Ecofeminist philosophy and literary theory need mutually to enhance each other's critical praxis. Ecofeminism provides the grounding necessary to turn the Bakhtinian dialogic method into a critical theory applicable to all of one's lived experience, while dialogics provides a method for advancing the application of ecofeminist thought in terms of literature, the other as speaking subject, and the interanimation of human and nonhuman aspects of nature. In the first part of this paper the benefits of dialogics to feminism and ecofeminism (...) are explored; in the second part dialogics as method is detailed; in the third part literary examples are discussed from a dialogical ecofeminist perspective. (shrink)

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis is a philosophical exposition of violence informed by two theoretical positions which confront complexity as a phenomenon. These positions are complexity theory and deconstruction. Both develop systemsbased understandings of complex phenomena in which relations of difference are constitutive of the meaning of those phenomena. There has been no focused investigation of the implications of complexity for the conceptualisation of violence thus far. In response to this theoretical gap, this thesis begins by distinguishing complexity theory as a (...) general, trans-disciplinary field of study from critical complexity theory. The latter is used to develop a critique and criticism of epistemological foundationalism, emphasising the limits to knowledge and the normative and ethical dimension of knowledge and understanding. The epistemological break implied by this critique reiterates the epistemological shift permeating the work of, among others, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida. In this context, critical complexity theory begins to articulate the idea of violence on two levels: first, as an empirical, ethical problem in the system; and, secondly, as asymmetry and antagonism. Violence in this second sense is implicated in the dynamic relations of difference through which structure and meaning are generated in complex organisation. The sensitivity to difference and violence shared by critical complexity theory and deconstruction allows for the parallel reading of these philosophical perspectives; and for the supplementation and opening of critical complexity theory by deconstruction within the architecture of this thesis. This supplementation seeks to preserve the singularity of each perspective, while exploring the potential of their points of affinity and tension in the production of a coherent philosophical analysis of violence. Deconstruction offers a more developed understanding of violence and a wealth of related motifs: différance, framing, law, singularity, aesthetics and others. These motifs necessitate the inclusion of other philosophical voices, notably, that of Nietzsche, Arendt, Kant, Levinas, and Benjamin. In conversation with these authors, this thesis links violence to meaning, to its possibility, to its production and to the process by which meaning comes to change. Given these links, violence is conceptualised in relation to the notion of difference on three distinct levels. The first is the difference between elements in a complex system of meaning; the second is the notion of difference between systems or texts around which boundaries or frames can be drawn; and the third is the notion of difference between meaning and the absence of meaning. This discussion examines the relationship between this violence implicated in the constitution of meaning and the more colloquial understanding of violence as atrocity, as rape, murder and other socially, politically and ethically problematic expressions thereof. It is to empirical violence, following Derrida and Levinas, that we are called to respond and to intervene in the suffering of the other. The ethical and political necessity of response anchors this discussion of violence. And, it is towards the possibility of an adequate response – the possibility of an ethics sensitive to its own violence and a politics that is directed at the eradication of empirical violence – which this discussion navigates. (shrink)

This paper traces how the concern with political transformation is central both to arguments for and against essentialism. But while pro‐essential argumentation is concerned with identity, as a condition of change, anti‐essentialist reasoning sees change as dependent on the historical mutability of identity. Using Freud, this paper attempts to reconcile these positions through focusing first, on identification rather than identity; and second, on an unorthodox concept of essence, stressing its energetic commonality between beings.

Identity politics is subject to similar critiques in contemporary public debate and political theory. A central topos of this critique is that identity politics is essentializing: it fixes subjects to their social position and resorts to a politics of particularity that leads to divisions in national citizenship and democratic discourse (the communitarian and liberal position) and to divisions within social movements (the critical position). Contrary to this one-sided critique, we propose a different interpretation with the concept of “constructivist identity politics.” (...) We show that political identities are not essentialistically given, but emerge from processes of social and political construction; that they are actively produced, learned, and practiced by political (sub)cultures and movements. In these processes of construction, political articulation and agency are produced, enabling subjects to critique relations of domination and discrimination. Following radical democratic theory, we argue that the particular political perspectives of identity politics thus enabled do not endanger democracy or solidarity in social movements, but contribute to their further democratization by actualizing the universal principles of democracy in particular disputes. While the construction processes of identity politics tend to essentialize and produce exclusions, critical reflection on such tendencies is also inherent to identity politics. This understanding also enables a critique of such identity politics that is not oriented towards the democratic values of equality and freedom and blocks critical self-reflection. After an overview of contemporary identity politics critique, we elaborate this constructivist understanding following debates in feminist and postcolonial theory since the 1980s. Building on this, we systematically develop the notion of constructivist identity politics by differentiating three aspects of it: subjectification, articulation, and representation. We refer to approaches by Foucault, Rancière, Laclau/Mouffe, and Hall and illustrate the respective aspects through examples of migrant self-organizations as well as gay culture and queer critique. (shrink)

Current radical democratic politics is characterized by new participatory spaces for citizens’ engagement, which aim at facilitating the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. These spaces are, however, situated in the context of deep societal inequalities. Modes of discrimination are carried over into participatory interaction. The democratic subject is judged by its physically embodied appearance, which replicates external hierarchies and impedes the freedom of self-expression. To tackle this problem, this article seeks to identify ways to increase the freedom of the (...) subject to explore its multiple self. Understanding the self as inherently fugitive, the article investigates participatory, deliberative and agonistic concepts of self-transformation. As all of them appear limited, it introduces a transformative perspective in democratic thought. Enriching the transformative perspective with queer and gender theory, the article generates the concept of a politics of becoming, which, through radical democratic practices of disidentification, advances the freedom of the subject to change. (shrink)

This special issue explores intersections of feminism, postcolonialism, and technoscience. The papers emerged out of a 2014 research seminar on Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan. Through innovative engagement with rich empirical cases and theoretical trends in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and STS, the papers trace local and global circulations of technoscience. They illuminate ways in which science and technology are imbricated in circuits of state power and global (...) inequality and in social movements resisting the state and neocolonial orders. The collection foregrounds the importance of feminist postcolonial STS to our understandings of technoscience, especially how power matters for epistemology and justice. (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)

Many theorists have charted for some time how capital extends its lines of flight into new spaces, creating new markets by harnessing affect and intervening in intimate, emotional and domestic relationships, and into bio-politics more generally. Feminists have known for a long time that women’s ‘domestic’ labour has been central to the reproduction of capital but that it has been made invisible, surplus and naturalised and is rarely taken into account in theories of value. Yet we are now in a (...) bizarre historical moment wherein a format has emerged (reality television) in a major capitalist industry (the media) that is premised upon spectacularly visualising women’s labour in all its forms, especially through its focus on relationships, dispositions and emotional performance. Drawing on an ESRC research project, ‘Making Class and the Self through Mediated Ethical Scenarios’, this paper demonstrates how very different spheres of exchange—economy and affect—have come together, offering possibilities for fusing calculation and care. This process bears remarkable similarity to the legal adjudication of property and propriety in intimate relationships. Yet the paper shows how, as attempts are made to commodify affect, it is precisely affect that exposes and disrupts exchange and enables reality television as a technology of affect to visualise the different types of person-value that are constituted through class and gender relations. (shrink)

Accounts of mothering have both contributed to feminist theory's development and depended on certain of its central concepts. Some of its critics, however, argue that feminist theory is undermined by the problems of exclusion and essentialism. Here I distinguish between these two problems and consider their implications for questions about mothering. I conclude that exclusion and essentialism do not present insurmountable obstacles to theorizing motherhood, but do suggest new directions for such theorizing.

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)

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)

According to C. S. Peirce, resemblance or similarity is the basis for the relationship of iconic signs to their dynamical objects. But what is the basis of resemblance or similarity itself and how is the phenomenon of iconicity generated? How does it function in cultural practices and processes by which various forms of signs are generated (say, for example, the cartographical procedures by which maps are drawn, more generally, the diagrammatic ones by which networks of relationships are iconically represented)? To (...) what extent are they themselves performances (maps are always both the result of mappings andthe impetus for re-mappings)? With examples from texts by Virginia Woolf, W. G. Sebald and Reif Larsen, I will argue that literary texts provide us with uniqueresources for exploring, among other matters, the performative dimension of iconicity in the complex interaction among icon, index and metaphor as aprerequisite for semiosis, the generation of signs. (shrink)

This is a paper about trauma and ineloquence, violence and banality, and the utopian conventions of self‐expression in liberal mass society: the U.S. is the scene of the case. The essay pursues relations among the post‐traumatic reparative contexts of the law, religion, therapy and popular culture, all under the sign of autobiography. These domains articulate generic conventions of self‐expressivity with the formalism of self‐reflective liberal personhood. They link norms of expressive denegation to genres that conventionalize, and make false equivalents among, (...) diverse traumatic consequences. When scenes of post‐traumatic ineloquence morph into modes of transformative‐style rhetoric, does the eloquent form distract from, become a mask for, or intensify the unreachable or inarticulable thought that wants to change the norms of negation? A short history of the soundtrack as a site that marks the centrality of ineloquence to traumatic expression condenses the paradox of the moment, where a post‐traumatic desire to become undefensive meets up with pop banality and therapeutic cliche. (shrink)

Draws from Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory to explore the concept of selfhood. This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigrants, exiles, (...) and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega’s project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega’s work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits. Mariana Ortega is Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University and coeditor (with Linda Martín Alcoff) of Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

This article draws on the cultural materialist paradigm articulated by Raymond Williams to offer a radical historicization of the idea of identity, with a view to clarifying and resolving some of the issues animating the ‘identity politics’ debates currently dividing left academia and activism. First, it offers clarity on the concept ‘identity politics’, demonstrating that we should reserve the term to refer only to politics that mobilize specifically and meaningfully around the concept of identity. Second, and in virtue of this, (...) it provides new insights into five central questions that have driven the identity politics debates: Do identity politics always tend towards essentialism?; Do identity politics inevitably promote a politics of recognition over redistribution?; Do identity politics inevitably create political cleavages rather than solidaristic forms of political action?; What is the relationship between ‘identity politics’ and ‘call-out culture’?; And, are the problems of identity politics resolved by reference to intersectionality? (shrink)

Beim eingeschränkten Fokus auf Wahrheit und dem Hervorbringen von „Beweisen“ im Kontext der türkischen Leugnung des Genozids an den ArmenierInnen wurde einem wesentlichen ethischen Problem bisher keine sonderliche Beachtung geschenkt: Dass innerhalb dieser sozial situierten, kooperativen Praxis der Etablierung von Wissen über die historischen Tatsachen – also darüber, was passiert ist und wie diese Geschehnisse zu interpretieren sind – Ungerechtigkeiten im Hinblick darauf entstehen können, wen man als glaubwürdige epistemische Akteure anerkennt. Gemäss dieser Überlegung soll dieser Beitrag zeigen, inwiefern Nachfahren (...) von Genozidopfern durch institutionalisierte Genozidleugnung einer erneuten Dehumanisierung zum Opfer fallen, nämlich der epistemischen Ungerechtigkeit. Diese besagt, dass den Nachfahren der Opfergruppe die Glaubwürdigkeit und damit epistemische Autorität auf der Grundlage ihrer sozialen Zugehörigkeit abgesprochen wird. In diesem Sinne kann die Genozidleugnung als eine fortgesetzte Unterdrückung und Delegitimierung der Opfergruppe, respektive Herabwürdigung ihrer Mitglieder verstanden werden, diesmal im Gewand einer Aberkennung ihrer essentiellen menschlichen Fähigkeit, Wissen zu generieren und weiterzugeben, sowie ihre Unrechtserfahrungen sich und andern intelligibel zu machen. (shrink)

This article examines what the work of New Delhi-based artist Mithu Sen brings to thinking about being a postcolonial feminist. Using images from Sen's solo exhibit in New Delhi and New York titled Half Full, I theorize on the complexities that proliferate when thinking about postcolonial feminism. Sen's images play with “an” identity to showcase the hybrid and mobile configuration of postcolonial subjectivity. Sen's provocative aesthetic urges us to rethink defining a set of conditions or tenets for postcolonial feminism. Rather, (...) her aesthetic politics propels through humor and provides a prism to constantly reimagine postcolonial feminist subjectivity by urging a consideration of maps that intersect and overlap. (shrink)

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)

The works of Malaysian poet, Wong Phui Nam’s Against the Wilderness (vii) China bride and Variations on a Birthday Theme (iv) Kali , illustrate a bride and a mother in terrifying images. Wong’s stylistic form of representing the female body through startling images of inversion and degradation evoke feelings of unease. The suspension between the known and the unknown causes a bewildering reality verging on madness. Interpreted through the lens of the carnivalesque, specifically, the grotesque body, festive language and parody, (...) I attempt to reconstruct the psyche of the Chinese migrant which underpins these poems. The migrant who arrived in Malaya during the colonial era in the early nineteenth century faced political and social struggles in adapting to a new land. In the poems, the migrant juxtaposes his position to a female and uses the female body as a site of contention to intensify the torment of the psyche and to reflect the despair of the Chinese in Malaysia. (shrink)

This article compares notes on different and new concepts of ‘the Human’, developed both within disciplinary and interdisciplinary academic scientific research and in broader social practices. The main focus is on the shifting relationship between the ‘two cultures’ of the humanities and science in the light of contemporary developments, such as the sophisticated forms of interdisciplinary research that have emerged in the fields of biotechnologies, neural sciences, environmental and climate change research and Information and Communication technologies. These rapid changes affect (...) the very definitions of the human and of human evolution. The question is how and to what extent they have an impact on both the practice of the humanities and on their self-representation. Is humanism challenged or strengthened by these developments? To what extent is anthropocentrism called to task by what is becoming known as posthuman theory? (shrink)

ABSTRACTScholars in transnationalism studies, a diverse and dynamic research field, emphasise the need for transdisciplinarity and diversification of empirical areas and issues, in order to cast light on the particularities of transnational practices, agency and emerging power relations. Starting from the premise that discourse is constitutive of transnational social fields, the articles in this special issue propose the integration of discourse analysis into the study of transnational processes and the exploration of public and semi-public discourses in a variety of specific (...) contexts. They identify multiple symbolic positionings and discursive strategies, such as instrumentalisation, legitimation, reification, bringing to attention the complexity of practices and power relations through which transnational social fields are produced. (shrink)

Back in October 2015 I had the opportunity to chair the book launch for all three works discussed in this review essay. At the event, Shirley Anne Tate said, “Black feminist theory is the theory”. The comment referred to how it is not ‘just’ that Black feminist theory is typically marginalised within institutional contexts and academic scholarship, ‘even’ within critical, feminist and poststructural work, but also to highlight the capacity of Black feminist scholarship to unpick and destabilise the known and (...) knowable in ways that are profoundly ontological, and which offer potential routes to meaningful social change through the hard task of working across difference. The three books reviewed here by Shirley Anne Tate, Suryia Nayak and Shona Hunter are theoretically rich and complex in breadth, scope and range, drawing on extensive Black feminist scholarship, as well as critical race, critical feminist, psychosocial, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, decolonial and poststructural approaches. Each book is embedded in everyday practices and social processes, offering multi-layered movement across different spatial-social and affective scales in ways that allow ‘big’ insights to emerge from the locatedness and particularity of human experience. They are reviewed in turn and some concluding comments identify important commonalities across the texts. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the import of philosophical discussions of ontology for organisational studies. It analyses the ontological presuppositions of positivism that still permeate much of sociology and organisational studies. These ontological presuppositions are then discussed from philosophical perspectives that propose or presuppose different ontologies: interpretivism; Heideggerian ontology; negative ontology and realism. The chapter then traces how these philosophical debates are reflected and extended in the field of organisational studies. The following approaches are discussed: positivism, Marxism, critical realism, post-foundational approaches, actor (...) network theory, process perspectives, postcolonial critique, ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism. We conclude by highlighting promising developments at the intersection of ontology and organisation studies: encouraging multiple methods of enquiry; asking ‘what is’, ‘how did’ and ‘what does it do’ questions; reflecting on ontology’s ethical and political implications; and refining the sensitivity and coherence of future studies of organisations. (shrink)

This article explores issues associated with schooling and political justice. Such issues are understood in light of the contention surrounding howWestern schooling contexts might best represent marginalised groups—in ways that accord them a political voice. The significance of group identity politics is explored drawing on international debates associated with ethnically segregated schooling. A postcolonial theorising of group identity highlights the ways in which segregated schooling can both support and undermine politically just representation for marginalised students. This theorising draws attention to (...) the problematic notion of voice in linking representation to identity in reductionist ways. The arguments presented point to the significance of people and their politics, rather than their membership to a particular identity group, in pursuing equity for marginalised groups. The article argues the imperative of understanding group identity as an aspect of negotiated social practice that can be drawn on in strategic and critical ways to address matters of political injustice. (shrink)

Companies operating and located in emerging economy nations routinely couch their corporate social responsibility (CSR) work in nation-building terms. In this article, I focus on the Indian context and critically examine mainstream CSR discourse from the perspective of the culture-centered approach (CCA). Accordingly, five main themes of CSR stand out: nation-building facade, underlying neoliberal logics, CSR as voluntary, CSR as synergetic, and a clear urban bias. Next, I outline a CCA-inspired CSR framework that allows corporate responsibility to be re-claimed and (...) re-framed by subaltern communities of interest. I identify such resistive openings via interrogations of culture (I focus on oft-cited Gandhian ethics here), structure (State policy, organizational strategy, and global/local flows), and agency (subaltern reframing of institutional responsibility, engagement with alternative modes of agency, and deconstructive vigilance). (shrink)

This article reconsiders the issue of Luce Irigaray's proximity to Jacques Derrida on the question of woman. I use Derrida's reading of Nietzsche in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (1979) and Irigaray's reading of Heidegger in L'Oubli de l'air (1983) to argue that reading them as supplements to one another is more accurate and more productive for feminism than separating one from the other. I conclude by laying out the benefits for feminism that such a reading would offer.

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 . 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)

Immigrant women to Western Europe, especially those originating from Islamic countries, have been turned into icons of cultural difference by the general discourse on immigration. They are not recognized as actors in a changing society, just as society's changes through immigrants tend to be denied. This obscures the work and the accomplishments of women in the course of their immigration. Focusing on a biographical interview with a Turkish woman who came to Germany as a ‘guest worker’ in 1972, the social (...) history of this labour migration is outlined. Instances of ‘biographical work’ in the interview are discussed, pointing out the transformation potential of immigrant women's biographies. (shrink)

Through illustrating the similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural contexts (such as `African' female genital cutting and `Western' cosmetic surgery), feminist theorists seek to reveal the instability of essentialist binaries which distinguish various groups as culturally, ethnically and morally `different'. They also aim to query how the term `culture' is employed differentially on the basis of embodied axes such as race and nation. However, in emphasizing overarching commonalities between practices, feminist cross-cultural comparisons risk collapsing into economies of sameness (...) that elide the complex relations of power through which such practices have been constituted. They can also fix the imagined subjects of these practices in troubling ways. Using the ubiquitous `African' female genital cutting and `Western' cosmetic surgery binary as an example, this article explores the difference it might make to address culturally essentialist constructions of embodied practice with a focus on relationality rather than commonality. As a means to reorient feminist cross-cultural approaches which depend on assertions of similarity or sameness, it argues for the theoretical and pedagogical utility of thinking through relational webs. (shrink)

This thesis contextualises academic writing in EAP (English for Academic Purposes) and subjects it to an interdisciplinary (educational and philosophical) analysis in order to argue that what makes writing academic are its socio-academic practices and values, not its conventional forms. In rejecting dominant discourses that frame academic writing as a transferable skill which can be reduced to conventional forms, I show that academic writings are varied and evolve alongside changing writer agencies and textual environments. This accounts for the emergence of (...) a diverse academic writing landscape that enacts diverse socio-academic practices and that does not reduce writing to predictable static surface features. My methodology resists traditional disciplinary classifications and is in line with the reflective and interpretative approaches associated with the humanities. Rather than ‘filling a gap’ in academic writing research, I challenge writing conventions in EAP by questioning assumptions. This is because EAP is influential in shaping discourses about academic writing and, as such, it must not mislead students and practitioners about the evolving purposes, forms and possibilities for academic expression. The thesis is divided into three parts, each containing two chapters. Part 1 is concerned with explaining what academic writing is in EAP and how EAP can misrepresent it. Part 2 delves into the history of writing and literacy to tease out the ideologies shaping writing practices. Part 3 proposes a model based on philosophical theories of mind and sociology that lays the foundation for a macro theory of academic writing and a future writing pedagogy. The model re-imagines academic writing as an affordance within a non-linear, emergent and complex social open system. This system can be referred to as an organic unity and requires a shift from conceiving writing as a ‘transferable skill’. When re-imagined as an affordance, change and diversity in academic writing practices become possible. (shrink)

This essay examines the contemporary masculinity of straight, white men in the business classes of the United States as a category of identity. I argue that this form of masculine identity is currently in crisis, and, through a reading of the 1995 film Toy Story, develop an argument about the value of ‘downsizing’ masculinity in an era of diminished work expectations.

The impact of postmodernism on research methodology: implications for nursingThis article considers what have been referred to as die two major crises in research methodology: (i) the crisis of legitimation (to what extent are the notions of reliability and validity still meaningful in the light of a posture that is said to approach an ’anything goes’ standpoint); and (ii) the crisis of representation (to what extent is it possible to represent the world view of ‘the odier’ without it being merely (...) a construction of the researcher). These are discussed in order to identify aspects of a continuing debate that is of relevance to nurses for they are integral to graduate research and the ongoing application of research in hospital or community contexts. Educating nurses in research requires that they learn a repertoire of research skills such as literature critiques, developing research questions, interviewing, analysing techniques and computer‐assisted analysis. However, postmodern debates can also be beneficial by facilitating their understanding of contemporary research issues so that they can critically integrate such reflexive thinking into dieir own research practices and go on to explore new ways to undertake research. (shrink)

The deconstructing angel: nursing, reflection and evidence‐based practice This paper explores Jacques Derrida's strategy of deconstruction as a way of understanding and critiquing nursing theory and practice. Deconstruction has its origins in philosophy, but I argue that it is useful and relevant as a way of challenging the dominant paradigm of any discipline, including nursing. Because deconstruction is notoriously difficult to define, I offer a number of examples of deconstruction in action. In particular, I focus on three critiques of reflective (...) practice by the meta‐narrative of evidence‐based practice (EBP) and attempt to show how those critiques can be directed back at EBP itself. I conclude with the observation that EBP is open to many of the criticisms that it directs at other discourses, including problems of a lack of empirical evidence, of distortions due to memory, and of falsification of the ‘facts’. (shrink)

When assumed by positions of dominance, the impersonal, analytical perspectives of scholar- narrators may serve to flatten, simplify, or render invisible the differences of constructed Others. Strategies of resistance necessarily correspond to where narrator-subjects enter relations of power. Without the presence of Others' narrations, dominance can neither value newly visible subjective agency nor confront the complicity in its own subjectivity. Intersubjectivity suggests a dialogical process that utilizes differences in lived experience to reconceive relationality.

(2000). Disability, Geography and Ethics. Philosophy & Geography: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 65-70.

Takamure Itsue has many faces following different phases of her life: poet, activist-writer, anarchist, ethnologist and historian. Throughout these transformations, Takamure maintained her feminist position. This article concentrates on her politics of love, sex and marriage, formulated and presented in the pre-war period during the time of Japanese colonial empire. A specific focus is placed on her positionality in the act of writing within the discursive field of women whose nation was colonizing others, notably Koreans. The combination of positivistic craving (...) for ‘scientific’ history to substantiate the uxorilocal tradition of Japanese matrimony and uncritical acceptance of ‘motherhood’ as a superior virtue led her to consequently embrace Japan's colonialism. (shrink)