Life in a ‘No-go Area’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nida Kirmani
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Robin Hood ◽  
Geographic Mapping ◽  
Academic Study

This chapter by Nida Kirmani offers a rare academic study on Lyari. It historicizes Lyari’s development as a contradictory ‘no-go’ site of resistance, protest and gang warfare. This perspective is organized around two of Lyari’s most notorious protagonists, Rehman Dakait and Uzair Baloch. Drawing on narratives of fear that comprise and interweave into everyday life in Lyari, she analyzes the persistent question of the extent to which gang war constitutes politics, rather than being separate to or an obstacle to politics. Through a portrait of Rehman as a community ‘Robin Hood’ figure, Kirmani’s analysis describes a geographic mapping of the paradox of ‘military-humanitarianism’ at the level of local gang warfare. This both mirrors, and also provokes, some original insights into ways these projects are inextricably linked in national and international politics.

Sir Alfred Zimmern revisited: fifty years on

1986 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 279-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. J. Markwell
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
International Politics ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Academic Study

The publication in 1936 of Sir Alfred Zimmern's The League of Nations and the Rule of Law is now, fifty years on, little mentioned. It was ‘perhaps…the most polished work of the “idealist” writers’ who dominated the academic study of international politics in Britain and America for most of the inter-war years;1 and Zimmern (then Montague Burton Professor of International Relations in Oxford) was ‘the most influential representative of our field’ in that period.

Far from the Caliph's Gaze

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas H. A. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Religious Doubt ◽  
New Model ◽  
Northern India ◽  
Spiritual Leader ◽  
The World ◽  
Minority People ◽  
Academic Study

How do you prove that you're Muslim? This is not a question that most believers ever have to ask themselves, and yet for members of India's Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, it poses an existential challenge. The Ahmadis are the minority of a minority—people for whom simply being Muslim is a challenge. They must constantly ask the question: What evidence could ever be sufficient to prove that I belong to the faith? This book explores how a need to respond to this question shapes the lives of Ahmadis in Qadian in northern India. Qadian was the birthplace of the Ahmadiyya community's founder, and it remains a location of huge spiritual importance for members of the community around the world. Nonetheless, it has been physically separated from the Ahmadis' spiritual leader—the caliph—since partition, and the believers who live there now and act as its guardians must confront daily the reality of this separation even while attempting to make their Muslimness verifiable. By exploring the centrality of this separation to the ethics of everyday life in Qadian, the book presents a new model for the academic study of religious doubt, one that is not premised on a concept of belief but instead captures the richness with which people might experience problematic relationships to truth.

Introduction

Loving Stones ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
David L. Haberman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Principal Characteristics ◽  
Northern India ◽  
Sense Of Reality ◽  
Hindu Deity ◽  
Academic Study

The Introduction provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the conceptions and worship of Mount Govardhan and its many stones. Mount Govardhan is a well-known sacred hill located in northern India and one of the most prominent features of Braj, a cultural region associated with the popular and playful Hindu deity Krishna. While describing and examining some of the principal characteristics of the worship of Mount Govardhan, this book aims to reflect on the gap that exists between the sense of reality one experiences every day while living near the sacred hill and the dominant reality experienced in everyday life in the United States, which fosters a portrayal of such worship as absurd, or even worse. The radical difference that exists between these two views creates a fruitful space for thinking about larger, more general issues encountered in the academic study of religion.

Sensible Politics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Callahan
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Social Ordering ◽  
Visual Artifacts

Visual images are everywhere in international politics. But how are we to understand them? Callahan uses his expertise in theory and filmmaking to explore not only what visuals mean, but also how visuals can viscerally move and connect us in “affective communities of sense.” Sensible Politics explores the visual geopolitics of war, peace, migration, and empire through an analysis of photographs, films, and art. It then expands the critical gaze to consider how “visual artifacts”—maps, veils, walls, gardens, and cyberspace—are sensory spaces in which international politics is performed through encounters on the local, national, and world stages. Here “sensible politics” isn’t just sensory, but looks beyond icons and ideology to the affective politics of everyday life. This approach challenges the Eurocentric understanding of international politics by exploring the meaning and impact of visuals from Asia and the Middle East. Sensible Politics thus decenters our understanding of social theory and international politics by (1) expanding from textual analysis to highlight the visual and the multisensory; (2) expanding from Eurocentric investigations of IR to a more comparative approach that looks to Asia and the Middle East; and (3) shifting from critical IR’s focus on inside/outside and self/Other distinctions. It draws on Callahan’s documentary filmmaking experience to see critique in terms of the creative processes of social-ordering and world-ordering. The goal is to make readers not only think visually, but also feel visually—and to creatively act visually for a multisensory appreciation of politics.

Feminist fatigue(s): reflections on feminism and familiar fables of militarisation

2009 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 611-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARIA STERN ◽  
MARYSIA ZALEWSKI
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Academic Study

AbstractIn this article we critically consider the idea that feminism has performatively failed within the discipline of International Relations. One aspect of this failure relates to the production of sexgender through feminism which we suggest is partly responsible for a weariness inflecting feminist scholarship, in particular as a critical theoretical resource. We reflect on this weariness in the context of the study and practice of international politics – arenas still reaping the potent benefits of the virile political energies reverberating since 9/11. To illustrate our arguments we re-count a familiar feminist fable of militarisation – a story which we use to exemplify how the production of feminist IR is ‘set’ up to ‘fail’. In so doing we clarify our depiction of feminism as seemingly haunted by its inherent paradoxes as well as explaining why it matters to discuss feminism within the locale of the academic study of international politics. We conclude with a consideration of the grammar of temporality that delimits representations of feminism and move to recast feminist failure as aporetic and concomitantly implicated in the process of intervening politically.

Thriving in Academia: Understanding and Managing the Complexities of Faculty Work

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ketevan Mamiseishvili
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Education Research ◽  
Community Engagement ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Work Setting ◽  
Higher Education Research ◽  
Faculty Work ◽  
College And University ◽  
Teaching Research ◽  
University Settings

In this paper, I will illustrate the changing nature and complexity of faculty employment in college and university settings. I will use existing higher education research to describe changes in faculty demographics, the escalating demands placed on faculty in the work setting, and challenges that confront professors seeking tenure or administrative advancement. Boyer’s (1990) framework for bringing traditionally marginalized and neglected functions of teaching, service, and community engagement into scholarship is examined as a model for balancing not only teaching, research, and service, but also work with everyday life.

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