On ‘Mismatch’ and ‘Metabolic Ghettos:’ The Conceptualization of Global Health Differences in Research on the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease. Epigenetic approaches to human health have received growing attention in the past two decades. They allow to view the development of human organisms as plastic, i.e. as open to influences from the social and material environment such as nutrition, stress, and trauma. This has lent new credence to approaches in biomedicine that aim to draw attention to the importance of (...) development for later life health. Some scholars in the social sciences and humanities have welcomed such approaches as a departure from gene‐centric perspectives and as an opportunity for highlighting the social and political determinants of health and illness. Others have warned that they might lead to new forms of biological reductionisms and determinisms. In this article, we explore how research on developmental plasticity addresses and articulates global health disparities, specifically in the context of postcolonial India. We discuss two prominent approaches from the field of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) that build on epigenetic perspectives on health and illness and view different global rates of disease susceptibility as the result of developmental processes: first, the ‘mismatch paradigm’ by Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson and second, the ‘metabolic ghetto’ concept by Jonathan Wells. We highlight how both approaches render historical and social factors meaningful for the development of global health disparities, but emphasize how they at the same time remain prone to determinisms and reductionisms reminiscent of a gene‐centric perspective. DOHaD actors themselves are critical of these tendencies, and in conclusion we explore novel opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations enabled by this critical potential. (shrink)

Why do American ghettos persist? Decades after Moynihan’s report on the black family and the Kerner Commission’s investigations of urban disorders, deeply disadvantaged black communities remain a disturbing reality. Scholars and commentators today often identify some factor―such as single motherhood, joblessness, or violent street crime―as the key to solving the problem and recommend policies accordingly. But, Tommie Shelby argues, these attempts to “fix” ghettos or “help” their poor inhabitants ignore fundamental questions of justice and fail to see the urban poor (...) as moral agents responding to injustice. (shrink)

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo mostrar lo que es una sana laicidad en la sociedad actual pluralista, multicultural, democrática y diversa. En primer lugar se presentan dos tentaciones de la iglesia hoy: refugiarse en el ghetto y cerrarse al mundo dando razón a los fundamentalistas laicos que la consideran como algo privado, o salir a la cruzada a imponer sus creencias y su mensaje. Luego se analiza el proceso histórico de formación del pluralismo, de la laicidad y de la (...) libertad religiosa con énfasis en los modelos norteamericano y francés. Se concluye con una visión de lo que es la laicidad en la doctrina de la iglesia católica hoy y una propuesta de lo que debe ser el verdadero pluralismo y la sana laicidad hoy. This article has as aim show what is a healthy secularism in the current pluralist, multicultural, democratic and diverse society. First, it presents two temptations of the church today: to shelter in the ghetto and to be closed to the world giving reason to the lay fundamentalists who consider faith to be something private, or to go out to the crusade to impose Christian beliefs and message. Then there is analyzed the historical process of formation of the pluralism, of the secularism and of the religious freedom emphatically in the models North American and French. The article concludes with a vision of what is the secularism in the doctrine of the catholic church today and a proposal of what must be the real pluralism and the healthy secularism today. (shrink)

In the first part of this essay, I develop the argument that Michel Foucault's work should be read with geographical and topological ideas in mind. I argue that Foucault's archeology and genealogy are fundamentally determined by spatial, topological, geographical, and geometrical metaphors and concepts. This spatial dimension of genealogy is explicitly related to racism and the regimes that domesticate agents through the practices, institutions and ideologies of racialization. The second part offers a genealogical reading of US history and spatiality in (...) terms of its racial institutions. I suggest that if we want to read the US geographies of topographies and cartographies of racism in a Foucauldian manner, then we must focus on plantations, ghettos, and prisons as the spaces‐institutions‐geographies that consolidated the racial matrix of US polity. My goal is to acculturate Foucauldian racial genealogy to the US racial matrix, and, conversely, to read US geo‐history in terms of racializing spatialities. (shrink)

More than half of the Roma population in Slovakia lives in spaces that are segregated or separated from dominant non-Roma communities. The socio-spatial marginalization of Roma is both generated and reinforced through open and discrete social processes and measures largely orchestrated by local governments, enabled by an ineffective state; and reinforced by the general socio-economic policy framework. This article builds on extensive field research on predominantly Roma-occupied spaces (i.e., ‘settlements’) in Slovakia and focuses on the nature and function of Roma (...) segregation and separation in Slovakia from an ecological socio-political, and economic standpoint. Based on Loi’c Wacquant’s work on ethno-racial segregation and the concept of environmental justice, we discuss social and environmental discrimination as one of the constituent elements in understanding Roma socio-spatial marginalization and its functions, and employ the neologism, ‘hyper-osada’ as a tool to conceptually and analytically investigate the; new impetus and recent trajectory of Roma segregation and separation. (shrink)

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo mostrar lo que es una sana laicidad en la sociedad actual pluralista, multicultural, democrática y diversa. En primer lugar se presentan dos tentaciones de la iglesia hoy: refugiarse en el ghetto y cerrarse al mundo dando razón a los fundamentalistas laicos que la consideran como algo privado, o salir a la cruzada a imponer sus creencias y su mensaje. Luego se analiza el proceso histórico de formación del pluralismo, de la laicidad y de la (...) libertad religiosa con énfasis en los modelos norteamericano y francés. Se concluye con una visión de lo que es la laicidad en la doctrina de la iglesia católica hoy y una propuesta de lo que debe ser el verdadero pluralismo y la sana laicidad hoy. (shrink)

© Mind Association 2017By any credible theory of justice, the creation and perpetuation of the ghetto—racially segregated metropolitan areas of concentrated disadvantage to which many poor blacks are consigned—is profoundly unjust. In Dark Ghettos, Tommie Shelby develops a nonideal moral perspective centred on the injustices of the ghetto, through which he critically examines state policies directed towards ameliorating these disadvantages. He also proposes an interpretation of the conduct of some of the more alienated ghetto residents as justified (...) resistance rather than moral vice. A powerful and distinctive feature of Dark Ghettos is its focus on ghetto residents as moral agents with ethical duties of justice as well as rights that need to be respected.Dark Ghettos advances a radical critique of current policies on the basis of surprisingly conventional conceptions of ideal theory and its relation to nonideal theory. Shelby accepts a Rawlsian theory of justice, focused on... (shrink)

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo mostrar lo que es una sana laicidad en la sociedad actual pluralista, multicultural, democrática y diversa. En primer lugar se presentan dos tentaciones de la iglesia hoy: refugiarse en el ghetto y cerrarse al mundo dando razón a los fundamentalistas laicos que la consideran como algo privado, o salir a la cruzada a imponer sus creencias y su mensaje. Luego se analiza el proceso histórico de formación del pluralismo, de la laicidad y de la (...) libertad religiosa con énfasis en los modelos norteamericano y francés. Se concluye con una visión de lo que es la laicidad en la doctrina de la iglesia católica hoy y una propuesta de lo que debe ser el verdadero pluralismo y la sana laicidad hoy. This article has as aim show what is a healthy secularism in the current pluralist, multicultural, democratic and diverse society. First, it presents two temptations of the church today: to shelter in the ghetto and to be closed to the world giving reason to the lay fundamentalists who consider faith to be something private, or to go out to the crusade to impose Christian beliefs and message. Then there is analyzed the historical process of formation of the pluralism, of the secularism and of the religious freedom emphatically in the models North American and French. The article concludes with a vision of what is the secularism in the doctrine of the catholic church today and a proposal of what must be the real pluralism and the healthy secularism today. (shrink)

This chapter aims at pointing out the correspondences between the transformative Five Percenter process of self-cultivation outlined in the Supreme Mathematics and previous interpretations articulated and transmitted in the sapiential traditions of Islam, Christianity, or Taoism.

Many philosophers have argued that psychological time is a fundamental, inherent quality of consciousness that provides continuity and sequence to mental events—enabling memory. And, since memory is consciousness, psychological time enables the individual intentionality of consciousness. Levinas , on the other hand, argues that an individual’s past, in the most original sense, is the past of other. The irreducible alterity of one’s past sets the stage for the other who co-determines the meaning of the past. This paper is about the (...) exploration cultural memory within the context of a Caucasian doctoral student entering into an African-American community during an internship, who finds that cultural memories are remarkably more complicated than the propositional description of historic events. The paper further explores how cultural memory is not a record of “what happened” but a sociolinguistic creative meaning making process. Histories can be contested. Memory, on the other hand, never adheres to the strict true or false dichotomy. Memory is like searching for the Divine, it cannot be found, only revealed in mysterious and small details. Memory, is the intruding of the infinite, creating as an effect the idea of a finite , they are not “representations” of the past nor are they a kind of mnemonic system of subjectivism to mediate all of consciousness. (shrink)

In the history of Western perceptions of Jews and the ‘Jewish problem’, the First World War marks a period of change which was, among other things, influenced by the course of the war on the Eastern Front. The German occupation of large parts of Russian Poland in 1915 brought the difficult conditions of Eastern European Jewry closer to public attention in the West, not only in Central Europe, but also in neutral states. For the Scandinavian writers who travelled to occupied (...) Poland in 1916 and 1917, the direct encounter with East European Jewry was a new and often disturbing experience. Their travelogues represent an illuminating and, so far, unused source for Scandinavian perceptions of Jews in Eastern Europe, focusing on the ‘ghetto’ as the physical embodiment of Eastern Jewish life. Analysing these accounts, the present article discusses the different depictions of Warsaw’s Jews thematically and identifies three interwoven perspectives of the ‘ghetto’: as a site of extreme poverty; as a foreign element in Europe; and as an archetype of Jewish life in general. (shrink)

This essay elaborates a magical realist reading of urban dispossession and the displacement of slum dwellers in contemporary New Delhi. More generally it argues that realist descriptions of the magical and magical descriptions of the real can help us sense and engage the multiple, fractured temporalities of the postcolonial city. The essay foregrounds an impending slum demolition in postcolonial Delhi’s famous magicians’ ghetto in the heart of the city, excavating a concept of ‘moving slums’ from Salman Rushdie’s classic magical (...) realist text Midnight’s Children. The interpretive concept of ‘moving slums’ describes the precarious temporality of slum demolition and re-settlement in postcolonial Delhi, juxtaposing dominant urbanist ideologies with everyday experiences and narratives of urban change. In societies deeply marked by the historical violence of uneven development, moving slums index the haunted morphology of the postcolonial city. (shrink)

This short personal essay considers the principles behind housing reform in New York at the turn of the last century in light of the controversies around the ghetto law in contemporary Denmark. I take the example of documentary journalist and reformer Jacob Riis, who photographed housing conditions in immigrant neighbor-hoods on the Lower East Side in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, as a case study for considering the ways that race informed—and continues to inform—ideals around (...) urban planning. Conversely, I also consider contemporary controversies around the ghetto law, and activism by community members as a way of re-thinking a research approach to historical urban reforms. (shrink)

In view of the explanatory significance of joblessness, some social scientists, policymakers, and commentators have advocated strong measures to ensure that the ghetto poor work, including mandating work as a condition of receiving welfare benefits. Indeed, across the ideological political spectrum, work is often seen as a moral or civic duty and as a necessary basis for personal dignity. And this normative stance is now instantiated in federal and state law, from the tax scheme to public benefits. This Article (...) reflects critically on this new regime of work. I ask whether the normative principles to which its advocates typically appeal actually justify the regime. I conclude that the case for a pro tanto moral or civic duty to work is not as strong as many believe and that there are reasonable responses to joblessness that do not involve instituting a work regime. However, even if we grant that there is a duty to work, I maintain that the ghetto poor would not be wronging their fellow citizens were they to choose not to work and to rely on public funds for material support. In fact, I argue that many among the black urban poor have good reasons to refuse to work. Throughout, I emphasize what too few advocates of the new work regime do, namely, that whether work is an obligation depends crucially on whether background social conditions within the polity are just. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 10 Heft: 2 Seiten: 215-244.

Tommie Shelby articulates a nonideal theory of black US ghettos that casts them as consequences of an intolerably unjust institutional structure. I argue that, despite some of its significant merits, Shelby’s theory is weakened by his rejection of integration as a principle for reforming disadvantaged ghettos and correcting structural injustices in the US. In particular, I argue that Shelby unwarrantedly downplays the socio-economic efficiency of integrationist policies and fails to consider some of the ways in which integration might count as (...) a duty of justice. (shrink)

Tommie Shelby articulates a nonideal theory of black US ghettos that casts them as consequences of an intolerably unjust institutional structure. I argue that, despite some of its significant merits, Shelby’s theory is weakened by his rejection of integration as a principle for reforming disadvantaged ghettos and correcting structural injustices in the US. In particular, I argue that Shelby unwarrantedly downplays the socio-economic efficiency of integrationist policies and fails to consider some of the ways in which integration might count as (...) a duty of justice. (shrink)

This article revisits an historic exchange between two black ex-communists, Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood, a debate that prefigured many of the central contradictions of the black-power era. Their exchange followed Cruse’s influential 1962 essay forStudies on the Left, ‘Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American’, which declared that the American Negro was a ‘subject of domestic colonialism’. Written against the prevailing liberal integrationist commitments of the civil-rights movement, his essay called for black economic and political independence, and inspired many of the (...) younger activists who would give birth to the black-power movement. In a series of essays for the Bay Area black radical journalSoulbook, Haywood criticised Cruse’s mishandling of class politics among blacks, and his retreat from anti-capitalism. This forgotten episode is important on its own terms, for what it says about the character and limitations of left-political thinking during the sixties, and equally for understanding and contesting those commonsensical notions of African-American public life in our times which too often remain rooted in the vanished social context and political realities of the twentieth-century racial ghetto. (shrink)

Port du foulard ou de la burqa, interdits alimentaires, boycotts de certains cours à l’école, créationnisme, refus de se faire soigner par un médecin de sexe opposé, mariages arrangés ou forcés, crimes d’honneur ; fatwas lancées contre des écrivains ou des caricaturistes blasphémateurs ; compétition mémorielle entre diasporas victimisées ; conflits interreligieux ou interethniques importés, actions terroristes anti-occidentales… Ce sont quelques-uns des symptômes les plus connus (ou les plus...

Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform is a major contribution to black political thought and the theorization of racial justice more generally. In these brief comments, I begin by situating Shelby’s work both in the Anglo-American political tradition and the Afro-modern political tradition. While praising the accomplishment that Shelby’s book represents, I nonetheless go on to point out some obstacles to his project arising from the tensions between these traditions. Using the concept of “dark mores”, I argue that (...) Shelby’s racially revisionist Rawlsianism is pre-empted by Rawls’s own restrictions on the scope of his theory, while Shelby’s invocation of “reciprocity” as a key norm is undermined by the structural asymmetries of a racist society. (shrink)

It is rare to find a book in political philosophy whose arguments successfully utilize both ideal and non-ideal theory. Rarer still does one find a book in political philosophy that takes seriously the proposition that the oppressed are not merely passive victims to injustice, but rather rational and moral agents, capable of making meaningful and informed choices concerning those things they have reason to value. Dark Ghettos does both.

This article explores the relationship between consciousness and the historical urban space of the former Jewish Ghetto in Vilnius, Lithuania. This relationship is investigated primarily within the existentialist school of philosophy and takes its point of departure from Sartre’s ‘gaze’ or ‘look’ from his philosophical work, Being and Nothingness. Within this existentialist schematic the ‘look’ is methodologically sub-divided into i) ‘being looked at’ and ii) the ‘look looked at’. This paper further discerns the nuances of consciousness within the field (...) of phenomenology in terms of upsurges and decompressions when ‘being looked at’ in the Ghetto. That is, when walking its streets and ‘being seen’ by, and through the Ghetto’s windows. Subject is primarily understood as subdivided into Self, ‘I’ and ‘me’, thus rendering it as carrying a non-stable first-person perspective. (shrink)

Tommie Shelby argues that social injustice undermines the moral standing states would have, were they just, to condemn criminal wrongdoers. He makes a good argument, but he does not go far enough to reject the blaming function of punishment. Shelby’s argument from “impure dissent,” in particular, helps to demonstrate the limits of blame in criminal justice.

In memory of Alina Margolis-Edelman ABSTRACT The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is the symbol of the heroism of the Jews during the Holocaust. For decades after the war it has been central for commemorating the Jewish victims. The symbolic meaning of the Uprising has led in the past sixty years to a wide and lively discussion about the meaning of the symbol, for it has often been used to support or justify different political or moral arguments. This article argues against (...) the transformation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into a heroic epic, and offers an alternative approach to its interpretation. (shrink)

For more than a century, Harlem has been the epicenter of black America, the celebrated heart of African American life and culture—but it has also been a byword for the problems that have long plagued inner-city neighborhoods: poverty, crime, violence, disinvestment, and decay. Photographer Camilo José Vergara has been chronicling the neighborhood for forty-three years, and Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto is an unprecedented record of urban change. Vergara began his documentation of Harlem in the tradition of such (...) masters as Helen Levitt and Aaron Siskind, and he later turned his focus on the neighborhood’s urban fabric, both the buildings that compose it and the life and culture embedded in them. By repeatedly returning to the same locations over the course of decades, Vergara is able to show us a community that is constantly changing—some areas declining, as longtime businesses give way to empty storefronts, graffiti, and garbage, while other areas gentrify, with corporate chain stores coming in to compete with the mom-and-pops. He also captures the ever-present street life of this densely populated neighborhood, from stoop gatherings to graffiti murals memorializing dead rappers to impersonators honoring Michael Jackson in front of the Apollo, as well as the growth of tourism and racial integration. Woven throughout the images is Vergara’s own account of his project and his experience of living and working in Harlem. Taken together, his unforgettable words and images tell the story of how Harlem and its residents navigated the segregation, dereliction and slow recovery of the closing years of the twentieth century and the boom and racial integration of the twenty-first century. A deeply personal investigation, Harlem will take its place with the best portrayals of urban life. (shrink)