Animal Politics

2019 ◽  
pp. 111-132
Author(s):  
Eva Meijer
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Institutional Violence ◽  
Epistemic Violence ◽  
Direct Violence ◽  
Political Exclusion

Chapter 4 challenges political anthropocentrism. It first discusses critiques of anthropocentric interpretations of politics from the perspective of justice. These critiques are important, but we also need to investigate the power relations that have shaped our understanding of politics, and investigate the different forms of institutional and epistemic violence that play a role in these processes. Our systems of knowledge, which are interconnected with cultural practices, intersect with political exclusion. While humans recognize direct violence towards other animals, institutional violence is often not recognized because it is interconnected with epistemic violence, rendering it invisible. Language plays a role in this process. Other animals are formally excluded from political institutions and practices because they do not speak, which refers back to a view of language as exclusively human, and this view is interconnected with cultural practices and knowledge production. Challenging this requires rethinking politics with other animals. Non-human animals exercise political agency, and recognizing this is part of seeing them as full persons. In addition to analyzing power relations, we should aim to get a better view of what constitutes a good life for them, and develop new forms of politics in interaction with them.

scholarly journals A feminist ethos for caring knowledge production in transdisciplinary sustainability science

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel K. Staffa ◽  
Maraja Riechers ◽  
Berta Martín-López
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Sustainability Science ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The Other ◽  
Academic Cultures ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
Epistemic Violence ◽  
Collaborative Knowledge ◽  
Taking Care

AbstractTransdisciplinary Sustainability Science has emerged as a viable answer to current sustainability crises with the aim to strengthen collaborative knowledge production. To expand its transformative potential, we argue that Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science needs to thoroughly engage with questions of unequal power relations and hierarchical scientific constructs. Drawing on the work of the feminist philosopher María Puig de la Bellacasa, we examine a feminist ethos of care which might provide useful guidance for sustainability researchers who are interested in generating critical-emancipatory knowledge. A feminist ethos of care is constituted by three interrelated modes of knowledge production: (1) thinking-with, (2) dissenting-within and (3) thinking-for. These modes of thinking and knowing enrich knowledge co-production in Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science by (i) embracing relational ontologies, (ii) relating to the ‘other than human’, (iii) cultivating caring academic cultures, (iv) taking care of non-academic research partners, (v) engaging with conflict and difference, (vi) interrogating positionalities and power relations through reflexivity, (vii) building upon marginalised knowledges via feminist standpoints and (viii) countering epistemic violence within and beyond academia. With our paper, we aim to make a specific feminist contribution to the field of Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science and emphasise its potentials to advance this field.

scholarly journals Power, Knowledge, and Epistemic Delinking

2017 ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
Aneta Stojnić
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Epistemic Violence ◽  
Central Argument

In this paper I shall argue that radical epistemic delinking has a key role in liberation from the Colonial Matrix of Power as well as the change in the existing global power relations which are based in the colonialism and maintained through exploitation, expropriation and construction of the (racial) Other. Those power relations render certain bodies and spaces as (epistemologically) irrelevant. In order to discuss possible models of struggle against such condition, firstly I have addressed the relation between de-colonial theories and postcolonial studies, arguing that decolonial positions are both historicising and re-politicising the postcolonial theory. In my central argument I have focused on the epistemic delinking and political implications of decolonial turn. With reference to Grada Killomba I have argued for the struggle against epistemic violence through decolonising knowledge. Decolonising knowledge requires delinking form Eurocentric model of knowledge production and radical dismantling the existing hierarchies among different knowledge. It requires recognition of the ‘Other epistemologies’ and ‘Other knowledge’ as well as liberation from Western disciplinary and methodological limitations. One of the main goals of decolonial project is deinking from the Colonial Matrix of Power. However, delinking is not required only in the areas of economy and politics but also in the field of epistemology. Article received: June 15, 2017; Article accepted: June 26, 2017; Published online: October 15, 2017; Original scholarly paperHow to cite this article: Stojnić, Aneta. "Power, Knowledge, and Epistemic Delinking." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 14 (2017): 105-111. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i14.218

Theorizing untranslatability: Temporalities and ambivalence in colonial literature of Taiwan and Korea

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 162 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pei Jean Chen
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Colonial Literature ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Asymmetrical Power ◽  
A Site ◽  
Transnational Space

This paper theorizes and historicizes the ideas of modern language and translation and challenges the imperialist and nationalistic mode of worlding with the notion of ‘untranslatability’ that is embedded in the linguistic and cultural practices of colonial Taiwan and Korea. I redefine the notion of translation as a bordering system – the knowledge-production of boundaries, discrimination, and classification – that simultaneously creates the translatable and the untranslatable (i.e. the equivalence and incommensurability) in asymmetrical power relations. With this, I discuss how this ambivalence is embodied in the experiences of colonial writers Wu Yung-fu and Pak T’aewŏn and their novellas ‘Head and Body’ (1933) and ‘A Day in the life of Kubo the Novelist’ (1934). I illustrate two characteristics of the ambivalent untranslatability embedded in their novellas: the linguistic untranslatability and the experience of ‘unhomeness’. The linguistic untranslatability and unhomeness, I argue, result in the colonized’s dislocation in homogeneous time-space relationships, resulting to the incompletion of the modernization project through colonialism. At the same time untranslatability offers a site to explore the transnational space that crosses linguistic boundaries, and to caution against the legacy of colonialism.

Encounters Across Borders. Modernist Ideas and Professional Practices in the 1970s Romania

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-420
Author(s):  
Mara Mărginean
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Third World ◽  
Professional Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Flows ◽  
Professional Practices ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
Urban Policies ◽  
European Culture

Building on several international professional meetings of architects organized in Romania or abroad, this article details how various modernist principles, traditionally subsumed to Western European culture, were gradually reinterpreted as an object of policy and professional knowledge on urban space in the second and third world countries. The article analyses the dialogue between Romanian architects and their foreign colleagues. It highlights how these conversations adjusted the hierarchies and power relations between states and hegemonic centres of knowledge production. In this sense, it contributes to the recent research on the means by which the "trans- nationalization of expertise" "transformed various (semi)peripheral states into new centres of knowledge and thus outlines a new analytical space where domestic actions of the Romanian state in the area of urban policies are to be analysed not as isolated practices of a totalitarian regime, but as expressions of the entanglements between industrialization models, knowledge flows and models of territoriality that were not only globally relevant, but they also often received specific regional, national and local forms.

scholarly journals Counter-talk as symbolic boundary drawing: Challenging legitimate cultural practices in individual and focus group interviews in the lower regions of social space

2021 ◽  
pp. 003802612110144
Author(s):  
Riie Heikkilä ◽  
Anu Katainen
Keyword(s):  
Focus Group ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Focus Group Interviews ◽  
Moral Boundaries ◽  
Popular Classes ◽  
Group Interviews ◽  
Symbolic Boundary

In qualitative interviews, challenges such as deviations from the topic, interruptions, silences or counter-questions are inevitable. It is debatable whether the researcher should try to alleviate them or consider them as important indicators of power relations. In this methodological article, we adopt the latter view and examine the episodes of counter-talk that emerge in qualitative interviews on cultural practices among underprivileged popular classes by drawing on 49 individual and focus group interviews conducted in the highly egalitarian context of Finland. Our main aim is to demonstrate how counter-talk emerging in interview situations could be fruitfully analysed as moral boundary drawing. We identify three types of counter-talk: resisting the situation, resisting the topic, and resisting the interviewer. While the first type unites many of the typical challenges inherent to qualitative interviewing in general (silences, deviations from the topic and so forth), the second one shows that explicit taste distinctions are an important feature of counter-talk, yet the interviewees mostly discuss them as something belonging to the personal sphere. Finally, the third type reveals how the strongest counter-talk and clearest moral boundary stemmed from the interviewees’ attitudes towards the interviewer herself. We argue that counter-talk in general should be given more importance as a key element of the qualitative interview. We demonstrate that all three types of counter-talk are crucial to properly understanding the power relations and moral boundaries present in qualitative interviews and that cultural practices are a particularly good topic to tease them out.

A Critique of Raz’s Liberal Perfectionism: Morality and Politics

1996 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-364
Author(s):  
Bi‐Hwan Kim
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Objective Knowledge ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Joseph Raz ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Liberal Perfectionism

Joseph Raz Has Long Been Well Known as a Legal philosopher and theorist of practical reason. But it is only in the last decade that he has come to be widely identified as the most prominent defender of a distinctive interpretation of the liberal tradition. Raz wholeheartedly endorses the communitarian view that the individual is a social being, who needs society to establish his/her self-identity and to gain objective knowledge of the good, rather than a self-contained subject abstracted from any specific social experience. Unlike neutralist liberals, such as Rawls and Dworkin, he rejects ‘the priority of right over the good’, stressing the interdependent relationship between right and the good. Yet he remains very much a liberal in his commitment to the value of autonomy (or freedom) and argues powerfully for the desirability (or necessity) of incommensurable plural conceptions of the good life for the well-being of people, as well as for the liberal virtue of toleration, and for their attendant liberal democratic political institutions.

scholarly journals Site of Resistance or Apparatus of Acquiescence? Tactics at the Bakery

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Ciro Martínez
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Resistance State ◽  
Laws And Regulations

This article explores the importance and impact of a set of actions through which bakers manipulate laws and regulations that seek to organize and regulate how they do business. It builds on eighteen months of fieldwork conducted in Jordan, twelve of which were spent working in three different bakeries in the capital, Amman. Moving away from the idea that public policies are simply imposed, the article looks in detail at the social relations through which they are enacted. By honing in on the bakery, and examining arrangements between bakery owners, workers, consumers and ministerial employees, it illuminates modes of political agency that escape conventional binaries of domination/resistance, state/society and legality/illegality. I argue against seeing these practices as easily categorized forms of resistance or frivolous acts of corruption. Nor are they simply reinforcements of hegemonic control. Instead, ‘tactics’ at the bakery subvert the order of things to serve other ends. Foregrounding them in this analysis seeks not only to challenge views of power relations as strictly binary but to elucidate some of the ways in which citizens inhabit and engage with the neoliberal and authoritarian logics that pervade everyday life in Jordan.

Civic Cultures and Skills in European Digital Rights Campaigning

2014 ◽  
pp. 273-295
Author(s):  
Yana Breindl
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Technical Skills ◽  
Digital Rights ◽  
Telecommunications Regulation ◽  
Eu Legislation ◽  
Copyright Enforcement ◽  
Gain Access ◽  
Law Making

Technical skills are increasingly necessary to successfully intervene in policy-making, especially when dealing with technical matters such as Internet or telecommunications regulation. Skills are rooted in experience and cultural practices. Dahlgren's concept of civic cultures is used in this chapter to investigate the cultural underpinnings of the emergent European digital rights movement that has repeatedly targeted EU legislation on copyright enforcement, software patents, and the Internet. The values and identity of the movement are investigated along with the way knowledge and information are processed and trust established through repeated practices in a variety of online and offline spaces. The analysis illustrates how digitally skilled actors can substantially affect policy-making by disrupting the course of parliamentary law-making at the European level. However, technical skills need to be complemented by social and political competencies to gain access and provide convincing input to political institutions that increasingly rely on extra-institutional expertise.

scholarly journals A critical reflexive politics of location, ‘feminist debt’ and thinking from the Global South

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 394-412
Author(s):  
Sumi Madhok
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Global South ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Conceptual Work ◽  
Politics Of Location

In this article, I raise a question and acknowledge a ‘feminist debt’. The ‘feminist debt’ is to the politics of location, and the question asks: what particular stipulations and enablements does a critical reflexive feminist politics of location put in place for knowledge production and for doing feminist theory? I suggest that there are at least three stipulations/enablements that a critical reflexive politics of location puts in place for knowledge production. Firstly, it demands/enables scholarly accounts to reveal their location within the prevailing entanglements of power relations and to highlight the politics of struggle that underpin these. Secondly, it demands/enables conceptual work from different geographical spaces – and in particular, it facilitates the production of conceptual work in non-standard background contexts and conditions. And finally, a critical reflexive politics of location demands/enables a methodological response to capture the different conceptual and analytical and empirical knowledges produced in different locations.

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