‘Khalas! Literature is the resistance against politics,and this is the politics of literature’: an interview with Atiq Rahimi

ABSTRACT

Atiq Rahimi is a director, photographer and translingual author who has published in Dari (Persian) and in French since 1999. As an outspoken author, Rahimi did not refrain from narrating loss, trauma and fundamentalism already in the 1990s. For his first publication in French, Syngué Sabour. Pierre de patience, he was awarded the highest literary price in France, the Prix Goncourt. With his recently published novel Les Porteurs d’eau, set in Afghanistan and Europe, Rahimi also explores challenges of the global Afghanistani diaspora. Inspired by his personal experiences of travelling from Kabul to Paris, Rahimi explores, with his Kafkaesque narratives, themes of loss, suffering and survival, all located in a war-torn country. In this interview, conducted in Paris, conversing in Persian and French, Rahimi talks about his personal journey and discusses cultural as well as literary theories. He mentions literature without borders, considers the power of literature as a means of taking a stand against political reality, learning French as a teenager and depicting strong female characters. Additionally, Rahimi explains to what extent Persian linguistics allowed him to depict the absurdity of living exile in his latest novel and ends the interview explaining the rationale behind the idea of authors without borders.     

Participatory action research and researcher’s responsibilities: an experience with an Indigenous community

This paper seeks to explore the relational participatory action research (PAR) frameworks that have been developed to allow non-Indigenous researchers, along with Indigenous co-researcher participants, to learn and honour Indigenous stories. Specifically, in the context of PAR research in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, we outline: (a) potential challenges between Indigenous research paradigms and Western research paradigms, (b) the situation of the non-Indigenous researcher in relation to the Indigenous community, (c) challenges associated with the non-Indigenous researcher’s selection of a research site, (d) collaboration throughout the research process and (e) the processes of developing and maintaining responsibilities. The aim is not to offer simple answers to such challenges, but to highlight the manner in which such processes can be addressed. This research may provide practical insight for future non-Indigenous researchers working with Indigenous communities through a participatory sharing process with Indigenous co-researcher participants, Elders, leaders, knowledge-holders and youths.     

Disabled persons’ job interview experiences: stories of discrimination,uncertainty and recognition

This paper explores disabled persons’ narrated experiences from job interviews. Based on interviews with employed disabled persons in the United States and Norway, the analysis investigates how the informants understand and deal with employers’ interpretations of disability. Three kinds of stories are identified: discrimination, uncertainty and recognition. In the first two stories, informants portrayed employers who used a non-inclusive discourse of disability. In the story of recognition, informants perceived employers to be primarily interested in their competence, and disability was dealt with in an inclusive manner. The comparison between American and Norwegian accounts reveals striking similarities in disabled persons’ narratives.     

Transforming Global Governance in the Post-2015 Era: Towards an Equitable and Sustainable World†

This article reports on a dialogic symposium that brought academics from a wide range of disciplines together with practitioners and activists. The purpose was to discuss key issues conditioning the possibility of establishing global governance mechanisms which could promote transition paths toward a more equitable and sustainable world. Following the structure of the symposium, the article is divided into four thematic sections. The first contextualizes the discussions by looking at the characteristics and challenges of global governance today. The second addresses power relations in global governance with a focus on the corporate and financial sectors. It discusses practices of multistakeholder governance and public–private partnerships, the unhealthy levels of corporate influence on the UN system, and the dominant discourse that naturalizes corporate power, ‘free’ trade, and corresponding definitions of ideas such as knowledge, efficiency, and development. The third section turns to sites and forms of countervailing power and practice with particular attention to transcalar approaches and social movement actors. It highlights the potential of multi-level, territorial approaches for breaking out of hierarchical and nation state-based frames and building alternative forms of democracy. It illustrates the relevance of bioregions and ecosystems as meaningful arenas for thinking about and organizing social and economic life and for managing common pool resources. It invokes the imperative of protecting the human rights framework from the multiple challenges it faces. Finally, it explores alternative ways of generating and sharing knowledge and of challenging narrowly defined ‘evidence-based’ policy by assembling legitimate, qualitative evidence rooted in lived realities. The concluding section raises the question of whether—and on what conditions—intergovernmental multilateralism can be seen as a locus for transformation, and suggests some avenues of future research.     

Cultural Studies and Deleuze-Guattari,Part 2: From Affect to Conjunctures†

This paper considers the state of the ‘field’ of affect studies and its development – partly through the involvement of one of its authors – over the course of decades. It argues that rather than identifying affect as the ‘other’ of signification and representation, thus ‘subtracting’ it from the conjuncture, one should understand the question of affect to point to the multiplicity of forms of sign behaviours – or, better, of forms of expression or collective assemblages of enunciation (in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari) that constitute a conjuncture in all its complexity. This article attempts to map this multiplicity by refining and expanding Guattari’s ‘mixed semiotics’. Finally, it offers a brief example of how such multiplicities (and their resulting hybridities) might be used to compare the ‘affective topographies’ and structures of feelings that have differentially enabled oppositional movements in the 1960s and the current moment.     

Survivor: spectators and gladiators in the US environmental movement, 2000–2010

What motivates people to participate in which forms of environmental activism? To address this question, we revise empirical models examining environmental activism by disaggregating the outcome variable of movement participation and dichotomizing two key motivational factors. Using repeated cross-sectional data from the US General Social Survey of 2000 and 2010, this study conducts logistic regression of four forms of participation on perceived severity and sense of efficacy, while accounting for biographical availability and political engagement. Results from regression analysis show that vocabularies of motive have substantial impacts on an individual’s likelihood of: (1) signing a petition; (2) giving money; (3) joining a group; and (4) joining a protest or demonstration. Their effects are large enough to override the noticeable impacts of liberalism and education. This study also finds that the level of participation in the movement across all forms has decreased between 2000 and 2010. These findings direct our attention to the limited capacity of the public sphere to accommodate the environmental movement during the last decade, as well as to potential changes in environmental activism in the coming decades that may mobilize those previously less likely to participate.     

Global walls and global movement: new destinations in Jewish migration, 1918–1939

Research often argues or implies that the First World War suddenly discontinued the age of Jewish mass migration and led to increased sedentarism. Indeed, the former main destinations like the USA drastically cut down on the arrival of East European Jews. This did not, however, result in the end of Jewish mass migration. This article will demonstrate that it rather led to manifold attempts to circumvent the newly introduced and increasingly exclusive measures, to a rising complexity of transnational movement patterns, and finally to the emergence of new destinations and Jewish communities all over the globe. This movement, however, was overshadowed and impacted by the almost global rise of xenophobia and fascism. Based on local histories, statistical and legal sources, as well as reports and communications by delegates of Jewish relief organizations, this article presents a social history of the intersection between global Jewish migration and politically motivated migration management. It leaves behind the focus on “departure” and “arrival” in Jewish migration history and elaborates on the relevance and dynamics of transmigration, the dominance of migrant networks and the complex relationship between national policies and migrants' agency.     

An Overview of the Victims’ Rights Movement: Historical,Legislative, and Research Developments†

The Victims' Rights Movement has made considerable accomplishments since the 1960s, when an increasing crime rate, coupled with the underreporting of crime, inspired concerns regarding crime victims. In subsequent decades the Victims' Rights Movement evolved and gained considerable momentum. This paper examines the historical development of the Victims' Rights Movement, including the movement's focus on specific types of victimization and crimes. State and Federal responses to the movement are also presented, with attention to constitutional developments and debates. Finally, current issues are presented and future research is suggested.     

Double binding of Japanese colonialism: trajectories of baseball in Japan,Taiwan, and Korea†

This study explores the historic implications of baseball within the larger processes of constructing modernity under Japanese colonialism by examining the game's regional trajectory, with a focus on its introduction and proliferation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although baseball was initially introduced into the region as a symbol of American modernity, it was spread and popularized by Imperial Japan. By examining the ways that baseball was received and appropriated in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea, this study demonstrates that its trajectory reflects not only colonization by both the USA and Japan but resistance that amounted to a double de-colonization against both of these entities. The term ‘double binding’ is heuristically used to illustrate both Japanese imperialism and postcolonial consciousness in its (former) colonies, in which the USA and Japan functioned as a pair of modernizing/imperial forces and as the objects of de-colonization.     

‘Your momma is day-glow white’: questioning the politics of racial identity,loyalty and obligation

This article utilizes discourse analysis and an auto-ethnographic approach to explore the impact of US racial and ethnic categorization on the experiences of an individual marked as ‘mixed-race’ in terms of individual identity and familial/cultural group loyalty and obligation(s). This essay focuses on an incidence of public policing through the popular social networking platform Facebook, centring on the invocation of racial obligation by white friends and family members. I analyse how racial loyalty is articulated by friends and family members in their posts on my personal Facebook page and how this ‘loyalty’ is used as means of regulating my mixed-race identity performance. This essay aims to understand several things, namely how identity is mediated through the invocation of racial obligation and how tension around identity plays out in the multiracial family.     

On pride,shame, passing and avoidance: an inquiry into Roma young people’s relationship with their ethnicity

Roma ethnicity is one of the most stigmatised identities of today’s Europe. An emerging discourse on ‘Roma pride’ aims to reshape this widespread perception, especially among the educated youth. Drawing on 57 interviews with young people with/in higher education in Romania, this article looks into their experiences of self-identification as Roma. On the one hand, this article identified a tendency for young people to move in a conceptual space, dominated by an understanding of ethnicity as bounded and static. On the other hand, it identified an emerging tendency for flexible, hybrid identifications that deliberately avoid reifying ethnicity (e.g. being a Roma of a different kind and living beyond ethnic labels). The article calls for more informed approaches addressing ethnic identification, which avoid assumptions of stable identification and embrace more complex understandings of the social dynamics involved.     

Law,campus policy,social movements,and sexual violence: Where do we stand in the #MeToo movement?

In the last 8 years, activist pressure has increased attention to sexual violence at universities. Most recently, the #MeToo movement has widened the conversation about sexual violence. This increased public attention has coincided with changes in federal guidelines, state laws, and campus policies on sexual violence as well as social movement activity by survivor‐activists and emerging counter‐movements. I argue that sociologists—specifically researchers who study gender and/or law and society—are uniquely situated to contribute to the study of sexual violence on campus. I synthesize a growing sociological and interdisciplinary literature on sexual violence—legal changes, policy effects, and social movement struggles—in order to advocate that sociologists study laws, campus policies, and social movements simultaneously.     

‘We feel the responsibility that you shirk’: movement institutionalization,the politics of responsibility and the case of the Swedish environmental movement

This article provides directions for advancing the conceptualization of the relationship between social movements and institutionalization, based on a case study of the Swedish environmental movement strategies. We argue that the concepts of (de)responsibilization and (de)politicization provide tools for an improved analysis of the dynamics of how social movements interact both with established political institutions and corporations in a new context. The introduction of new regulatory frameworks in environmental politics has shaped interaction between social movements and the state in new ways, involving neoliberal responsibilization, meaning active involvement by civil society and business in political responsibilities previously associated with state agencies – a development involving an increasing emphasis on market mechanisms. We argue that this has involved a de-politicization of environmental issues in the sense that it engages political actors in a moral discourse and a technocratic practice that suppresses the (potential) articulation of social conflict through consensus building. However, we also show how movement actors resist the discourse that encourages them to take on certain responsibilities, thus engaging in a politics of responsibility. Empirically, we demonstrate how the changing strategies of the Swedish environmental movement in the 2000s need to be understood in relation to the following processes, indicating that the Swedish case has a general relevance for an understanding of the contemporary environmental movement globally: (1) the transformation of the Swedish model of welfare capitalism under the influence of neoliberal discourse; (2) international environmental policy developments, most importantly the emergence of climate change as a dominant issue globally.     

The Football Lads Alliance and Democratic Football Lad’s Alliance: an insight into the dynamism and diversification of Britain’s counter-jihad movement

ABSTRACT

In response to 2017’s terror attacks in Britain, the Football Lads Alliance (FLA) and latterly, the Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA) were formed. Self-described as street-protest movements that encourage rival ‘football firms’ to reject acrimonious hostilities to unite against the Islamist extremism and extremists it believes are threatening Britain, its culture, values and way of life. As new incarnations of the British counter-jihad movement, this article affords new insights into how the movement and constituent parts are dynamically identifying and mobilising behind an increasingly diverse range of identities and socio-political issues. Contributing new knowledge about the FLA and DFLA, neither of which have been subjected to scholarly inquiry, this article makes a timely contribution to an embryonic scholarly canon. Contextualising the counter-jihad movement, this article explores how ‘football’ afforded the FLA and DFLA with a shared identity around which to mobilise. Highlighting how this is different to other far-right and counter-jihadi groups, their ideologies and activities are explored in relation to their establishment, support base and function. In conclusion, this article positions both groups within an ‘identity-oriented’ paradigm of new social movements as a means of offering new understanding and explanation.