Knowledge translation has been widely taken up as an innovative process to facilitate the uptake of research-derived knowledge into health care services. Drawing on a recent research project, we engage in a philosophic examination of how knowledge translation might serve as vehicle for the transfer of critically oriented knowledge regarding social justice, health inequities, and cultural safety into clinical practice. Through an explication of what might be considered disparate traditions, we identify compatibilities and discrepancies both within the critical tradition, and (...) between critical inquiry and knowledge translation. The ontological and epistemological origins of the knowledge to be translated carry implications for the synthesis and translation phases of knowledge translation. In our case, the studies we synthesized were informed by various critical perspectives and hence we needed to reconcile differences that exist within the critical tradition. A review of the history of critical inquiry served to articulate the nature of these differences while identifying common purposes around which to strategically coalesce. Other challenges arise when knowledge translation and critical inquiry are brought together. Critique is one of the hallmark methods of critical inquiry and, yet, the engagement required for knowledge translation between researchers and health care administrators, practitioners, and other stakeholders makes an antagonistic stance of critique problematic. While knowledge translation offers expanded views of evidence and the complex processes of knowledge exchange, we have been alerted to the continual pull toward epistemologies and methods reminiscent of the positivist paradigm by their instrumental views of knowledge and assumptions of objectivity and political neutrality. These types of tensions have been productive for us as a research team in prompting a critical reconceptualization of knowledge translation. (shrink)

In this post‐9/11 era marked by religious and ethnic conflicts and the rise of cultural intolerance, ambiguities arising from the conflation of multiculturalism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism jeopardize the delivery of culturally safe nursing care to non‐Western populations. This new social reality requires nurses to develop a heightened awareness of health issues pertaining to racism and ethnocentrism to provide culturally safe care to non‐Western immigrants or refugees. Through the lens of post‐colonial feminism, this paper explores the challenge of providing culturally (...) safe nursing care in the context of the post‐9/11 in Canadian healthcare settings. A critical appraisal of the literature demonstrates that post‐colonial feminism, despite some limitations, remains a valuable theoretical perspective to apply in cultural nursing research and develop culturally safe nursing practice. Post‐colonial feminism offers the analytical lens to understand how health, social and cultural context, race and gender intersect to impact on non‐Western populations’ health. However, an uncritical application of post‐colonial feminism may not serve racialized men's and women's interests because of its essentialist risk. Post‐colonial feminism must expand its epistemological assumptions to integrate Taylor's concept of identity and recognition and Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism and unfinalizability to explore non‐Western populations’ health issues and the context of nursing practice. This would strengthen the theoretical adequacy of post‐colonial feminist approaches in unveiling the process of racialization that arises from the conflation of multiculturalism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism in Western healthcare settings. (shrink)

This article offers a Derridean analysis of Barack Obama’s statement that, as president, he would be willing to negotiate with political actors dubbed ‘terrorists’, ‘rogues’, ‘enemies’, or members of the ‘axis of evil’. The article argues that the Derridean concept of the ‘parergonal’ is useful, as is the Derridean distinction between hospitality and tolerance. This is because a parergonal approach to politics, evidenced in a willingness to listen to those that others have ignored, and to include those left out, illustrates (...) hospitality’s commitment to allowing alterity to remain untranslated: the other is accepted as other. Undoubtedly, this deconstructive aspect of Obama’s political outlook proves threatening to traditional Americans, for its hospitality could potentially rewrite America’s hegemonic position in the world arena. (shrink)

In the long 20th century, modern China experienced perhaps the world’s most radical and systematic secularization process and the decimation of traditional religious and ritual cultures. This article seeks to account for this experience by engaging with postcolonial theory, a body of discourse seldom found relevant to China Studies. The article attempts a two-pronged critique of both state secularization and some aspects of existing Postcolonial Studies/theory. It shows the many ways in which nationalist elites in modern China unwittingly absorbed Western (...) Orientalist discourse even as their words and actions were ostensibly anti-colonial, and much of the article examines the consequences of this native Orientalism upon Chinese religiosities. Finally, the article suggests that one cannot discuss governmentality in modern China without understanding how it is intertwined with a sovereign power that is both archaic and, at the same time, has experienced renewal and expansion in modernity. (shrink)

This paper posits the concept of cognitive confinement as a useful tool for understanding the idea of decolonization of knowledge and the opposite notion of epistemic colonization. For the sake of...

When assessing North American students' oral participation in classes, should all students be subject to the same evaluation criteria or should teachers make reasonable allowances for Asian students practicing humility? How do we weigh the promotion of 'courage' through character education initiatives with traditional Asian dispositions? Viewing Asian humility in Western classrooms and as it rubs up against liberal principles of equality or justice, and a virtue ethic raises a number of philosophical questions around authenticity, polyvalence, and relativity. I approach (...) first through the lens of liberal philosophy as the 'dilemma of diversity' meets a boundary with communitarianism, and then through the contextualist lenses of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Foucault. Drawing on Tully's political philosophy, I inspect humility as embedded in language-games and then open it to revision through comparative history, inviting participants in the teacher's game of assessment to renegotiate the rules: a process complicated by their reticence to speak up. I also use Medina and Scheman's political reading of Wittgenstein to discuss how teachers can discern humility as performative silence within the classroom, distinguishing between genealogical accounts that show how comportments could be otherwise from perspicuous inspection of interconnected language-games in current educational settings. (shrink)

Latin America has often been represented by images of pre-Columbian artifacts and artwork on book covers and in other printed materials produced by Latin American studies. This article tries to show that there are strong connections between this type of representation and the semantics of Latin America both in everyday English language and in the discourses of the social sciences. First, the author reviews the history of the concept of Latin America in everyday English language, showing how it has been (...) defined as the opposite of a glorified collective self-image of America, in cultural, temporal, and racial terms. Next, chief approaches of Latin American studies (modernization theory, studies of corporatism, and the present-day textbook literature) are examined, focusing on how social scientific discourses have defined Latin America. Before returning to the topic of pre-Columbian representation, the covers of the best-selling present-day textbooks are surveyed to show how these pictorial representations reproduce the cultural and temporal perceptions of otherness already present in the texts, plus a racial perception that is mostly absent in them. The author argues that the pre-Columbian representation reproduces the three aspects of Latin America’s othering in a powerful and synthetic way. Last, the results of the present analysis are evaluated in the light of some contributions to postcolonial theory, visual culture studies and picture theory. (shrink)

This article commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of The Sociological Imagination by recalling, renewing and updating C. Wright Mills’ pledge to expand a politically aware, self-reflective and publicly accessible intellectual culture between aestheticism and scientism. We begin by sketching how Mills’ ‘bifocal’ vision of the translation between the close-up perspective on personal milieus and the longer view of social structures contrasts with recent calls for a public sociology which would sustain its professional legitimacy while reviving its critical conscience. To illustrate this (...) point, we argue that his project can be reframed in a way that ‘provincializes’ the universalizing claims and scientific aspirations of much of North American sociology by exposing its imperial unconscious in pre- and post-war movements toward the professionalization and scientization of knowledge. Here our focus turns to the prospects for a ‘sociology of empire’ to trace imperial forms which are symptomatically manifested both in the discipline’s assumptions about historical progress and in Mills’ critique of these assumptions. Finally, with an example from the history of British colonialism in Egypt, we show how, despite its blindspots, Mills’ vision of the sociological imagination implicitly projects an alternative ‘sociological map’ with distinct vantage points that can account for the changing cultural tasks of our time, especially concerning how collectives of human and non-human agents are unequally mediated within networks of power. We conclude by revisiting Mills’ distinctive approach to ‘the craft of sociology’, considered more as a prayer than a profession, and undertaken more as a personal and political calling than as career. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the method of genealogy in moral philosophy, with a focus on evaluating the credibility of moral progress judgments. Despite genealogy becoming a new trend in this field, I critique three types of defective grand narrative genealogies represented by the works of Peter Railton, Michael Huemer, and Nicholas Smyth. I argue that their genealogies fail to be adequate for evaluating moral progress judgments’ credibility. Railton’s genealogy lacks specificity regarding the relatum of the causal story he presents, (...) Huemer’s fails to withstand the scrutiny of historical evidence, and Smyth’s gives no clear verdict on the credibility of the moral progress judgments it explains. These failures, I argue, stem from grand narratives’ neglect of the particularities in each case of moral belief emergence. The disregard for details renders grand narratives generally inadequate for credibility evaluation. Instead, I propose a case study approach that takes into account four types of particulars in each case. I argue that this approach is more methodologically adequate in evaluating the credibility of moral progress judgments since these case-specific details are essential in determining the credibility of a moral belief. (shrink)

This study explores the circulation of Bourdieu's symbolic capital at the level of face-to-face interactions. Recounting a single interaction between three individuals, this study provides an example of the negotiated nature of capital articulation and the relationship between identity practice and capital articulation, when addressed at the microlevel of interaction. Given a group task which forced participants to negotiate at an explicit level symbolic capital affordances, one participant – a non-native speaker of English in an English conversation – was able (...) to articulate cultural capital by way of her links to academic institutions. However, later in the group task her attempt to index capital by way of her reflexive positioning as Asian was rebuked, leading her to disengage from the group task. This study emphasizes the need to analyze symbolic capital from the ‘ground-up’ for that is where its distribution is reproduced but also potentially transformed. (shrink)

It is not uncommon for activists to use the language of colonization or occupation to describe the social dynamics at work in cities undergoing gentrification. Should these claims be regarded as ou...

This essay has two purposes. One is to present a detailed analysis of a historical example to defend the validity of the idea of universal rationality. Although diverse arguments have been offered...

This article examines the discursive strategies of news reports on China's human rights in The New York Times and People's Daily. After an analysis of local semantics, I argue that the discursive representations in the two newspapers reflect the struggle over articulation of human rights. The New York Times attempts to project the notion of natural rights as universal truth, whereas People's Daily defines human rights as a process of development to counter Western condemnation as well as to justify rights (...) abuses in China. The struggle over articulation is also a manifestation of the hierarchy of discourse. The powerful try to fix the preferred meaning while the powerless strive to negate the dominant meaning. (shrink)

The theoretical and moral bedrock of Western colonialism has been its claim to “universalism.” Central to this universalism is a Cartesian dualism in which only the disembodied mind has access to the universal, and the body, as a mere particular, does not. This paper (Part 1) and the following paper (Part 2) propose an alternative model of “universalism” as the totality of interactions between embodied particulars. This model of “universalism” is based on the relationship between the classical Chinese philosophical concepts (...) of “feeling” (qing, 情), interaction (gan, 感), and the unimpeded free-flow (tong, 通) that results. This Chinese model of universalism is ultimately based on the organicist metaphysics of life that understands meaning and order to be the result of organic interaction between bodies. this paper will show how the dominant Chinese tradition understood the universal as a result of the sympathetic interaction between embodied particulars. (shrink)

It is part of a global trend today that new relationships are being forged between religion and society, between spirituality and materiality, giving rise to announcements that we live in a ‘postsecular’ or ‘desecularized’ world. Taking up two educational movements, the mindfulness movement in the West and the revival of Confucian education in China, this paper examines what and how postsecular orientations and sensibilities penetrate educational discourses and practices in different cultural contexts. We compare the two movements to reveal a (...) new quality of hybrid modernization in that they react, in different ways, to certain pathologies that are identified as consequences of secular modernity. Burnout syndrome, the sense of a spiritual void, but also the loss of a spiritual and cultural identity are being perceived as correlating to a one-sided push towards a modernity that emphasizes secular rationalization over mindfulness and Westernization over cultural particularity. The two case studies mark a critical insight on the present condition and limits of secularism and highlights the ongoing negotiations of values and modes of self-cultivation in schools. In an increasingly pluralistic world, the entanglement of the secular, spiritual, religious and wisdom traditions provides the opportunity to rethink education as a creative realm and an impossible possibility to re-engage the minds and lives of those in the hybrid pedagogical time. (shrink)

Hollywood films partially construct how Americans think about education. Recent work on the representation of schools in American cinema has highlighted the role of class difference in shaping school film genres. It has also advanced the idea that a nuanced understanding of American individualism helps to explain why the different class genres are shaped as they are. This article attempts to refine this theoretical approach by focusing on the paradox of individualism, which suggests that individualism must always be dependent on (...) community. We examine 5 films (Rushmore 1988, The Breakfast Club 1985, Mona Lisa Smile 2003, School of Rock 2003, and Stand and Deliver 1988) and argue that, although the values of individualism are certainly celebrated, these films also show, perhaps unwittingly, that the achievements of individualism require robust student communities. We describe how student communities function in these films, what achievements they make possible, and what obstacles they face. (shrink)

During the past two centuries, and in particular during the inter-war period, American ways of living and of thinking have become one principal object of European reflections on modernity. This essay explores some of the ways in which the rejection or affirmation of modernity in Europe has been channelled through observations on America. It is argued that the variety of European ways of looking at America also demonstrates the range of forms available to social theory for thinking the social world (...) under conditions of modernity and that this European debate provided some seeds for the current discussion about `multiple modernities'. (shrink)

This article examines the concept of creating shared value as articulated by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer, in non-Western and Western contexts. We define non-Western contexts as those in so-called “developing” countries and emerging economies, whereas Western ones pertain to dominant thinking in “developed” regions. We frame our research in postcolonial theory and offer an overview of existing critiques of CSV. We conduct a critical discourse analysis of 66 articles to identify how CSV is being cited by authors, and potential (...) underlying power dynamics that affect its relevance for non-Western contexts. Our review exposes increasingly critical views about the paradoxical positioning of CSV as an instrumental concept that can offer “win-win” solutions, particularly from those working in non-Western settings. Western perspectives generally tend to be more supportive of its instrumental nature, but also recognize the increasing complexity of the business-society nexus and stakeholder engagement. We argue that the CSV framework requires further development to maintain credibility and applicability, especially in non-Western domains. (shrink)

Derrida, in some remarks about the inauguration of new refuge-cities in Europe and America,argues for the invention of a new cosmopolitical polity which would be instituted on the basis of an ethics of hospitality. The implications run up against current notions of sovereigntyand challenge many current assumptions about citizenship and rights which draw from Enlightenment thought. This article will sketch these issues, linking up notions of rights and sovereignty inherited from the Enlightenment to their possible transmutation in contemporary conditions and (...) to questions of an ethics of responsibility and hospitality. It will examine the implications for the dissolution of the public sphere as it is now constituted and the emergence of culturally plural and transmodern forms of sociality. (shrink)

Derrida, in some remarks about the inauguration of new refuge-cities in Europe and America,argues for the invention of a new cosmopolitical polity which would be instituted on the basis of an ethics of hospitality. The implications run up against current notions of sovereigntyand challenge many current assumptions about citizenship and rights which draw from Enlightenment thought. This article will sketch these issues, linking up notions of rights and sovereignty inherited from the Enlightenment to their possible transmutation in contemporary conditions and (...) to questions of an ethics of responsibility and hospitality. It will examine the implications for the dissolution of the public sphere as it is now constituted and the emergence of culturally plural and transmodern forms of sociality. (shrink)

Over the past several decades, nurses have been increasingly theorizing about the relationships between culture, health, and nursing practice. This culture theorizing has changed over time and has recently been subject to much critical examination. The purpose of this paper is to identify the challenges impeding nurses' ability to build theory about the relationships between culture and health. Through a historical overview, I argue that continued support for the essentialist view of culture can maintain a limited view of complex race (...) relations. I also argue that attempts to apply culture theory, without knowledge of important historical, political, and economic factors, has often resulted in oversimplified versions of what was originally intended. Furthermore, I argue that individual-level interventions alone will be insufficient to address health inequities related to culture. Despite new critical conceptualizations of culture and the uptake of cultural safety, nursing scholars must better address the broader organizational, population, and political interventions needed to address inequities in health. I conclude with suggestions for how nurses might proceed with culture theorizing given these challenges. (shrink)

The emergence of a science of religion and religions in which the sacred became a topic of disinterested, objective inquiry was itself an important statement about the general character of social change and can be taken as an index of secularization. It implies a level of critical self-reflexive scrutiny in society. In the West, the study of ‘religion’ as a topic of independent inquiry was initially undertaken by theologians who wanted to understand how Christianity could be differentiated from other religions. (...) The problem of religious diversity had arisen as an inevitable consequence of colonial contact with other religious traditions and with phenomena that shared a family resemblance with religion, such as fetishism, animism and magic. The science of religion implies a capacity for self-reflection and criticism, and it is often claimed that other religions do not possess such a science of religion. While different cultures give religion a different content, Christianity was defined as a world religion. In Hegel's dialectical scheme, the increasing self-awareness of the Spirit was a consequence of the historical development of Christianity. The contemporary scientific study of religion and religions is confronted by significant epistemological problems that are associated with globalization, and the traditional question about the nature of religion has acquired a new intensity. (shrink)

There are broadly five interconnected meanings of the noun ‘discipline’. Disciplinawere instructions to disciples, and hence a branch of instruction or department of knowledge. This religious context provided the modern educational notion of a ‘body of knowledge’, or a discipline such as sociology or economics. We can define discipline as a body of knowledge and knowledge for the body, because the training of the mind has inevitably involved a training of the body. Second, it signified a method of training or (...) instruction in a body of knowledge. Discipline had an important military connection involving drill, practice in the use of weapons. Third, there is an ecclesiastical meaning referring to a system of rules by which order is maintained in a church. It included the use of penal methods to achieve obedience. To discipline is to chastise. Fourth, to discipline is to bring about obedience through various forms of punishment; it is a means of correction. Finally there is a rare use of the term to describe a medical regimen in which ‘doctor's orders’ brings about a discipline of the patient. In contemporary society, there is, following the work of Michel Foucault, the notion of increasing personal regulation resulting in a ‘disciplinary society’ or a society based upon carceral institutions. (shrink)

In this article, Thomas Kuhn’s theory of incommensurable paradigms learned through exemplars is discussed as a theory of acculturation akin to those of cultural anthropology. Yet his hermeneutic approach results in a classic problem, referred to here as the paradox of objective relativism. A solution, at least for observers of contemporary cultures, is drawn from Kuhn’s own writings: a fieldwork method of “going native.” It is argued that Kuhn’s views are as important a corrective for anthropologists studying native systems of (...) knowledge as they have been for philosophers and sociologists of science. The epistemological and disciplinary implications of such a methodology are discussed. (shrink)

This article traces the hidden race-religion constellation in Europe. The term “race-religion constellation” refers to the connection or co-constitution of the categories of race and “religion.” Specifically, the term “race-religion constellation” is used to refer to the practice of classifying people into races according to categories we now associate with the term “religion.” This calls for a consideration of European history and forms of racism in Europe, such as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. This article aims to provide an alternative non-secularized or (...) biological account of the origins of the socially constructed category of race in Europe. The alternative story begins in the sixteenth century, when the category of “religion” as a means for classifying peoples was both constructed and politicized. In tracing this alternative story, this article seeks to outline a framework for a critical philosophy of race focused on a European religion line that intersects with Du Bois's color line. (shrink)

Postcolonial pedagogy invites academic teaching staff to create situations, in which hegemonic modes of knowledge production can be critically reflected and one’s own entanglement as disciplinary s...

I report the findings of a comparative analysis of online Christian and Buddhist responses to artificial intelligence. I review the Buddhist response and compare it with the Christian response outlined in an earlier essay (Tamatea 2008). The discussion seeks to answer two questions: Which approach to imago Dei informs the online Buddhist response to artificial intelligence? And to what extent does the preference for a particular approach emerge from a desire to construct the Self? The conclusion is that, like the (...) Christian response, the Buddhist response is grounded not so much in the reality of AI as it is in the discursive constructions of AI made available through Buddhist cosmology, which (paradoxically), like the Christian response, are deployed in defense of the Self, despite claimed adherence to the notion of anatta, or non-Self. (shrink)

This article offers a novel historical interpretation of the problem of jihadism through a critique of the philosophical foundations of Olivier Roy’s scholarship on Islam and jihadism. In particular, the article elucidates the consequences of the dominant positivist ontology and secular episteme of the social sciences for the analysis of jihadism. To this end, it formulates an alternative conceptualization of the main terms of analysis (namely, Islam, the ummah, the caliphate, and jihad), highlighting their political significance and disavowing thereby the (...) epistemic prejudices of Eurocentric social science. The article argues jihad designates a political phenomenon tied to Islam’s presence as a universal order and Muslims as an autonomous community. It is a signifier of the organized, collective warfare of Muslims as a distinct political group, represented by the caliphate as an ‘Islamicate great power’, and waged by its professional armies. Jihadism represents the venture to recover jihad in a world without a caliphate, its condition of possibility being the disappearance of the caliphate, and in that it signifies the fragmentation, disorganization, and de-politicization of jihad. (shrink)

ArgumentThe Scandinavian countries share a solid reputation as longstanding contributors to top level Arctic research. This received view, however, veils some deep-seated contrasts in the ways that Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have conducted research in the Arctic and the North Atlantic. In this paper it is argued that instead of focusing on the geographical determinism of science – the fact that the Arctic is close to, indeed part of, Scandinavian territories – we should look more closely at the geopolitics of (...) science to understand the differences and similarities between these three Nordic countries. Through case studies of, mainly, Swedish Arctic and North Atlantic glaciology in the 1920s through to the 1940s, and of Norwegian preparations in the 1950s for the International Geophysical Year 1957/58, the paper demonstrates how different styles of research – research agendas, methodological choices, collaborative patterns, international networks, availability of infrastructure, relations to politics and power – are conditioned on economic interests and strategic and geopolitical trajectories, either these are explicitly put in the forefront of scientific priorities as in the case of Norway in the 1950s, or when they are manifestly disregarded in the name of scientific internationalism, as in the case of Swedish glaciology. The case of Danish colonial science in Greenland is only cursorily drawn into this analysis but corroborates the overall thesis. The analysis of this wider science politics of Scandinavian circumpolar science is exercised against a brief introductory backdrop of Arctic science historiography. Its chief message is that the analysis of polar science applying modern theory and method of the social studies of science is comparatively recent and that the full potential of merging the literature of Arctic science and exploration with those of security, geopolitics, indigenous voices, and the politics of nationalism is yet to be realized. (shrink)

Food policy increasingly attempts to accommodate a wider and more diverse range of stakeholder interests. However, the emerging influence of different communities and networks of actors with localized concerns and interests around how food should be produced and traded, can challenge attempts to achieving more open, sustainable and globally-integrated food chains. This article analyses how cultural factors internal to a developed country can disrupt the export of food to a developing country. A framing analysis is applied to examine how activists (...) using social media to interact with the traditional news media in Australia were able to inflame public opinion and provoke outrage to disrupt the policy agenda. The paper contains a case study analysis of the media controversy in 2011 around the slaughter of beef cattle in Indonesian abattoirs and the subsequent banning of live cattle exports to Indonesia by Australia. The analysis draws on the theory of binary cultural oppositions to examine how practices in relation to the slaughter of beef cattle in Indonesia were reframed, through extensive media coverage of moral outrage into a critique of the values and cultural practices of Indonesian society. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the interpretive readings that teenagers from a high socio-economic class offer for one of the most popular reality programs in Israel: Big Brother. The findings of the study demonstrate how the youth completely focused on the ‘ethnic other' in Israel. The dominant interpretations of the participants suggested open use of accounts affiliated with Orientalist discourse. The findings of the study also show that to explain the Orientalist accounts, the youth made dominant use of the neoliberal discourse. The (...) discussion section offers some thoughts on this discursive alliance between the Orientalist and neoliberal discourse. (shrink)

This essay explores some of the elements by which Muslim women who wear the hijab in the United States are managed so as to produce and distinguish "unruly" from "good" Muslim female citizens within the context of American liberation. Unlike the French state, which has regulated both the hijab and niqab through national legislation, the American liberal framework utilizes a laissez-faire approach, which relies on a range of public and private institutions to determine acceptable public presentations of the liberal female (...) subject. I refer to this form of management as "neoliberalism." Neoliberalism management works in conjunction with popular political discourses and domestic events in ways that alternately contract and expand the boundaries that allow "suitable Muslim women" in the public sphere. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article explores the history of mummy unwrappings in the West, culminating in Margaret Murray's public unrolling of two mummies in Manchester in 1908. Mummy unwrappings as a practice have shifted often between public spectacles which displayed and objectified exotic artifacts, and scientific investigations which sought to reveal medical and historical information about ancient life. Although others have looked at Murray's work in the context of the history of mummy studies, I argue that her work should be viewed culturally as (...) poised between spectacle and science, drawing morbid public interest while also producing ground-breaking scientific work that continues to this day. Murray's main goal was to excite the interest of the public while at the same time educating them in the true history of ancient Egypt, while ascertaining new scientific information and contributing to the scholarly interpretations of ancient Egypt. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the deployment and the transformation of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and the purpose it serves. I argue that, in its travel from Rome to London, this notion acquired something like a truth-value. In London the notion yielded what I call ‘hegemony thinking’: a distinctive style of thinking that focused on strategy to carry out effective political interventions. To demonstrate my claim I trace the Marxism Today discussion on the crisis of the Left and strategy in (...) the UK. In particular, I look at the engagements of the late historian Eric Hobsbawm and the cultural theorist Stuart Hall with Gramsci’s work, and examine the appropriation of the coordinates of hegemony by the entrepreneur and Blair policy advisor Geoff Mulgan. (shrink)

We argue that claims of racial progress rest upon untenable teleological assumptions founded in Enlightenment discourse. We examine the theoretical and methodological focus on progress and its historical roots. We argue research should examine the concrete mechanisms that produce racial stability and change, and we offer three alternative frameworks for interpreting longitudinal racial data and phenomena. The first sees racism as a “fundamental cause,” arguing that race remains a “master category” of social differentiation. The second builds on Glenn’s “settler colonialism (...) as structure” framework to describe race relations as a mutually constituted and place-based system of resource allocation. The third framework draws attention to racialized agency. (shrink)

This article politicises the discourse of emerging markets in global finance. The black-boxed appearance of credit markets easily obscures the significant amount of subjective evaluation and cultural work that underpins capital flows. This article reveals the colonial, masculine, and racial imagination that informs the articulation of emerging markets as geographies of risk and profit. This brings into view the postcolonial nature of contemporary finance and how colonialism’s regimes of power and knowledge remain crucial for the reproduction of the global political (...) economy. To illustrate this point, the article highlights the sociality of credit practices. Contrary to their mathematical appearance, credit is a relationship with the future, mediated by social imaginations of trust. Focusing on emerging markets as ‘risk-versus-reward’ investments, this article examines the long-term colonial histories embedded in modern investment discourses. The article aims to show the continuing relevance this history plays for emerging market economies in modern financial markets and their political economies. (shrink)

Distance is central to both Heidegger’s depiction of being-in-the-world and Derrida’s theorization of the culture of friendship. It is equally fundamental to the structure of language and, I argue, to the concept of the foreign. This essay brings together these theories of distance and demonstrates the ways they act on and through each other, the role that linguistic distance plays in constructing both foreigners and friends, and the permeable semantic boundaries that the concept of distance shares with movement, strangeness, instability, (...) and indefiniteness. It further contends that this semantic seepage has proven threatening to certain species of philosophy and politics and prompted disciplinary efforts – to eradicate distance, regulate foreigners, immobilize meaning, and stabilize friendship – that are remarkably structurally similar and sometimes mutually supportive, but that both Heidegger and Derrida, by contrast, undertake a significant revaluation of distance and the foreignness and indeterminacy associated with it. (shrink)