Precarity, hospitality and the becoming of a subject that matters: A study of Syrian refugees in Lebanese tented settlements

How is it possible to gain a sense that you have a voice and that your life matters when you have lost everything and live your life as a ‘displaced person’ in extreme precarity? We explore this question by examining the mundane everyday organizing practices of Syrian refugees living in tented settlements in Lebanon. Contrasting traditional empirical settings within organization studies where an already placed and mattering subject can be assumed, our context provides an opportunity to reveal how relations of recognition and mattering become constituted, and how subjects in precarious settings become enacted as such. Specifically, drawing on theories on the relational enactment of self and other, we show how material-discursive boundary-making and invitational practices—organizing a home, cooking and eating, and organizing a digital ‘home’—function to enact relational host/guest subject positions. We also disclose how these guest/host relationalities create the conditions of possibility for the enactment of a subject that matters, and for the despair enacted in everyday precarious life to transform into ‘undefeated despair’.

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Censored: Whistleblowers and impossible speech

Human Relations ◽

10.1177/0018726717733311 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 71 (8) ◽

pp. 1025-1048 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Kate Kenny

Keyword(s):

Empirical Research ◽

Speech Act ◽

Financial Sector ◽

Organization Studies ◽

Subject Positions ◽

Self And Other ◽

Working Through ◽

Recruitment Practices

What happens to a person who speaks out about corruption in their organization, and finds themselves excluded from their profession? In this article, I argue that whistleblowers experience exclusions because they have engaged in ‘impossible speech’, that is, a speech act considered to be unacceptable or illegitimate. Drawing on Butler’s theories of recognition and censorship, I show how norms of acceptable speech working through recruitment practices, alongside the actions of colleagues, can regulate subject positions and ultimately ‘un-do’ whistleblowers. In turn, they construct boundaries against ‘unethical’ others who have not spoken out. Based on in-depth empirical research on financial sector whistleblowers, the article departs from existing literature that depicts the excluded whistleblower as a passive victim – a hollow stereotype. It contributes to organization studies in a number of ways. To debates on Butler’s recognition-based critique of subjectivity in organizations, it yields a performative ontology of excluded whistleblower subjects, in which they are both ‘derealized’ by powerful norms, and compelled into ongoing and ambivalent negotiations with self and other. These insights contribute to a theory of subjective derealization in instances of ‘impossible speech’, which provides a more nuanced conception of excluded organizational subjects, including blacklisted whistleblowers, than previously available.

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Breaching Boundaries in Muslim and Christian Tourism from Indonesia to Israel and Palestine

TRaNS Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia ◽

10.1017/trn.2021.12 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-16

Author(s):

Mirjam Lücking

Keyword(s):

Middle East ◽

Social Identities ◽

Symbolic Boundaries ◽

Spatial Mobility ◽

Self And Other ◽

Cultural Boundary ◽

Boundary Making

Abstract Studies on tourism and pilgrimage show that spatial mobility, including transregional travel, mostly confirms and strengthens tourists’ and pilgrims’ social identities and symbolic boundaries between Self and Other. However, in guided religious package tours from Indonesia to Israel and Palestine, experiences with spatial boundaries do affect the Muslim and Christian pilgrims, adding more nuances to socio-cultural boundary-making. This complex making and breaching of boundaries relates to inner-Indonesian religious dynamics. Among both Muslim and Christian Indonesians, references to the Middle East express not only transregional solidarity but also multifarious orientations in inter and intra-religious relations within Indonesia. Among Indonesian Muslims, some orthodox Muslims’ orientations towards the Middle East as the birthplace of Islam are contested but also combined with indigenous Islamic traditions. Similar to these intra-Muslim frictions, members of Indonesia's Christian minority experience fissures in the expressions of local and global Christian identities. This article analyses how symbolic, social, and spatial boundaries are maintained and breached in transregional tourism from Indonesia to the Middle East.

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“I Was Raised in Addiction”: Constructions of the Self and the Other in Discourses of Addiction and Recovery

Qualitative Health Research ◽

10.1177/1049732320948829 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 30 (14) ◽

pp. 2278-2290

Author(s):

Adams L. Sibley ◽

Christine A. Schalkoff ◽

Emma L. Richard ◽

Hannah M. Piscalko ◽

Daniel L. Brook ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Substance Use ◽

Lived Experiences ◽

The Self ◽

The Other ◽

People Who Use Drugs ◽

Opioid Epidemic ◽

Subject Positions ◽

Self And Other ◽

Good Samaritan ◽

Social Discourses

The aim of this article is to address how conceptualizations of addiction shape the lived experiences of people who use drugs (PWUDs) during the current opioid epidemic. Using a discourse analytic approach, we examine interview transcripts from 27 PWUDs in rural Appalachian Ohio. We investigate the ways in which participants talk about their substance use, what these linguistic choices reveal about their conceptions of self and other PWUDs, and how participants’ discursive caches might be constrained by or defined within broader social discourses. We highlight three subject positions enacted by participants during the interviews: addict as victim of circumstance, addict as good Samaritan, and addict as motivated for change. We argue participants leverage these positions to contrast themselves with a reified addict-other whose identity carries socially ascribed characteristics of being blameworthy, immoral, callous, and complicit. We implicate these processes in the perpetuation of intragroup stigma and discuss implications for intervention.

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Scheherazade’s Achievement(s): Practices of Care in Fatema Mernissi’s Memoir, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, and her Creative Non-Fiction, Scheherazade Goes West

English in Africa ◽

10.4314/eia.v47i3.7s ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 47 (3) ◽

pp. 121-143

Author(s):

Tina Steiner

Keyword(s):

Role Model ◽

Life Writing ◽

Social Contexts ◽

Self And Other ◽

Western Modernity ◽

Non Fiction ◽

The Everyday ◽

Creative Non Fiction ◽

Conditions Of Possibility ◽

Different Cultures

The Moroccan feminist sociologist Fatema Mernissi (1940–2015) is probably best known for her pioneering scholarly work on gender equality in Islam. This paper, however focuses on her life writing: her memoir, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, published in 1994 and her reflections on its Eurocentric reception, which culminated in the publication of her work of creative non-fiction Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems in 2001. Written in popular genres in accessible registers, Mernissi’s texts translate her scholarly feminism into stories of the everyday in order to encourage her readers to see possibilities of feminist practices within and against oppressive social structures. Both texts deal with the way in which women’s agency is circumscribed by particular horizons of constraint determined by their social contexts and thus the texts contrast local, particular forms of constraint with more diffuse forms of oppression that characterise western modernity. This paper offers a reading of her harem childhood to trace some of the alternative modes of enacting small freedoms that the memoir documents. As becomes apparent in Mernissi’s reflections on the memoir’s reception, these achievements seem to be largely illegible within meritocratic scripts of success. In contrast, Mernissi asserts that care for self and other – via modes of storytelling, performance, artistic production and looking after one’s physical wellbeing – mark direct, albeit subtle, forms of resistance even if they are not recognised as such. Drawing on a popular cultural repertoire, the well-known figure of Scheherazade emerges in Mernissi’s texts as a central role model for women crafting pockets of resistance and webs of care. In this way, Mernissi’s texts offers a Moroccan perspective on the debate of the conditions of possibility of ordinary feminist practices inspired by popular artistic forms. Keywords: Fatema Mernissi, life writing, Scheherazade, ethics of care, storytelling, Moroccan feminism

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Constructing cultural Self and Other in the Internet discussion of a Korean historical TV drama

Journal of Asian Pacific Communication ◽

10.1075/japc.19.2.03lin ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 19 (2) ◽

pp. 289-312 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Angel Lin ◽

Avin Tong

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

Cultural Identities ◽

Cultural Identification ◽

Discursive Construction ◽

General Sense ◽

Web Based ◽

Subject Positions ◽

Self And Other ◽

Internet Discussion ◽

Cultural Self

In this paper messages from viewers of the popular Korean historical TV drama — Dae Jang Geum (Da Chang Jin) — in a Hong Kong web-based discussion forum are analyzed to see how some Hong Kong viewers construct their Chinese cultural identities through discursive moves of positioning (Harrè and van Langenhove, 1999). Different subject positions are adopted by these forum discussion participants to draw, maintain, and shift the boundary between “self” and “other” in different storylines projected in their messages. In asserting their Chinese cultural identities they also seem to be engaged in discursive construction of cultural others (e.g. Japanese, Koreans). We problematize these constructions as double-edged in their possible consequences: while they seem to cultivate a sense of Chinese cultural solidarity (albeit only temporarily), they also show the danger of constructing a hegemonic Sino-centric discourse of Great China culturalism. The cultural identification patterns of these Hong Kong viewers also seem to be unstable, ambivalent and contradictory, perhaps reflecting Hong Kong people’s general sense of ambivalence and fluidity in their negotiation of cultural identities.

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Syrian Displacement, Gender and Boundary-Making in the Turkish Borderlands

Anthropology of East Europe Review ◽

10.14434/aeer.v37i1.33502 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 37 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Şule Can

Keyword(s):

Forced Migration ◽

Subject Position ◽

Syrian Refugees ◽

The European Union ◽

Durable Response ◽

Contested Spaces ◽

Syrian Civil War ◽

Border Zones ◽

Boundary Making ◽

Ethnographic Analysis

This article presents a reflexive ethnographic analysis of ‘refugee lives’ and borders and boundary-making in the Turkish borderlands. Since 2011, the humanitarian crisis as a result of the Syrian civil war, and the arrival at the European border zones of refugees crossing the Mediterranean, have occupied the news outlets of the world. Today the European Union and Turkey look for permanent ‘solutions’ and emphasize ‘integration’ as a durable response to forced migration. This essay explores reflexive dimensions of long-term-fieldwork with Syrian refugees at the Turkey-Syria border through an analysis of ethnographic encounters and the politics of belonging and place-making. Borders are often contested spaces that complicate the researcher’s positionality, which oscillates between a politically engaged subject position and the ‘stranger’ who encounters the ‘other’ and must negotiate her space. By examining the Turkish-Syrian border and Syrian refugees’ experiences in the border city of Antakya, this article offers a critical lens to view the identity and politics of the researcher and embodied geopolitics.

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