Abstract: Building on recent work in the sociology of intellectual interventions, the study of cultural boundaries of science, and the role of ideas in politics, the article develops a theory of public epistemologies as argumentative tools people use to support or oppose political positions. Two prominent public epistemologies that have recently crystallized in Italian politics are taken as illustrations, with special attention paid to the role of two academics (an economist and an immunologist) turned public intellectuals. The article argues that the rise of populism in Italy has contributed to unusual alignments between political and epistemological positions, which has made questions about science and expert knowledge much more relevant in contesting and supporting political decisions. PubDate: 2021-03-01
Abstract: For more than a decade, Jeffrey Alexander has been developing the cultural sociology of politics as an alternative to rationalist theories of political life. Nearly every part of the 2016 US presidential election offers some vindication for Alexander’s cultural sociology of politics. The election of Donald Trump suggested that performance, stage craft, and messaging might be more fundamental to presidential campaigns. Yet on closer examination, political performance in the 2016 election challenges certain aspects of the cultural sociology of politics. Specifically, the performance of Donald Trump frequently occasioned the violation of the background representations of American political life. This article uses the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump to investigate how a single candidate can be a successful political performer even while profaning a society’s sacred or animating ideals. In the course of this analysis, I argue for a greater appreciation of the value of mundane social interaction in political performance. In liberal and democratic societies, the value of individualism means that the principles of social interaction will be as important to political performance as the ability to channel other principles and ideals. PubDate: 2021-03-01
Abstract: Throughout its long history, the Walt Disney Company has repeatedly relied on a patriarchal idealization of femininity to craft its animated female protagonists. In Disney films, male interests, expectations, power, and leadership are consistently valued over those of female characters, who must submit unquestioningly to male direction. Internet reviewers and respected news sources alike claimed that Judy Hopps, Zootopia’s bunny cop protagonist, and Moana’s royal Polynesian title character, are independent, “feminist” heroines who counter this patriarchal narrative template. While critics argue that Judy and Moana defy Disney’s patriarchal template, these two films actually represent a postfeminist, rather than a feminist, reimagining of Disney’s template which resigns both protagonists to narratives that celebrate and center male power. Judy Hopps and Moana act independently, but each woman is relegated to a tenuous relationship with a domineering male character whom she must defer to and emotionally nurture. Intentionally or not, Disney empowers Judy and Moana only to the extent that both women manage and control themselves, rather than allowing them to exercise power to contest the relationships and societies which oppress them. Thus, these films offer a tepid acknowledgment of the problems with Disney’s traditional depiction of femininity, but they ultimately reveal that female empowerment exists in the Disney Co.’s narratives only when incubated in a toxic, platonic relationship with a male character. PubDate: 2021-03-01
Abstract: This article interrogates narrow forms of nationalism and nativist ideologies that are hidden beneath post-colonial African political leader statements and rhetoric about reversing colonial imbalances. The focus is on Zimbabwe’s Third Chimurenga spearheaded by Robert Mugabe during the last ten years of his presidency. An analysis of the linguistic and discursive aspects of economic nationalisation, land reform and indigenisation programmes in Zimbabwe—also known as the Third Chimurenga—enables us to see the elements of policy discord and inconsistencies that characterised the second half of Robert Mugabe’s nearly four-decade rule. The argument is that the reified and reductionist framing of the Third Chimurenga resulted in two unintended consequences: (i) alienating the majority of the very same black people that the policy sought to empower and (ii) diminishing opportunities for beneficiaries to contribute towards realisation of the ideals and aspirational goals of pushing back the frontiers of colonially inherited social and economic inequalities. I conclude by suggesting that Robert Mugabe’s language and discursive rhetoric around social transformation in Zimbabwe betray unhelpful commitment to political exigencies at the expense of sustainable economic empowerment of ordinary men and women. PubDate: 2021-03-01
Abstract: This article examines the institution of celebrity within academia. Academic celebrity has parallels with the celebrity seen in the wider world, though it is born of conditions unique to the fields of higher education and research and exhibits its own special characteristics. Whilst the scholarly prominence of academics can be based on more or less impersonal measures, especially citation statistics, academic celebrity, like popular celebrity, has emotional and subjective dimensions that call for non-subjective analysis. That challenge is met in this article by pointing to the cultural and institutional underpinnings of the phenomenon. In outlining some of academic celebrity’s defining features, we explore the critical difference between scholarly prominence, which is based on the perception of an academic’s excellence within their field, and celebrity, which incorporates adulation from colleagues and students. In reviewing the literature on the subject, we find models elaborating the ways in which modernity, in contrast to Elias’s court society (Rojek), or the world of aristocratic artistic patronage (Bourdieu), creates the conditions for the adulation of celebrities and the emergence of celebrity as an institution. We also find views critical of both the vulgarising effect of celebrity on literary and artistic taste (Coser), and its self-perpetuating character (Boorstin, Merton). Finally, we examine aspects of academic celebrity’s institutionalisation: the dynamic that drives the creation of new fields of specialisation within which academic celebrity is embedded, and the ‘managerial university’, which is said to generate and sustain it (Moran). PubDate: 2021-03-01
Abstract: North et al. (2009) argue that accounting for different development outcomes requires understanding how different societies manage violence. Almost all societies have been limited-access orders where elites constrain violence to preserve their rents. Alternatively, in open-access orders, violence is constrained by a government characterized by widespread political participation. Open-access societies were the first cases of sustained economic development; almost all of them have been Western European or offshoots. Understanding why is important. North et al. elaborate on three necessary conditions for achieving open access: (1) rule of law for elites, (2) support for perpetually-lived organizations, and (3) centralization and consolidation of violence. These constitute the “doorstep” to an open-access order. I argue that significant progress towards this doorstep was affected by the Carolingians of the early medieval era. I emphasize their large-scale distributions of confiscated/conquered lands to vassals, cultivation of bonds with the Church, and regularization of assemblies. The Carolingians introduced governance innovations that impersonalized relationships between elites and encouraged their enforcement under the rule of law. PubDate: 2021-01-07 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09393-1
Abstract: Heritage is increasingly promoted as a tool for economic and social development to help rebuild societies that have suffered conflict and deep social trauma. Heritage diplomacy is an emergent form of cultural relations that forms a ‘contact zone’ between different stakeholders and divergent expectations. This paper explores some aspects of this field of heritage diplomacy and develops a basic typology by contrasting the tension between the uses of ‘charismatic heritage diplomacy’ and more ‘careful heritage diplomacy’. It examines differences between local realities and international expectations of heritage by bringing together two case studies: one from a Creative Europe–funded project where civil society actors develop strategies for working with the difficult heritage that lies behind nationalist myths, and the other from a British Council–funded programme dealing with endangered heritage in the MENA region. Critical studies of heritage-making often pitch the local against the international, with grassroot activities contrasted with international rhetoric surrounding heritage places, objects and practices. However, this dichotomy can mask other actors and social dynamics, not least the subtleties of how the collective traumas of conflict play out in the cultural field. The idea of heritage diplomacy as a ‘contact zone’ (Clifford 1997) highlights that heritage-making in (post-)conflict cultural relations is an ontological encounter between international agents and the traumatised communities for whom the stakes are, inevitably, higher. Mediated through the transnational best practices of heritage professionals, and through the visible pragmatism of civil society heritage activists, the impacts of heritage-making nevertheless remain complicated and entangled. PubDate: 2021-01-05 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09391-3
Abstract: Increasingly, French citizens are prosecuted for the ‘crime of solidarity’: hosting undocumented migrants in defiance of state laws forbidding it (and subsequently named ‘solidarity delinquents’). This paper explores contemporary ‘crimes of solidarity’ by investigating why indignant subjects defy the state and, in so doing, constitute themselves as citizens. Drawing on the concepts of hospitality and governmentality, the paper examines France’s vexed relation with hospitality alongside a particular mode of governing the state as a home (‘domopolitics’) in relation to citizenship and migrancy. Hospitality as a governmentality rationalises processes of classification and identification that determine which mobile presences in the home are least disruptive to its social and moral order. Yet French ‘solidarity delinquents’ are savvy to the instrumentalisation and politicisation of hospitality. I show they too have a use for politicising hospitality and themselves. Mobilising these ideas through Isin’s (2008) ‘acts of citizenship’ framework, I capture a citizenly response to domopolitical rule: hospitality becomes the terrain upon which republican citizens demonstrate liberté, égalité and especially fraternité, will not be suspended in the home. More broadly, the hospitality and citizen identity that is at present claimed must be seen in one crucial respect: state and dissident see in hospitality a tactic for realising a conception of Frenchness and citizenship, albeit in two competing, and perhaps irreconcilable, ways. PubDate: 2020-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09355-7
Abstract: This article reflects on the relationship between time and the figure of the citizen, where the citizen is understood in relational terms to the migrant. The article examines a stalled or interrupted flow of time that characterises the experience of certain migrants and citizens alike. This is time experienced as waiting for the fulfillment of citizenship. The article goes on to show how a progressive temporal narrative of citizenship-to-come obscures the effective denial of citizenship. While citizenship remains a key aspiration for those who lack its full or partial protections, it may not represent the ultimate horizon for struggles concerned with questions of border justice. With this proposition in mind, the article speculates on alternative horizons that may be emerging organically within struggles that refuse the citizen/migrant divide as a basis for imagining collective political futures. PubDate: 2020-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09358-4
Abstract: This article ethnographically examines the everyday lives and collective activism of undocumented migrants in Belgium as they await the results of asylum appeals and regularisation applications. We show how the values emphasised by state-led migrant legalisation regimes contrast with undocumented migrants’ narratives of their own worthiness. In foregrounding deservingness as a moral and legal threshold, we argue that the Belgian nation-state responds to undocumented migrants by enforcing and implementing citizenship policies that persistently keep them on the fringes of legitimacy and recognition. The discursive constructions of ‘good citizens’ that undocumented migrants embody and make claims to in Belgium extend to and envelop the lives of undocumented migrants in Europe in general. PubDate: 2020-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09360-w
Abstract: In a global context of narrowing civil liberties and intensifying state repression, it is critical to have adequately nuanced theories to account for the conditions of the emergence of democratic subjectivities. Guillermo O’Donnell’s theory of citizen agency, in which citizens are rights-bearing moral agents and the ‘vectors of democratization’, bridges democratic and citizenship theory, normative and empirical approaches. In O’Donnell’s rendering, the significance of rights lies in their capacity to legitimise rights claiming and other performances of citizenship. Australia is unique among democracies insofar as it does not recognise the rights of the citizens constitutionally or in a bill of rights. I use O’Donnell’s Democracy, Agency, and the State as a focus for reflecting on the meanings and symbolism of Australian citizenship, and the symbolic significance of not grounding citizenship in rights. My discussion combines ethnographic analysis of citizenship ceremonies with critical discussion of recent laws. I argue that the absenting of rights in constitutional and ceremonial evocations of citizenship has created a vague and contradictory figure of the citizen that straddles authoritarian and democratic values and symbols. This empty and contradictory mythology unhinges citizenship from democracy in Australian political culture, leaving it susceptible to authoritarian creep. Nonetheless, democracy’s symbolic openness offers hope for the emergence of new democratic subjectivities, even amidst conditions of narrowing civic possibility. O’Donnell’s study of citizen agency hones attention to the importance of the cultural conditions amenable to democratic subjectivity and warrants further comparative exploration. PubDate: 2020-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09353-9
Abstract: The Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Teto (MTST)—Homeless Workers’ Movement—is a social movement that struggles for housing and for a radical transformation of capitalistic socio-economic relations. The present paper offers a problematization of the movement’s plea to social rights. They are part of the movement’s discourse and strategy. However, the activists’ objective is more radical: they aim at a complete transformation of the Brazilian economy and society. By first discussing two sets of literatures—Critical Legal Theory and Governmentality Studies—this article illustrates the complexity and the ambivalences of a radical politics of rights. Then, by contrasting my ongoing ethnographic research with the work of James Holston and Lucy Earle, I discuss the relevance of a citizenship framework for the MTST’s struggle. Finally, inspired by Foucault’s concept of counter-conducts, the article argues that the movement’s politics of rights represents an effective tactic to contrast neoliberal governmentality and to create radical democratic spaces of struggle and collective resistance. PubDate: 2020-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09356-6
Abstract: Expulsion from the state is approached as a crisis within both human rights and refugee studies, with Hannah Arendt proposing that the ‘loss of national rights was identical with the loss of human rights’ (Arendt 1976, p. 292). This analysis conceptualises the state as a protective structure and seeks to rehabilitate the refugee into the state system, whether within a reformed natal state (through return) or into a new state (through local integration or resettlement), ultimately restoring the refugee as ‘citizen’. This model is rooted in what Nira Yuval-Davis (1997, p. 119) terms ‘the “fraternal” enlightenment project’ and is both western centric and has a male, purportedly universal-imagined citizen at its heart. Postcolonial feminist scholars have articulated the many ways in which third world/non-western women’s relationships to the state are more commonly either distant or repressive. Expulsion from the state may not, for those who have held only notional or marginal citizenship, entail the ‘radical crisis’ of human rights (Agamben 1998, p. 126) that refugee studies and human rights that theories conceive. Moments of rupture and crisis that disrupt powerful sociocultural norms and break the alliance between constraining state and civil society structures (patriarchal ethnic and religious institutions) can also be moments of social transformation and opportunity. This paper explores the social practices and testimonies of refugees in transit in Indonesia to examine the assumptions underpinning citizenship and to question whether the social good that citizenship aims to deliver needs to be tied to the state. PubDate: 2020-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09359-3
Abstract: This paper connects two seemingly distinct categories of subjects—Indigenous people and asylum seekers and refugees—of the Australian state. In our analysis, Indigenous people and refugees and asylum seekers remain disparate subjects that are yet connected through the violent operations of the Australian biopolitical settler state and its ‘liberal art of government’, premised in Foucauldian terms, on the ‘interplay of freedom and security’. The biopolitical caesura upon which citizenship is predicated enables the rationalisation of the violence that is exercised by the liberal state in order to exclude those subjects deemed as ‘enemies of the state’ and as threats to the health, wealth, freedom and security of its citizens. We examine the operations of this biopolitical caesura in the context of the Australian settler-colonial state and its tradition of liberal governance in order to bring into focus both its racialised dimensions—what we term its white racial logic—and its ongoing violent effects on both Indigenous people and asylum seekers and refugees. PubDate: 2020-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09354-8
Abstract: Against the backdrop of interminable war on terror, militarised borderzones and neoliberal and securitarian depoliticisation, migrants, refugees, and other undocumented persons are politicising themselves and conceptions of citizenship in their struggles for rights, recognition and the freedom to move. Although much less a focus of migration and refugee literature, citizens too, and in solidarity with vulnerable migrants, are waging battles and claims-making against the state over competing conceptions of what citizenship can and does mean at certain times and places. This themed special issue offers a collection of articles that explore these emerging, disappearing and reimagined figures of citizenship. It brings into dialogue empirical work on the political struggles and mobilisations underway in several countries, including France, Indonesia, Belgium, Australia and Brazil with theoretical accounts of enacted citizenship, disobedience and dissent; violence and the place of riots; and questions of temporality, indeterminacy, crisis and opportunity when it comes to citizenship and the shared ground on which they come into effect and are enacted. Rather than navigate the struggles of those aspiring to be recognised as citizens, and those wanting to protect their agency as citizens as separate terrains, this collection of articles aims to make a rigorous contribution to contemporary scholarship by situating them together, as part of a common dynamic that is reshaping citizenship, politics and the political. PubDate: 2020-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09352-w
Abstract: This article’s guiding thesis is that the theory of radical democratic citizenship is built on a tension between a radical, conflictual element and a democratic element. As radical democrats, these philosophers point to the intimate relation between conflict and both emancipation and democracy. But as radical democrats, they also propose different methods that prevent conflict from breaking up the polis—the common ground that makes democratic conflict possible. I look at two radical democrats’ way of dealing with this tension: Chantal Mouffe and Étienne Balibar. My claim is that the former ends up overemphasising the danger of division in her later democratic works and is therefore unable to account for more intense forms of democratic resistance (such as riots). In the work of Balibar, however, we find a way of dealing with this tension. PubDate: 2020-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09357-5
Abstract: This article aims to delve deeper in the underexplored but critical role Arctic Council representations and visual images have played over its first 20 years of existence. Through a visual discourse narrative of Arctic Council publications and media platforms, the article will explore how the Artic Council’s self-constructed visual narrative has evolved over the past two decades, moving from a primarily environmentally focused narrative in 1996 to one imbued with political legitimacy and power in 2016 through strategic communications. The research is multidisciplinary and lends its foundation to four areas of study: (i) international relations, power, and the esthetic turn; (ii) art history, identity, power, and iconography; (iii) the history and production of science visuals in the history and philosophy of science; and (iv) geography, imagined geographies, and border studies. While the research is positioned primarily in the first of these areas, the so-called Esthetic Turn of International Relations, its analysis rests at the nexus of all four. By offering an analysis of 20 years of the strategic visual communication of the Arctic Council, this article aims to fill a gap in current scholarship with a case study of strategic communication strategies in visual imagery and political iconography in perceptions of Northern governance. PubDate: 2020-10-23 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09384-2
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