renewed criticality targeting the phenomenological method itself, does it expand its subject matter to marginalized experiences, does it retool key phenomenological concepts? One aspect of this debate that has been left under-interrogated, however, is the word “phenomenology” itself. There is after all another question to ask in (...) this context: what is phenomenological about critical phenomenology? Many avenues of response are of course possible. Phenomenology could most broadly be meant as an approach that concerns itself with what is given in experience in order to describe the structures of that givenness. From a Husserlian perspective, pure phenomenology is the science which concerns itself with phenomena in the full and diverse sense of the word—not as understood by specific natural or human sciences. What is distinctive of phenomenology is thus not what subset or type of phenomena it is interested in but how it relates to them, which, as Husserl introduces Ideas I, happens “in a completely different attitude.”. (shrink)

In this article, I introduce the critical study of the skin in three parts. I start with a reflection on what makes the skin such a suggestive and, arguably, special phenomenon. I then provide a brief overview of the key works, recurring themes and ongoing debates that characterize the skin studies subfield. And finally, I end with a presentation of the articles that make up Body and Society’s special issue on the skin, taking care to highlight how they both contribute (...) to the subfield as it currently stands while orienting it towards new questions, concerns and challenges. (shrink)

Indigenous peoples are, in the current historical conjuncture, leading the opposition to the capitalist state in Canada. The specific features of Indigenous cultures, history and struggles demand of historical materialism a regional theory that deploys existing concepts and categories in reinvigorated and sometimes different ways. Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks makes a critically important contribution to this project by offering a creative, materialist-leaning reading of Frantz Fanon as a lever to criticise those prominent liberal arguments of Indigenous conflict that (...) are based on notions of recognition. While Coulthard’s argument and project would be significantly advanced by raising Marx’s concept of ‘mode of production’ from the secondary status it enjoys in the work to a more foundational role, in part because this moves the problem of totalisation to the core of strategies of resistance, he nevertheless in his affirmative project rightly centres returning to aboriginal cultural forms as a critical feature of decolonisation. (shrink)

I use critical phenomenological resources in Tetsurō Watsuji and Sarah Ahmed to explore the spatial origin of some social impairments in Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). I argue that a critical phenomenological perspective puts pressure on the idea that social impairments in ASD are exclusively (or even primarily) neurocognitive deficits that can be addressed by focusing on cognitive factors internal to the autistic person — for example, training them to adopt a more neurotypical approach to social cognition. Instead, I argue that (...) the structure and character of some neurotypical spaces may play a regulative role in shaping aspects of at least some of the social impairments autistic people exhibit when they inhabit these spaces. I also briefly consider some possible therapeutic applications of this critical phenomenological approach. (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)

This article investigates the embodied identities of Hong Kong gay men in two different `sites of desire', namely London and Hong Kong. In London, Hong Kong gay men have constantly encountered the intertwining relationships between race and sexuality in the constellation of the Western construction of body/desire/masculinity. By contrast, Hong Kong gay men in Hong Kong tend to place more emphasis on issues of family and culture. The main site of struggle for Hong Kong gay men in Hong Kong is (...) the family-oriented and community-based environment. They adopt not a confrontational politics in a constitutional sense but rather derive tactics of microscopic resistance against societal and familial domination. By comparing 34 Hong Kong gay men living in London and Hong Kong, I argue the divergent constructions of being gay in these two contexts. Through the `voices' of these gay men, I criticize the `Western' construction of identity/the body and offer new insights into the discussion of gay identities. (shrink)

This article conceptualizes the British Empire as a spatial arrangement created and sustained in the everyday activities of women. Focusing on the work of Jane Waterston – a missionary and doctor working in South Africa – and Mary Kingsley – a traveller and political lobbyist – it argues that women played an important part in fabricating the social relationships and practical activities of empire in their daily lives. Women also contributed to the spatial configuration of empire in their journeys back (...) and forth between Britain and various parts of the empire. It argues that women's routes and journeys connected parts of the empire with each other and with Britain as they, along with sailors, traders and adventurers, wove the diasporas of privilege. In making places and the connections between them, women also made themselves and their lives in new terms. In making use of the maps of territorial expansion in making themselves and their lives, the women featured in this article also contributed to forging versions of white British subjectivities which bear the imprint of empire. (shrink)

In his writings on the gaze and the body in Being and Nothingness , Jean-Paul Sartre describes the ways in which bodies are exposed and vulnerable to the anonymous gaze of the other, and how they in the midst of their vulnerability depend entirely on being seen by the gaze for their meaning and their very being. Although it sometimes appears as quite depressingly restrictive, Sartre’s analysis of the gaze and his account of the body offer rich and important resources (...) for recognizing the force of objectifying categories and meanings in the constitution of identities. This article suggests that Sartre’s almost remorseless descriptions of how the body is molded by the gaze of the other provide a productive point of departure for understanding the becoming of singular identities, as they are lived on the margins and in the intersections of established categories which determine them in often oppressive ways. Being marked by difference, whether sexual, ethnic, racial, or other, is in many ways being trapped by the objectifying gaze of the other in such a way that the ability to return the gaze and claim a subject position is deeply circumscribed. The article gives an account of Sartre’s analysis of the phenomenon of the gaze as the force which objectifies me before the other and of his description of the body as it is subjectively experienced as objectified. This “third ontological dimension of the body” captures the tensions inherent in subjectivity and brings to light its perpetual exposure to its own unknown exterior as it is seen and constituted by the other. (shrink)

From its inception, philosophy for/with children (P4wC) has sought to promote philosophical discussion with children based on the latter’s own questions and a pedagogic method designed to encourage critical, creative, and caring thinking. Communities of inquiry can be plagued by power struggles prompted by diverse identities, however. These not always being highlighted in the literature or P4wC discourse, this article proposes a two-stage model for facilitators as part of their ethical responsibility. In the first phase, they should free themselves from (...) assumptions and closed-mindedness. They should liberate themselves from pedagogy of fear and “banking education” in order to act freely in an educational space characterized by improvisation that cultivates participation of the children. Here, the text is based on normalizing education principles, counter-education and diasporic-education approaches in order to ensure openness and inclusiveness. In the second, they should embrace enabling-identity views and practices in order to make the community of inquiry as identity-broad and -rich as possible, recognizing and legitimizing the participants’ differences. Here, the text is based on principles such as recognizing power games as part of the community, ensuring multi-narratives human environment and enabling epistemic justice in order to ensure perspectival multiplicity, multiple identities, and the legitimization of difference characterized by pedagogy of search. (shrink)

Informed by the critical humanisms of Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Paul Gilroy, the authors argue for an orientation to teaching and learning that troubles the continuing effects of dehumanizing race logic. Reflecting on Paul Haggis's Oscar award winning film Crash from 2004, they suggest that the metaphor of racial 'crashing' captures what happens when we act out from experiences of racial injury instead of being touched by it. They propose a psychoanalytic pedagogy of emotions as a method for reading (...) representation beyond the limits of detached rational critique. Learning from the affect of racial injury as it is made manifest in representation, they suggest, is an important ethical starting point for generating new insights into what it might mean to live within and beyond contemporary legacies of racial hatred. (shrink)

In gestational surrogacy arrangements, the womb is often figured as a holding environment that brings the child of commissioning parents to fruition but does not shape fetal identity. This article probes the racial imaginary of such a figuration—what I term the “nonracializing womb”—where gestation is seen as peripheral to racial transmission. Drawing on feminist science studies frameworks and data from interviews with parents who commissioned surrogates, this article traces the cultural politics of the nonracializing womb, positioning it as an index (...) for broader understandings of race, reproductive labor, and kinship that hinge on nuclear and biogenetic forms. It then problematizes this figure of gestation by engaging emerging research on environmental epigenetics, which offers a lively model of pregnancy as shaping fetal biology, blurring the lines between surrogate and fetus. I argue that epigenetics offers a resource to reimagine gestation as a racializing process, by theorizing race not as solely genetic, but as relational, socio-environmental, and forged through distributed kinship lineages. (shrink)

Generally, regulation is thought of as a constant that carries with it both a formative and conservative power, a power that standardises, demarcates and forms an order, through procedures, rules and precedents. It is dominantly thought that the singularity and formalisation of structures like rules is what enables regulation to achieve its aim of identifying, apprehending, sanctioning and forestalling/pre-empting threats and crime or harm. From this point of view, regulation serves to firmly establish fixed and stable categories of what norms, (...) customs, morals and behaviours are applicable to a particular territory, society or community in a given time. These fixed categories are then transmitted onto individuals by convention, ritual and enforcement through imperatives of law (and technology) that mark certain behaviours as permissible and others as forbidden, off bounds. In this manner, regulation serves a programming (i.e., a calculable or determinable) purpose. It functions as a pro-active management or as a mastery of threats, risks, crimes and harms that affect a society and its security both in the future and in the present. Regulation for instance, will inscribe and codify what it determines to constitute crime or harm such as pornography, incitement of terrorism, extremist speech, racial hatred etc. These determined or calculated/calculable categories will then be enforced and regulated (e.g. through automated filtering) in order to ensure a preservation of public order within society. Drawing mainly from deconstruction, this article situates law and technologies within a wider ecological process of texts, speech and writing i.e., communication. In placing regulation within disseminatory and iterable processes of communication, this article complicates, destabilises and critiques the dominant position of determinability and calculability within the regulatory operations of law. (shrink)

Many philosophers endorse the ideal of justice yet disagree radically over what that ideal requires. One persistent problem for thinking about justice is that the unjust social arrangements that originally motivated our questions may also distort our thinking about possible answers. This paper suggests some strategies for improving our thinking about justice in the unjust meantime. As our world becomes more just, we may expect our thinking about justice to improve.

Differences between, and struggles over, plural forms of time and temporal categories is a crucial yet underexplored aspect of debates about global justice. This article aims to reorient the global...

This article uses two national survey data sets to analyze the effects of skin color on life outcomes for African American and Mexican American women. Using a historical framework of European colonialism and slavery, this article explains how skin color hierarchies were established and are maintained. The concept of social capital is used to explain how beauty, defined through light skin, works as capital and as a stratifying agent for women on the dimensions of education, income, and spousal status. The (...) analysis shows that light skin predicts higher educational attainment for both groups of women. Light skin directly predicts higher personal earnings for African American women and indirectly affects personal earnings for Mexican American women. Light skin predicts higher spousal status for African American women but not for Mexican American women. (shrink)

This essay places psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial, anti-racist message from Peau Noire, Masques Blancs/Black Skin, White Masks in conversation with the new diagnoses of “Gender Dysphoria” and “Transvestic Disorder” in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Specifically, the essay discusses sexologist Ray Blanchard’s controversial theory of autogynephilia alongside Fanon’s ambivalent rendering of transgender desire and interracial trans phenomenology in a crucial but frequently overlooked passage in Black Skin. Fanon’s anti-colonial critique of psychiatry (...) allows us to reconsider how Blanchard’s theories on paraphilia engage with the foundational psychoanalytic concepts of identification and desire, as identified by the Freudian and Lacanian models and explored in the writings of Judith Butler, Catherine Millot, Charles Shepherdson, and others. By offering a fresh interpretation of the French text, this essay argues that a “trans of color critique” can benefit from Black Skin’s unexpected insight into trans desire: Fanon’s “man of color,” who simultaneously undergoes a gender transition and a racial transformation, represents the literal embodiment of his critique of colonial racism. Given the role of the new paraphilias in the DSM-V, this essay concludes that a trans of color critique is well positioned to reinforce the anti-colonial message Fanon addressed to the psychiatric and psychoanalytical fields, which have tended to diagnose psychic injury while ignoring its causation, and which continue to neglect the fact that medical access is just as important as material support and security for minority subjects, in particular. (shrink)

This article takes up Hortense Spillers’ conception of ‘ungendered’ flesh and Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the ‘position of the unthought’ occupied by the figure of the Black-qua-Slave in order to explore their resonance for considering the interrelations between anti-black racial antagonism, ontological positioning and hegemonic renderings of gender formation and sexual taxonomies. Examining the performance and reception of the recent Broadway revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch starring Taye Diggs as a case study, it asks what role race, and (...) specifically (anti-)blackness, plays in the representation, recognition and intelligibility of proper, (non-)normative gendered corporealities within the dominant imaginary and collective unconscious. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice and remedies for this injustice are widely debated. This article adds to the existing debate by arguing that theories of recog- nition can fruitfully contribute to Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice and can provide a framework for structural remedy. By pairing Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice with theories of recognition, I bring forward a modest claim and a more radical claim. The first concerns a shift in our vocabulary; recognition theory can give a name (...) to the seriousness of the long-term effects of hermeneutical injustice. The second claim is more radical: thinking of hermeneutical injustice as preventing what I call “self-recogni- tion” provides a structural remedy to the phenomenon of hermeneutical injustice. Because hermeneutical injustice is first and foremost a structural injustice, I contend that every virtue theory of hermeneutical justice should be complemented by structural remedies in terms of recognition. Finally, what I argue sheds light on the seriousness of cases of exclusion of and discrimination against women in academia and helps to draw our attention to new ways to combat such problems. (shrink)

Crises have become a new normality. This normality is turned into grounds for the politics of fear. The hegemonic principle of the politics of fear is security. This politics, which invents objects of fear, is intimately linked to the nationalist identity politics shaped by a particular nationalist essence. Racism is an elemental part of the nationalist identity politics. In the text, racism is considered in relation to, on the one hand, fear and anxiety and, on the other hand, the imaginary (...) and symbolic orders and the structure of fantasy. This analysis shows how xenophobic images, nationalist signifiers and racist fantasies create the vicious circles of fear and hate that gives justification for the nationalist identity politics that raises security as the hegemonic organizing principle. To counter the nationalist identity politics, the nationalist and racist fantasy must be traversed. Therefore, an anti-racist politics cannot be based on any pre-given identity. It takes place only as emancipatory events that confront the racists and nationalist fantasy. (shrink)

Marxism was central to the understanding of South Africa’s struggle for freedom. This article provides a critical analysis of Marxist literature on South Africa since the 1970s, drawing out its relevance for contemporary analyses of the post-apartheid state and for radical politics today. It suggests that while the literature offered important insights into the character of the apartheid state, it failed to provide a critical appraisal of the state per se. Moreover, the capturing of state power by the liberation movement (...) was not grounded in an understanding of the oppressive character of the state-form. The undermining of mainstream Marxism under neo-liberalizing conditions in post-apartheid South Africa has opened up the prospects for anti-statist radical libertarian thinking (including autonomist Marxism), and this thinking is consistent with the practices of certain autonomist popular politics currently emerging. Social theorizing on South Africa has had a complex relationship with Marxism. This article is interested in drawing on this experience in an effort to understand its implications for the ‘new’ South Africa where, 20 years after apartheid’s formal ending, social transformation remains caught in the logic not of Marxism but neo-liberalizing capitalism. (shrink)

Today the phenomenological concept of the lived body figures centrally in several philosophical and special scientific debates. In these wide and widening fields, the concept is used with multiple different meanings. In order to clarify and delineate the debates, this paper provides an explication of the phenomenological-transcendental methods. It argues that these methods help us remove the most fundamental ambiguities of the concept of embodiment by distinguishing between the main constituents of the lived body and by illuminating their mutual relations.

In this paper, we examine Shaun Gallagher’s project of “naturalizing” phenomenology with the cognitive sciences: front-loaded phenomenology. While we think it is a productive proposal, we argue that Gallagher does not employ genetic phenomenological methods in his execution of FLP. We show that without such methods, FLP’s attempt to locate neurological correlates of conscious experience is not yet adequate. We demonstrate this by analyzing Gallagher’s critique of cognitive neuropsychologist Christopher Frith’s functional explanation of schizophrenic symptoms. In “constraining” Gallagher’s FLP program, (...) we discuss what genetic phenomenological method is and why FLP ought to embrace it. We also indicate what types of structures a genetically modified FLP will consider, and how such an approach would affect the manner in which potential neurological correlates of conscious experience are conceptually understood and experimentally investigated. (shrink)

This article contributes to an ongoing discussion within sports philosophy concerning how to understand intentional movement in sporting activities. The operations of ‘representation intentionality...

AI technology is capturing the African imaginations as a gateway to progress and prosperity. There is a growing interest in AI by different actors across the continent including scientists, researchers, humanitarian and aid organizations, academic institutions, tech start-ups, and media organizations. Several African states are looking to adopt AI technology to capture economic growth and development opportunities. On the other hand, African researchers highlight the gap in regulatory frameworks and policies that govern the development of AI in the continent. They (...) argue that this could lead to AI technology exacerbating problems of inequalities and injustice in the continent. However, most of the literature on AI ethics is biased toward Euro-American perspectives and lack the understanding of how AI development is apprehended in the Global South, and particularly Africa. Drawing on the case study of the first African Master’s in Machine Intelligence program, this paper argues for looking beyond the question of ethics in AI and examining AI governance issues through the analytical lens of the raciality of computing and the political economy of technoscience to understand AI development in Africa. By doing so, this paper seeks a different theorization for AI ethics from the South that is based on lived experiences of those in the margins and avoids the framings of technological futures that simplistically pathologize or celebrate Africa. (shrink)

Dignity is a universal principle that requires us to treat every person as having worth beyond who a particular person is or what they do. Dignity is a complex and sometimes contested idea, that at times can be compromised in health care and allegedly also within the practice of outdoor therapy. Outdoor therapies comprise a range of therapeutic approaches including nature-based therapy, adventure therapy, animal-assisted therapy, forest therapy, wilderness therapy, surf therapy, and more. Within the literature of outdoor therapies there (...) has been limited research on ethics related to common understandings of care concepts such as relational dignity and human rights. The aim of this paper is therefore to unravel briefly whether dignity in general, and relational qualities of dignified care more particularly, might be a useful concept to apply in order to support an ethical practice in outdoor therapies. (shrink)

Scholars are increasingly concerned about social biases in facial analysis systems, particularly with regard to the tangible consequences of misidentification of marginalized groups. However, few have examined how automated facial analysis technologies intersect with the historical genealogy of racialized gender—the gender binary and its classification as a highly racialized tool of colonial power and control. In this paper, we introduce the concept of auto-essentialization: the use of automated technologies to re-inscribe the essential notions of difference that were established under colonial (...) rule. We consider how the face has emerged as a legitimate site of gender classification, despite being historically tied to projects of racial domination. We examine the history of gendering the face and body, from colonial projects aimed at disciplining bodies which do not fit within the European gender binary, to sexology's role in normalizing that binary, to physiognomic practices that ascribed notions of inferiority to non-European groups and women. We argue that the contemporary auto-essentialization of gender via the face is both racialized and trans-exclusive: it asserts a fixed gender binary and it elevates the white face as the ultimate model of gender difference. We demonstrate that imperialist ideologies are reflected in modern automated facial analysis tools in computer vision through two case studies: commercial gender classification and the security of both small-scale and large-scale spaces. Thus, we posit a rethinking of ethical attention to these systems: not as immature and novel, but as mature instantiations of much older technologies. (shrink)

The high rate of inequality in South Africa is rooted in colonial dispossession and racial exploitation, and still runs primarily along the racial divide. Policy initiatives taken to redress past economic injustices through the black economic empowerment (BEE) have failed to bring economic transformation. Using the twin lenses of epistemic violence and racial capitalism, this study analyses how entangled interests aimed to co-opt the ruling party elite by the apartheid-era business elite led to the BEE impasse. The pervasiveness of cultural (...) alienation in BEE failure suggests that a shift to restorative justice is necessary to break from the impasse. (shrink)

One issue that is often ignored in political theory is the problem of means and modes of communication affecting dialogue between parties. In this age of hyper communication, this is something particularly relevant. The point here is that, despite the ease with which we have access to both means and modes of communication, there remains the problem of truly communicating and truly dialoguing with the Other. Michel Serres’ work Le Parasite is a seminal work on this issue. According to him, (...) in means and modes of communication, the parasite is an unwanted entity that interferes with what would otherwise be a clear connection between a sender and a receiver. But messages must pass through means and modes of communication, and this necessarily interferes with the message. The noise is therefore a constitutive feature of any form of communication. In this article, I assess the implications of Serres’ theory for Buber’s views on dialogue and for conflict resolution between individuals and communities in conflict. My discussion will be centred on informal education and will make reference to concrete instances of Anti-Semitism in the Middle-Eastern media, and how it affects relations between communities in the region. (shrink)

What is the meaning of critique for critical phenomenology? Building on Gayle Salamon’s engagement with this question in the inaugural issue of Puncta: A Journal for Critical Phenomenology (2018), I will propose a six-fold account of critique as: 1) the art of asking questions, moved by crisis; 2) a transcendental inquiry into the conditions of possibility for meaningful experience; 3) a quasi-transcendental, historically-grounded study of particular lifeworlds; 4) a (situated and interested) analysis of power; 5) the problematization of basic concepts (...) and methods; and 6) a praxis of freedom that seeks not only to interpret the meaning of lived experience, but also to change the conditions under which horizons of possibility for meaning, action, and relationship are wrongfully limited or foreclosed. While the first two dimensions of critique are alive and well in classical phenomenology, the others help to articulate what is distinctive about critical phenomenology. (shrink)

Shame is notoriously ambivalent. On one hand, it operates as a mechanism of normalization and social exclusion, installing or reinforcing patterns of silence and invisibility; on the other hand, the capacity for shame may be indispensible for ethical life insofar as it attests to the subject’s constitutive relationality and its openness to the provocation of others. Sartre, Levinas and Beauvoir each offer phenomenological analyses of shame in which its basic structure emerges as a feeling of being exposed to others and (...) bound to one’s own identity. For Sartre, shame is an ontological provocation, constitutive of subjectivity as a being-for-Others. For Levinas, ontological shame takes the form of an inability to escape one’s own relation to being; this predicament is altered by the ethical provocation of an Other who puts my freedom in question and commands me to justify myself. For Beauvoir, shame is an effect of oppression, both for the woman whose embodied existence is marked as shameful, and for the beneficiary of colonial domination who feels ashamed of her privilege. For each thinker, shame articulates the temporality of social life in both its promise and its danger. (shrink)

The world as we know it is structured by intersecting forms of systemic violence. It might seem obvious that this violence calls for critique. But this essay experiments with another, more radical possibility inspired by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Black feminist poethics and by abolitionist refusals of critique as an end in itself and a substitute for collective action. To what extent might phenomenology, even in its most critical form, be so deeply invested in the Kantian tradition of transcendental critique (...) that it confirms the logic of the world as we know it? And how, if at all, might a praxis of phenomenology beyond critique imagine and affirm a poethical world in which entanglement, indeterminacy, and simultaneity generate virtual possibilities for being, knowing, and doing beyond and against racial violence? (shrink)

Despite the growing literature on childhood obesity and lifestyle intervention programmes focusing on weight loss, few studies have examined young persons’ experiences of being identified as candidates for such programmes and of participating in them. This paper does so. Juxtaposing insights from phenomenology with an approach inspired by Foucault, the paper shows how teenage girls’ bodily self-perception and bodily self-awareness are shaped in intercorporeal assemblages comprising other people and specific features or elements of the lifestyle programme. Inspired by van Manen’s (...) hermeneutic-phenomenological approach, with its point of departure in lived experience, this paper draws on interviews with Norwegian teenage girls participating in the same lifestyle programme and identifies three core thematic aspects of the girls’ experiences: being identified as a candidate for a lifestyle programme and not wanting this; negotiating the lack of weight loss and the scales; and bodily situated agency – feeling good and being able. Permeating all three themes are two central, interrelated phenomena: agency and resistance. Furthermore, the paper shows how a combination of Foucauldian insights and a phenomenological understanding of intercorporeality can help to shed light on the power, affective, material and temporal dimensions of dys-appearance, as well as those of eu-appearance, and thus contribute to the understanding of the girls’ narrated lived experiences. On the basis of these findings, we argue that weight-related treatment goals are not necessarily compatible with the strengthening of adolescents’ body images and self-esteem. However, whilst being obliged to attend to their bodies while in the programme, the girls also encountered unexpected, positive bodily feelings and experiences. Such events, we suggest, offer a means of resisting the more troubling dys-appearing bodily situations our participants described so powerfully. (shrink)

According to Ernst Gombrich, cartoons provide us the chance to “study the use of symbols in a circumscribed context [and] find out what role the image may play in the household of our mind” (Gombrich 1973, 190). This paper looks at some underexplored implications and outcomes of Ernst Gombrich’s conceptual schemata when such a schemata is applied to cartoons. While we might easily avoid defamatory reference when picking out a subject in writing or speech, cartoon depictions, especially those unaccompanied by (...) speech bubbles or captions, often rely on a visual symbolism typified by the warping of some features the removal of others, and the manifestation of some visual trope or other, more easily lend themselves to defamatory reference. While harms to the referent are many in cases of defamatory cartoons, this paper focuses on the harms to the viewers of such cartoons by the depicter’s message and mode of representation, unique to the cartoon form. I will focus on the harms of misinformation of the viewer by the visual schemata (Gombrich 1960) present in certain cartoons, and the way this misinformative visual schemata (Ibid) may also restrict the possibility of conceptual revisions in its viewership. Harms of this kind come out uniquely in cartoons via norms of cartooning (as a particularly stylized and symbolic mode of visual representation) and the norms of interaction employed in the act of viewing a cartoon. As we’ll see in our case study of the infamous Jyllands Posten cartoons of Muhammad the Prophet, even in cases where a cartoon representation bears no visual similarity to its referent, viewers can easily and reliably pick out the referent by calling to mind, in our focal case, the defamatory stereotypes, stock figures and icons inextricably linked with the referent. I argue that the damage to viewers of these sorts of depictions lies not in the fact that the viewer manages to pick out the intended referent of the depiction but what tools they use to pick out the referent and how such tools of reference (mis)inform their understanding of the referent they’ve picked out. (shrink)

The texts of Walid Daka, a Palestinian political prisoner incarcerated since 1986, challenge the notion that colonial power ends with decolonization and expose the shortcomings of examining colonial prisons solely through the eliminatory prism of death and deprivation. Studying Daka’s texts, the article presents how the Israeli carceral system has managed to utilize prisoners’ hopes and longings – in their relations with one another, their political actions such as hunger strikes or their building of internal leadership hierarchies, and their affective (...) worlds – to further its own goals. Rather than a pessimistic account, this article critically analyzes Daka’s writings to demonstrate how a first-person study of carceral subjectification can unfold within an activist framework. Daka uses these observations to develop an alternative articulation of decolonization that I term ‘abolitionist decolonization’ as a collective and continued insistence on setting the terms of getting free. By ‘abolitionist decolonization,’ I conjure a difficult conversation between a Fanonian project of never-ending decolonization and a Foucauldian project of never-ending abolition. As such, this critical attitude aims to counter settler-colonial carcerality in ways that will foil the administration’s attempts to reproduce the dangers that the prisoners seek to elude, through the very means they deploy to elude them. (shrink)

This article is the keynote address of the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, philosophy symposium in celebration of the 200th Anniversary of the British outlawing the Atlantic Slave Trade. The paper explores questions of enslavement and freedom through challenges of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of social change, and metacritical reflections posed by African Diasporic or Africana philosophy. Such challenges include the relevance and legitimacy of philosophical reflection to the lives of racialized slaves and concludes with a discussion (...) of the implications of the analysis for an understanding of the “face” of political life and the importance of the concept of “home” for a cogent theory of freedom. (shrink)

The concept of dignity is widely debated as to its efficacy as a ground upon which to base respect particularly in relation to human rights. Traditional concepts of inherent dignity associate dignity with the possession of rationality and autonomy, which consequently excludes non-rational humans from being viewed as possessing inherent dignity and therefore equal and inherent worth. This paper offers a theory of inherent dignity based on an account of a common humanity within which all humans might be seen as (...) possessing inherent worth and, therefore, deserving of being recognized and respected equally as ends in themselves. The theory is based on the communal practice and expectation of moral accountability, a practice that can be viewed as taking place universally both between and within human communities. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to draw attention to a currently underdeveloped notion of pain and alienation, in order to sketch an account of the harms of ‘discursive abuse’. This form of abuse comprises systemic practices of violating a person’s vulnerable integrity as a knowing agent. Discursive abuse results in, what I would like to call, ‘agential alienation’. This particular genus of alienation, whose broad conceptual origins lie in the respective works of Hegel and the early Marx, involves an (...) agent being robbed of their self-conception as a rational inquirer and participant in a deliberative public sphere. Such alienation causes a particular kind of pain for an agent that often has harrowing material effects. (shrink)

This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law’s enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontroversial, natural, and universal conditions of being ‘human’ cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, (...) the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law’s understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence. (shrink)

A study of the reception and utilization of realism in literature outside of Europe during and after the nineteenth century, the area and period of its prominence, grants us some insight into how theories, practices and cultures travel and change in the process. In particular, it allows us to see how realism has been relativized in such a way as to open up the possibilities of redefinition of the notion and practice and moving beyond them. For these reasons I am (...) undertaking a short survey in this paper of the transculturation, after Fernando Ortiz, of realism in Africa, tracing its genesis from the primary mode of the western novel form to its utilization in anticolonial resistance literature and transmogrification into the magical realism and postmodernism of postcolonial experimental writing. (shrink)

The publication of the Phenomena of power: Authority, domination, and violence into English allows for the English-speaking world to engage the work of Heinrich Popitz. Popitz provides a thorough and organized description of how power operates in social relations that should be valuable to any scholar of the human sciences. This essay is supportive of Popitz’s project, but seeks a critical engagement by extending the analysis on violence and technical power. I argue that reading Popitz alongside the decolonial thinker, Franz (...) Fanon and the media ecologist, Marshall McLuhan can provide important correctives. In particular, Fanon’s analysis that the colonial use of rhetorical power to dehumanize the oppressed and McLuhan’s comment on the importance of the control of medium are missing in an otherwise very thorough philosophical anthropology on the phenomena of power. (shrink)

Although previous treatments of affective injustice have identified some particular types of affective injustice, the general concept of affective injustice remains unclear. This article proposes a novel articulation of this general concept, according to which affective injustice is defined as a state in which individuals or groups are deprived of “affective goods” which are owed to them. On this basis, I sketch an approach to the philosophical investigation of affective injustice that begins by establishing which affective goods are fundamental, and (...) then considers which subsidiary goods—such as freedoms, resources, opportunities, and forms of recognition—may be necessary for the provision of those fundamental affective goods. Drawing from and developing ideas in the extant literature, I argue that two such fundamental affective goods include subjective well-being and emotional aptness. I then show that by analyzing deprivations of the subsidiary goods that enable a person to pursue and attain subjective well-being and emotional aptness, it is possible to shed new light on the cases of affective injustice that have been described in the extant literature, while also identifying other kinds of cases that have not been theorized to the same extent. (shrink)