Theory as Technology? (original) (raw)
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Infrastructure and Power in the Global South
2019
The study of infrastructure by the humanists and social scientists was incubated some twenty years ago in the field of STS (science and technology studies). Interest in infrastructure has ballooned since then, with STS scholars entering into conversation with area studies, post/colonial studies, and other scholarship on the “Global South.” These conversations have produced dramatic new understandings of what “infrastructures” are, how to theorize them, and how to analyze them as conduits of social and political power. This course offers a graduate-level introduction to these conversations, drawing primarily on works from STS, anthropology, history, geography, and (to a lesser extent) architecture & urban studies.
Participation in Panel IX-B-2 Energy Sector Reforms in Africa: Key Innovations and Crucial Challenges 11/18/2017 - 8:30 AM Chair: Christopher Gore, Ryerson University Power to the People?: The Provision of Electricity and Political Participation in Africa Kirk Harris, Indiana University Bloomington and Lauren Morris MacLean, Indiana University Evolving Institutions and Livelihoods in Two Oil-Bearing Communities: Gamba, Gabon and Takoradi, Ghana Joseph Mangarella, Leiden University - African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL) Contesting Neoliberalism: The Case of Electricity Sector Reform in Africa Christopher Gore, Ryerson University and Lauren Morris MacLean, Indiana University The African Commission on Nuclear Energy: An Assessment Jo-Ansie van Wyk, University of South Africa
"Where There is Fire, There is Politics": Ungovernability and Material Life in Urban South Africa
This article combines theories of liberal governance, material life, and popular politics to examine the unruly force of fire in state-citizen struggles. Tracking interactions between state agents and activist networks during South Africa’s celebrated democratic transition, I analyze how the urban poor leverage the material properties of fire to secure techno-institutional claims to energy infrastructure, and more broadly to political inclusion and economic redistribution. I highlight how fire, as a social and historical as well as a chemical process, becomes a staging ground for the promise and endangerment of infrastructure. Approaching fire as intertwined with power, I argue, illuminates how those living on the margins of the city come to inhabit political roles that transform economic relationships in the context of liberalism. Key words: democracy; energy; material life; race; urban poverty
ACLA 2016: Plato and Kafka: The Dialectics of Withdrawn Revelation
Both Plato’s dialogues, as ancient literary philosophy, and Kafka’s stories, as modern philosophical literature, incorporate divine revelation as part of a dialectical dissection of values. Plato's dialogues repeatedly invoke, then scrutinize presumably divine imperatives for action: supernatural lawgivers are dismissed in the Laws and the afterlife is emphatically a myth or story in three different tellings in the Republic, Phaedo, and Gorgias; the Oracle at Delphi and Socrates’ sign in the Apology both seem to provide a privileged connection to the divine, yet are undercut as simple imperatives by tendentious philosophical interpretation, just as “piety” is interrogated in the Euthyphro. Kafka, analogously, approaches revelation in several stories and withdraws it quite clearly. He brings us to the outwards signs of it, to the need for it, to the aesthetics of it ("In the Penal Colony," “Before the Law,” and “Jackals and Arabs”) but also to the fact the modern world cannot accept it. Contrasting these two thinkers’ reworkings of culturally accepted theological imperatives from different eras and genres provides insight into their shared dialectical method. Each includes the framework and aspects of supernatural revelation, then subverts through further plot turns (Kafka) or philosophical discussion (Plato) the presumed commandment predicated on access to the divine. Each has moments where they swing the focus, unexpectedly, to the animal. The unusual negation of the human but retention in anthropomorphism, hybridity, metaphor, or parable, demonstrates the work of thought, askew from where we expected it to be. The self-conscious poesis in each is part of an attempt to shift perspective internally, addressing life and the negative of death through already internalizing the animal, in a proliferating dialectic. Their procedure--part game, part indictment--forces us interlocutors to return through their methods of negation and reengaging the non-human world, to think the person-animal, animal-person, and thus rethink the human in the unrevealed political world.
When Liberation Means Defecation: Western Feminism’s Fascination with (Nude) Bodies in Egypt
When Liberation Means Defecation: Western Feminism’s Fascination with (Nude) Bodies in Egypt
In 2011, in the wake of Egypt’s uprising, an Egyptian self-styled feminist by the name of Alia El Mahdy decided to post pictures of herself nude on her Facebook page in an act of ‘freedom’. This bellow for ‘freedom’, and the subsequent outcry against it, allowed her to put forward an application for ‘political’ asylum in Sweden which was swiftly granted. In the comfort of Sweden in 2014, Alia El Mahdy posted pictures of her nude body once again, bleeding on the flag of the Islamic State. This latest expose was part of El Mahdy’s work with Femen, the Ukranian based feminist group. Both instances are part of the continued fascination of Western feminism’s desire to liberate individuals of a lower racial hierarchy as an act that defines both the ‘political’ and as a corollary ‘freedom’. In this liberation the West is rendered as the guardian of ‘freedom’. In that instance a racialized other that lacks ‘freedom’ and ‘political’ awareness is performed. El Mahdy’s body becomes an articulation of how this freedom is imbricated with the West’s own contradictions when it comes to balancing rhetoric of openness and the question of Arab refugees. Yet El Mahdy’s interprelation of the ‘political’ and ‘freedom’ is not germane nor is it as seamless as the West makes it seem, contrary to Sweden’s asylum standards which do not include Syrians or Iraqi fleeing the region. This paper traces the infrastructure that is necessary for such an interpellation and the repression of other cases of ‘freedom’ such that this instance become possible. By looking at the operation of the foreign donor community in Egypt, local comprador NGOs and missionizing Western development practitioners a material infrastructure is revealed that is invested in repressing other cases of ‘freedom’ such that El Mahdy’s appear as indigenous.
Introduction to Latin American Studies and the Humanities: Past, Present, Future.pdf
Latin American Research Review, 2018
This essay outlines the three articles in this dossier, “Latin American Studies and the Humanities: Past, Present, Future.” The authors, working in different disciplines, contribute to debates about how to reconceptualize area studies. Each article considers how area studies might be enriched by considering different spatial scales and incorporating methodologies drawn from ethnic studies disciplines. Our introduction explains how each essay contributes to our understanding of five key issues in Latin American studies: (1) the relationship between the field’s regionally bound framework and emerging conceptual paradigms like the global South; (2) the potential for interdisciplinary, rather than multidisciplinary, research; (3) how to place Latin American studies in dialogue with ethnic studies; (4) how to rethink the origins of Latin American studies by tracing the long history of Latin America–generated knowledge about the region; and (5) how recent indigenous studies approaches might decolonize the field of Latin American studies. El presente ensayo ofrece un resumen de los tres artículos, escritos por investigadores de diversas áreas académicas, incluidos en el dossier “Latin American Studies and the Humanities: Past, Present, Future” (Estudios latinoamericanos y las humanidades: Pasado, presente, futuro). En su conjunto y desde sus particulares perspectivas disciplinarias los ensayos contribuyen a notables debates actuales en los estudios latinoamericanos, planteando así cómo podemos enriquecer nuestras investigaciones a través de diferentes escalas espaciales-temporales y con diferentes métodos, incluyendo varias metodologías derivadas de los estudios étnicos. El presente ensayo introductorio explica cómo los tres ensayos contribuyen a nuestro conocimiento de cinco temas claves en los estudios latinoamericanos, incluyendo: (1) la relación entre las tradicionales demarcaciones geográficas de los estudios latinoamericanos y nuevos paradigmas conceptuales, entre ellos el Sur Global; (2) la posibilidad de mayores investigaciones interdisciplinarias en vez de trabajos multidisciplinarios; (3) los vínculos entre los estudios latinoamericanos y los estudios étnicos; (4) cómo una nueva historia de los saberes latinoamericanos, así generados en la región, nos ayudará repensar los orígenes de los estudios latinoamericanos; (5) cómo nuevos matices en los estudios indígenas podrán descolonizar los estudios latinoamericanos.
Interface: a journal for and about social movements , 2017
After three long years as a Cambridge English student, the thing that is most memorable about my degree and the thing that has caused me the most frustration is just how unbearably white the curriculum is. Myself and countless others have written at length about the ways in which a white curriculum is nothing more than the maintenance of structural and epistemological power. Decolonising the curriculum is a process -a process that requires thought and consideration. It means rethinking what we learn and how we learn it; critically analysing whose voices are given priority in our education and for what reason. It is not an easy process and why should it be?