A growing number of left-wing scholars criticize practices of transnational solidarity. Pointing to the cooptation of “globalism” by neoliberal capitalism, these scholars utilize this critique to advance leftwing nationalism. In this article, I reconstruct symptomatic texts of this genre and identify the critique of (liberal) cosmopolitanism as the common denominator in their calls for nationalizing the Left. As a consequence of their opposition to cosmopolitanism, these authors reject freedom of movement or global justice activism. In order to examine whether the (...) project of transnational solidarity is affected by this critique, I reconstruct its justifications in Critical Theory and postcolonial-feminist theory. Hauke Brunkhorst and Chandra Mohanty exemplarily theorize transnational solidarity in different ways, but each based on a substantial critique of liberal cosmopolitanism. By that, I show that a principled return to nationalism derived from a critique of cosmopolitanism is informed by coincidental evidence that rejects practices of transnational solidarity because of their alleged embeddedness in cosmopolitan reason. Drawing on La Via Campesina, I illustrate principles of a transnational solidarity project that is not justified with liberal cosmopolitan ideas. Their experiences challenge the nationalist/statist critique while not falling back into naïve and/or neoliberal cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

This article focuses on the current trends and initiatives in human capacity building in Africa. It takes as it starting point that human capacity development is essential for Africa to become an information and know-ledge society and therefore an equal partner in the global sharing of knowledge. Four knowledge areas are identified and discussed. These are education, research and development, brain drain and information and documentation drain. The paper concludes that there is a clear understanding in Africa that its future (...) lies with education and that most African leaders have a strong political will to invest in human capacity building on the continent. It is also clear that much has been done, particularly primary education. Africa will most defi-nitely benefit from this in the long run. Problem areas remain however. These are in the needed growth of research and development and how to address the brain and information drain phenomena. (shrink)

This thesis argues that John Dewey’s theory of collective intelligence presents a unique critical social theory that escapes the dead-ends of Frankfurt School critical theory and speaks directly to the political situation faced today by academics and the public. In Part 1, Dewey’s critical social theory is argued to present a ‘method of democracy’ that proposes a form of ‘intelligent populism’ as the mode of collective action in contemporary ‘political democracies’. Part 2 applies the method of democracy to the contemporary (...) ‘problematic situation’ of neoliberalism in crisis. It is argued that ‘third-wave neoliberalism’ in the UK has turned to higher education as a solution to this crisis, seeking to redirect HE through the TEF, REF and KEF national performance management systems to the needs of a stagnating monopoly capitalist economy. Part 3 explores ways out of the current crisis based on Dewey’s theory of collective intelligence. Beginning with the institutional context of social theory today, Michael Burawoy’s theory of public sociology is reconstructed as ‘democratic sociology’ based on a practice of ‘co-inquiry’ with the public. While Burawoy argues that the ‘founding tension’ in sociology between professional and radical sociology can be resolved by establishing an ‘organic solidarity’ within the discipline, the analysis of marketisation presented in the thesis suggests that only by uniting with other academics and the public in the fight against neoliberalism can sociologists avoid co-optation. The method of democracy then provides the basis for a reconstruction of the academic profession on a model of ‘democratic collegiality’. Democratic collegiality in turn offers a solution to the contradictions in governance arising from marketisation, pointing to the ‘social co-operative’ as an ideal form for democratised universities. Finally, Corbynism is argued to be a ‘verification’ of Dewey’s hypothesis of intelligent populism, and the book concludes with an analysis of the Lucas Plan, which offers valuable lessons for activist-academics seeking to help realise this genuine alternative to neoliberalism today. (shrink)

The small nation-state of Singapore has increasingly been referred to in the popular media as the Intelligent Island of the future. With significant state investment in the promotion and dissemination of information-communications technology and attendant social ramifications, this has become an area that can no longer be ignored or taken for granted. This article intends to map the conditions of possibility on which Singapore can be conceived of as an Intelligent Island, in situating the role of information technology and Intelligent (...) Island discourse within the discourses of postcoloniality, technocapitalism, late modernity, and globalization. In particular, this article attempts to show how, in Intelligent Island discourse, the processes of the construction of a Singaporean nation are intricately linked to the shift in political discourse from mobilizing a rhetoric of crisis to one of utopianism. (shrink)

This article draws on three ecofeminist theorists (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Val Plumwood, and Donna Haraway) in order to criticize the dominant model of globalization, which oppresses humans and the natural environment, and propose an alternative globalization grounded in planetary love. Rather than affirming or opposing the globalization, planetary love acknowledges its complicity with the neocolonial tendencies of globalization while aiming toward another globalization, a more just, peaceful, and sustainable globalization. In this context, love is characterized by non-coercive, mutually transformative contact, (...) which opens spaces of respect and responsibility for the unique differences and otherness of planetary subjects (humans and nonhumans). (shrink)

This paper argues that contemporary child and youth experiences of globalization call for retheorizing global justice around a new concept of empowered inclusion. The first part of the paper examines three case studies in globalization – child labour movements, child and youth migration, and young people’s organization around climate change – and shows how, in each case, young people, through their struggles against injustice, are simultaneously disempowered and empowered by their deep global interdependency. The second part proposes new theoretical advances (...) in global justice that better respond to child and youth experiences through a childist concept of the empowered inclusion of both children and other marginalized groups. And the third part advances some preliminary suggestions about how a more child-responsive conception of global power and justice might be operationalized in practice across global policies, institutions, and culture. (shrink)

I wish to take up some of the sentiments we have towards animals and put them to test in respect of the claims to moral high grounds in Indian thought-traditions vis-à-vis Abrahamic theologies. And I do this by turning the focus in this instance—on a par with issues of caste, gender, minority status, albeit still within the human community ambience—to the question of animals. Which leads me to ask how sophisticated and in-depth is the appreciation of the issues and questions (...) that are currently being debated in contemporary circles? What degree of awareness could we say has been present in the traditions—not just in some perfunctory, platitudinal, belief-based descriptions or prescriptions, but in actual explanatory and morally sensitized senses? (shrink)

Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory.

This article investigates the discourse on child marriage as reflected in the entire corpus of official investigations Statens Offentliga Utredningar and government bills proposing legislative measures against child marriage in Sweden since the first motions on the issue were drafted in 2001. It analyzes them as instances of sexularism: a form of secularism where the secular is construed in relation to sexual emancipation and gender equality rather than in relation to politics or the public sphere. It then connects the effects (...) of legislation against child marriage on the right to family reunification to the racialization of migrant populations and religious minorities in Sweden. (shrink)

This article identifies and analyses the dominant stories that academics tell about the development of Western second wave feminist theory. Through an examination of recent production of interdisciplinary feminist and cultural theory journals, I suggest that despite a rhetorical insistence on multiple feminisms, Western feminist trajectories emerge as startlingly singular. In particular, I am critical of an insistent narrative that sees the development of feminist thought as a relentless march of progress or loss. This dominant approach oversimplifies the complex history (...) of Western feminisms, fixes writers and perspectives within a particular decade, and repeatedly (and erroneously) positions poststructuralist feminists as ‘the first’ to challenge the category ‘woman’ as the subject and object of feminist knowledge. Rather than provide a corrective history of Western feminist theory, the article interrogates the techniques through which this dominant story is secured, despite the fact that we (feminist theorists) know better. My focus, therefore, is on citation patterns, discursive framings and some of their textual, theoretical and political effects. As an alternative, I suggest a realignment of key theorists purported to provide a critical break in feminist theory with their feminist citational traces, to force a concomitant re-imagining of our historical legacy and our place within it. (shrink)

Focusing on contemporary Bolivia, this article examines promises and pitfalls of political and legal initiatives that have turned Pachamama into a subject of rights. The conferral of rights on the indigenous earth being had the potential to unsettle the Western ontological distinction between active human subjects who engage in politics and passive natural resources. This essay, however, highlights some paradoxical effects of the rights of nature in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ model of development relies on the intensification of the export-oriented (...) extractive economy. Through the analysis of a range of texts, including paintings, legal documents, political speeches and activist interventions, I consider the equivocation between the normatively gendered Mother Earth that the state recognises as the subject of rights, and the figure of Pachamama evoked by feminist and indigenous activists. Pachamama, I suggest, has been incorporated into the Bolivian state as a being whose generative capacities have been translated into a rigid gender binary. As a gendered subject of rights, Pachamama/mother Earth is exposed to governmental strategies that ultimately increase its subordination to state power. The concluding remarks foreground the import of feminist perspectives in yielding insights concerning political ontological conflicts. (shrink)

This paper explores the problem of racial privilege in US American feminist thought. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s analysis of ethics, particularly her ideas of epistemic discontinuity and teleopoietic reading, I argue that a specific kind of ethical openness can help feminist social-political philosophy better negotiate the legacy of white privilege. Spivak’s work calls for a reconsideration and reworking of the subject who theorizes. Her analysis of ethics suggests that racially privileged feminists must be able to confront their own complicity in (...) order to engage in political critique less likely to recreate historical patterns of racial domination and exclusion. (shrink)

In neocolonial contexts of globalization, the epistemological terrain of radical diversity poses significant ethical challenges to transnational feminisms. In view of historical associations between knowledge and discourses of love which were conditioned by imperialist brands of humanism and benevolence under colonialism, this paper argues for a deconstructionist approach to conceptualizing love in relation to knowledge and for an ethics that severs the association with benevolence, instead making alterity the basis for its account.

Wem wird geglaubt und wem nicht? Wessen Wissen wird weitergegeben und wessen nicht? Wer hat eine Stimme und wer nicht? Theorien der epistemischen Ungerechtigkeit befassen sich mit dem breiten Feld der ungerechten oder unfairen Behandlung, die mit Fragen des Wissens, Verstehens und Kommunizierens zusammenhängen, wie z.B. die Möglichkeit, vom Wissen oder von kommunikativen Praktiken ausgeschlossen zu werden oder zum Schweigen gebracht zu werden, aber auch Kontexte, in denen die Bedeutungen mancher systematisch verzerrt oder falsch gehört und falsch dargestellt werden, in (...) denen manchen misstraut wird oder es an epistemischer Handlungsfähigkeit mangelt. In diesem Buch wird eine Übersicht über die breite Debatte epistemischer Ungerechtigkeit, epistemischer Unterdrückung und epistemischer Gewalt gegeben, in dem unterschiedliche Theorien, die sich auf der Schnittstelle von Gerechtigkeitstheorie und epistemischen Fragen befinden, systematisch und kritisch diskutiert sowie theoretische Vorgänger dieser Theorien beleuchtet werden. (shrink)

This paper focusses on the negotiations in which many subaltern peoples engage within contexts of unequal power relations in colonial settings like eighteenth-century Peru. The trial and ‘confession’ of Micaela Bastidas, an indigenous mestizo and wife of the Inca rebel Túpac Amaru II, allows for an analysis of the complexity of her subjectivity and agency, both as products of colonial impositions and Andean notions of gender complementarity and power. As a woman, wife of a noble curaca and member of a (...) conquered indigenous population, she defied rigidly bipolar colonial ethnic and gender norms. Skilfully engaging in ‘rituals of subordination’ through the manipulation of discriminatory colonial expectations, Micaela refused to share what was expected of her, subverting colonial gender and power hierarchies, albeit momentarily. (shrink)

If, following Masuzawa, Fitzgerald and others we assume that “the religious” is a category produced by Western colonial regimes in tandem with that of “the secular,” then consequently the post-secular would need to be post-religious, as well. Here I demonstrate how in one metropolitan case, Germany, the religious and secular divide is evoked to produce a particular exclusivist narrative of national identity. A substantial part of German civil society, media, and legal establishment mobilize an imagined culturally Christian vision of Germany (...) in order to exclude from public visibility and political participation German born Muslims of Turkish descent. The colonial twin categories of secular-religious still operate in the shaping of the German polity. Decolonizing it would thus require not only to enter a post-secular dialogue with religious presentations in the public sphere, as Habermas contends; rather a post-secular polity would require the post-religious. (shrink)

The expansion process of a Western multinational corporation in India is investigated using ethnographic tools. In particular the paper deals with the processes of knowledge appropriation enacted by the Indian workforce employed at the Research & Development Center in Bangalore. Young Indian professionals in the early stages of their scientific or corporate careers seem to take advantage of the investments that the corporation makes in the competitive Indian industrial district, by frequently changing job and finding new positions. The underlying strategy (...) is that of subtracting competences and applied knowledge from the corporation in order to appropriate them and then reinvest them locally and more profitably. Working for a multinational corporation is investigated in its material and metaphorical dimensions, demonstrating the methodological shift required to analyze a very large productive organization through the eyes of its employees. One consequence of scaling down in the ethnographic analysis is that the family is introduced as an economic actor contributing to shaping decisions and public policies. (shrink)

Appeal to women’s experience for moral delineation in theological ethics has been perplexed by the issue of cultural diversity and colonialism as raised by postcolonial critique. This paper aims to examine the debates from Third-World feminism and Christian feminism in dealing with difference and solidarity, leading to the call for contextual analysis and related power mappings. Margaret A. Farley’s proposal for sexual ethics in Just Love will then serve as an example to discuss how the search for common morality among (...) cultural diversity may prevent or reinforce colonial agendas and other privileges. (shrink)

In recent years there have been several calls in professional and academic journals for healthcare personnel in Canada to raise the profile of postcolonial theory as a theoretical and explanatory framework for their practice with Indigenous people. In this paper I explore some of the challenges that are likely to confront those healthcare personnel in engaging with postcolonial theory in a training context. I consider these challenges in relation to three areas of conflict. First I consider conflicts around paradigms of (...) knowledge, wherein postcolonial theory operates from a different base from most professional knowledge in health care. Second I consider conflicts of ideology, wherein postcolonial theory is largely at odds with Canada’s political and popular cultures. And finally I consider issues around the question of Canada’s legitimacy, which postcolonial theory puts in doubt. I suggest ways in which these conflicts might be addressed and managed in the training context, and also identify potential positive outcomes that would be enabling for healthcare personnel, and might also contribute to an improvement in Canada’s relationship with its indigenous peoples. (shrink)

Feminism as a radical discourse has always been a challenge to Christian Theology. The contemporary deconstructive feminist social thought that signals a radical epistemic shift in transnational politics, economics and culture invokes theology to re-locate its methodology and focus. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s deconstructive feminism re-positions contemporary feminist thought in a post-Marxist, postcolonial, and postmodern epistemological context. This article tries to explore the methodological significance of the Spivakian de-constructive feminist epistemology and to sketch out its implications on the contemporary theological program. (...) The thesis is analysed in three major sections. The first section is an introduction to the Spivakian epistemological ‘itinerary’. The second section tries to explicate the contours of Spivakian feminist epistemology by elucidating three specific categories, viz: subalternity, marginality, and planetarity. The third section explores its implications on theological methodology in conversation with some of the contemporary postcolonial feminist theologians who engage creatively with Spivak. Spivakian feminist epistemology is being signified here in order to re-imagine a feminist systematic theology in a post-globalized context. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that although it is important to attend to injustices surrounding women's epistemic exclusions, it is equally important to attend to injustices surrounding women's epistemic inclusions. Partly in response to the historical exclusion of women's knowledge, there has been increasing effort among first-world actors to seek out women's knowledge. This trend is apparent in efforts to mainstream gender in climate change negotiation. Here, one is told that women's superior knowledge about how to adapt to climate change (...) makes them “poised to help solve and overcome this daunting challenge.” Pulling from the work of Miranda Fricker, I argue that such claims risk epistemically objectifying women. To illuminate the risk of women's epistemic objectification in climate change discourse, I offer a feminist analysis of current efforts to seek women's environmental knowledge, cautioning throughout that such efforts must reflect just epistemic relations. (shrink)

This article explores the discourses of multiculturalism and gender equality in relation to nation-building in Finland. The two discourses relate differently to the nation so that gender equality is seen as inherent to the nation while multiculturalism is seen as a challenge posed from outside. Nevertheless, the two discourses are dependent upon each other and cite each other. The material for the analysis is a document produced by an NGO-based multicultural women’s project in Finland. The article can also be read (...) as a contribution to the debate over the compatibility between gender equality and multiculturalism through an analysis of how gender equality - as an ideology and as a set of practices - is deeply embedded in the production of otherness in the Finnish context. (shrink)

This paper explores how educators might intervene in canonized texts of the human subject on which a particular and exclusive kind of humanism rests. In imagining possible interventions educators might make, I turn to and trace Jacques Derrida's on‐going deconstruction of the philosophical texts of subjectivity. In his body of work, Derrida destabilizes fixed notions of the human subject and the institutions it founds (like philosophy and education). From Derrida's points of destabilization and through a differing but similar deconstructive stance, (...) I also consider Gayatri Spivak's suggestive question ‘Who is not the subject of humanism?’ to provide another possible trajectory for intervention that educators might take. Departing from knowledge‐based conceptions of human subjectivity, Spivak urges educators to respond to their students in meaningful encounter with the ‘Other’ while Derrida suggests human beings might begin the difficult and complex task of re‐envisioning an altered humanism, a humanism founded on the call of the Other in institutional sites like education. By an engaged rereading of the texts of human subjectivity upon which human beings are written and by turning to respond to the face of the human beings in and outside their classrooms as a means of encountering the Other's humanity, I suggest that educators be the catalyst for changing what it means to be human and education the means by which we approach a humanism yet to be. (shrink)

This article recognises that any attempt to theorise the first wave globally must specify the use of the term ‘global’, so as not to elide the specificity of local differences, and must critically account for how feminist struggles among postcolonial, indigenous women are intertwined with a resistance to a history of colonialism and racial domination. While more than a demand for equal access to the symbolic order on the basis of gender alone, Western feminists must study carefully the cultural and (...) gender implications of work by indigenous women in postcolonial contexts which do not easily fit into familiar theoretical paradigms that mimic the development of Western feminism, given the heterosexist biases of Western feminism historically. To what extent does the very form of historicisation of feminist struggles in the West repeat the colonising gesture when attempting to historicise the struggles of women in postcolonial contexts where the three waves of feminism as an organising framework, however loosely constructed, are transplanted to locations where they did not emerge historically? Through an examination of feminist work coming out of southern Africa, the article argues how attention to affective and erotic bonds between women in Lesotho provides a critical response to the heterosexist biases of African cultural nationalism, as well as to the colonising tendencies of feminist and queer enquiry in the West that do not account for the primacy of the performativity of sexual expression rather than its discursive naming as a precise sexual identity. The article concludes by asking for a reconceptualisation of the temporality of feminism not limited to its periodisation in the West, but informed by the specificities of feminist struggles locally and globally, including erotic autonomy as a viable praxis of decolonisation and a heightened self-reflexivity about the imperialist gestures guiding the production of (feminist) history and scholarship. (shrink)

This article seeks to expand the sociology of religion’s conceptual toolkit beyond the focus on religious belief and on organizational structures inherited from Western Christianity. After criticizing these origins, I use Ibn Khaldûn’s notion of al ‘assabiyyah or “group-feeling” to analyze the events surrounding the Marian apparitions at Medjugorje, Bosnia, in the 1980s and the later events in the same region during the 1990s Bosnian wars. This concept’s strength is its ability to treat religious and ethnic solidarity as part of (...) the same phenomenon—something that previous literature on Medjugorje and the Bosnian war failed to do. Its weakness is its focus on centripetal solidarity rather than solidarity created by heightened social boundaries. The solidarities at Medjugorje were more often of the latter kind. (shrink)

Over the last decades, many scholars, feminist and others, have argued that critique must be reframed in different and more ‘productive’ ways because its ‘conventional’ formulation and practice have outlived its usefulness as a conceptual tool. Instead, they have called for affirmation or affirmative critique and a more generative mode of critical engagement in the search for new imaginaries, transformative potentialities and other futures. New feminist materialist thought’s emergence is, we argue, symptomatic of this contemporary intellectual landscape that claims to (...) move beyond critique. While sympathetic with the desire to rethink a form of critique that speaks to the (urgent) politics of the present and the remaking of political imaginaries, we argue that the theoretical gesture to move beyond critique may offer a potentially troubling remapping organised around certain kinds of repression (of the undetermined and ambivalent work of critique) and amnesia (of feminist genealogies and over different feminist projects’ conceptualisation of matter) that yield a politics without politics. (shrink)

In his essay ‘The Deconstruction of Christianity’, Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Christianity with the heart of the West, thus following René Girard's claim that Christianity is the religion that exposes the workings of scapegoating and mimetic violence that drive most religions and cultures. However, in On Touching, Derrida distances himself from Nancy's project, and I argue that this is precisely because he is aware that a straightforward embrace of the deconstruction of Christianity is a ruse, as it will end up in (...) a Christian victory that ultimately overcomes deconstruction. The problem, however, is that a simple opposition to Christianity is also insufficient because it gets caught in a similar trap where Christianity ultimately wins (religion will always triumph, as Lacan says). The workings of this ‘trap’ will be explored through a reading of Derrida's essay ‘What is a Relevant Translation?’ and particularly his discussion of Shylock's situation in Merchant of Venice, where Derrida recognizes the ruse of Christianity in its ability to trump Shylock's literal translation of the law, but still he ‘insist[s] on the Christian dimension’. Why? To answer this question this paper turns to another: how do we survive Christianity? (shrink)

In writing about `whiteness' we are trying to enact a `way of talking' that draws in part on Aboriginal ideas about how to conduct a conversation or tell a story. We also use Homi Bhabha's ideas of `third space' (an `interruptive, interrogative, and enunciative' space) and hybridity as a related way to think through the problems of essentializing binaries and rigid identities. In Aboriginal cultures in Australia and Canada, rather than adopting the `neutral' or `objective' stance common in the academy, (...) it is customary to introduce oneself to one's audience, providing a context to assist in interpretation and exchange. Without such an introduction, real stories cannot be told and productive conversations cannot happen. We thus begin our conversation with each other and with you by examining our personal relationship to the idea of whiteness in order to reveal some of its complexity in Canada and Australia. `Whiteness' as an abstraction has proved useful in moving the invisible norm to visibility, but we show how an awareness of `whiteness' in the two locations can be recuperated to re-privilege the already privileged. Aboriginal speakers and writers have theorized `whiteness', in many cases from outside the academy, in the process `hybridizing' traditional genres. For many of them, Aboriginality, like whiteness, is a construct that often stands in the way of thinking clearly about where to go next in the fight against racism. (shrink)

This paper analyses the notions of desire and metissage that circulate in The Lover, Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel about an illicit and scandalous sexual relationship between an adolescent French girl and a wealthy Chinese man set in 1920s French colonial Siagon. Rather than celebrate The Lover as a tale of a young French girl's resistance to colonial sexual mores and regulations, this paper seeks to excavate how that resistance both affirms and challenges the racializing and racist dynamics of colonial society. (...) In particular, I explore the intertwining discourses of colonial sexuality, gender, race, and Orientalism that both produced and constrained the specific forms of desire and subjectivities available to and taken up by European women in French Indochina, and that circumscribe the story that Duras is able to tell about the French girl's love affair in The Lover. I suggest that Duras's portrayal of the French girl as a sexually autonomous female subject – one whose erotic relations are not bound by the dictates of colonial patriarchy – is made possible only by the ambivalent structure of the girl's desire, by her simultaneous attraction to and repulsion of the racialized others of the French colonies. (shrink)

A position joining critical theory with the Marxist critique of imperialism informs the following discussion on the perceived shortcomings of Chibber’s study in its avowed claim to disavow postcolonial theory. Chibber’s insistence on reading Subaltern Studiesaspostcolonial theory is unsustainable in that it fails to address the epistemological premises of a theory adopted and not initiated by the project. Whereas Chibber does ably contest assertions made by Subaltern Studies concerning the special conditions of India halting capitalism’s universalising drive, his concentrated but (...) narrowly-focused and repetitive criticism disregards prior work contiguous to his own specialism as well as disciplines other than the social sciences. Thus the explanatory power of Uneven and Combined Development in understanding the internal conditions of societies conscripted into capitalism is cast aside, as are the resources of Marxist cultural criticism in writing a metanarrative of these consequences inallof their aspects: economic, social, cultural and experiential – omissions that paradoxically are to the fore in postcolonial theory. (shrink)

Can work be done for pay, and still be loving? While many feminists believe that marketization inevitably leads to a degradation of social connections, we suggest that markets are themselves forms of social organization, and that even relationships of unequal power can sometimes include mutual respect. We call for increased attention to specific causes of suffering, such as greed, poverty, and subordination. We conclude with a summary of contributions to this Special Issue.

This essay presents a general summary of post-modern philosophy’s conception of agency. It argues that while post-modern philosophers offer formidable intellectual tools for criticizing contemporary restrictions on agency, their conception falters for a variety of philosophical and political reasons. This implies we should develop a more robust conception of agency to provide a foundation for progressive politics. The essay concludes by analyzing several recent steps to develop such a conception.

In this article, I raise a question and acknowledge a ‘feminist debt’. The ‘feminist debt’ is to the politics of location, and the question asks: what particular stipulations and enablements does a critical reflexive feminist politics of location put in place for knowledge production and for doing feminist theory? I suggest that there are at least three stipulations/enablements that a critical reflexive politics of location puts in place for knowledge production. Firstly, it demands/enables scholarly accounts to reveal their location within (...) the prevailing entanglements of power relations and to highlight the politics of struggle that underpin these. Secondly, it demands/enables conceptual work from different geographical spaces – and in particular, it facilitates the production of conceptual work in non-standard background contexts and conditions. And finally, a critical reflexive politics of location demands/enables a methodological response to capture the different conceptual and analytical and empirical knowledges produced in different locations. (shrink)

The ordeal of `Comfort Women' who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese Imperial Military during the Second World War became widely known in the 1990s through these women's accounts of their experience. Instead of considering their narratives as historical data which reflect the `true' historical past, this article locates them within a broader framework of thinking of narratives. Drawing on the understanding of narrative as a key to the self and the subject which has been developed in narrative research, as (...) well as Judith Butler on interpellation and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on subaltern agency, this article argues that the `Comfort Women's' testimonies should not be read one-dimensionally in the light of `truth' and `falsity', but should rather be considered as the site of their subject-formation. Their narratives are where agency concurrently emerges, and `Comfort Women' are thus not powerless victims but are active participants in their creation of their own narratives and their own selves. (shrink)