All the world is staged: intellectuals and the projects of ethnography (original) (raw)
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This article addresses the vexed question of relations between critique and political struggle. As emphasis upon the “impact” of research increases, possibilities of integrating research into practices of resistance have been highlighted. Such approaches lend themselves to ethnographic methods, with scholars engaged in these ways offering nuanced reflections on possibilities of “bridging gaps” between research and solidarity. Here, however, I draw on over a decade of “activist” ethnography to highlight risks of conceptual enclosure associated with this move. The politics of struggle are quickly erased through available categories and problematics, which are readily absorbed into existing constellations of power. By contrast, the gaps between solidarity and writing provide spaces for emergence of a critical attitude—along lines sketched by Foucault. Nevertheless, to “apply” Foucault to this sort of ethnography carries a risk of betrayal. Foucault's critical ethos can be neither starting point nor end of engagement with actually existing struggles. Inspired by the philosophical tradition in which Foucault's work was rooted, I advocate a practice that gives weight to ontologies emerging from struggle as conjectures perpetually in question. This implies not closing gaps but a persistent back-and-forth between critique and commitment—risking ourselves as subjects at both ends.
Decolonizing knowledges in feminist world politics
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2018
in May 2016 and is the theme of this special issue arising from it. The continuing annual conferences of this journal seek to identify and coalesce research on emergent and major currents in feminist International Relations (IR) and transnational feminist thought and action. The theme of the 2016 conference and this special issue refers to both sighting decolonizing knowledges already present in feminist world politics inquiry and seeking ways to further decolonize it. Although the "decolonial turn" (Maldonado-Torres 2008) in critical thinking has a long history, embedded in centuries of resistances to colonization and settler colonialism, it is only recently that IR, as a discipline, has been recognized as a fundamentally colonial project. Eurocentric (and later US-centric) colonialism and imperialism both founded and remain constitutive of IR (Barkawi and Laffey 2002; Jones 2006; Tickner 2014). Past and continuing stories of Westphalian "sovereignty and liberal democracy" as the history and foundations of the discipline cover up "the authoritarianism, theft, racism, and in significant cases, massacre and genocide" at the heart of the "colonial state and political economy" that IR represents and legitimizes (Jones 2006, 3-4). Moreover, the structure of contemporary IR knowledge production has been likened to a colonial household in which perspectives of colonized peoples and post-colonial critiques are either consigned to servitude in it or kept outside of it altogether (Agathangelou and Ling 2004). Also relatively recently, feminist studies have been challenged for still present colonial legacies and colonizing moves within it, particularly in the US but also elsewhere. Although gender, ethnic and queer studies have importantly exposed the hegemonies and costs of gendered, racialized, and heteronormative ideologies and structures, without a central interrogation of colonization and particularly settler colonialism, such studies can devolve into "liberal multicultural discourses" that champion "inclusion and equality" within the nation (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 10). These can play into "the expansion of the settler state" by increasing the "opportunity" of previously excluded majorities and minorities to take part in the settling processes that dispossess" Indigenous peoples (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 10). "Indigenous communities' concerns are often not about achieving formal equality and civil rights within a nationstate, but instead achieving substantial independence from a Western nation-stateindependence decided on their own terms" (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 10). Moreover, a neglect of colonialism can mean inattention to the appropriation and destruction of
Human Affairs, 2021
This article describes experiences of long-term ethnographic fieldwork on disobedience, disloyalty and dissensus among women in public space in selected (post-)Yugoslav cities. I focus on the opportunities and pitfalls of feminist ethnography and methodology in the context of positionality, engagement and solidarity as essential elements of research into activist networks. In order to problematize the emerging field positionalities and solidarities, I examine the "militant ethnography" methodological approach (Jeffrey Juris), which seeks to move beyond the divide between research practice and politically engaged participation. It is about being among and within the activist network and adopting many identities and roles by constantly shifting between reflective solidarity and analysis. In trying to shed light on the critical self-reflective research process of embodied understandings and experiences, I focus on ethnographic practices embedded in transnational "crowded fields" that encompass the dynamics of relationships and dependencies between knowledge producers.
Theorizing Transnational Feminist Praxis
2010
Richa Nagar and Amanda Lock Swarr that is premised on a denial and dismissal of the collaborative basis of all intellectual work produced within the institution. This general tendency in the U.S. academy is made more pronounced by a celebrity culture where an internalized need to present oneself as an individual academic star often translates into a drive to abstract and generalize, frequently in opposition to those who are seen as immersed in "grounded struggles." The assumptions and fallacies of a model based on the notion of an individual knowledge producer in academia (feminist studies included) are useful starting points for an interrogation of three sets of dichotomies critical to rethinking the meanings and possibilities of feminist praxis: individually/collaboratively produced knowledges, academia/activism, and theory/method. Such interrogation can also serve as a meaningful entry point from which to consider the relationships between local and global as well as to revisit the politics of authenticity, translation, and mediation with an explicit aim of extending ongoing conversations about the meanings and possibilities of transnational feminist engagements. This volume is an initial step in what we see as our long-term collaborative journey with one another and with collaborators in other academic and nonacademic locations (e.g., Swarr and Nagar 2004; Nagar and Swarr 2004; Bullington and Swarr 2007; Sangtin Writers [and Nagar] 2006) to refl ect on the meanings and implications of these three dichotomies in relation to transnational feminist praxis. We note two phenomena that have been in mutual tension. On the one hand, growing interests in questions of globalization, neo-liberalism, and social justice have fuelled the emergence and growth of transnational feminisms in interdisciplinary feminist studies. On the other hand, ongoing debates since the 980s over questions of voice, authority, representation, and identity have often produced a gap between the efforts of feminists engaged in theorizing the complexities of knowledge production across borders and those concerned with imagining concrete ways to enact solidarities across nations, institutions, sociopolitical identifi cations, and economic categories and materialities. We reconceptualize collaboration as an intellectual and political tool to bridge this gap, with possibilities that exceed its potential as a methodological intervention. We suggest that interweaving theories and practices of knowledge production through collaborative dialogues provides a way to radically rethink existing approaches to subalternity, voice, authorship, and representation. Although such concepts as transnational feminist studies are sometimes invoked as if a subfi eld with shared meanings and assumptions exists, we suggest that the two phenomena noted here have constituted transnational feminisms as a diverse and diffuse fi eld where hierarchies and the consciousness of one's womanhood coincides with the realization that it has already been appropriated in one form or another by outsiders, women as well as men, experts in things Middle Eastern. In this sense, the feminist project is warped and rarely brings with it the potential for personal liberation that it does in this country [U.S.] or in Europe.
Feminist Methodology as a Tool for Ethnographic Inquiry on Globalization
It has been suggested that leading scholars of globalization (such as Anthony Giddens and David Harvey) have tended to write from the vantage of "a privileged airspace above the world they theorize" (Burawoy 2000b:340; see also Lewellen 2002:95 on anthropologists who analyze transnational and global concerns). This observation certainly does not discount the value and usefulness of this body of theoretical discourse generated by sociologists, geographers, and other social scientists. It does, however, emphasize the importance of documenting, elucidating, and explaining the complexities and intricacies of global "forces, connections, and imaginations" (Burawoy 2000a:28, 2000b:342) from a diversity of partial perspectives, grounded in lived, embodied, and differentially situated knowledges (Haraway 1988). Such culturally diverse knowledges and the socially negotiated experiences on which they are based are among the concerns of ethnographic inquiry and the theories and analytical perspectives that inform and compose this approach. As much more than a genre for writing and textualizing culture (Behar and Gordon 1995; Clifford and Marcus 1986), ethnography has long inspired sociocultural anthropologists and, increasingly, researchers in other fields (for example, Brown and Dobrin 2004).
The Strange Case of Ethnography and International Relations (2008)
Over the past couple of decades a growing number of International Relations (IR) scholars have adapted and adopted ethnographic research and writing modes, hoping that ethnography would introduce an emancipatory research agenda and refurbish the discipline's parochial vestiges. This article discusses the promising and problematic implications of this move. It argues that the 'ethnographic turn' in IR ignores recent anthropological literature on the topic and employs a selective and often instrumental notion of what ethnography is and does. By reviewing some of the most prominent ethnographic contributions made by feminist and social constructivist authors, this article demonstrates that, in international relations, the complexity of ethnography has been reduced to (1) an empiricist data-collection machine, (2) a writing style, or (3) a theoretical sensibility. However, this intervention also hopes to encourage students of global politics to rewrite international relations from an ethnographical stance and take full advantage of ethnography's radical promise.
Hypatia
's anthology Decolonizing Feminism: Transnational Feminism and Globalization addresses a broad range of issues that underscore the importance of decolonizing feminist theory. Chapters included in this book examine a wide variety of approaches to decolonizing feminism from a transnational and global perspective. Theorists champion Indigenous feminism, global and communal forms of knowledge, collective movements that emphasize women's rights, citizenship, care chains and democratic processes, home in a global worker context, and the plight of refugee women, to name a few. These issues demonstrate the need for feminism to have a transnational, decolonial, and global lens. McLaren and the authors in the anthology face these challenges head-on. The result is a bold and innovative anthology that makes a significant contribution to feminist philosophy. Decolonizing Feminism links feminism and decoloniality by joining the conversation about decoloniality begun and sustained by Anibal Quijano,
Troubling transnational feminism(s): Theorising activist praxis
This article identifies a misfit between transnational feminist networks observed at the World Social Forum and the extant scholarship on transnational feminism. The conceptual divide is pos-ited as one between transnational feminism understood, on the one hand, as a normative discourse involving a particular analytic and methodological approach in feminist knowledge production and, on the other, as an empirical referent to feminist cross-border organising. The author proposes that the US-based and Anglophone character of the scholarship, its post-structural-ist and post-colonial genealogies, and the transnational paradigm's displacement of area studies can be seen as contributing to the misfit. The article concludes by arguing for theoretical reconsideration of activist practice, place, and the 'posts'-post-structuralism and post-colonialism, in the study of contemporary transnational feminist activisms. This marks an effort to get beyond the binary framework of 'transnational feminism' versus 'global sisterhood' in analysing activist practices on an increasingly diverse and complex transnational feminist field.