This article excavates a discussion on the mediations that informed the making of the film Aaj Kaal by Asian elders, in a project directed by Avtar Brah and coordinated by Jasbir Panesar with the film trainer Vipin Kumar. It brings this largely unknown and inventive film to the foreground of current developments in participative media research practices. The discussion explores the coming together of the ethnographic imagination and performative pedagogies during the course of an adult education community project centred on (...) South Asian elders making a film. Collaborative dialogic encounters illuminate post-war British front rooms, the seaside and public spheres from what is usually an unlikely vantage point of view in public accounts. (shrink)

This paper draws on the ‘new wars’ literature and global political economy research to explore how feminists and other critical analysts might investigate linkages between, and the gendering of, licit and illicit informal activities in relation to transnational financing of new wars. The paper considers the interdependence (co-constitution) of reproductive, productive and virtual economies, and aims to illuminate the intersection of race, gender, and economic inequalities (within and among states) as structural features of neoliberal globalization. Finally, the paper develops an (...) analytical framing of coping, combat and criminal informal economies, which overlap and interact but entail distinctive sets of actors, motivations, and activities. A brief description of each economy is followed by suggesting how it is gendered and how this might inform feminist theory/practice in relation to war. (shrink)

This paper arises out of research on the New Zealand designer fashion industry. An unexpected success story, this export-oriented industry is dominated by women as designers, employees, wholesale and public relations agents, industry officials, fashion writers and editors, in addition to women holding more traditionally gendered roles as garment workers, tastemakers and consumers. Our analysis of the gendered globalization of the New Zealand fashion industry exposes a number of disconnections between women's positions in this industry and the literatures on globalization, (...) clothing and fashion. We argue that the New Zealand designer fashion industry not only embodies new ways of working associated with the movement of first world women into the labour force, but its very success is underpinned by these changes. Our conclusion is that more work is needed to explicate links between globalization and first world women's entry into the labour force. (shrink)

Feminists witness legal worlds as they observe, document and share nothing less than the reproduction of life itself. The world of the abortion trail, where people and things move across borders to change life’s reproduction, has generated a rich variety of legal sources, figures and objects for feminist witnessing. In watching how feminist activists improvise with sources, figures and objects of legal consciousness on the abortion trail, this article seeks to contribute to critical understanding of a plurality of witnessing practice, (...) particularly as it emerges in diaspora space. Focusing on Murphy’s concept of immodest witnessing, with its attention to bodies, protocols and apparatuses as constituents of knowledge, the article thinks with the diasporic feminist performance group, Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A., about how they used self-examination, collaboration and knowledge-sharing on the trail to repeal Ireland’s 8th Amendment. The article argues that their improvisation with legal consciousness of reproductive choice enacts ‘cheeky witnessing’. Cheeky witnessing has three dynamics as a method of observation. First, it is messy and irreverent in innovating with names to display the mixed genealogies of feminist knowledge. Second, cheeky witnessing generates novel subject-figures who make connections between different reproductive labourers as observers of the trail in diaspora space. Third, cheeky witnessing places funny objects, knickers in this instance, so as to join up particular public locations and make them more, if unevenly, comfortable for sexual and reproductive bodies. Cheeky witnessing shows us how committed and partial practices play a role in speaking across interests and experiences, in stretching the legal imagination and in sustaining the everyday grind of making a better world. (shrink)