Necropenology: conquering new bodies,psychics, and territories of death in East Jerusalem

ABSTRACT

In theorising penal politics, this article investigates the marking of the colonised through an analysis of state violence over dead bodies. Delving into and describing the political scene in which the state – through its courts, law, military, and police – leaves dead bodies bleeding after death, withholds them in carceral refrigerators, and tortures their communities, uncovers what I define as necropenology. Developed from the voices of Jerusalemite families whose children were imprisoned after death, this paper argues that expanding spaces of carcerality, criminalising those who are already dead, and penetrating Palestinian spaces of mourning, illustrates new modes of penology, a necropenology. Necropenology conquers new bodies, psychics, and territories in life and in death through the performance of power that marks both dead and living bodies as disposable. Jerusalemite families articulate first-hand how this form of power strips control of one’s own emotions, inscribes indignities, and keeps the colonised as dangerous entities, always on trial in death and when dead.     

The World Social Forum: the paradoxical quest for strength in plurality

ABSTRACT

In this reflexive essay, I explore how the present and the future of the World Social Forum are intimately related to the ability of its actors to acknowledge and actively address the inherent tensions of open spaces. The former must compose themselves articulating seemingly opposites: ideals shared within the World Social Forum vs. some practices not in accordance with its principles (enhanced in contexts of urgency); claimed horizontality vs. dynamic power relations; internal plurality vs. the need to act in unity to achieve systemic global change, amongst others. I will propose perspectives on how the strength of the WSF can be seen as its capacity to continue building radical hope for a positive shift of paradigm within progressive civil society: from divergences to resilient complementarities.     

Contesting racism: how do the black middle-class use cultural consumption for anti-racism?

ABSTRACT

Drawing on interviews with thirty-two black British professionals, and ethnographic work in middle-class cultural spaces across London, this paper asks ‘How do the black middle-class use cultural consumption for anti-racism?’ I argue that the black middle-class contest the racial hierarchy at three levels through their cultural consumption: the material, the ideological, and the symbolic. At the material level, black middle-class people consume cultural forms they decode as ‘white’ in order to establish an equity with whites in levels of cultural capital. At the ideological level, black middle-class people consume cultural forms that uplift meanings and representations of blackness, thus challenging controlling images of blackness. Lastly, at the symbolic level, black middle-class folks create and sustain cultural spaces where black people’s cultural and symbolic knowledge is given proper recognition and authority.     

Figures of youth: on the very object of Youth Studies

ABSTRACT

‘Youth’ as a social category is used and abused in all manner of ways across an array of fields, platforms, discourses and spaces, Youth Studies notwithstanding. When we talk about ‘young people’ sometimes we seem to be referring to different phenomena, depending upon our political interests, theoretical perspectives and research methods. This article interrogates how the concept of ‘youth’ is figuratively put to work. By suggesting different figures of youth, and inviting suggestions for more, I propose that tracing how they are situated in different ontological spaces can develop a clearer conception of our research object(s) and help reduce confusion and the possibility that we are talking past each other. The incomplete picture I want to paint of figures of youth, in quite broad-brush strokes, all inter-relate in something of a feedback loop, a material-semiotic assemblage that forms powerful affects for the ways that ‘youth’ is brought into being, how youth are researched, governed, co-opted and exploited.     

Mentoring,Sexual Harassment,and Black Women Academics

ABSTRACT

The #MeToo Movement both within academia and popular culture has largely been seen as an issue for white women (and men). While the phrase Me Too was originally coined by Tarana Burke in 2006 to raise public awareness of sexual harassment, violence and assault experienced by women of color, the Movement has largely been whitewashed by primarily depicting victims and survivors as white women. Black women academics, like myself, also experience sexual harassment. By highlighting the ways that race-based sexual harassment further marginalizes already underrepresented groups in political science, I use my personal story to elucidate how a gender-only lens misses the complexities of Black women’s experiences with power inequities in academia. Throughout this narrative I underscore the importance of mentorship, professional networks, and the ability to harness scholarship as a vehicle to combat the pervasiveness of sexual harassment, violence, and assault for Black women in political science.     

Enfleshing temporal insurgencies and decolonial times

ABSTRACT

Time and temporality often remain the unthought in our spaces, moments, and movements of radical political imagination and practice. In this contribution, we aim to open a dialogue between current queer/feminist/black/decolonial scholarship on time, and the praxis of feminist movements and women in movement in Cali, Colombia. We hope to nurture, in this way, a systematization of the role of decolonial times and insurgent temporalities in our anti-capitalist praxis and deepen the theorization of decolonial emancipation and/as healing. We develop this systematization through exploration of three moments of encounter; the first a women-only workshop ‘Finding Voice’, the second a workshop that was part of a diálogo de saberes between feminist/peace movements in the region, and the final a public talk-performance at the International Conference in Mental Health and Well-Being, all held in Cali. Exploration and excavation of these moments suggest-enflesh that embracing our untimely rhythms and that which is out-of-time in our subjectivities, excavating together the epistemological possibilities of silence and the pauses in-between speech, as well as reconfiguring ‘failure’ as a moment of possibility, open embodied pathways to decolonising and feminising the revolutionary political.     

Gay and Lesbian Couples at Home: Identity Work in Domestic Space

ABSTRACT

Social research into gay/lesbian experiences of home has tended to posit domestic environments as alienating for gay/lesbian subjects, silencing their sexual identities. Meanwhile, work on the spatiality of sexual identity more broadly has largely focused on individuals or communities, not couples or households. In this context, this article aims to recover the importance of home for gay/lesbian couples. I explore how cohabiting gay/lesbian couples generate shared identities through domestic space, examining various ways in which these couples use homes to establish and consolidate their partnerships. Empirical data is drawn from twenty-three in-depth interviews with gay/lesbian Australians who are cohabiting, or have cohabited, with a long-term partner. The sample is largely limited to white, educated, middle-class gay men and lesbians living in urban Australia, providing an ethnographic window into the domestic identity-formation of a particular community of practice. Four key themes regarding “coupled identities” at home emerged from the interviews: (i) the importance of privacy and control at home for enabling gay/lesbian partnerships; (ii) the negotiated creation and use of shared domestic spaces; (iii) the accumulation and arrangement of household objects in those domestic spaces; and (iv) the importance of maintaining separate “personal” spaces for each partner for the well-being of the relationship.     

Democracy as a transitional compass: women’s participation in South Africa and Kerala,India

ABSTRACT

In this article I explore the attempts by the states in South Africa and Kerala to create spaces for public participation by specifically focusing on women’s involvement in local spaces. Democracy is a crucial part of any emancipatory future that seeks to challenge and overcome inequality. I show that both states have ‘invited’ participation by women in various ways, but that the transformative potential of this participation is limited by national political economy, bureaucratization, and the lack of political will. In South Africa, the invited spaces eventually transformed into avenues for delivery and in response the women in this study shifted to inventing ways to engage in development in their personal lives. By using a double comparison – South Africa over time and South Africa compared to India – I argue that transformative politics requires a combination of invented and invited spaces.     

Working with Narratives

ABSTRACT

This article will discuss healing across cultures and describe narrative practice as a means of access to coping strategies in African American folk beliefs and traditional healing practices. Four elements were found in empirical research on folk healing among African Americans: spirituality, ritual, the power of words, and dreams. These culture-specific healing elements often emerge as themes in personal narratives about coping in response to stress, crisis, and trauma. Viewing healing elements as themes is a useful framework for construing meanings from clients' experiences of stress, trauma, and crisis and coping strategies embedded in folk beliefs and traditional healing practices.

Additionally, the author presents a structured interview questionnaire for identifying folk healing themes, illustrates narrative practice as an approach for integrating folk beliefs and healing practices, and discusses implications for clinical training.     

Dangerous Liaisons: The Time Is Out of Joint

ABSTRACT

Anne is an older woman, with a history of severe, complex trauma, including abandonment and multiple rounds of sexual abuse, which started in her early childhood and was followed by sexual exploitation in a previous experience of therapy. In this article I discuss her treatment with me in the context of the #MeToo movement and the rest of the current troubling sociopolitical constellation. I argue that when tanks crash into our bedrooms and transform them into battlefields, seismic psychic change occurs: catastrophic or healing or both. I also contemplate the nature of the psychoanalytic contract between patient and therapist, as well as the limits of the psychoanalytic endeavor in the face of massive social and historical trauma, “when the time is out of joint” (Shakespeare, “Hamlet”).     

Human waste/wasting humans: dirt,disposable bodies and power relations in Nigerian newspaper reports

Abstract

This study examines four newspaper reports and analyses the ways that “dirt,” “waste” and “garbage” function within a range of intersecting sanitation and social contexts where people and materials figure as disposable objects. My main premise is that when scoop reports in newspapers deal with the issue of “dirt” and sanitation, they often leave undertones that reveal or imply a contest for power in which actual dirt and contamination or their images and vocabularies are employed to justify exclusion from certain social privileges and positions and also to protest such exclusions. I argue and then proceed to show that when “dirt,” “waste” and “garbage” are stretched beyond the domain of health, they can offer a lens with multiple focal positions from which we may view and analyse complex political, social and economic behaviours and make sense of them. I focus on Nigerian urban spaces and analyse the reports to show how the terms have come to mark ways that literal and figurative entropy commingle to reveal the dynamics of power and social relations.     

The limits of participatory democracy and the inclusion of social movements in local government

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the decentralisation of decision-making processes in local government. Empirically, I analyse how Brazilian housing movements are included in participatory processes by examining the ways in which participatory models integrate social movements in spaces of decision-making. I argue that the rules and focus on incremental policy-making limits the participation of social movements. Findings suggests that unequal power structures at local councils, barriers to the participation of citizens, and the lack of transparency of government decisions all prevent social movements from having a more influential voice in decision-making. Although previous studies in Brazil examined the integration of citizens in government institutions, this paper contributes to the literature in two ways: firstly, it provides new evidence on the impact of decentralisation in local government. Secondly, by examining the attitudes of housing council members towards popular political participation, it provides new insights into the limits of decentralisation and participatory governance in contemporary Brazil.     

Becoming a Trustworthy Profession: Doing Better Than Doing Good

Abstract

Social work is a relationship-based profession. For this reason, social work professionals need to be perceived as trustworthy by those with whom we work. This address outlines the nature and importance of trustworthiness and the specific issues the social work profession faces in relation to the question of trustworthiness. I argue that scandals in human services and faith-based institutions as well as pressures associated with new public management create further challenges to achieving trustworthiness. The address discusses how the profession can enhance its trustworthiness through increasing our capacity to articulate professional purpose, committing to professional excellence and to being courageous in speaking out about abuses of power that impact on the lives of people who use our services.     

Empirical and analytical subaltern space? Ashrams,brothels and trafficking in colonial Delhi

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I engage with Gayatri Spivak’s writings on the figure of the subaltern, focusing on a recurrent tension in her writings, and in readings of them. The tension is between two seemingly contradictory definitions of the subaltern. One, more empirical definition, has featured in Spivak’s writings for over 25 years and identifies the subaltern as the non-elite, the immobile or the figure beyond the reach of the state. Against this more empirical definition comes the famous analytical definition of the subaltern as he or she who ‘cannot speak’, being defined by their inaccessibility in the archive, as broadly conceived. This paper will argue that these two interconnected definitions have their respective forms of space, which demand different methodologies. I will suggest that an over-emphasis on the analytical definition has led to an over-cautious approach to subaltern spaces, neglecting the compulsion to attempt to find and say something about subaltern spaces, as Spivak insists. The paper demonstrates this approach through the examination of a report into the abuse of women in some of Delhi’s ashrams in the 1930s, so as to suggest how we can use studies of empirically archived subaltern space to think about the analytically subaltern spaces that must always be beyond exploration.     

Race,Religiosity, and the Women's Vote

Abstract

Much of our popular political discourse focuses on the Democratic character of the women's vote, but there is, in fact, considerable diversity among female voters. Important sectors of the female electorate have political concerns that are at odds with the Democratic Party, though they hold these preferences less strongly than do men. This article focuses on these differences between women and links them to electoral behavior in the 1996 presidential election. I argue that women, like men, cast their vote with the party that best represents their interests, as they understand them. African American women overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party in 1996, which is consistent with theories of racial group interests, but white women diverge politically.

The main finding of this research is that religious values play a central role in white women's voting behavior, even after taking into account ideological and partisan predispositions. We see this result, I argue, because religious and secular women correctly identify the Republican Party as the repository of social conservatism and the Democratic Party as embracing social liberalism.     

Willingness to Participate in Organ Donation Among Black Seventh-Day Adventist College Students

Objective and Participants: The authors studied a group of black and white Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) college students (N = 334) to compare the power of religious socialization with racial socialization. Methods: The authors compared the levels of willingness to donate organs between black and nonblack students in an availability sample. Results: Black SDA college students were significantly more likely than white SDA students or SDA students of other races to perceive racism in the healthcare system and to believe that doctors would not make heroic efforts to save their lives if they knew they were organ donors; they were 66.9% less likely to donate organs than were white SDA students or SDA students of other races. Conclusions: Despite a common religion with a purposive indoctrination, the racial socialization of black SDA students exerted a stronger influence on willingness to participate in organ donation than did that of white students and students of other races within this religion.     

The Embarrassment of Co-Presence: AU Pairs and their Rooms

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ways Slovak au pairs living in London relate to their rooms through decoration and alternative aesthetic strategies. In this article the theme is neither the appropriation nor the refusal of personal spaces, but rather an ambivalence that becomes evident through the detailed study of au pairs' material culture. The source of this ambivalence lies both in the transience of their residence and in the contradictions inherent in the au pair scheme, causing a relationship that I explore as the embarrassment of co-presence. The evidence suggests that au pairs find themselves torn between a desire to settle and appropriate a space and an equal desire not to be present or not to make an impact upon this space. This emerges not only from strategies of (non-)decoration, but also from au pairs' exploitation of the parameters of tidiness and mess, and alternative foci of self-expression such as the individual body.     

Every Object Tells a Story

ABSTRACT

The article considers objects and stories within the homes of Pakistani Heritage families who came from Pakistan to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s. The research team particularly explored the relationship between objects and family stories and timescales. Part of the research process involved an ethnographic inquiry exploring the stories told by the families. An exhibition was constructed from these stories and a website. The experience of migration, of the resettling of people and objects produced new kinds of stories in relation to objects, as families moved across national and transnational spaces. I highlight how a nuanced understanding of timescales can help illuminate studies of home cultures of migrant families. Notions of place and space are disrupted when possessions are left behind, and language is all there is left to recreate lost objects in old spaces. Longer timescales can be attached to objects that appear valueless when actual objects are lost or in transit. By making the timescales a focus for discussion, actual stories and experiences of families making that transition can be more readily heard. Home cultures can be understood in this context as “traveling” and subject to transformation and disruption.     

Pleasure and Danger: An Appreciation of Muriel Dimen

ABSTRACT

In this essay I recall a 40-year experience knowing and working with Muriel Dimen. This is a reminiscence of a shared activist life in the late 1970s and 1980s and later our lives emerging in psychoanalysis and relational psychoanalysis after the mid-1980s. It is an appreciation of the particular turns and potent hot spots in Muriel Dimen’s evolving theorizing of sexuality and power, body and gender and culture from this point in the mid-1980s to her death in 2016.     

Sandboxes and Heavenly Dwellings

ABSTRACT

Finnish housing was fundamentally transformed during the postwar period of (re-)construction. The emergence of new kinds of urban spaces entailed radical changes in the landscape, housing customs, and details of everyday life. The article explores suburbs as lived spaces, where architecture, environment, and inhabitants come together. I consider the built environment, discussions in the media regarding the new suburbs, and the written memories of inhabitants collected between 1995 and 2000. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the new suburbs symbolized a new way of life and were described enthusiastically in the media. However, from the late 1960s onwards criticism grew increasingly louder. By contrast, inhabitants' accounts present a multifaceted and mainly positive view in tension with media representations, offering a radically different perspective on suburban habitation. In my article, I explore the relations of suburban space and gender through two cases: the modern dwelling described as “heavenly” in the written memories; and the playground with the sandbox as its nucleus. These sites were crucial both in the narratives of suburban living and the planning of new residential environments. I pay particular attention to the figure of the suburban housewife and the agency of inhabitants as well as suburban social networks (claimed to be nonexistent in the then current criticism). My analysis proposes that meaningful social relations were formed in the suburbs, but they were constructed mainly by women and children. I suggest that instead of being the antithesis of modernity, suburbs were key spaces for the formation of the postwar Finnish housing environment, society, and gender relations.