There is a rich tradition of inquiry in consumer research into how collective consumption manifests in various forms and contexts. While this literature has shown how group cohesion prescribes ethical and moral positions, our study explores how ethicality can arise from consumers and their relations in a more emergent fashion. To do so, we present a Levinasian perspective on consumer ethics through a focus on Restaurant Day, a global food carnival that is organized by consumers themselves. Our ethnographic findings highlight (...) a non-individualistic way of approaching ethical subjectivity that translates into acts of catering to the needs of other people and the subversion of extant legislation by foregrounding personal responsibility. These findings show that while consumer gatherings provide participants a license to temporarily subvert existing roles, they also allow the possibility of ethical autonomy when the mundane rules of city life are renegotiated. These sensibilities also create ‘ethical surplus’, which is an affective excess of togetherness. In the Levinasian register, Restaurant Day thus acts as an inarticulable ‘remainder’—a trace of the possibility of being able to live otherwise alongside one another in city contexts. (shrink)

This article reassesses Arendt's relationship to Augustine, exploring the Augustinian context for Arendt's own thinking about the relationship between thought and action. What Arendt drew from Augustine, the contours of which remain in her later work, is a journey of memory in which reflection, as it removes us from the world, paradoxically reveals us as inserted into this world. Out of this ontology of origins emerges an ethic of beginning as we recognize, in the moment of reflection, a bond of (...) kinship and an equality toward each other that is constituted by our common relationship of beginning and fatefulness to the world. It is this Augustinian journey of memory that continued to guide Arendt's thinking in developing a political ethic that shared with action the ontological foundation of beginning. (shrink)

Background Despite recent developments aimed at creating international guidelines for ethical global health research, critical disconnections remain between how global health research is conducted in the field and the institutional ethics frameworks intended to guide research practice. Discussion In this paper we attempt to map out the ethical tensions likely to arise in global health fieldwork as researchers negotiate the challenges of balancing ethics committees’ rules and bureaucracies with actual fieldwork processes in local contexts. Drawing from our research experiences with (...) an implementation and evaluation project in Jamaica, we argue that ethical research is produced through negotiated spaces and reflexivity practices that are centred on relationships between researchers and study participants and which critically examine issues of positionality and power that emerge at multiple levels. In doing so, we position ethical research practice in global health as a dialectical movement between the spoken and unspoken, or, more generally, between operationalized rules and the embodied relational understanding of persons. Summary Global health research ethics should be premised not upon passive accordance with existing guidelines on ethical conduct, but on tactile modes of knowing that rely upon being engaged with, and responsive to, research participants. Rather than focusing on the operationalization of ethical practice through forms and procedures, it is crucial that researchers recognize that each ethical dilemma encountered during fieldwork is unique and rooted in social contexts, interpersonal relationships, and personal narratives. (shrink)

Zygmunt Bauman's sociology has had a paradoxical reception, widespread, yet elusive. Partly this is due to its diversity, partly due to Bauman's style, which is often provocative rather than soothing. Whatever the case, Bauman's work is among the most important sources for critical sociology today. This exploratory essay, a flag for a book in progress called Modernity as Ambivalence - Zygmunt Bauman's Sociology indicates some key co-ordinates: modernity and the postmodern, sociology and socialism, Marxism and after, via a scanner of (...) some of the major works, especially Legislators and Interpreters, through Modernity and Ambivalence. Bauman's work is evocative not only because of its critical or historical sensibilities, but also because of its existential and anthropological clues. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the theoretical foundations of collective interest in the sufferings of strangers. Concern with the suffering of others, accompanied by the urge to help, is compassion. This study develops the social and historical conditions under which public compassion emerges. Two broad interpretations of these developments are suggested. The democratization perspective suggests that with the lessening of profoundly categorical and corporate social distinctions, compassion becomes more extensive. A second perspective is linked to the emergence of market society. By defining (...) a universal field of others with whom contracts and exchanges can be made, market perspectives extend the sphere of moral concern as well: however unintentionally. Public compassion is part of the language of modernity. This gives compassion the possibility to be also part of a newly emerging ‘Second Modernity’. (shrink)

This article considers how to go beyond the polarities of individualism and communitarianism in the analysis of contemporary political cultures in a global era. It is argued that there is a need to ground analysis in a presumption of social networks and coalitions, rather than in the concept of recognition. Political cultures are always already riddled with complexity and cross-cutting relations with other political cultures, coalitions and alliances. Within the politics of recognition, the conventional operationalization of the concept of the (...) ‘social’ via the concept of ‘community’ misleadingly narrows the analysis of key aspects of social relations. Rather, we should invoke a wider range of sociological concepts to capture the nature of the social including, among many others, coalition, network and reference groups. In particular, the selection of the ‘other’ against whom aspirational comparisons are made is a complex social process, much previously analysed by reference group theory. The contemporary framing of some political claims in reference to a socially constructed conception of the universal is an increasingly common strategy. The politics of recognition is shown to be subordinate to the politics of equality, when sociological analysis of contemporary political cultures, of how people actually do make ethical and political claims, is prioritized. (shrink)