Cultural Borders

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-205
Author(s):  
Charles E. Scott
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gloria Anzaldua ◽  
Relations Of Power

Abstract This essay is motivated by the question, how might we describe the occurrences of cultural borders? It is organized in three sections with these titles: A. Borders of Concealment and Translation; B. Attunement with Fragmented, Differential Borders; C. Metaphors, Relations of Power, Borderlands. I limit these topics by focusing primarily on cultural borders and transformations within the United States. My aims within the context of these situated accounts are to encourage greater awareness of borders as events that often have shared and describable characteristics, to make evident a group of issues that need further philosophical attention, to develop an enlarged philosophical vocabulary for such thought in comparison to that in standard use, and to bring to the fore questions of cultural sensibility and their transformations. In this process I address and utilize specific works by Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gloria Anzaldúa.

Democracy

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Norton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Left And Right ◽  
Anglo American

This chapter examines how the Muslim question is tied to the question of democracy. In his book Voyous (translated as Rogues), Jacques Derrida referred to the United States and Islam as the enemies of democracy. In particular, he called Islam “the other of democracy.” Only Islam, Derrida insisted, refuses democracy. Derrida was not the only scholar to have made that claim. His account echoes Samuel Huntington. John Rawls thought Islam so alien that he was obliged to treat it separately. There are countless scholars, left and right, Anglo-American and Continental, who have insisted that Islam is the other of democracy. The chapter suggests that political philosophy in the Muslim (but not simply Muslim) tradition offers visions of democracy, cosmopolitanism, immigration, and integration that are remarkably familiar.

scholarly journals Being-Disrupted and Being-Disruptive: Coping Students in Uncertain Times

SAGE Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824401882237
Author(s):  
Magnar Ødegård
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Disruptive Behavior ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Skillful Coping ◽  
The World

In the light of Martin Heidegger and Hubert Dreyfus’s concepts of being-in-the-world and skillful coping, this article addresses disruptions students face in modern society. Such disruptions involve pressure for achievement and lack of belonging to communities. In the discussion, the article presents the terms being-disrupted and being-disruptive. These terms outline ways students could cope with disruptions in their everyday practices. These practices include students’ relations to society and other people. Further elements addressed in the discussion are students’ interrelatedness with the world, their moods, and willingness to take risks. The article is part of the research project “A Comparative Study of Disruptive Behavior Between Schools in Norway and the United States.”

Decolonial Theology in the North Atlantic World

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-88
Author(s):  
Joseph Drexler-Dreis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The United States ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
General Perspective

Abstract This essay develops a response to the historical situation of the North Atlantic world in general and the United States in particular through theological reflection. It offers an overview of some decolonial perspectives with which theologians can engage, and argues for a general perspective for a decolonial theology as a possible response to modern/colonial structures and relations of power, particularly in the United States. Decolonial theory holds together a set of critical perspectives that seek the end of the modern/colonial world-system and not merely a democratization of its benefits. A decolonial theology, it is argued, critiques how the confinement of knowledge to European traditions has closed possibilities for understanding historical encounters with divinity, and thus possibilities of critical reflection. A decolonial theology reflects critically on a historical situation in light of faith in a divine reality, the understanding of which is liberated from the monopoly of modern/colonial ways of knowing, in order to catalyze social transformation.

scholarly journals Organizing alternatives : examining normative and alternative nonprofit organizing practices

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Peter Jensen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Institutional Logics ◽  
Organizational Level ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Social ◽  
Organizational Problem ◽  
Communicative Constitution ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relations Of Power

Homelessness presents a massive organizational problem in the United States, with over 400,000 men, women, and children making use of shelter services each night. In this study, I take a comparative ethnographic approach to study how the use of the organizing Discourses of feminism, paternalism, neoliberalism, and anarchism result in more normative or alternative organizing practices. My project examines the organizing practices at two shelters for homeless women. One shelter is affiliated with an international religious nonprofit organization and self-identified anarchists run the other. Using the communicative constitution of organization (CCO) and institutional logics theories, I propose a theoretical framework for understanding how organizing Discourses are enacted or resisted at the organizational and individual level. My findings highlight how the institutional logics of responsibility, social welfare, and market manifest in different and sometimes paradoxical organizing practices based on the Discourse that is being translated. In this project, I highlight and critique how Discursive translations of institutional logics structure relations of power that impact agency at the individual and organizational level. My project has implications for understanding why the United States organizes around the social problem of homelessness the way it does, and explores alternatives to normative nonprofit organizing practices.

Anzaldúa and Transnational American Studies

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (1) ◽  
pp. 260-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debra A. Castillo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gloria Anzaldua ◽  
Academic World ◽  
Academic Collaboration ◽  
Border Theory ◽  
Transnational American Studies ◽  
Political Work ◽  
To Come

For several years now, at least since the 2000 census, the United States has in one way or another told itself that it needs to come to terms with what it means to live in a country of over forty million Latinos/as. Latina actors grace the covers of People magazine, Latin beats percolate through the earbuds of iPods, and McDonald's serves up breakfast burritos alongside its McMuffins. In the academic world, the increasing consciousness of the Latino/a presence in the United States means that it is now unthinkable for any major university not to have a program of studies focusing on the histories and cultures of this ill-defined population; it means border theory is increasingly present on our syllabi; and it means that we all nod our heads wisely when the name “Gloria Anzaldúa” is mentioned. For years before her untimely death, Anzaldúa complained bitterly about being “repeatedly tokeni[zed]” (“Haciendo Caras” xvi), as one of the same half dozen women continually called on as a resource for academic collaboration. Being a token meant that she saw clearly how she was both overhyped and treated less than seriously; worse, she felt drained of the energy that would allow her to continue her literary and political work.

The competing meanings of “biopolitics” in political science: Biological and postmodern approaches to politics

2012 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 2-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurette T. Liesen ◽  
Mary Barbara Walsh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
American Political Science

The term “biopolitics” carries multiple, sometimes competing, meanings in political science. When the term was first used in the United States in the late 1970s, it referred to an emerging subdiscipline that incorporated the theories and data of the life sciences into the study of political behavior and public policy. But by the mid-1990s, biopolitics was adopted by postmodernist scholars at the American Political Science Association's annual meeting who followed Foucault's work in examining the power of the state on individuals. Michel Foucault first used the term biopolitics in the 1970s to denote social and political power over life. Since then, two groups of political scientists have been using this term in very different ways. This paper examines the parallel developments of the term “biopolitics,” how two subdisciplines gained (and one lost) control of the term, and what the future holds for its meaning in political science.

scholarly journals Associationalism and Panopticism in American Democracy: An Analysis of Jewish Power

Perceptions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Ramey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
The Political ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
American Jews

This paper combines the theories of Alexis de Tocqueville and Michel Foucault to explain the political power Jewish associations have accrued in the United States. By applying Tocqueville’s idea of associationalism and Foucault’s interpretation of panopticism together, it is possible to analyze how the majority and minority access and respond to power in American Democracy. Through associationalism, American Jews could make themselves visible without breaching any norms—and could become part of the structure of panoptic surveillance as well. Jewish experiences as a diaspora people prepared Jewish associations for the challenges of assimilation and political organizing. This research draws upon mostly Tocqueville and Foucault’s classic texts, articles on Jewish studies, and primary sources including memoirs.

Between Biography and Ethnography

2008 ◽  
Vol 101 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 377-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gloria Anzaldua ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Repressed Memories ◽  
The World ◽  
Border Culture ◽  
Divinity School ◽  
Point Of Departure

My point of departure in this essay is Davíd Carrasco's Convocation Address at the Harvard Divinity School in September 2006. Speaking of the borderlands between Mexico and the United States, Carrasco projects an image of a vexed and ambiguous zone that is not merely geographic or political; it defines an existential situation of being betwixt and between, of struggle and suffering, that Karl Jaspers sums up in the term Grenzsituationen (borders/limit situations). The frontier throws up images of borderline experiences, of a destabilized and transgressive consciousness in which “dreams, repressed memories, psychological transferences and associations” possess greater presence than they do in ordinary waking life, and religious experiences emerge from the unconscious like apparitions. This interplay between borderlands and borderline phenomena—between “the differences we have with others and the conflicts within ourselves” also finds expression in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. “Mestiza consciousness,” she observes, may be identified with a “juncture … where phenomena collide.” This implies “a shock culture, a border culture, a third country” where migrants find themselves at the limits of what they can endure, border patrol agents are stretched beyond the limits of what they can control, and intellectuals find that orthodox ways of describing and analyzing the world do not do justice to the experiences involved.

Varieties of Order: Balance of Power, Hegemonic, and Constitutional

After Victory ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 21-49
Author(s):  
G. John Ikenberry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
State Power ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Power And Authority

This chapter discusses the order-building strategies of the leading postwar states and variations in the character of postwar order. Across the great historical junctures, leading states have adopted different strategies for coping with the uncertainties and disparities of postwar power and, as a result, have built different types of postwar orders. Variations in the extent to which leading states attempted to build order around binding institutions are manifest in the divergent order-building efforts of Britain in 1815 and the United States in 1919 and 1945. The chapter then distinguishes three types of order: balance of power, hegemonic, and constitutional. Each represents a different way in which power is distributed and exercised among states—differences, that is, in the basic organizing relations of power and authority. They also differ in terms of the restraints that are manifest on the exercise of state power and in the sources of cohesion and cooperation among states.

The competing meanings of “biopolitics” in political science: Biological and postmodern approaches to politics

2012 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 2-15
Author(s):  
Laurette T. Liesen ◽  
Mary Barbara Walsh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
American Political Science

The term “biopolitics” carries multiple, sometimes competing, meanings in political science. When the term was first used in the United States in the late 1970s, it referred to an emerging subdiscipline that incorporated the theories and data of the life sciences into the study of political behavior and public policy. But by the mid-1990s, biopolitics was adopted by postmodernist scholars at the American Political Science Association's annual meeting who followed Foucault's work in examining the power of the state on individuals. Michel Foucault first used the term biopolitics in the 1970s to denote social and political power over life. Since then, two groups of political scientists have been using this term in very different ways. This paper examines the parallel developments of the term “biopolitics,” how two subdisciplines gained (and one lost) control of the term, and what the future holds for its meaning in political science.

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