A state of limbo: the politics of waiting in neo‐liberal Latvia

This article presents an ethnographic study of politics of waiting in a post‐Soviet context. While activation has been explored in sociological and anthropological literature as a neo‐liberal governmental technology and its application in post‐socialist context has also been compellingly documented, waiting as a political artefact has only recently been receiving increased scholarly attention. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a state‐run unemployment office in Riga, this article shows how, alongside activation, state welfare policies also produce passivity and waiting. Engaging with the small but developing field of sociological literature on the politics of waiting, I argue that, rather than interpreting it as a clash between ‘neo‐liberal’ and ‘Soviet’ regimes, we should understand the double‐move of activation and imposition of waiting as a key mechanism of neo‐liberal biopolitics. This article thus extends the existing theorizations of the temporal politics of neo‐liberalism.     

福柯的生命政治与生命概念辨析

“生命政治”是福柯最复杂的概念之一，涉及福柯的权力分析及其后期的一系列主题。通过辨析福柯的生命政治、生命权力概念，并借助对福柯的“生命”概念在规范和审美两个维度上的延伸讨论，发现对于福柯而言，与康吉莱姆的“否定性生命价值”相对应，生命政治的核心仍然是在生命的肯定性层面，自由、反抗或者新的主体性的生成，均与这一肯定性的生命政治理解密切相关。     

The migration map trap. On the invasion arrows in the cartography of migration

ABSTRACT

How is undocumented migration typically mapped in contemporary cartography? To answer this question, we conduct an iconological dissection of what could be seen as the epitome of the cartography on undocumented migration, the map made by Frontex – the EU’s border agency. We find that, rather than a scientific depiction of a migratory phenomenon, its cartography peddles a crude distortion of undocumented migration that smoothly splices into the xenophobic tradition of propaganda cartography – and stands in full confrontation with contemporary geographical scholarship. We conclude with an urgent appeal for more scientifically robust, critical and decidedly more creative cartographies of migration.     

Complicated narratives of ‘Korean-ness’: towards strategic provisionality in parental involvement

The purpose of this paper is to advance the discourse on parental involvement drawing from Butlerian notion of strategic provisionality. In developing a new approach to understanding cultural differences and their relation to Korean parental involvement, the authors analyze qualitative and quantitative data from five New York metropolitan elementary schools. The authors examine the ways in which ‘Korean-ness’ and Korean parental involvement are discursively constructed and embodied in sociopolitical and historical contexts in the United States. We present two themes related to Korean parental involvement: (a) the double-edged component of respect for teachers and (b) biopolitics related to English language and parental involvement. By challenging normalized understanding about Korean-ness, the authors suggest a different approach to ethnoepistemology in order to enrich discourses concerning parental involvement and ethnic/racial studies.     

Postcolonial reproductions: disability,indigeneity and the formation of the white masculine settler state of Australia

There has been a growing debate within the broad field of postcolonial scholarship which seeks to challenge both its territorial boundaries with the advent of globalization and its limitations when applied to the realm of white-settler societies. The debate has been extremely fruitful in situating emerging scholarship that seeks to extend postcoloniality, its theoretical framing, and the internal processes of social categorization for peoples caught within the nation-state's territorial sphere. Unfortunately, disability and indigeneity remain largely absent from these fresh debates; or when included, are explored as singular fields of analytical inquiry with little intersectional dialogue. With this paper, I aim to extend these nascent debates by critically engaging with both disability and indigeneity as two interlocking sites of (post)colonial nation-state power. To explicate this argument, my analysis focuses on a key historical moment in the Australian experience – the formation of the colonial white-settler society of Australia in its early years (1901–1920s), comparing and contrasting the systems of administrative management of disability and indigeneity. In doing so, the paper reveals the deep materialities of white, able-bodied, masculine, (post)colonial settler rule that bring together disability and indigeneity via gender reproductive controls. The conclusion reflects on the transformative effects of managing transgressive bodies and minds under the white able-bodied settler state and the potential this opens to negotiate practices of solidarity.     

Critique as justification – and beyond

The article discusses the predicament of contemporary critique by focusing on a theoretical case, the ‘sociology of critique’ as it is formulated by Boltanski and Thévenot ( 2006 ) and developed by Boltanski and Chiapello ( 2007 ). This sociology is critical of critical theory and endeavours to supplement critical theory with a ‘theory of critique’, with a pragmatic analysis of the normative values that inspire intentional action. In order to be critical, it insists, one must first understand what critique is. However, the sociology of critique delimits critique to justification on the basis of (only) existing values and indexes all critique to the governmental idea of reform. The article elaborates on this by juxtaposing radical critique and pragmatic critique in the light of recent debate.     

Feminism,the state,and the centrality of reproduction: abortion struggles in 1970s Italy

This article analyses an episode of intense socio-political conflict over the question of abortion in 1970s Italy. Considering the shifting positions of feminist groups and other pro-legalization actors on the one hand, and institutions, political parties and the Church on the other, it offers a new analysis of social mobilization, leading to parliamentary debate and legal change. It presents an original approach to an understanding of feminist challenges to patriarchal cultures and institutions, and of the latter’s immediate responses. Focusing on Italy but referring to developments in other industrialized countries, the article inscribes the history of the battle for reproductive rights in 1970s Italy within a framework centred on the Foucauldian notion of biopolitical power. It is argued that the legal settling of the issue came to be seen by state actors as central to the wider socio-political stabilization of the country. For feminists, the question of abortion was less straightforward than is often assumed. Italian feminist debate, while visibly impacting on wider society, was marked by dilemmas around the private and the public, the relationship to the state, and concerns around centring the feminist agenda on reproduction.     

Of monsters

Monsters gave birth to modernity: those unnamable figures of horror and fascination shadow civilization as its constitutive and abjected discontent. In Europe, from the late eighteenth century on, the term monstrosity mobilized a set of discursive practices that tied racial and sexual deviancy to an overall apparatus of discipline, and, later in the nineteenth century, to the emergence of biopolitics. This article draws a history of monstrosity through overlapping discourses, tying the contemporary figure of the monster-terrorist to the sexual and racial deviancy of what Michel Foucault termed the ‘Abnormals.’ Beginning with an engagement with Deleuze's and Foucault's notion of ‘biopolitics,’ this article follows the emergence of the monster-terrorist in that subfield of policy studies known as ‘terrorism studies.’ This article argues that specific and implicit conceptions of the civilized psyche, linked to norms of the heterosexual family, ground the figure of the Islamic terrorist in an older colonial discourse of the despotic and licentious Oriental male.     

The Power of the Vulnerable Body

Abstract

Through a critical Agambean reading of aging Finland's care deficit, I argue that the human body is politically powerful in its “bare” vulnerability. Even in feminist care theory, however, the neediness of the body is barely recognized as political. This is somewhat paradoxical, given that the vulnerable body is discursively deeply feminized. Thus, through a deconstructive reading of feminist care theory and Joan Tronto's (1993 Tronto, J. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York and London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) ethics of care in particular, I argue for a new political understanding of care, defined as a corporeal relation. In this conception, the political dimensions of care are no longer understood in terms of work or the moral dispositions enabled by caring, as the existing literature largely suggests. Rather, the political relevance of care is seen as departing from that which makes the work of care an absolute necessity: namely, the needy body that belongs to each and every one of us. Through its neediness, the vulnerable body exposes itself as a constant opening of the political, the recognition of which also leads to an alternative type of ethics.     

Contained mobility and the racialization of poverty in Europe: the Roma at the development–security nexus

ABSTRACT

This paper starts from the observation that, since the collapse of eastern European state socialism, the Roma have become the subject and target of Europe-wide development programs and discourses, while, at the same time, they have been problematized in terms of social, public and national security. Due to the ways in which development and security have ambiguously come together in Europe’s recent history, I will argue that the living conditions of the poorest among the Roma have not only worsened, but also, and more fundamentally, the divide between Europe’s rich and poor has become seriously racialized and almost unbridgeable. I explain how the bio- and geopolitical conditions under which development and security have merged in Europe’s engagement with the Roma have led to a situation in which the official aim of Roma-related development programs – the improvement of their living conditions and life chances – tends to result in a dreadlock.