How can educators and their students interrogate the ethics and politics of suffering in ways that do not create fixed and totalized narratives from the past? In responding to this question, this essay draws on J. M. Coeetze’s Disgrace, and discusses how this novel constitutes a crucial site for bearing witness to the suffering engendered by apartheid through inventing new forms of mourning and community. The anti-historicist stance of the novel is grounded on the notion that bearing witness to suffering (...) without betraying it means refusing to represent it, that is, refusing to translate history and speak of it; instead, the novel’s characters remain inconsolable before history. The essay builds on these ideas and considers whether educators and their students need to (re)learn the limits of historicism in comprehending conflict, oppression, otherness and suffering; also, it examines the educational implications of such a pedagogical task. (shrink)

In liberal democracies that were British colonies, law constructs the linkages and distinctions between individual and political bodies. Legality re-iterates the form of an ancient construct called the King’s Two Bodies. The legal construction of these bodies ensures that their borders are continuously and perpetually contested and transgressed, and different modalities of power have arisen to take advantage of them. Additionally, in times of mass insecurity or crisis, we might believe that we need to fix our (personal or political) borders (...) and construct them in more solid ways. However, because other modalities of power take advantage of these borders, even if legal reconstruction can momentarily assuage concerns, it is argued here that legal processes construct borders around individual and political bodies to ensure the (re)production of those contests and crises. (shrink)

This article examines the implications of the Deleuzian concept of `nomad thought' within the context of postcoloniality and indigenous politics. I argue that Deleuze's deconstruction of coherent and self-identical subjectivity through this concept disallows the possibility of effective indigenous politics through its lack of accountability to a `politics of location', its implicit reproduction of a universalized western subject, and its delegitimation of `experience' and `local knowledge'. I investigate these dynamics in Deleuze's work, and also in deployments of the Deleuzian figure (...) of the nomad and of `nomad thought' by Rosi Braidotti and Paul Patton. As a counterpoint to Deleuze, I discuss a number of feminist and postcolonial writers who recuperate concepts such as `experience' and `local knowledge', yet without lapsing into essentializing discourses. Their work enables robust versions of indigenous politics, and it is by adopting such approaches that feminist and postcolonial theory can move forward in politically accountable ways. (shrink)

Who owns feminist theory? and just what is meant by the idea of ‘theory’? We explore these fundamental questions as part of interrogating some emergent orthodoxies about feminist theory, proposing that there is a ‘missing revolution’ in feminist thinking, for while ideas about feminist epistemology, methodology and ethics have been fundamentally reworked, those concerning feminist theory have not. Our purpose is to stimulate a debate about the form of feminist theory, rather than the more usual controversies about its content; and (...) thus our concern is with promoting the development of feminist metatheory. We argue that the now-dominant version of feminist theory is a parallel project to that of mainstream/malestream social theory, and that a feminist autocritique of this and related developments is needed, with the aim of achieving a transformation of the fundamental categories of feminist theory. (shrink)

Science studies scholars often study up to high-tech elites who produce and design scientific knowledge and technology. Methodological tension begins when you pair a desire to study down to less economically developed countries, with the desire to study up to high-tech elites within them. This becomes further complicated when the ethnographer and his/her informants share professional interests and credentials. In these situations, the researcher has high status because of geopolitical privilege. However, the researcher is neither a high-tech elite nor a (...) local cultural elite. How might the ethnographer successfully access and navigate field sites imbued with these unseen power differentials? There are currently no visual mapping tools to enhance the process of reflexivity by feminist ethnographers, as they consider their globally embedded multiple, hierarchical, and situated positionality. This reflection methodology piece provides a tool to consider this phenomenon, as it exists across the Global North/south divide of power. Such a tool would be useful to northern ethnographers to better strategize ethics and access while avoiding complicity with structures of inequality and empowering their southern interlocutors. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of art generally assumes that aesthetic experience is constituted by a certain ontological-phenomenological structure: the apprehension by a subject of an object. This article explores an underexamined critique of this philosophical model found within the black intellectual and artistic tradition. I will specifically focus on the version of this critique proposed by the similarly underexamined black philosophers Adrian Piper and Fred Moten. This critique, which I dub the subjectivizing concern, takes issue with the notion of ontological distance that (...) I argue defines the subject-object model. I define ontological distance as the removal and alienation of the subject’s fundamental sense of self from that of so-called objects. The subjectivizing concern holds that this distance is not value neutral. Rather, the subject-object model is considered to be directly entwined with projects and practices of aesthetic and extraesthetic racism and antiblackness. After offering Piper’s own model of aesthetic experience—which she dubs catalysis—as an alternative, I propose three possible ways in which the subject-object model can be conceived as tied to antiblack racism. (shrink)

This essay traces the ontological and political limits of Bruno Latour’s conceptualization of the ‘common world’. Latour formulates this concept in explicating how modernist scientific and political institutions require a metaphysical foundation that is anti-democratic in rigidly partitioning nature from society. In the stead of nature/society, Latour proposes a ‘cosmopolitics’ in which we recognize our embroilment in systems comprised of heterogeneous human and nonhuman actors, and seek to innovate appropriate procedures for governing such systems and composing a more peaceful common (...) world. However, feminist and postcolonialist science studies scholars have argued that Latour’s project fails to apprehend the experiences of subjects marginalized by scientific and political structures of representation. Thus, science studies scholars seem to be faced with a problem; to avoid ontological dissonance and contradiction in integrating Latour’s program with feminist and postcolonialist critiques we must defer his claims that the cosmopolitical program entirely supersedes contemporary social movements and oppositional politics. I offer an alternative. Namely, I argue that Latour’s formulations of cosmopolitics’ procedures and the common world’s boundaries actually require an incipient model of the limits of democratic representation. I modify Latour’s proposed system of representation by reading it against Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of ‘subaltern pasts’, which are unassimilable to academic historical narratives (in their attribution of agency to nonhuman gods, for example). This reading emphasizes how Latour does not adequately theorize and politicize the partially autonomous reality of those excluded from the common world and thus fails to attend to how this externalization replicates the violence of modernist representational institutions. (shrink)

This article draws on feminism and post-structuralism to theorize a narrative framework for developing and critiquing therapeutic practices with women who have experienced child sexual abuse. I argue that both objectivism and relativism provide poor guides for conducting therapy and that it is only through situating our knowledges precisely that more liberatory therapy practices may be developed. This approach, termed ‘visible therapy’, is used to directly and explicitly challenge normative constructions of women, child sexual abuse and therapy. I argue that (...) it is necessary to explicate the embedded assumptions produced through practices of abuse, and which serve to construct children's experiences of that abuse, in order to ward against their reproduction within therapy relationships. I demonstrate that it is through situating and explicating the operations of power that the authenticity of experience and identity may be questioned and women's ongoing positioning as guilty victims may be challenged. Thus, I am concerned not with who women ‘really are’ but with how they come to know and be known through practices of both abuse and therapy. This, then, is about making the tactics of abuse and therapy visible. Problems are not located within individuals, but rather within the narratives which situate both past and current relationships but which, through reiteration, obscure their own social production. I conclude that it is only when categorical identity is no longer assumed that progressive therapy practices with women who have been sexually abused can be developed and maintained. (shrink)

Postcolonial theory remains part of the challenge of literary theory to curriculum development. As the author's personal history suggests, it is more than simply another way of reading and interpretation, but enables an engagement with, a bearing witness to, the gross inequalities of the world today. Drama is a good example, evidenced by the production and impact of South African Athol Fugard's work — introduced as a set text for the first time in an Open University course, while becoming part (...) of the author's published research. The positive response to Fugard made possible the inclusion of substantial new areas of literature in a modern literature course coinciding with the global changes of the late I980s, in turn aiding the inclusion of postcolonial writings and theory in the departmental curriculum and raising awareness of issues outside the students' immediate experience. The texts studied demand an understanding beyond merely formal or `close' critical readings, and it is teachers' responsibility to be alive to the claims of contemporary history and politics. (shrink)

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

How do certain social conflicts come to fall within the law? How does the law come to have its space? I argue that law emerged in British Honduras through a structure of racial differentiation. The law arrived as a mode of ordering space, bodies, and justice that realizes an immanent structure of racial difference. Racial difference thus founds the space of law. To advance this argument, I examine the record of the first criminal trial prosecuted in the place now called (...) southern Belize—for the murder of an unnamed Indigenous woman by an enslaved Black man. Through an analysis of the trial record that draws upon Jameson’s reading of Greimas’s semiotic method, I show that the standing of the trial, as well as the evaluation of evidence, hinge upon the delineation and operation of racial categories. While British colonialism has ended, these categories persist. (shrink)

This paper explores the commodification of animals, beginning with Marx’s description of how value arises within a system of exchange. Drawing from Irigaray, I observe that value in animals is both arrived at through the use value of the animal as a commodity for human consumption and as a form of currency which serves a function in reproducing the value of the “human” itself. Extending this further, I reflect on Derrida’s discussion of the metaphor as a way to understand the (...) removal of the skin of the animal in order to produce value. As I argue, we find here a convergence of material and symbolic violence which produces value in a way which is distinct from other commodities, and participates in generating the “mirage” of human sovereignty over other animals. (shrink)

In September 2013, images of bruised, bleeding and battered Hindu goddesses went viral on social media networks. Saraswati (the goddess of knowledge), Lakshmi (the goddess of wealth) and Durga (the goddess of strength and power) appear as victims of domestic abuse in the Abused Goddesses advertising campaign against domestic violence. In this article, I analyse the Abused Goddesses campaign and the conversations it generated. I argue that it reiterates both a form of Hindu nationalistic discourse as well as longstanding patriarchal, (...) orientalist and neocolonialist perspectives about sexual violence in India. I examine the discourse generated by the Abused Goddesses campaign on social and mainstream media in order to trace how these images were circulated, perceived and engaged with by Indian and international audiences. While the campaign went viral on social media, I argue that its virality offers insufficient conditions for substantial social change around gender violence, including consciousness raising. Through analysis of the campaign and the ways in which it has been commented on, I demonstrate how the representation of domestic violence through the calendar art imagery of abused goddesses ultimately reaffirms classist, casteist, racist, sexist and orientalist discourses about Indian women and the violence they face. (shrink)

The performative representation of the Spanish Roma woman reveals a historical journey that brings her closer to many symbolic elaborations of the feminine, giving her a special affinity with the imaginary concerning the colonized woman, particularly with the Orientalist vision. Developed initially by the travelling intellectuals in Spain who sought a fusion of the topics of sexualized exoticism, the myth was reworked by local artists and thinkers without undermining their power to silence and make invisible the reality of the most (...) vulnerable and most represented members of the ethnic group, their women. Today, a growing awareness of the importance of collective action directs Roma women to initiatives such as the revision of their historical memory, at the intersection between the external gaze and self-perception. These searches lead to the pioneering creation of community museum institutions, which have arisen around feminine Roma associations and are a symptom of an emerging desire to be heard. Based on the terminological tools shared by women and memory studies, this article seeks the personal dimension of this invitation to listen. The authors analyse a series of interviews with Roma women that investigate the social agents of representation, self-representation and their conceptual and experiential foundations. (shrink)

This paper argues that Michel Foucault explicitly rejected the model of critique by which he is often understood—by both his defenders and detractors. Rather than justifying norms that could be said to represent “the people;” judging institutions, norms, and practices accordingly; and creating programs for others to enact, he theorized and practiced an experimental social criticism in which specific intellectuals help people work through “intolerable” situations by multiplying the ways they can think about and act upon them. As Foucault’s work (...) with the prisons in France shows, one way intellectuals can be part of the experimental transformations social bodies carry out upon themselves is through genealogical work describing the ways problems have come to be identified—and can thus be transformed. This account of criticism undercuts the problem of justifying a standpoint of critique that has plagued philosophers and suggests a few concrete means of better aligning theory and practice. (shrink)

The article proposes a new way of thinking through truth commissions by discerning the manner in which they usher in new political configurations through voices and vocalizations. It contributes to our understanding of truth commissions by way of proposing a pragmatic ontology of bonds between the body, voice, and testimony by elucidating the central features that make them vocal assemblages, composed of five sub-institutional capacities: they affect and are affected by bodies in a complex topological relation; they are driven by (...) an apology, which itself proffers a non-human body of transformation; they potentiate reconciliation through spontaneous vocalizations; they are ontogenetic openings that reassemble national pasts, presents, and futures; and they are temporally experiential predecessors to political action. While victim testimony is taken as a historical crowning of the edifice for nations seeking to mend their past injustices, I contend that public reparation flourishes only if the state is open to the alternative orientations the voice proffers—that is, following recent observations of transitional justice, truth commissions have the potential to seek out alternative context-specific forms of justice in place of a universal law of reconciliation. By way of a brief discussion of Aboriginal artist K.C. Adams’ diptych series, Perception, the article proposes that voices pose a nuanced figuration of auto-affection as a communicative possibility towards the presentation and invention of the self. (shrink)

The body in need of care is the subaltern of the neoliberal epistemic order: it is that which cannot be heard, and that which is muted, partially so even in care ethics. In order to read the writing by which the needy body writes the world, a new ethics must be articulated. Building on Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notions of subalternity and epistemic violence, critical disability scholarship, and corporeal care theories, in this article I develop an (...) ethics of needs. This is an ethical position that seeks to read the world that care needs write with the relations they enact. The ethics of needs deconstructs the world with a focus on those care needs that are presently responded to with neglect, indifference, or even violence: the absence of care. Specifically, the ethics of needs opens a space—a spacing, an aporia—for a more ethical politics of life than neoliberal biopolitics can ever provide, namely, the politics of life of needs. (shrink)

This article explores how US legal expansions narrow justice possibilities. Drawing from Joan Scott's work on experience, echo and reverberation, the article puts forth a method for reading the convergence of historical absences within legal subjectivity. In particular, it traces the denial of one Nigerian woman's US political asylum claim within the context of US handlings of Nigerian human rights cases focused on petroleum violence alongside the expansion of political asylum to include gender and sexual violence. The article accounts for (...) the production of gender within a larger context of colonial state violence and questions how gender becomes a viable legal category through a variety of violent histories that implicate the US. By reframing questions of feminist justice within the site of law, the article argues for a deeper engagement with discontinuous narratives, which read against our common sense understandings, as a first step in divesting in US legal privilege. (shrink)

Agricultural reports and guides, nonhuman animal welfare studies, and animal rights reports attempt to document and convey the condition of nonhuman animals in agriculture. These disciplines tend to resist a prolonged and methodically versatile examination of individual animals. In his pioneer work, Lovenheim , The author produced such a biographical documentation of calves in the dairy and meat industries. He provided an exceptionally prolonged and detailed tracing of their lives as individuals, establishing an emotional attachment in both documenter and reader. (...) Yet, sentiments for the farmers, typical urban conceptions of communication with nonhuman animals, and difficulties in obtaining the relevant information limit Lovenheim's success and imply similar difficulties in other cases. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur used to raise the question From where do you speak? at the beginning of his seminars as a way of inaugurating a new space of discussion while questioning immediately the theoretical foundations from which this conversation would rise. The question is not How are you doing? or Who are you? but From where do you speak? as preliminary to any discussion, as a precondition to a true encounter, as if Ricoeur wanted to have the best and most complete (...) understanding of where his interlocutor was in order to make sure that communication was even possible. The assumption behind the question is that the more precise our understanding of the place from where one speaks is, the more accurate our understanding of... (shrink)

Hegemony is one of the most widely diffused concepts in the contemporary social sciences and humanities internationally, interpreted in a variety of ways in different disciplinary and national contexts. However, its contemporary relevance and conceptual coherence has recently been challenged by various theories of ‘posthegemony’. This article offers a critical assessment of this theoretical initiative. In the first part of the article, I distinguish between three main versions of posthegemony – temporal, foundational and expansive – characterized by different understandings of (...) the temporal and logical implications of hegemony. I then offer a critical assessment of the shared presuppositions of these theories, including their ‘pre-Gramscianism’, their indebtedness to Laclau and Mouffe’s formulation of hegemony, and their characterization of hegemony in terms compatible with modern theories of sovereignty. I conclude by arguing that the contradictions and oversights of the debate on posthegemony encourage us to undertake a reassessment of the real historical complexity of hegemonic politics and its different traditions of conceptualization. (shrink)

This article advances some considerations on the current production of hegemonic effects, starting with some problems posed by the work of one of the most influential writers in cultural studies – the American Palestinian critic Edward Said. Said's commentary on the coverage of Islam in the US media in the late 1970s allows for some challenging considerations on how hegemonic strategies directed at the formation of publics and public opinion are increasingly integrated within a global noopolitics of communication whose understanding (...) of the public is not derived from the notion of civil society but from the biopolitical element of the population – and the bio-racist segmentation that constitutes it. As outlined in Michel Foucault's analysis of liberal and neoliberal governmentality, such understanding of the public locates the latter straight within a new dispositif of power which is biopolitical and noopolitical at the same time, that is, which addresses itself at the same time to the biological, economic and spiritual life of the population. Such understanding involves a reconsideration of the constitution of publics and public opinion in times of netwars and information warfare as both subjects and objects of power/knowledge. In as much as such noopolitics affects what Maurizio Lazzarato calls a second bios, the life of the brain, it has the potential to give expression to the virtual power of immaterial events of subjectification which materialize in the bodies which actualize them and the possible, shared worlds that they are capable of producing. (shrink)

The increasing availability of digital data reflecting economic and human development, and in particular the availability of data emitted as a by-product of people’s use of technological devices and services, has both political and practical implications for the way people are seen and treated by the state and by the private sector. Yet the data revolution is so far primarily a technical one: the power of data to sort, categorise and intervene has not yet been explicitly connected to a social (...) justice agenda by the agencies and authorities involved. Meanwhile, although data-driven discrimination is advancing at a similar pace to data processing technologies, awareness and mechanisms for combating it are not. This paper posits that just as an idea of justice is needed in order to establish the rule of law, an idea of data justice – fairness in the way people are made visible, represented and treated as a result of their production of digital data – is necessary to determine ethical paths through a datafying world. Bringing together the emerging scholarly perspectives on this topic, I propose three pillars as the basis of a notion of international data justice: visibility, engagement with technology and antidiscrimination. These pillars integrate positive with negative rights and freedoms, and by doing so challenge both the basis of current data protection regulations and the growing assumption that being visible through the data we emit is part of the contemporary social contract. (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 asks if the incorporation of Sumak Kawsay, a concept from Andean philosophy, into the Constitution of Ecuador, has impacted the legal regulation of violence against women. It examines the trajectory of penal reform in the field of domestic violence and suggests that the decolonial shift in the Constitution has failed to significantly disrupt the dominant framework of penality in which gender violence regulation is inscribed. At the same time, feminist demands have been reframed through the formations of criminal (...) law and the dominant political discourse, resulting in provisions that reproduce a positivistic logic and a family protection rationality, with problematic consequences for women’s access to justice on the ground. If securing success in legal reform entails translating emancipatory demands into established and unchallenged penal paradigms, the potential of decolonial notions is overshadowed by the language, formalities and underlying assumptions of criminal law. (shrink)

European prostitutes occupied an important intermediary status in colonial Bombay’s racially stratified sexual order. In this article, the author offers a transnational feminist analysis of how the colonial state managed its racial and spatial location. The colonial state individuated, fostered, and monitored European prostitutes much more closely than others involved in the sex trade, and “coercive protection” by the police and brothel mistresses kept European brothel workers within their assigned spaces. Paradoxically, international antitrafficking efforts in colonial Bombay consolidated, rather than (...) undermined, these relations of coercive protection. The League of Nations’ antitrafficking measures in the 1920s encouraged the police to focus on cross-nationalcases andthird-partyprocurers andto overlook women who were deemed insufficiently pure. Comparing police, missionary, and social workers’ records, the author offers a critique of both international antitrafficking discourses and the Indian colonial state’s interests in sustaining the sex trade. (shrink)

The paper is an interpretation of J.-J.Rousseau’s book on the government of Poland. The central part of the paper is devoted to complex relations between the notions of nature, nation, childhood, and civic education. Methodologically, the analysis involves interpretation of historical contexts and positions significant in the writing of the book, and deconstruction of its key categories. In the latter respect, the idea of “strangeness” of Poland is the point of departure, and the role it plays in the construction of (...) national and European identity is the aim of analysis. (shrink)

Technologies that deploy data science methods are liable to result in epistemic harms involving the diminution of individuals with respect to their standing as knowers or their credibility as sources of testimony. Not all harms of this kind are unjust but when they are we ought to try to prevent or correct them. Epistemically unjust harms will typically intersect with other more familiar and well-studied kinds of harm that result from the design, development, and use of data science technologies. However, (...) we argue that epistemic injustices can be distinguished conceptually from more familiar kinds of harm. We argue that epistemic harms are morally relevant even in cases where those who suffer them are unharmed in other ways. Via a series of examples from the criminal justice system, workplace hierarchies, and educational contexts we explain the kinds of epistemic injustice that can result from common uses of data science technologies. (shrink)

Decentering Rushdie argues that postcolonial studies has consistently underestimated the investment of the English-language Indian novel in the nation by focusing on a handful of texts that conform to Western assumptions about the bankruptcy of the postcolonial nation-state. Taking Salman Rushdie’s work as the sign of a presumed homology between postcolonialism and a postmodern distrust of totality, Jani demonstrates that his novels are hardly representative of the range of Indian writing in English. Instead, in a series of expert readings of (...) less well-known texts, he demonstrates the commitment to the decolonising project that exists even within the inevitably cosmopolitan worldview of Indians writing in a colonial language. Situating his work within foundational debates in postcolonial studies, this review demonstrates the fresh light he sheds on the vexed relations among historical location, political ideology and literary form. (shrink)

In this article, I introduce engaged phenomenology as an approach through which phenomenologists can more explicitly and critically consider the generative conditions and implications of their rese...

This essay sketches out the post-feminist narrative employed by the radical-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland in the German national parliament between October 2017 and July 2018. Striving to establish a hegemonic ontology, the Alternative für Deutschland conjures up a social imaginary of a German heartland, where equal rights between ‘naturally’ different women and men have long been achieved – a heartland that has to be protected from ‘Muslim culture’ as much as from the ‘leveling down’ imposed by a ‘radical (...) feminist elite’. Between these frames, the Alternative für Deutschland presents itself as the only true champion of women and, while never asserting to be feminist, implicitly lays claim to a particular and exclusivist post-feminist position. I argue that the Alternative für Deutschland’s capabilities to promote this populist narrative have become further enhanced by its election to the national parliament, presenting a serious challenge and also a chance for German feminism to self-critically engage with issues of intersectionality and representation in public discourse. (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)

When I first starting hearing and reading about Jacques Rancière a number of years ago, I was deeply skeptical. Wasn’t this yet another European man becoming the new political theory “It Girl”? Wasn’t the claim that Rancière had a singular, fresh approach to dissent and protest overblown, when other people—especially critical race scholars, postcolonial theorists, feminists, queer theorists, and so on—had already addressed these topics thoroughly but were rarely acknowledged in mainstream scholarship? Did we really need to deify and create (...) a cottage industry around yet one more white male Western theorist, especially one who so rarely deigns to cite his influences or the work of others? It took... (shrink)

We advance understandings of knowledge transfer by showing the central role of symbolic action, taking the form of ritual, in contexts characterized by worldview differences. Using qualitative data from interactions between farming communities in rural Ghana and agriculture development specialists, we examine how rituals do relational work that enables informational work. We find that rituals (i.e., visits, value affirmations, gift-giving, prayer, performing, storytelling) do so by means of their functions–bracketing worldview differences, modeling collaboration between farmers and agriculture development specialists, and (...) packaging new knowledge in displays of compatibility. Our work also expands scholarship on the role of rituals in organizations and on management practices in Africa. Overall, our paper offers a complex, comprehensive view of knowledge transfer as involving both relational and informational work and relying on both symbolic action and tangible elements. (shrink)

Today’s technological-scientific prospect of posthumanity simultaneously evokes and defies historical understanding. On the one hand, it implies a historical claim of an epochal transformation concerning posthumanity as a new era. On the other, by postulating the birth of a novel, better-than-human subject for this new era, it eliminates the human subject of modern Western historical understanding. In this article, I attempt to understand posthumanity as measured against the story of humanity as the story of history itself. I examine the fate (...) of humanity as the central subject of history in three consecutive steps: first, by exploring how classical philosophies of history achieved the integrity of the greatest historical narrative of history itself through the very invention of humanity as its subject; second, by recounting how this central subject came under heavy criticism by postcolonial and gender studies in the last half-century, targeting the universalism of the story of humanity as the greatest historical narrative of history; and third, by conceptualizing the challenge of posthumanity against both the story of humanity and its criticism. Whereas criticism fragmented history but retained the possibility of smaller-scale narratives, posthumanity does not doubt the feasibility of the story of humanity. Instead, it necessarily invokes humanity, if only in order to be able to claim its supersession by a better-than-human subject. In that, it represents a fundamental challenge to the modern Western historical condition and the very possibility of historical narratives – small-scale or large-scale, fragmented or universal. (shrink)

Pendant et juste après l’explosion de 1968, l’extrême droite, au moins dans ses publications, a réussi à reconvertir son obsession algérienne – de la « trahison » de l’Algérie français à la description des hommes Algériens comme une menace pour la France d’alors – dans l’élaboration de grilles d’analyse reposant sur un registre sexué et sexuel permettant de comprendre « Mai » : c’est-à-dire à la fois les événements eux-mêmes et la crise générale qui minait la France.

Pendant et juste après l’explosion de 1968, l’extrême droite, au moins dans ses publications, a réussi à reconvertir son obsession algérienne – de la « trahison » de l’Algérie français à la description des hommes Algériens comme une menace pour la France d’alors – dans l’élaboration de grilles d’analyse reposant sur un registre sexué et sexuel permettant de comprendre « Mai » : c’est-à-dire à la fois les événements eux-mêmes et la crise générale qui minait la France.