Power is clearly a crucial concept for feminist theory. Insofar as feminists are interested in analyzing power, it is because they have an interest in understanding, critiquing, and ultimately challenging the multiple array of unjust power relations affecting women in contemporary Western societies, including sexism, racism, heterosexism, and class oppression. In "The Power of Feminist Theory," Amy Allen diagnoses the inadequacies of previous feminist conceptions of power, and draws on the work of a diverse group of theorists of power, including (...) Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Hannah Arendt, in order to construct a new feminist conception of power. The conception of power developed in this book enables readers to theorize domination, resistance, and solidarity, and, perhaps more importantly, to do so in a way that illuminates the interrelatedness of these three modalities of power. (shrink)

In 1925, Russian philosopher Ivan Il'in published a book entitled On Resistance to Evil by Force . The book generated a bitter polemic among @migré Russian thinkers, which constitutes probably the most thorough debate on the justification of the use of force ever conducted among Russian scholars. This paper analyses Il'in's work and places it into the context of Russian history and philosophy. Il'in argued that war was sometimes necessary, but never 'just'. On occasions, the only way of fulfilling one's (...) obligation to resist evil is to fight. At such times one must do so. But one must understand that what one is doing, though necessary, is unjust, because one is always at least partially responsible for the situation which made violence necessary. While not shirking one's responsibilities, it is only by facing up to the guilt of one's deeds that one can prevent war from undermining one's moral equilibrium. This paper shows that most of those who took part in the debate provoked by Il'in's book agreed with the fundamentals of his argument. This fact illustrates that there is a distinctive Russian philosophy regarding the use of force which in important aspects differs from Western just war theory. (shrink)

This paper provides a revisionist account of the authority and power of the criminal mugshot. Dominant theories in the field have tended to focus on the ways in which mugshots have been used as a way of disciplining criminal bodies and rendering them docile. It is argued here that additional emphasis could usefully be placed on stories of resistance in which the monological production site of the prison or police station transforms into a dialogical site, in which the (...) objects of police photography can acquire agency. These issues are explored with particular reference to a set of photographs of English suffragettes acquired by the police for surveillance purposes. The suffragette’s refusal to comply with requests to have their photographs taken is used as a case study through which to examine the ways in which conventions about the form of the mugshot can be subverted, ideas about the types of people who were the object/subject of mugshots disrupted and the assumption of documentary neutrality undermined. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Notes References.

Perspectivists hold that what you ought to do is determined by your perspective, that is, your epistemic position. Objectivists hold that what you ought to do is determined by the facts irrespective of your perspective. This paper explores an influential argument for perspectivism which appeals to the thought that the normative is action guiding. The crucial premise of the argument is that you ought to φ only if you are able to φ for the reasons which determine that you ought (...) to φ. We show that this premise can be understood in different ways. On one reading, it provides no support for perspectivism. On another reading, the premise lacks support. So, the argument fails. An important upshot of the paper is that the objectivist can embrace the thought about guidance. (shrink)

Based upon Ajit Maan's groundbreaking theory of Internarrative Identity, this collection focuses upon redefining self, slave narrative, the black Caribbean diaspora, and cyberspace to explore the interconnection between identity and life experience as expressed through personal narrative.

This article focuses on applying some of Žižek’s theoretical work to a specific space within the capitalist conjuncture, the pub. Jürgen Habermas’ influential conception of the public sphere has shown the important role of the caffeine-centric cafés of the past in producing a lively democratic movement. As most any trip to a post-modern coffeehouse will attest, however, such locations have become little more than outlets for free and always individualized Wi-Fi. But the local pub, in the current political climate, has (...) attained something more. The central argument here is that pub culture, built on neither action nor reaction, is the last bastion of anti-capitalism. Indeed, if Bartleby’s “I’d prefer not to,” was an effective response to the demands of capitalism in the work place, then “I’d prefer another” does such duty with even more resistance and relevance for the present. To make this case, and explore its implications, I will turn to key insights from theorists such as Žižek, Lawrence Grossberg, and Deleuze and Guattari, while also comparing and contrasting today’s global pub culture to that of the historical role of the café. (shrink)

This thesis is a critique of Hegel from a Heideggerian standpoint focusing on the role of action in community. It argues, first, that Heidegger has a more highly developed account of the present of action than does Hegel on account of his theory of temporality. On the basis of a discussion of the nature of action and it's site, I examine the way in which action functions in community in both Hegel and Heidegger. For Hegel, action is essential to community (...) and intersubjective relations and mutual recognition depends upon it. For Heidegger it is precisely the non-acting moment, the moment of vision, which forms the basis for community. Community, for Heidegger would thus be prior to action, issuing from a place proper to Dasein which precedes all action in the world. I argue that the existence of a moment, the moment of vision, which would initially seem to refuse community in Heidegger actually provides a rich sense of the intersubjective because it allows for the experience of that which is totally Other. On the basis of this experience, Dasein would thus be capable of recognizing the essential alienness of the everyday communal world to it. It would thus be able to recognize its difference and thus the difference of others from how their actions are taken up in the communal sphere. Action would thus not be the basis for community. For Hegel, action is essential to the mutual recognition which is the fabric of community. The radical otherness that is found in Heidegger when he articulates the authentic moment is dismissed as an affront to the possibility of community. For Hegel, we are what we do and we are recognized exclusively on the basis of our actions. Consequently, I argue that Heidegger has a deeper and more radical sense of community than Hegel. (shrink)

Donald Davidson is probably the most eminent living analytic philosopher, and his writings in philosophy of language and philosophy of action have shaped much of the recent work in both these fields. However, despite the obvious shared concerns of literary theory and these aspects of philosophy, up to this point literary theorists have not paid much attention to Davidson's ideas or have only known about them through the interpretations of other philosophers like Richard Rorty. Literary theorists have seen more relevance (...) to their concerns in Continental philosophy and, among analytic philosophers, in the essentially anti-analytic work of J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein than in the harder tradition of analytic philosophy—more concerned with logic and philosophy of science—represented by the work of Donald Davidson. _Literary Theory after Davidson _challenges both views, stressing the variety of ways in which Davidson's thought can contribute to the development of literary theory. Davidson himself has contributed a new essay to the collection that explores the interrelations between his theories of language and literature. (shrink)

This article explores the dilemmas of reform in weak states through an examination of efforts to decentralize the fiscal system in post-Soviet Ukraine in the 1990s. Despite increased attention to the state, many reform efforts still ignore the full implications that state weakness has for institutional transformation. Inattention to the problems of institutional capacity has led to a misdiagnosis of the problems facing intergovernmental institutions in post-Soviet Ukraine. Overcentralization and soft budget constraints built into formal institutional design demand an unrecognized (...) degree of institutional capacity that is frequently weak or absent in the post-Soviet context. In addition, reform measures that fail to take into account the problems of weak institutions have inadvertently reduced the authority of already enfeebled state institutions. (shrink)

This book has two main aims. First, it develops and defends a constitutive account of normative reasons as premises of good reasoning. This account says, roughly, that to be a normative reason for a response (such as a belief or intention) is to be premise of good reasoning, from fitting responses, to that response. Second, building on the account of reasons, it develops and defends a fittingness-first account of the structure of the normative domain. This account says that there is (...) a single normative property, fittingness, which is normatively basic, and on which all other normative properties depend. On this view, reasons, oughts, value, and other normative phenomena all ultimately depend on fittingness. The account of normative reasons is a part of this general view of the normative domain. The book begins, in Chapter 1, by motivating the account of reasons as premises of good reasoning. Chapter 2 argues that good reasoning is, roughly, reasoning that preserves fittingness. Chapter 3 addresses the question of what fittingness is. Chapter 4 defends constitutive accounts of evaluative properties, like goodness, in terms of fitting attitudes. Chapters 5 and 6 shows how the view provides an attractive account of how reasons determine the deontic status of a response—whether you ought or may so respond. Chapter 7 addresses some challenges concerning certain reasons for belief, the relationship between reasons for action and reasons for intention, and reasons for emotion. (shrink)

Donald Davidson is probably the most eminent living analytic philosopher, and his writings in philosophy of language and philosophy of action have shaped much of the recent work in both these fields. However, despite the obvious shared concerns of literary theory and these aspects of philosophy, up to this point literary theorists have not paid much attention to Davidson's ideas or have only known about them through the interpretations of other philosophers like Richard Rorty. Literary theorists have seen more relevance (...) to their concerns in Continental philosophy and, among analytic philosophers, in the essentially anti-analytic work of J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein than in the harder tradition of analytic philosophy—more concerned with logic and philosophy of science—represented by the work of Donald Davidson. _Literary Theory after Davidson _challenges both views, stressing the variety of ways in which Davidson's thought can contribute to the development of literary theory. Davidson himself has contributed a new essay to the collection that explores the interrelations between his theories of language and literature. (shrink)

Redrawing the Lines,the first book to focus on that interaction, brings together ten essays by key figures who have worked to connect literary theory and philosophy and to reassess the relationship between analytic and Continental ...

This article problematizes the way of thinking schooling in discourse of sign system, which involves opposition, and double gesture of inclusion/exclusion. Drawing on two fundamental texts of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu, this article puts forward the seemingly passive Non-Word and Non-Self to resist the hierarchy ordering of conceptions and man, and to undo duality of binary opposition. It links the history of assessment and PISA to the rethinking of evidence and sign in contemporary movements. The second (...) section proposes teaching as wandering (you, 游), the transcendence into Non-Self with response to men’s natural inquiry, but not artificially manipulating and shaping man by privileging certain knowledge, value, and thoughts over other. Instead of making categories of race, gender, and normal/abnormal, Taoist provides a way of reconsider the self operating on assessing, standardizing, normalizing, correcting and predicting others in school accountability. It is built on the ontology of considering individual as belonging to an ultimate sameness, the oneness. The article concludes with underlying assumption that students are subjected to change, and their difference must be eliminated through standard test. It further questions tactics of reason that educational reform face in the current regime of school accountability. (shrink)

I began this study with Laudan's argument from the pessimistic induction and I promised to show that the caloric theory of heat cannot be used to support the premisses of the meta-induction on past scientific theories. I tried to show that the laws of experimental calorimetry, adiabatic change and Carnot's theory of the motive power of heat were independent of the assumption that heat is a material substance, approximately true, deducible and accounted for within thermodynamics.I stressed that results and (...) were known to most theorists of the caloric theory and that result was put forward by the founders of the new thermodynamics. In other words, the truth-content of the caloric theory was located, selected carefully, and preserved by the founders of thermodynamics.However, the reader might think that even if I have succeeded in showing that laudan is wrong about the caloric theory, I have not shown how the strategy followed in this paper can be generalised against the pessimistic meta-induction. I think that the general strategy against Laudan's argument suggested in this paper is this: the empirical success of a mature scientific theory suggests that there are respects and degrees in which this theory is true. The difficulty for — and and real challenge to — philosophers of science is to suggest ways in which this truth-content can be located and shown to be preserved — if at all — to subsequent theories. In particular, the empirical success of a theory does not, automatically, suggest that all theoretical terms of the theory refer. On the contrary, judgments of referential success depend on which theoretical claims are well-supported by the evidence. This is a matter of specific investigation. Generally, one would expect that claims about theoretical entities which are not strongly supported by the evidence or turn out to be independent of the evidence at hand, are not compelling. For simply, if the evidence does not make it likely that our beliefs about putative theoretical entities are approximately correct, a belief in those entities would be ill-founded and unjustified. Theoretical extrapolations in science are indespensable, but they are not arbitrary. If the evidence does not warrant them I do not see why someone should commit herself to them. In a sense, the problem with empricist philisophers is not that they demand that theoretical beliefs must be warranted by evidence. Rather, it is that they claim that no evidence can warrant theorretical beliefs. A realist philosopher of science would not disagree on the first, but she has good grounds to deny the second.I argued that claims about theoretical entities which are not strongly supported by the evidence must not be taken as belief-worthy. But can one sustaon the more ambitious view that loosely supported parts of a theory tend to be just those that include non-referring terms? There is an obvious excess risk in such a generalisation. For there are well-known cases in which a theoretical claim was initially weakly supported by the evidence. (shrink)

Those who bear the burdens of injustice and oppression are entitled to act in ways contrary to existing laws and institutions to secure their own entitlements and those of others. This article aims to articulate a Confucian perspective on resistance against injustice. There are reasons for thinking that the notion of resistance is fundamentally at odds with Confucian political thought. In this article, I move beyond this simple conflict/compatibility model and explore the complex relationships between resistance and Confucianism. On (...) one hand, some of Confucianism’s core commitments can be better attained in contemporary societies by allowing resistance; on the other, a Confucian perspective can offer insights into current discussions on the ethics of resistance. (shrink)

Those who bear the burdens of injustice and oppression are entitled to act in ways contrary to existing laws and institutions to secure their own entitlements and those of others. This article aims to articulate a Confucian perspective on resistance against injustice. There are reasons for thinking that the notion of resistance is fundamentally at odds with Confucian political thought. In this article, I move beyond this simple conflict/compatibility model and explore the complex relationships between resistance and Confucianism. On (...) one hand, some of Confucianism’s core commitments can be better attained in contemporary societies by allowing resistance; on the other, a Confucian perspective can offer insights into current discussions on the ethics of resistance. (shrink)

Inside Knowledge: (Un)doing Ways of Knowing in the Humanities is a collection of original essays proposing a fresh examination of epistemological questions relevant to scholars in any discipline of the humanities. Is objective knowledge still a viable ideal? Can art produce or express knowledge of any kind? Is the body a promising medium for a knowledge less abstract or logocentric than the kind Western culture has favoured so far? How are epistemological regimes maintained with the use of established linguistic (...) tropes? Is knowledge to be resisted or employed as a tool of resistance? Distinguished as well as young, emerging scholars from disciplines such as philosophy, comparative literature, musicology and art theory discuss concrete case studies in which these questions arise. The essays share a commitment to interdisciplinary approaches and the close analysis of cultural objects, and refuse to take for granted the conventional methodologies that often guide research projects in their respective fields. The Inside Knowledge volume stages encounters between different ways of knowing, which contribute to an interdiciplinary understanding of the concept of knowledge and of epistemological questions in the humanities. (shrink)

The research Nevin & Grace report is impressive in its integrative power, but it also shows the current limits of operant theory: There is tremendous concentration on understanding how existing behavioral relations are modulated in rate or time allocation, but little on dealing with the origin of the behavioral relations themselves. Specifying what should count as a behavioral unit will require source principles sensitive to the composition of the units being related.

Epistemology, like ethics, is normative. Just as ethics addresses questions about how we ought to act, so epistemology addresses questions about how we ought to believe and enquire. We can also ask metanormative questions. What does it mean to claim that someone ought to do or believe something? Do such claims express beliefs about independently existing facts, or only attitudes of approval and disapproval towards certain pieces of conduct? How do putative facts about what people ought to do or believe (...) fit in to the natural world? In the case of ethics, such questions have been subject to extensive and systematic investigation, yielding the thriving subdiscipline of metaethics. Yet the corresponding questions have been largely ignored in epistemology; there is no serious subdiscipline of metaepistemology. This surprising state of affairs reflects a more general tendency for ethics and epistemology to be carried out largely in isolation from each other, despite the important substantive and structural connections between them. A movement to overturn the general tendency has only recently gained serious momentum, and has yet to tackle metanormative questions in a sustained way. This edited collection aims to stimulate this project and thus advance the new subdiscipline of metaepistemology. Its original essays draw on the sophisticated theories and frameworks that have been developed in metaethics concerning practical normativity, examine whether they can be applied to epistemic normativity, and consider what this might tell us about both. (shrink)

Contemporary literary theory takes truth and meaning to be dependent on shared conventions in a community of discourse and views authors’ intentions as irrelevant to interpretation. This view, argues Reed Way Dasenbrock, owes much to Anglo-American analytic philosophy as developed in the 1950s and 1960s by such thinkers as Austin and Kuhn, but it ignores more recent work by philosophers like Davidson and Putnam, who have mounted a counterattack on this earlier conventionalism. This book draws on current analytic philosophy to (...) resuscitate the notion of objective truth and intentionalist models of meaning and interpretation, thereby moving beyond the antifoundationalism of postmodern theory. It addresses the work of Rorty and Fish as representative of literary conventionalism, discusses the futility of Derrida’s anti-intentionalism, and shows how poststructuralist thinkers like Althusser and Foucault have contributed to the "new thematics" of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation that dominates literary theory today. Examining the counter-arguments of conventionalists to have their theory judged by its consequences, Dasenbrock shows how damaging this antiobjectivism and anti-intentionalism have been for literary studies. (shrink)

This article problematizes the way of thinking schooling in discourse of sign system, which involves opposition, and double gesture of inclusion/exclusion. Drawing on two fundamental texts of Taois...

Using the exemplary case of 19th-century American state penitentiaries, the authors explore penitentiary control from the perspective of sensing agents who navigate a controlled sensory ecology – the prison, as structured by institutional rules, differential power relations, and architectural plans. Moving beyond Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Goffman’s Asylums, they stress a pragmatist approach to understanding human sensing and explain inmates’ creativity under constraints. Employing wardens’ disciplinary journals and other secondary reports, the article emphasizes three theoretical issues that explain why (...) Panoptical prisons’ attempts to control sense experiences can sometimes fail: architectural designs that inadequately negotiate the contradictory demands of visual and acoustic control; inmates’ active mobilization of perceptible objects as means of resistance; and power differences between prison authorities and inmates that prevent actors from sharing a common sensory field. The authors’ overarching goal is to advance, via pragmatism, a sensory analysis of institutional control. (shrink)

Informed by Gloria Anzaldúa's and José Carlos Mariátegui's work, as well as by Andean cosmology, Omar Rivera turns to Inka stonework and architecture as an example of a "Cosmological Aesthetics." He articulates ways of sensing, feeling and remembering that are attuned to an aesthetic of water, earth and light. On this basis, Rivera brings forth a corporeal orientation that can be inhabited by the oppressed, one that withdraws from predominant modern/Western conceptions of the human. By providing an aesthetic analysis (...) of cosmological sensing, Rivera sets the stage for exploring physical dimensions of anti-colonial resistance, and furthers the Latinx and Latin American tradition of anti-colonial and liberatory philosophy. Seeingaesthetic involvements with the cosmos as a source for embodied modes of resistance, Rivera turns to the work of María Lugones and Enrique Dussel in order to make explicit the aesthetic dimensions of their work. Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance creates a new dialogue between art historians, artists, and philosophers working on Latin American thought, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. It weaves together a Latin American philosophy that connects pre-Columbian cosmologies with contemporary thinkers. Rivera's original approach introduces us to the living, evolving and aesthetic alternatives to coloniality of power and of knowledge, overhauling current understandings of decolonial theory and opening the tradition in transformative ways. (shrink)

Channeling affinities with certain motifs of Daoism, Walter Benjamin renews a form of dialectical thought that diffuses ideological notions of progress and grants minimal weight to the ontological distinction of the Subject. In fleeting yet pivotal moments of contact with Chinese aesthetics, Benjamin moves attention toward the practice of ‘thinking by way of resemblance’ – a phenomenon he variously enacts. Calling forth resonances within late-capitalist modernity, he retrieves from Daoist literature a notion of dialectical reversal freed from progressive synthesis, as (...) well as image-repertoires of self-forgetting, which he understands to be irreducible to reification. The Daoist imaginary offers Benjamin resources for breaking open the anthropocentric closure of Hellenic accounts of mimesis. He theorizes similitude more capaciously as something that can flash up across temporally discontinuous phenomena – without deferring to predetermined categories of Being. Benjamin thus recasts resemblance – regarded by Enlightenment rationality as an impoverished mode of cognition – as a medium of historical apprehension that resists the occlusion of transience by the ontology of the victors. (shrink)

The present is characterized by the ontological crisis of the political subject and by the increasingly clear approach of radical political praxis to the libertarian thesis of rejection of the delegation of power and approach to direct action. Taking to the streets, assembly, direct action, individual insurrection, and daily resistance are some of the tools that characterize the new forms of resistance. However, where do these forms come from? This article aims to analyze the way in which poststructuralism, anarchism and (...) intersectional and decolonial feminisms act as a source of inspiration for these new forms of radical political resistance. (shrink)

Part two of an innovative trilogy on anarchist geography, this text examines how we can better understand the ways in which space has been used for resistance.

Recent feminist theorizing has pointed to a `resurgent patriarchy' within neo-liberal postfeminist times, which re-orders and restabilizes the heterosexual matrix through a politics of `postfeminist masquerade' demanded of girls and women (McRobbie). This paper seeks to complicate this thesis, exploring the regulation and rupture of Butler's `heterosexual matrix' as a complex performative politics through which girls' conflictual relationships with themselves, and other girls and boys are staged and through which dominant versions of tweenage and teenage femininity are reinscribed but also (...) reworked, in race and class specific ways. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's powerful conceptual repertoire for disrupting Oedipal logics in Anti-Oedipus, we offer a `molecular mapping', illustrating cracks and ruptures in what is a porous heterosexual matrix, exploring a rhythm of `deterritorializations' and `reterritorializations' of the normative in our respective ethnographic and narrative interviews with girls. We also trace more sustained ruptures of heteronormative femininity drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's notion of `lines of flight' and Braidotti's concept of `alternative figuration'. We argue ruptures and alternative figurations are not constitutive of total `molar' resistance to norms, but are significant spaces of doing girl differently and crucial to map if we are to perceive the malleability and multiplicity of contemporary girl subjectivities, which exceed heteronormative femininity and phallogocentric desire. (shrink)

The social world is saturated with powerful formations of knowledge that colonise individual and institutional identities. Some knowledge emerges as legitimised and authoritative; other knowledge is resisted or repressed. Psychosocial approaches highlight the unstable basis of knowledge, learning and research; of knowing and not knowing. How do we come to formulate knowledge in the ways that we do? Are there other possible ways of knowing that are too difficult or unsettling for us to begin to explore? Do we (...) need the authority of legitimised institutions and regularized methods to build secure knowledge? What might it mean to build _in_secure edifices of knowledge? How might we trouble notions of knowledge in processes of teaching, learning and research? This collection addresses these questions, drawing on a range of psychoanalytic and social theory, from Bion, Freud and Lacan, to Derrida, Kristeva and Zizek. Showcasing work from North America, Europe and Japan, contributors explore writing as a practice that can stabilise _or_ unsettle subjectivities; the unconscious relations between school practices, subjectivities, educational spaces and ideologies; implications of the productive energies and the deadening inwardness associated with mourning and melancholia for formal and informal learning; and the authority we invest in apparently rigid or ephemeral institutional spaces. Strongly empirical as well as theoretical in approach, this collection will be of interest to students and academics seeking ways to resist normative orders of legitimacy and coherence in education and research. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Pedagogy, Culture & Society. _. (shrink)

I argue that with the advent of poststructuralism, traditional theories of representation, truth, and resistance have been seriously brought into question. References to the “natural” and the “wild” cannot escape the poststructural attack against foundational concepts and the constituting character of human-centered language. I explore the ways in which environmental movements and literary expression have tended to posit pre-ideological essences, thereby replicating patterns of power and authority. I also point to how environmentalism might be reshaped in light of (...) poststructuralism to challenge power without reference to authority. (shrink)

This dissertation draws on the Aristotelian and contemporary communitarian belief that humans are socially constituted, and analyzes the manifestations of this belief in contemporary identity politics and in the concept of 'culture' that often underlies identity politics. While I argue that it is important to maintain a communitarian conception of the self, I depart from Aristotle and the communitarian tradition by rejecting the assumption that a constitutive community is characterized by unity and homogeneity. I then claim that identity politics has (...) inherited both the virtues and the problems of communitarian theory. Just as communitarians claim that the self is never free from social constitution, so identity politics have taken the self's identity to be formed along lines of socially defined group differences, and like communitarianism, some identity politics has entailed a call for unity. In the case of identity politics, the requirement for membership in the community may be sharing certain essential characteristics of identity; difference can result in marginalization, forced assimilation to the group norm, or expulsion. Because identity politics often relies upon the concept of 'culture' to ground group identities, I also examine this concept. When a community's unity derives from its members understanding themselves to share a culture, the maintenance of the culture itself can be conservatizing; the culture can remain closed off from changes as it preserves the "traditional" or "authentic"; furthermore, it can come to be treated as an object outside of the people who live it and as such the changing lived realities of these people--particularly changes that cross lines of identity--do not serve to continually offer new, changing, and ambiguous ways of conceiving of what is shared between members of the community. I argue for the development of group identity that recognizes intersecting group differences, and can permit hybridity or mixed identities. I end by suggesting that for a constitutive community to remain truly constitutive without harming its members through marginalization, forced assimilation to a norm or a shared essence, or stagnation, members must give up the sort of control that maintains the community as a unity. (shrink)

Today the relationship between food and cities is revitalizing urban areas, as food production practices transform locales one block and one neighborhood at a time. The key catalysts of this transformation include the commitment to address the root causes of inequalities within food systems and the desire to increase local control over food systems that have been increasingly industrialized and globalized. These goals, encapsulated by the terms “food justice” and “food sovereignty,” play major roles in guiding local food initiatives in (...) cities today. This study explores how justice-oriented urban agriculture projects transform city contexts in ways that reduce regulatory barriers – barriers that, when left in place, could perpetuate systems of oppression. The study ends with the argument that, by removing regulatory barriers, urban agriculture projects are transforming cityscapes in ways that cultivate justice at the system level. (shrink)

Syntactic and semantic theories of quantificational phenomena traditionally treat all noun phrases alike, thus predicting that noun phrases exhibit a uniform behavior. It is well-known that this is an idealization: in any given case, some noun phrases will support a desired reading more readily than others. Anyone who has lectured on quantifier scope ambiguities to a class of unbrainwashed undergraduates will recall the amount of preparation time that goes into coming up with two or three examples that the class (...) will judge to be ambiguous in exactly the ways the theory under discussion predicts. The same experience with ``good citizens'' and ``bad citizens'' repeats itself in connection with branching, anaphora, distributive versus collective readings, extraction, event quantification, pair-list questions, and so on. (shrink)

This article examines the critical potential of Honneth’s theory or ethics of recognition by raising two concerns as regards the success of such a project. Firstly, this article argues that Honneth’s ethical turn in critical theory might not be completely warranted and that there are good reasons to supplement his theory of recognition with an account of justificatory practices. Secondly, it argues that the complexity of the beginnings of political resistance proves that an explanative gap remains to be filled to (...) account for the way in which personal experience of disrespect can be transformed into a collective struggle for recognition. By way of conclusion, this article posits that instead of rejecting the critical potential of Honneth’s theory, the concerns raised therein are invitations to specify his theory further, so that contemporary struggles for recognition can be understood more profoundly. (shrink)

This article gauges the progress that sociologists of gender and sexuality have made in employing the insights of queer theory by examining four recent monographs that have utilized aspects of queer theory in their empirical work: Rupp and Taylor, Seidman, Bettie, and Schippers. The article uses the insights of queer theory to push the monographs in an even “queerer” theoretical direction. This direction involves taking more seriously the nonnormative alignments of sex, gender, sexuality, resisting the tendency to essentialize identity or (...) conflate it with the broad range of gender and sexual expression and treating the construction of intersectional subjectivities as both performed and performative in nature. The analysis of these texts also insists that a queer sociological theory situate its emphasis on discursive power more firmly in economic, political, and other institutional processes. Ethnographic methods are proposed as the most useful way of combining queer theory with sociological analysis. (shrink)

Studies have shown that a person can consciously believe that they value racial equality and desire not to perpetuate racial stigmas, but unwittingly exhibit racist attitudes and beliefs. In order to explain this discrepancy between conscious beliefs and behavior, scholars have turned their attention to unconscious racial prejudice. One approach that is gaining wide acceptance is the Implicit Bias Model, which appeals to distinct implicit and explicit cognitive processes, coupled with an account of the ways in which people unconsciously (...) internalize widespread stereotypes and stigmas. This article claims that although the Implicit Bias Model is in many respects useful, it leaves out a central aspect of unconscious racial prejudice: the underlying motivations and incentives for harboring racist attitudes and beliefs, which generate psychological resistances to knowing about or changing prejudices. A more complete account of unconscious racial prejudice can be developed by turning to theories of active ignorance, which contribute to what this article calls the Resistance Model. (shrink)

One of the greatest woman intellectuals of eighteenth-century Germany is Elise Reimarus, whose contribution to Enlightenment political theory is rarely acknowledged today. Unlike other social contract theorists, Reimarus rejects a people's right to violent resistance or revolution in her philosophical dialogue Freedom (1791). Exploring the arguments in Freedom, this paper observes a number of similarities in the political thought of Elise Reimarus and Immanuel Kant. Both, I suggest, reject violence as an illegitimate response to perceived political injustice in a way (...) that opposes Locke's strong voluntarism and the absolutism of Hobbes. First, they emphasize the need to maintain the legal state as a precondition for the possibility of external right. Second, they share an optimistic view of the inherently "just" nature of the tripartite republican state. And finally, Reimarus and Kant both outline an alternative, non-violent response to political injustice that consists in the freedom of public expression and a discourse on the moral enlightenment of man. (shrink)

One of the greatest woman intellectuals of eighteenth‐century Germany is Elise Reimarus, whose contribution to Enlightenment political theory is rarely acknowledged today. Unlike other social contract theorists, Reimarus rejects a people's right to violent resistance or revolution in her philosophical dialogue Freedom. Exploring the arguments in Freedom, this paper observes a number of similarities in the political thought of Elise Reimarus and Immanuel Kant. Both, I suggest, reject violence as an illegitimate response to perceived political injustice in a way that (...) opposes Locke's strong voluntarism and the absolutism of Hobbes. First, they emphasize the need to maintain the legal state as a precondition for the possibility of external right. Second, they share an optimistic view of the inherently “just” nature of the tripartite republican state. And finally, Reimarus and Kant both outline an alternative, nonviolent response to political injustice that consists in the freedom of public expression and a discourse on the moral enlightenment of man. (shrink)

I address an interesting puzzle of how marginalized groups gain self-representation and influence firms’ strategies. Accordingly, I examine the case of access to low-cost HIV/AIDS drugs in South Africa by integrating W. E. B. Du Bois’s work into stakeholder theory. Du Bois’s scholarly work, most notably his founding contribution to Black scholarship, has profound significance in the humanities and social sciences disciplines and vast potential to inspire a new way of thinking and doing research in the management and organization fields, (...) including business ethics research. By drawing on Du Bois’s works, I argue that through reconstruction of their selves—knowing their souls—marginalized groups know their capabilities better, enabling them to overcome their political and strategic limitations and ensure their true self-representation. They are also empowered to use political imagination and strategies of resistance against more powerful opponents. This influences powerful actors to accept the demands of marginalized groups. (shrink)

This paper discusses literacy as a socio-political phenomenon from the perspective of several relatively independent educational discourses. The first is critical education theory and research revealing the hidden mechanisms by which education policies act in the interests of a global market economy. The second is the perspective of critical pedagogy scholars on contemporary educational challenges, who offer responses similar to those discussed in current discourse on informal civic education. The third is the heated discussion of high-stakes literacy testing (related to (...) OECD literacy studies such as PISA, IALS, etc.) the results of which are used as a source of argumentation for diverse attitudes and educational consequences. Based on an analysis of literacy theory, research on active citizenship and civic education, the term “civic literacy” is proposed and argued as a relevant conceptual frame for conceptualizing school as an institution which can be involved in resistance to all forms of power politics or ideological indoctrination and manipulation, while at the same time, respecting the traditional values and aims of general education. (shrink)

‘‘Theoretical biology’’ is a surprisingly heter- ogeneous field, partly because it encompasses ‘‘doing the- ory’’ across disciplines as diverse as molecular biology, systematics, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Moreover, it is done in a stunning variety of different ways, using anything from formal analytical models to computer sim- ulations, from graphic representations to verbal arguments. In this essay I survey a number of aspects of what it means to do theoretical biology, and how they compare with the allegedly much more (...) restricted sense of theory in the physical sciences. I also tackle a recent trend toward the presentation of all-encompassing theories in the biological sciences, from general theories of ecology to a recent attempt to provide a conceptual framework for the entire set of biological disciplines. Finally, I discuss the roles played by philosophers of science in criticizing and shap- ing biological theorizing. (shrink)

Postmodernism has evoked great controversy and it continues to do so today, as it disseminates into general discourse. Some see its principles, such as its fundamental resistance to metanarratives, as frighteningly disruptive, while a growing number are reaping the benefits of its innovative perspective. In Political Theory and Postmodernism, Stephen K. White outlines a path through the postmodern problematic by distinguishing two distinct ways of thinking about the meaning of responsibility, one prevalent in modern and the other in postmodern (...) perspectives. Using this as a guide, White explores the work of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Habermas, as well as 'difference' feminists, with the goal of showing how postmodernism can inform contemporary ethical-political reflection. In his concluding chapter, White examines how this revisioned postmodern perspective might bear on our thinking about justice. (shrink)

"Alexander's commentary on Book 1 concerns the definition of Aristotelian syllogistic argument; its resistance to the rival Stoic theory of inference; and the character of inductive inference and of rhetorical argument. Alexander distinguishes inseparable accidents, such as the whiteness of snow, from defining differentiae, such as its being frozen, and considers how these differences fit into the schemes of categories. He speaks of dialectic as a stochastic discipline in which success is to be judged not by victory but by skill (...) in argument. Alexander also investigates the subject of ambiguity, which had been richly developed since Aristotle by the rival Stoic school."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

This essay addresses the much discussed problem of archiving digital poetry. Digital media are labile, and several writers of digital poetry are incorporating the media’s ephemerality into their poetics. Rather than rehash arguments that have been taking place within the field of digital media and digital poetics for years, I turn to the field of contemporary art curation and preservation, a field in which curators and archivists are struggling with the very immediate concerns, ethical and otherwise, related to archiving works (...) that are made from ephemeral media. One particular digital poem that has recently broken, has recently become unreadable, is Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia. Memmott composed the poem in 2000, and he incorporated the poem’s inevitable obsolescence into the text of the poem itself. He has since refused to “fix” or “update” the poem, because he contends that that would make it something other than what it was intended to be. Rather, he is choosing to let the poem die because that is what the poem is supposed to do. This essay concludes with a discussion of the political implications of acknowledging the ephemerality of digital media, the resistant potential of the poem when its ephemerality is embraced, and some ways in which archivists can preserve the memory of the poem without necessarily preserving the poem itself. (shrink)

A. Meinong’s views are usually associated with an highly inflated ontology including various kinds of nonexistent objects, incomplete and impossible ones among others. Around the turn of the century B. Russell strongly criticised this ontology accusing it of inconsistency. And perhaps because of this criticism Meinong’s views have been forgotten for a long time. Only recently some philosophers have created theories of objects which are formalisations of Meinong’s ontology or which are directly inspired by the ontology 1 . However (...) there still remains a need to discuss the problem of ways of reference to Meinongian objects regarding their specific structure of predication, and the interrelated problem of ontological commitment of those theories. Meinong’s ontological theory seems to be not so bizzare if we interpret it as a theory of possible intentional objects, i.e. possible objects of consciousness. And this interpretation perfectly agrees with phenomenological tradition from Brentano to Husserl and with the contemporary philosophy of mind. Needless to say reference is a special form of intentional relation so semantical investigations into these objects are of great relevance for general theory of intentionality. (shrink)

It is widely believed that some wars are just, and that the paradigm case of a just war is a defensive war. A familiar strategy used to justify defensive war is to infer its permissibility from the case of self-defensive killing. I show, however, that the permission to defend oneself does not justify killing, but instead calls for nonviolent resistance. I conclude that on the account of self-defense I develop, the appropriate way to respond to a war of aggression is (...) not by prosecuting a defensive war, but by engaging in a form of nonviolence I call pacific resistance. (shrink)

This study focuses on the experimental and philosophical analysis of the meaning of life in death situation, according to Wittgenstein’s way of life and sayings during the war. The method of extraction and analysis of information is grounded theory. For this purpose, Wittgenstein’s writings such as his letters and memories, and other’s texts about his life and his internal moods were analyzed. After analyzing the collected information and categorizing them in frames of open codes, axial codes, etc. we recognized (...) that Wittgenstein's point of view in death situation was supernatural God-centered. By reading Tolstoy gospel and Dostoyevsky's works, Wittgenstein has reached a kind of religious awakening in that period of his life. But before and after the war period he had a naturalistic point of view toward the meaning of life, in which moral values are in the core. (shrink)