In its attempt to respond to changing historical realities the university has undergone significant transformations, most of which, however, have focused on teaching material, tools, methods or practices adapted to the new demands. Taking as a case study the literary disciplines, this article focuses on the theoretical, mostly implicit, presuppositions that often underlie attempts at institutional innovations. To put the educational process at the center of attention has often meant that a certain view of the epistemic object itself has been (...) largely presupposed; this article attempts to unearth an unquestioned essentialism of the object, by showing how this has, to an extent, been constituted against a certain relativism of the processes that create it. Indeed, the educational setting and its space carry a set of implications for the object of study — that is, literature — that should not remain unaddressed. (shrink)

The article delineates how actors invoke nationalizing accounts—accounts that turn local conditions, actions, and actors into national ones—in everyday talk. Taking the case of Japanese university scientists depicting their commercialization trajectories after the adoption of a set of policies that originated from the U.S., the article delineates how scientists stipulate what they do is Japanese. I outline the discursive practices through which they posit that the cause of others’ actions, or of they themselves, derives from some kind of ethno-national distinctiveness. (...) Interviews show how such nationalizing accounts were made through the inevitable gaps between local practices and formal global structures. Scientific and commercialization practices in Japan that deviated from the original form were explained not only through the institutional differences between the U.S. and Japan, but also through lay categories of “culture,” ethno-psychology, and readily available tropes about Japanese history. In such nationalizing accounts, what the Japanese scientists did under these new, and explicitly global policies, was argued to be fundamentally Japanese because they were rooted in and caused by the ethno-national character. As new institutional theory suggests, a decoupling between formal rules and local contingencies is a hallmark of any institution. The article further shows that such decoupling could then be used as a resource for everyday nationalism. At least in some cases, the global adoption and the localization of a global form may create an opportunity to enact the nation, contributing to a discourse that posits that an imagined community is distinct and special, precisely as the world becomes more globalized. (shrink)

The nation/state as an imaginative enterprise encompasses multiple imagined subnational boundaries. The ‘public/private’, I suggest, is a ‘purposeful fiction’ constitutive of the will to statehood. As such, its configurations are impacted upon by the institutions and forces competing with and within state-building enterprises. Proposing the terms government, non-government and domestic as analytical tools to demarcate discursive and material domains, I argue that, in Lebanon, the fluidity of boundaries among these spheres is constitutive of patriarchal connectivity, a form of patriarchal kinship (...) linked to the state-building enterprise. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 1, Page 5-24, February 2021.

The dialogic relationship between individuals and the cultural space of Europe embodies cultural definitions, political definitions and individual definitions. As individuals draw from Europe as a cultural space and strive to identify and define themselves, definitions are created against an “other,” leading to Europe being defined against the “other.” Identity is established through difference, and in this, the relationship between the EU—a force of integration—and Europe as a cultural space is strained. As boundaries change through the European Union, transforming the (...) cultural space of Europe, the “other” against whom individuals have traditionally defined themselves is also transforming. This article asks if the integration of Europe through the European Union is resulting in the political mobilization of xenophobia and thereby transforming the cultural space of Europe into a xenophobic space. As many academics and professionals have argued that xenophobia in Europe has been on the rise since the 1990s, this paper will question how the relationship between the European Union—as a force of European integration—and Europe—as a cultural space—is contributing to the construction of xenophobia. (shrink)

This article explores the connection between politics and music; in particular it asks how music might be incorporated into accounts of political thought and action. Despite the fact that political science has tended to neglect the place of music in politics, there are a number of writers, such as Jean‐Jacques Rousseau, who have taken a different course. For them, music is intimately linked, via its aesthetics, to ethical judgements and to social order. The article develops these latter claims and connects (...) them to work of a similar kind in music studies to propose a framework which helps to make sense of, and give due weight to, the place of music – as organised sound – in political thought and action. Music, it is argued, should not be viewed just as a footnote to, or appendage of, political thought and action, but rather as an integral feature of them. (shrink)

STS research has devoted relatively little attention to the promotion and reception of science and technology by non-scientific actors and institutions. One consequence is that the relationship of science and technology to political power has tended to remain undertheorized. This article aims to fill that gap by introducing the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. Through a comparative examination of the development and regulation of nuclear power in the US and South Korea, the article demonstrates the analytic potential of the imaginaries concept. (...) Although nuclear power and nationhood have long been imagined together in both countries, the nature of those imaginations has remained strikingly different. In the US, the state’s central move was to present itself as a responsible regulator of a potentially runaway technology that demands effective containment. In South Korea, the dominant imaginary was of atoms for development which the state not only imported but incorporated into its scientific, technological and political practices. In turn, these disparate imaginaries have underwritten very different responses to a variety of nuclear shocks and challenges, such as Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl, and the spread of the anti-nuclear movement. (shrink)

Feminist scholarship on women in religious and right-wing social and political movements has moved from a reductive focus on causal or motivational factors to more sophisticated analyses explicating processes of agency and subject formation. With the aim of expanding and deepening this conceptual space, I will discuss some of my interactions with a group of women in the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, as we attempted to explore the complex meanings of ‘the modern’ that informed the self-understanding of my interviewees. My work (...) corroborates some of the contemporary scholarship on what is referred to as Political Islam in arguing that Islamist movements in Muslim societies are also the catalysts of modernization, rather than simply its interlocutors. This article argues that these processes of social and political organizing entail particular interrogations and the reconstituting of identities in ways that blur the line between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’. On the one hand, we need to understand Jamaat women's self-construction as religious or pious women; on the other hand, we must grasp the specificity of their claims to act as modern subjects situated in the time of political and cultural modernity. (shrink)

This article reviews the feminist theorization of the concept of citizenship in an attempt to contextualize it in a situation where the basic ingredients for a sovereign state do not exist. The formation of the Palestinian Authority included the reconstruction of the Palestinian ‘imagined’ community within which approaches to gender policies were reformulated to suit a new era. However, the feminist use of the concept of citizenship itself comes into question under conditions of prolonged Occupation. In this analysis, I submit (...) that while women’s NGOs and grass-roots organizations have an important role to play in creating space for women to politicize their demands in advocating full citizenship rights, there are serious limits to what institutions of civil society can achieve when the basic foundations for the state are in a precarious situation. (shrink)

Heralded as revolutionary in their potential to improve efficiency, transparency, and sustainability, blockchain technologies promise new forms of large-scale coordination between actors that do not necessarily trust each other. This paper examines blockchain imaginaries and associated metaphors. Our analysis focuses on bitcoin and ethereum, today’s most prominent blockchains that use the proof-of-work consensus mechanism. We identify three principles that organise blockchain imaginaries: substantial, morphological, and structural. These principles position blockchain as an enabler of economic, political and epistemological practices, respectively. Blockchain (...) infrastructure and protocols rely on substantial metaphors (e.g. gold, gas) to govern resource allocation, morphological metaphors (e.g. work, trust) to generate consensus and structural metaphors (e.g. chain, transaction) to establish shared knowledge. Those imaginaries rely on metaphorical displacements of meaning that make blockchain technology relevant and intelligible while simultaneously shaping the direction of technological development and positing these technologies as new forms of economic, political and epistemological organisation. They are not merely descriptive but performative. We conclude by showing how these principles partially overlap with three symbolically generalized media: money, power and truth. Money organises scarcity within the economic system, power organises consensus within the political system, and truth organises knowledge within the science system. (shrink)

Support for independence in Catalonia has been rapidly increasing since 2010. Civil organisations have been instrumental in the secessionist movement and have used social media to mobilise the Catalan public and raise national consciousness. Drawing on theories of national identity, gender and nation, and the discursive construction of national identity, this article examines constructions of national identity and the gendered dimensions of these constructions in a Twitter corpus collected in the week up to the public consultation on independence held in (...) Catalonia in November 2014. Analysis of the contrasting representations of men and women found in the data suggests that, among both the elites and the public, the contemporary Catalan nationalist project continues to be built on traditional gender normative models of nationalism. The study concludes that this type of nationalism has now become so banal that it has been naturalised and suggests that a more inclusive approach may be needed in future campaigns or in the Catalan nationalist project as a whole. (shrink)

This article addresses two shortcomings in the literature on nationalism: the need to theorize transformations of nationalism, and the relative absence of comparative works on Latin America. We propose a state-focused theoretical framework, centered on conflicts between states elites and social movements, for explaining transformations of nationalism. Different configurations of four key factors — the mobilization of excluded elites and subordinate actors, state elites’ political control, the ideological capacities of states, and polarization around ethnoracial cleavages — shape how contrasting trajectories (...) of nationalism unfold over time. A comparative analysis of early– and mid–twentieth century Mexico, Argentina, and Peru illustrates the explanatory power of our theoretical framework. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie Annahme einer engen Beziehung zwischen dem Fußball als populärster Publikumssportart in Deutschland und Vorstellungen von kollektiven Identitäten und deren Grenzen gehört zu den etablierten Denkfiguren der Sportsoziologie. Anzunehmen ist, dass insbesondere die Fußballberichterstattung zur Formung von Selbst- und Fremdbildern der Deutschen beiträgt. Die Forschungslage ist in diesem Bereich allerdings noch lückenhaft, insbesondere die TV-Berichterstattung wird nur selten empirisch in den Fokus genommen. Der vorliegende Beitrag skizziert zunächst einige theoretische Überlegungen zur Bedeutung von Fußball für nationale Selbst- und Fremdbilder, bevor (...) anhand der Analyse zweier kurzer Videoausschnitte der Berichterstattung zur WM 2006 demonstriert wird, auf welche Weise das Genre Fußballberichterstattung zur Konstruktion von Vorstellungen über ‚das Eigene‘ und ‚die Anderen‘ beiträgt. (shrink)

Social practices of quantification, or the production and communication of numbers, have been recognized as important foundations of organizational knowledge, as well as sources of power. With the advent of increasingly sophisticated digital tools to capture and extract numerical data from social life, however, there is a pressing need to understand the ethical stakes of quantification. The current study examines quantification from an ethical lens, to frame and promote a research agenda around the ethics of quantification. After a brief overview (...) of quantification research and its uses in state and market organization, I discuss quantification in terms of three core subprocesses—capture, specification, and appropriation, illustrating and identifying ethical concerns around each process. Linking these processes to the performative effects of measures, I present a working model of quantification from which the discussion builds ideas for developing a research agenda around quantification. (shrink)

Nationality, citizenship and eligibility have become increasingly relevant in sport, especially under current conditions where there is an increasing number of players who change their ?allegiances? for international sporting purposes. While it is reasonable to link such trends to wider processes of globalisation and accelerated migratory flows, it is also evident that national sporting representation is subject to the venal power of commercialism. The concern is that national representation has developed into a more strategic, planned and economically driven activity that (...) involves the overt collusion of national governing bodies and individual athletes. This paper evaluates the moral status of current international sporting representation (ISR) rules and practices as they relate to the Olympics. By drawing on de Coubertin's notion of ?sincere internationalism? and Walsh and Guilianotti's (2007) work on hyper-commercialisation in sport, we will attempt to demonstrate how some of the current practices and regulations of ISR are ethically problematic. We conclude that current ISR regulations are drawn too loosely and need to be amended in order to limit the moral pathologies identified. Our critique is informed by empirical data collected from members of the Welsh sports practice community. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In order to understand the national identities of our time, we need to understand the history of discourses defining the nation and those included and excluded from that definition. This study explores discursive processes of othering in constructions of Swedish national identity in a selection of texts from 1870 to 1940. Analysing discursive constructions of national identities, the paper offers insight into processes of othering that construct and perpetuate Swedish identity through strategies of assimilation and dissimilation. The study indicates (...) that Othering is a context-dependent discursive process that defines the national self in interaction with dominant discourses in a given time and place. Colonial discourses construct an exotic, black or oriental Other in colonised parts of the world, compared to white, European Swedes. Scientific racism discourses classify the Other as inferior compared to a pure Swedish race. In eugenics discourses, finally, an undesired Other, defined by psychological devices as ‘substandard’ or ‘imbecile’, is contrasted to an ideal Swedish citizen. While discourses and ideas of who the Other is changes over time, othering seems to be a discursive practice with a linguistic repertoire that can be used to create and unify national identity, as well as managing perceived social threats. (shrink)

Members of the Baha'i Faith have been subject to persecution in Iran since the mid‐nineteenth century. Our investigation considers how collective identity among a Pacific Northwest Community has been constructed through the contexts of continued persecution in Iran and the development of religious texts, which helped to define the religious community. The texts found within the Baha'i Faith utilize metaphors of the body to construct religious identity. Many anthropologists have theorized on the usefulness of the body as a unit of (...) study; in addition, recent attention by scholars has illustrated the intersection of the body and religion. A model is developed linking identity, consciousness, the body and experience that explains how collective identity is constructed. When considering the situation of the Baha'i community, this model has proven particularly useful in understanding how geographically disassociated people manage to construct social kinship within the context of religious persecution. In particular, American Baha'is describe the persecution of Baha'is in Iran as a collective experience, especially since the direct experience of persecution is far removed from their everyday living. Preliminary analysis of interviews with an American Baha'i, and an ex‐patriot Iranian Baha'i reveal differences in constructions of identity. (shrink)

The question of nationalism as spoken about in contem porary circles is structurally the same as Marx's 'Jewish Question'. Through a reading of Marx's early writings, particularly the 'Jewish Question' essay, guided by Derrida's Specters of Marx and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, it is possible to begin to rethink the nationalist question. In this light, nationalism emerges as the byproduct of the reduction of heterogeneous 'people' into a homo geneous 'state'; such 'excessive' voices occupy an ontological space outside of the (...) categories within which the state operates, and thus return, in Derrida's terms, to 'haunt' it. When the nationalist ques tion is viewed in this way, contemporary solutions that depend on reproducing this reduction are called into question. Key Words: B. Anderson • Derrida • G. Gottlieb • R. Kaplan • Marx • nationalism. (shrink)

The debate over the existence of a “public sphere” in China’s Late Qing/Early Republican era began nearly three decades ago, but it has yet to generate a special socio-cultural review on the “Confucian social imaginary” of the Chinese people. The article builds on existing “economic-political approach” and “idea-communication approach” to argue decisive factors hindering the development of a Habermasian “public sphere.” These includes (1) people’s traditional-collectivist lifestyle, (2) lack of understanding of “universal equality,” (3) conservative self-positioning during social transition, (4) (...) regionalist attitude toward outsiders, (5) lack of access to Enlightenment ideas, (6) disregard for parliamentary systems, and (7) ignorance of the rule of law. (shrink)

Many Hong Kong schools are concerned about the growing number of ethnic minority students. How they are supported and how the diversity of their pastoral needs is fulfilled become critical. This article examines teachers?, students? and parents? narratives of the cross?cultural experience of ethnic minority students from India, Pakistan, Philippines, Nepal and Thailand, and the diversity of those students? pastoral needs. The qualitative data were collected from interviews, through which the constructs of 32 teachers and 32 students from three secondary (...) schools were explored. Four groups of focus?group interviews were conducted, in which 15 parents were involved. This article argues that to implement the ethos of caring, it is not only necessary for the school to promote the intercultural sensitivity of all practitioners, but equally important to develop a connected school system where ethnic minority students and parents can be consistently supported in the subsystems of classroom, school and home. (shrink)

This article broadens understanding of the role that East European intellectuals have played in building foundations for democratic institutions and practices over the past two decades. Drawing on Habermas’ writings on the public sphere, we use interviews conducted with founders of women’s and gender studies centers, professional women’s NGOs and Internet forums to examine the establishment of new micro-contexts for civic engagement and critical debate in Ukraine. Three main types of indigenous feminist micro-public are identified: academic, professional and virtual. Through (...) an analysis of these micro-publics as well as the works of writer Oksana Zabuzhko, we explore the articulation and legitimation of a “national feminist” standpoint that draws upon feminism to criticize populist understandings of national history and civic belonging. We contribute to studies of democratization and transition by suggesting how small groups of critical intellectuals (locally called “tusovky”) acted as microfoundations of civil society. By supporting local engagement with Western critical theory, these small groups helped to create a new infrastructure for engaging intellectuals in the pluralization and diversification of public life. (shrink)

The author points out that the moral condemnation of “nationalism” that is common in contemporary Anglo-Saxon literature does not hold up once we subject it to historical and, by extension, sociolinguistic criticism. This term, originally nebulous and confusing, has become meaningless as a result of forgetting that it is the designation of the relationship of an individual (or social group) to the entity of a nation, an entity that is the result of the empirically well grasped historical process of nation (...) formation under conditions that were specifically European. This circumstance is especially important in the case of the category “small nation”, by which the author means those nations whose formation took place in the form of a national movement – a purposeful effort to acquire all relevant attributes of a nation for one’s own ethnic community. This movement, in its scholarly and agitational phase, was based on a selfless effort to develop and ennoble the nation as an abstract community of cultural values and should be designated by the term “patriotism” and possibly its translations into (some) central European languages, which were and are used with a morally positive connotation. The pejorative label “nationalism” is justified only where the national movement has progressed to its mass phase, when a substantial part, if not most, of the members of the ethnic group have identified with the nation. Since then, it has been necessary to talk about the nation in a dual position. Not only in the position of an abstract community of values but also in the position of “sociological fact”, where it also acquired the morally ambivalent nature of the struggle for power. This ambivalence – the tension between altruism and egoism – is still preserved today even where the national interest is discussed. (shrink)

Death and bereavement are human experiences that new media helps facilitate alongside creating new social grief practices that occur online. This study investigated how people’s postings and tweets facilitated the communication of grief after pop music icon Michael Jackson died. Drawing on past grief research, religion, and new media studies, a thematic analysis of 1,046 messages was conducted on three mediated sites (Twitter, TMZ.com, and Facebook). Results suggested that social media served as grieving spaces for people to accept Jackson’s death (...) rather than denying it or expressing anger over his passing. The findings also illustrate how interactive exchanges online helped recycle news and “resurrected” the life of Jackson. Additionally, as fans of deceased celebrities create and disseminate web-based memorials, new social media practices such as “Michael Mondays” synchronize tweets within everyday life rhythms and foster practices to hasten the grieving process. (shrink)

Recent technical developments in genetictesting has led to a situation where the DNA inpreviously stored tissue samples can beextracted and used for genetic analysis. Thisraises the question of how to decide whether aspecific use of such samples should be allowed.Using the genetic testing of ancient DNA ingeneral, and the DNA of the pharaoh Tutankhamenin particular as examples this paper analysesthe question. It investigates whether ethicalframeworks based on proxy consent, culturalaffiliation, ownership, or the privacy rightsof the dead are appropriate and justifiable (...) inthis context. The conclusion is that frameworksbased on proxy consent, cultural affiliation,and ownership are not very useful. (shrink)

This article focuses on emergency medical care in black urban populations, suggesting that the classification of a "community" within clinical trial language is problematic. The article references a cultural history of black Americans with pre-hospital emergency medical treatment as relevant to contemporary emergency medicine paradigms. Part I explores a relationship between "autonomy" and "community." The idea of community emerges as a displacement for the ethical principle of autonomy precisely at the moment that institutionalized medicine focuses on diversity. Part II examines (...) a clinical trial for the blood substitute PolyHeme® (Northfield Laboratories, Inc., Evanston, IL). It illustrates the ways in which bias in research paradigms and Institutional Review Board decisions attach to the notion and utility of the language of "community." The conclusion's contemporary anecdote makes apparent the vitality of the issues of prehospital emergency medical care and the ways in which decisions and practices fall too easily into a narrative of culturally biased treatment. (shrink)

This article rehearses the critical theory of Craig Calhoun’s book on nationalism and applies his threefold typology of ‘project, discourse, evaluation’ to the peculiar case of modern Philippine nationalism. The Republic of the Philippines is a marine archipelago of over 7100 islands and 85 million people of various ethnic, linguistic and cultural identities. Because of its history of colonizations (Spanish, American, Japanese), the predominance of Christianity, and the lack of a unified or prestigious pre-modern religious, political or economic order, the (...) Philippines is frequently positioned as ‘in but not of Asia’. Because Filipinos are made acutely aware of their peculiar trajectory as a modern nation-state and precarious position within the region, the dominant discourses of ‘the Philippines’ have been too anxious to construct a genealogy of the modern nation-state as telos and to assert some form of ‘Filipino’ identity and spirit. Now that the nationalist moment of contemporary nation-states has passed with the fading of the post-Second World War ‘developmentalist state’ project and its usurpation since the 1980s by ‘the globalization’ project, an opportunity is afforded for a changing of our critical lens from searches for revolutionary projects of founding myths and ends, of romantic nationalisms, or of nostalgic returns to pre-modern idylls (whether ethnic or colonial). Accordingly, this article has three parts. Part One provides a brief synopsis of Calhoun’s arguments about nationalism. Part Two applies these critical insights to the case of Philippine nationalism, especially as it is expressed in the historical and social sciences. Part Three then introduces alternative ways of thinking about the Philippines as sites of cultural hybridity and traffic. (shrink)

From a simple idea to unite asset owners in their quest for responsible investment at its launch in April 2006, the United Nations supported Principles for Responsible Investment have grown in just one decade into an initiative with more than 1500 fee-paying signatories. Jointly, the PRI’s signatories hold assets worth more than $80 trillion, making it one of the more prevalent not-for-profit organizations worldwide. Furthermore, the PRI’s ambitious mission to transform the financial system at large into a more sustainable one (...) makes it a worthwhile subject of inquiry from an institutional perspective. We undertake an empirical investigation of the adoption of the PRI by asset owners during five crucial years of the association’s emergence: 2007–2011. Following a tripartite view of institutional theory proposed by Scott, we explore if regulative, normative, and cultural–cognitive factors influence an asset owner’s decision to subscribe to the PRI. Applying both parametric and non-parametric survival analysis, we find that asset owners are indeed significantly affected by normative, cultural–cognitive, and regulative aspects. In particular, public service employee and labor union pension funds from social backgrounds more culturally aligned with values represented by the RI movement with historically more voluntary legislation on environmental, social, and governance issues are most likely to sign the PRI. In contrast, institutional environments with a higher number of pre-existing mandatory ESG regulation decrease the likelihood of signing the PRI. Our results indicate that normative and cultural–cognitive factors were crucial contributors to the PRI’s growth. With respect to the regulative environments, our results imply that some asset owners may use the PRI as a collective industry initiative to substitute for mandatory legislation. Conversely, a high level of historical mandatory legislation may constrain organizational resources that could otherwise be dedicated to voluntary initiatives such as PRI. Our findings are robust to relevant controls and econometric concerns. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Recent reflection on the role of museums and galleries has focused on their socially situated nature; and that as a social construct, co-produced with its audiences, heritage is in part discursively constituted. This has included acknowledgement that the inherited discourse is hegemonic and exclusive of divergent narratives, leading to moves to create alternatives to contest it, which include temporary exhibitions. These provide a potentially democratic space for discursive incursions freed from the constraints of the permanent museum. But they are (...) also spatially and temporally peripheral, occupying a discursive space outside the standard visit. This raises questions as to whether, once the exhibition is over, the alternative will be subsumed once more. This article explores this issue using a dataset of TripAdvisor reviews to analyse the discursive responses of visitors to temporary and permanent collections, using the Musée d’Orsay's 2019 exhibition Le Modèle Noir as a case study. Analysis shows that Le Modèle Noir reviews exhibit greater discursive fragmentation, reveal a relative lack of appeals to collective identity, and do not connect the exhibition with the permanent collection. Potential implications of this for initiatives that seek to counter the hegemonic narrative are discussed. (shrink)

Increasingly, psychologists have shown a healthy interest in cultural variation and a skepticism about assuming that research with North American and Northern European undergraduates provides reliable insight into universal psychological processes. Unfortunately, this reappraisal has not been extended to questioning the notion of culture central to this project. Rather, there is wide acceptance that culture refers to a kind of social form that is entity-like, territorialized, marked by a high degree of shared beliefs and coalescing into patterns of key values (...) that animate a broad range of cultural performances and representations. Ironically, anthropologists and other scholars in cultural studies have overwhelmingly come to reject this view of culture. Arguably, then, the move in psychology to attend to cultural environments has paradoxically further distanced it from the fields most concerned with cultural forms. This essay reviews this state of affairs and offers a proposal how a more nuanced appreciation of cultural life can be articulated with theories and methods familiar and available to psychologists. (shrink)

Crises have become a new normality. This normality is turned into grounds for the politics of fear. The hegemonic principle of the politics of fear is security. This politics, which invents objects of fear, is intimately linked to the nationalist identity politics shaped by a particular nationalist essence. Racism is an elemental part of the nationalist identity politics. In the text, racism is considered in relation to, on the one hand, fear and anxiety and, on the other hand, the imaginary (...) and symbolic orders and the structure of fantasy. This analysis shows how xenophobic images, nationalist signifiers and racist fantasies create the vicious circles of fear and hate that gives justification for the nationalist identity politics that raises security as the hegemonic organizing principle. To counter the nationalist identity politics, the nationalist and racist fantasy must be traversed. Therefore, an anti-racist politics cannot be based on any pre-given identity. It takes place only as emancipatory events that confront the racists and nationalist fantasy. (shrink)

This article explores the contemporary scientific practice of human genome science in light of Michel Foucault’s articulation of the problem of population. Rather than transcending the politics of social categories and identities, human genome research mobilizes many different kinds of populations. How then might we aim to avoid overgeneralized readings of the refiguring of human difference in the life sciences and grapple with the multiple and contradictory logics of population classification? In exploring the study of human variation through the case (...) of the ‘Quebec founder population’ at a private genome research laboratory in Canada, the article argues that the power to define and shape meanings of human variation and to organize vitality is not held by any one institution or form of scientific practice. While molecular genomics may be transforming conceptions of human difference, the laboratory is only one of many places where human genomic variation accrues value, meaning and relevance. Molecular configurations of human difference gain meaning through a traffic in populations that extends beyond the laboratory. In the case explored here this traffic in populations is constituted within a nexus of empire, national census practices and contemporary articulations of multicultural policies. (shrink)

This article examines inequality from a framework of justice that attends to the socially situated nature of market activity, including exchange. I argue that accounts of unsituated exchange—accounts of market exchange that abstract from social situations, such as philosopher Robert Nozick’s influential libertarian account of justice—overlook various factors that contribute to growing economic inequality in contemporary society. Analyses of market exchange must incorporate the role of “third parties” who play a role in shaping and/or who are affected by economic transactions. (...) The involvement of these additional parties, including the government and future generations, is not interference but, instead, an integral part of the economic and moral accounting of exchange. An approach to justice and inequality which embeds exchange within multiple dimensions of economy and society is needed; the latter part of this article traces such a socially situated approach. (shrink)

This inclusive cross-cultural study rethinks the nexus between engineering education and context. In so doing the book offers a reflection on contextual boundaries with an overall boundary crossing ambition and juxtaposes important cases of critical participation within engineering education with sophisticated scholarly reflection on both opportunities and discontents. -/- Whether and in what way engineering education is or ought to be contextualized or de-contextualized is an object of heated debate among engineering educators. The uniqueness of this study is that this (...) debate is given comprehensive coverage – presenting both instrumentally inclined as well as radical positions on transforming engineering education. -/- In contextualizing engineering education, this book offers diverse commentary from a range of disciplinary, meta- and interdisciplinary perspectives on how cultural, professional, institutional and educational systems contexts shape histories, structural dynamics, ideologies and challenges as well as new pathways in engineering education. Topics addressed include examining engineering education in countries ranging from India to America, to racial and gender equity in engineering education and incorporating social awareness into the area. -/- Using context as “bridge” this book confronts engineering education head on. Contending engineering ideologies and corresponding views on context are juxtaposed with contending discourses of reform. The uniqueness of the book is that it brings together scholars from the humanities, the social sciences and engineering from Europe – both East and West – with the United States, China, Brazil, India and Australia. (shrink)

Most Third World feminists consider nationalism as detrimental to feminism. Against this general trend, I argue that “polycentric” nationalism has potentials for advocating feminist causes in the Third World. “Polycentric” nationalism, whose proper goal is the attainment and maintenance of national self-determination, is still relevant in this neocolonial age of capitalist globalization and may serve feminist purposes of promoting the well-being of the majority of Third World women who suffer disproportionately under this system.

Understanding the ways in which Muslims are turned into “a problem” requires an analytic incorporating the insights gained through the concepts of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism into a larger frame. The “Muslim Question” can provide such a frame by attending to the systematic character of this form of racism, explored here through biopolitics. This article develops a conceptualization of Europe’s “Muslim Question” along three lines. First, the “Muslim Question” emerges as an accusation of being an “alien body” to the nation, (...) often expressed through the Trojan horse legend. Second, the “Muslim Question” is elaborated through demands of integration and assimilation, in which the production of difference entangles with calls and measures to regulate Muslims. And third, the “Muslim Question” is brought to life upon the terrain of gender and sexuality, as the imaginary of threat at the heart of the “Muslim Question” is a replacement conspiracy centered on birthrates. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn postcolonial countries the bilingual/bicultural elite played an undeniable role in the propagation of a modernist ideology about the nation and national identity. In Tunisia and in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring, this ideology has been seriously challenged by opposing discourses. Focusing on newspaper articles published by Tunisian Francophones, this article investigates the discursive strategies employed by this group to defend this ideology and its emergent national identity. Analysis is based on an inventory of the referential/predicational strategies developed (...) within the Discourse Historical Approach to represent Self-Other identities [Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R.. Discourse and Discrimination. London: Routledge]. Findings indicated a staunch defense of a de-ethninicized, de-racialized, multilingual and secular Tunisia. Attributes of Arabism/islamism are consistently problematized; they are primitivized, religionized, de-intellectualized and negatively ideologized. By contrast, elements of Frenchness are championed on the basis of the modernist ideology they are thought to uphold. Frenchness is predicated on a continuum of Enlightenment, historicity, aesthetics,, religious reformism and economic progress. This triumphalist rhetoric is, however, undermined by a discourse of language endangerment whereby the Francophiles deplore the possible loss of French in Tunisia. It is argued that while Frenchness will survive as part of Tunisian national identity and discourse tradition due to its strong anchoring in many domains, it seems that this Frenchified modernist identity politics has been transformed into a version which disavows its politicized, contingent and debatable nature. (shrink)

This study investigates the discursive construction of the idea of tunisianité in a sample of 41 articles published in the national press in the wake of the Arab Spring. Using analytical categories developed within the discourse-historical approach, the analysis indicates three general, strongly secularist, representations of tunisianité. One of these, which can be called essentialist, claims an unmistakable ethnolinguistic connection to a glorified pre-Arabo-Islamic classicism which goes back to the foundation of Carthage. A second and a more dominant one construes (...) tunisianité in assimilationist terms, that is, Tunisia as a ‘melting pot’ lumping different Eastern and Western ethnolinguistic and cultural traditions. A third emerging, but a marginalized trend in the data, grounds tunisianité within the Enlightenment/revolutionary ideals of Democracy, Dignity and Freedom and warns against its possible disintegration because of its vulnerability to the upheavals of terrorism, corporatism, populism and socioeconomic insecurity. While the third representation is laudable from the perspective of the Revolutionary demands, the dominant nationalist identity discourse remains backward-looking, reactionary and strongly preoccupied with a perceived political invasion by the Islamist-Arabist Other. It is argued that the dominant model of identity politics and the political economy associated with it are incompatible with Tunisians’ aspirations for socioeconomic development and social justice. (shrink)

The deaths of millions from war, genocide, poverty and famine are symptomatic of a crisis that extends beyond site-specific failures of governance, culture or economies. Rather than reiterate standard critiques of capitalism, uneven development and inequality, this article probes and maps a shift in both the global economy and logic of capital that posits death as a central activity of value creation. “Crisis,” then, is more than an accidental failure or inconvenient side effect of either global economy or political reality, (...) but pivotal to both. Extending notions of biopower and necropolitics, I argue that, due to the extension of market logic, populations have been reconfigured and reconceptualized as “excess” - not only disposable but also fundamentally valued only in their negation. This devaluation of selected population is devalorization of living labor, thus creating a space for death as a generalized commodity, market and economic activity. Crucially, this shift exceeds the historic understandings... (shrink)

National days often represent unifying narratives about nation-states. Recent calls for historical redress within settler-colonial nations, however, have been based on redefinitions of triumphalist historical narratives, incorporating darker histories of colonialisation’s ongoing effects. This has resulted in controversy about national days, especially in Australia (celebrated on the anniversary of British colonisation). Discussions about Australia's national day may show us if, and how, these competing historical narratives can be integrated into a unified national story. A critical discursive examination of Australian news (...) media articles demonstrated the ways historical narratives were deployed to construct competing understandings of the national day’s meaning. Analysis showed how the narrative of colonisation as a force for cultural advancement was used to justify celebrating the current date. In contrast, acknowledging and reckoning with the past was positioned as crucial to moving forward, and, correspondingly, that changing the date was necessary. Respecifying the historical narrative in this way brought together a more complex, nation-building story unifying Indigenous peoples, settlers, and newer migrants in celebrating the (new?) national day. Such reimagined national stories offer potential ‘golden futures’, but risk allowing nations to continue to avoid reckoning with their dark histories, and, especially, the connection of these to present-day inequalities. (shrink)

During the 2020 COVID-19 epidemic a variety of social activities migrated online, including religious ceremonies and rituals. One such instance is the case of Santo Daime, a Brazilian rainforest religion that utilizes the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca in its rituals. During the pandemic, multiple Santo Daime rituals involving the consumption of ayahuasca took place online, mediated through Zoom and other online platforms. The phenomenon is notable since the effects of hallucinogens are defined by context and Santo Daime rituals are habitually governed (...) by punctilious regulations aimed at directing the experience of participants. The abrupt move to online space thus augurs significant implications in the context of hallucinogenic rituals. This paper looks at this development and its repercussions for entheogenic rituals, as it asks how do psychedelic rituals change when they move online? Building on the author’s previous work on set and setting in the Santo Daime religion, the paper introduces accounts from 12 semi-structured interviews with daimistas participating in online daime rituals, approached through the prism of set and setting, and the study of online religiosity. The analysis points at several key dynamics emerging in the context of virtual rituals. The migration online allowed for the continuation of Santo Daime entheogenic rituals at a time of social distancing, fostered a sense of global brotherhood and opened new possibility for religious participation and learning. Concurrently, online ritual produced an impoverished ritual experience and novel types of challenges including a higher potential for distractions, technical difficulties, and low sensory fidelity. Other novel challenges included social anxiety and an in-built tension between the social and spiritual dimensions of ritual. Finally, some participants were concerned by the cultural context of online rituals: technological mediation, consumerism, commodification, and digital divide. The limitations of digital technology appear amplified by the highly immersive, body oriented, experientially intensified context of the psychedelic experience. This paper contributes to the literature on the extra-pharmacological factors shaping experiences with psychedelics, as well as to the literature on the consequences of the adoption of digital media technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Over the last decade and a half, in a literature otherwise obsessed with citizenship in all its forms, a broad array of scholars has downplayed, criticized, and at times trivialized national citizenship. The assault on citizenship has had both an expansionary and a contractionary thrust. It is expansionary in that the language of citizenship is no longer linked with nationality, but rather protest politics. An earlier generation of social scientists would have described these actions as lobbying; they have now become (...) “citizenship practice.” It is contractionary in that what one might have thought to be the core of citizenship; nationality, the possession of a nation-state’s passport is viewed as less and less relevant to citizenship. Scholars have dislodged both the substance of citizenship, what it is, and the location of citizenship, where it “happens,” from the nation-state and national citizenship. The article challenges this devaluation of citizenship and the nation-state on empirical, conceptual, and normative grounds. Empirically, scholars, whom I link together under the umbrella term “postnationalists,” have based their anti-statist arguments on evidence that, when subjected to further inspection, wholly fails to support the arguments advanced. Conceptually, postnationalists rely on categories that are confused and untenable, being that national variables are cited as evidence of transnational developments. Normatively, postnationalists have lost the emancipatory thrust that once gave concerns with citizenship real-world purchase. (shrink)