scholarly journals “Breonna Taylor Could Have Been Me”: Bearing Witness to Faith in Black (Feminist) Futurity at the Speed Art Museum’s Promise, Witness, Remembrance Exhibit

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 980
Author(s):  
Michael Brandon McCormack
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
The State ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Felt Sense ◽  
Crisis Of Faith ◽  
A Site

This article explores the Speed Art Museum’s exhibit, Promise, Witness, Remembrance, as a site of meaning-making in the wake of the state-sponsored killing of Breonna Taylor. The article focuses on how the curators engaged the felt sense of vulnerability to premature death among Black viewers identified with Taylor in ways that held in tension a crisis of faith in, and an insistence upon, Black futurity.

Development Against Violence: Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship (PMRDF) in India

2020 ◽  
pp. 154231662097264
Author(s):  
Hena Khatun ◽  
Jyotirmaya Tripathy
Keyword(s):  
Rural Development ◽  
West Bengal ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
The State ◽  
Local People ◽  
Broad Theory ◽  
The Subject ◽  
A Site ◽  
Development State

This article advances the literature on development vis-à-vis Naxal violence in India by using the Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship (PMRDF) as a site of developmental meaning making. In the process, it reappraises the idea of the development state, its relation with violence, and its ways of vernacularizing itself through PMRDF. Drawing from the experience of three PMRD Fellows from West Bengal and interrogating existing scholarship on the subject, we argue that development matters in people’s lives and is a bulwark against violence, something which legitimates the development state. We also propose that far from being an arm of the security state as some critiques promote, PMRDF was an interactive space that brought the state and people to conversation and offered development actors who discovered themselves among local people rather than within bureaucracy. What is attempted here is not a broad theory which guides local developmental practices but a grounded approach that can work as a contingent model to understand conflict and development and how they relate to people’s place within the state.

scholarly journals Poetry as Praxis + “Illumination”: Toward an Epistemically Just Health Promotion for Resistance, Healing, and (Re)Imagination

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 20S-26S
Author(s):  
Ryan J. Petteway
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Health Promotion ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Black Feminist Theory ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Creative Power ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
A Site

Health promotion is facing a most challenging future in the intersections of structural racism, COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019), racialized police violence, and climate change. Now is a critical moment to ask how health promotion might become more responsive to and representative of people’s daily realities. Also how it can become a more inclusive partner in, and collaborative conduit of, knowledge—one capable of both informing intellects and transforming hearts. It needs to feel the pulse of the “fierce urgency of now,” and perhaps nothing can reveal this pulse more than the creative power of art—especially poetry. Drawing from critical and Black feminist theory, I use commentary in prose to conceptualize and call for an epistemically just health promotion guided by poetry as praxis—not just as method. I posit that, as praxis rooted in lived realities, poetry becomes experiential excavation and illumination; a practice of community, communion, and solidarity; a site and source of healing; and a space to create new narratives of health to forge new paths toward its promotion. I accordingly suggest a need to view and value poetry as a critical scholarship format to advance health promotion knowledge, discourse, and action toward a more humanized pursuit—and narrative—of health equity.

scholarly journals Remittance Houses and Transnational Citizenship: Mapping Eritrea’s Diaspora–State Relationships

2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-80
Author(s):  
Milena Belloni
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Transnational Citizenship ◽  
A Site

Can diaspora houses be used as a site to explore transnational citizenship? Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Eritrea, this article shows that different kinds of remittance houses reify different categories of transnational citizens with various sets of rights and duties. Drawing on studies on state–diaspora relations and remittance houses, I illustrate the key role that housing plays in the Eritrean state’s efforts to build a loyal diaspora. By looking at housing projects (state-led and individual) over the last thirty years, the article shows how different groups of emigrants – based on their relationship to the state of origin as well as their status in their country of residence – have been more or less able to realise their aspirations to build a house back home. By doing this, I show the importance of considering remittance houses as not only transnational cultural artefacts but also political claims to membership.

Gendered Secularization and the Body Policing of Muslim Women

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raissa Killoran
Keyword(s):  
Muslim Women ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Cultural Symbols ◽  
Religious Symbols ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Many ◽  
A Site

The many usages of the term ‘secularism’ have generated an ambiguity in the word; as a political guise, it may be used to engender anti-religious fervor. Particularly in regards to veiling among female Muslim adherents, the attainment of a secular state and touting of the necessity of dismantling religious symbols have functioned as linguistic shields. By calling a “burka ban” necessary or even egalitarian secularization, legislators employ ‘secularization’ as jargon for political ends, enacting a stance of supremacy under the semblance of progress. Secularization has come to function as a political tool - in the name of it, governments may prescribe which cultural symbols are normative and which are of ‘other’ cultures or religious origins. As such, the identification of some religious symbols as foreign and others as normative is a usage of secularization for normalization of dominant religious expression. In this, there is an implicit neocolonialism; by imposing standards of cultural normalcy which are definitively nonMuslim, such policies attempt to divorce Muslims from Islam.  Further, I intend to investigate the gendered aspect of secularization politics. By critiquing clothing and body policing of women, I will demonstrate how secularization projects use the female body and dress as a site for display. By rendering the female physically emblematic of the honor and virtue of an ‘other’ culture, those enacting secularization norms target women’s bodies to act as visual exhibitions of the dominant culture’s hegemony. Here, we see gendered secularization at work - female bodies become controlled by the antireligious zeal of the state, while the state carries out this control on the predicate that it is the religious group enacting unjust control. As such, the policing of female Muslim bodies is symbolic of the policing of Islam as a whole; it acts as an illustration of an imposed, gendered secularization project.

“An Inside Thing to Live by”: Refusal, Conjure, and Black Feminist Imaginaries among Granny Midwives

Hypatia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Lindsey Stewart
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Politics Of Recognition ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Conjure Woman ◽  
Birthing Practices ◽  
American Thought

Abstract “Granny midwives” often based their authority to practice midwifery on the spiritual traditions of rootwork or conjure passed down by the foremothers who trained them. However, granny midwives were compelled to give up their conjure-infused methods of birthing if they wanted to become licensed (that is, to get a “permit”) or be authorized by the state to continue their practice of midwifery. In response, some granny midwives refused to recognize the authority of the state in the birthing realm, willfully retaining rootwork in their birthing practices. In this article, I contrast the response of granny midwives, a politics of refusal, with another major tradition in African American thought, a politics of recognition, such as gaining citizenship and rights, permits, and licenses from the state. Due to the political stakes of the granny midwife's conflict with the state, I argue that black feminists often endow the figure of the granny midwife (or more broadly, the conjure woman) with the political significance of refusal in our emancipatory imaginaries. To demonstrate this, I will analyze the interventions in black liberation politics that two black feminist writers make through their invocation of granny midwives: Zora Neale Hurston's essay, “High John de Conquer,” and Toni Morrison's novel, Paradise.

Contending with Carcerality: Discursive Resistance to Elite Appropriation of Antiviolence Activism in Indian Media

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780122110260
Author(s):  
Chiara C. Packard
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Cultural Struggle ◽  
Carceral Feminism ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
A Site ◽  
The U.S

Research has revealed how antiviolence activism can become entangled with the state's punitive agenda, leading to what some have called “carceral feminism.” However, this scholarship focuses primarily on the U.S. context. Additionally, few studies examine the cultural battles about gender-based violence that emerge in television media, a site of cultural struggle and meaning making. This study conducts a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 46 Indian television panel broadcasts following a highly publicized rape in New Delhi in 2012. I find that elite state actors pursue punitive agendas, but feminists and other panelists engage in discursive resistance to this approach.

Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba'thist State

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hawraa Al-Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
The State ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Material Form

The book examines the trajectory of the state sponsored novel in Iraq and considers the ways in which explicitly political and/or ideological texts functioned as resistive counter narratives. It argues that both the novel and ‘progressive’ discourses on women were used as markers of Iraq’s cultural revival under the Ba‘th and were a key element in the state’s propaganda campaign within Iraq and abroad. In an effort to expand its readership and increase support for its pan-Arab project, the Iraqi Ba‘th almost completely eradicated illiteracy among women. As Iraq was metaphorically transformed into a ‘female’, through its nationalist trope, women writers simultaneously found opportunities and faced obstacles from the state, as the ‘Woman Question’ became a site of contention between those who would advocate the progressiveness of the Ba‘th and those who would stress its repressiveness and immorality. By exploring discourses on gender in both propaganda and high art fictional writings by Iraqis, this book offers an alternative narrative of the literary and cultural history of Iraq. It ultimately expands the idea of cultural resistance beyond the modern/traditional, progressive/backward paradigms that characterise discourses on Arab women and the state, and argues that resistance is embedded in the material form of texts as much as their content or ideological message.

The community strike: From precarity to militant organizing

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 159-177
Author(s):  
Marcel Paret
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Informal Settlements ◽  
The State ◽  
A Site ◽  
Collective Actor

How do insecure layers of the working class resist when they lack access to power and organization at the workplace? The community strike represents one possible approach. Whereas traditional workplace strikes target employers and exercise power by withholding labor, community strikes focus on the sphere of reproduction, target the state, and build power through moral appeals and disruptions of public space. Drawing on ethnography and interviews in the impoverished Black townships and informal settlements around Johannesburg, I illustrate this approach by examining widespread local protests in South Africa. Insecurely employed and unemployed residents implemented community strikes by demanding public services, barricading roads and destroying property, and boycotting activities such as work and school. Within these local revolts, community represented both a site of struggle and a collective actor. While community strikes enabled economically insecure groups to mobilize and make demands, they also confronted significant limits, including tensions between protesters and workers.

scholarly journals To Build a Notion: US State Department Nation Building Expertise and Postwar Settlements in 20th Century East Central Europe

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-89
Author(s):  
Liliana Riga ◽  
James Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
State Department ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
The State ◽  
Freedom Of Information ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
Comparative Historical Sociology ◽  
Knowledge Practices ◽  
Collection Practices ◽  
A Site

This article offers a contribution to the sociology of social science knowledge practices and expertise through the empirical lens of US nation building policies. Drawing on archival materials, including the State Department's Freedom of Information Act documents, and interviews with key policymakers we offer a comparative historical sociology of the US State Department as a site of nation building knowledge and expertise. In examining the evolving character of nation building expertise in three key moments across the twentieth century, we find that as nation building expertise and its attendant knowledge practices were redefined and institutionally relocated, the essential character of the expertise and data collection practices that were valorized shifted from social scientism in the 1910s to geopolitical empiricism in the 1940s to liberal legalism in the 1990s. This changing character of nation building knowledge practices at the State Department had an effect on the substance of US nation building policy.

scholarly journals Trends in modern theatrical interpretation of A. P. Chekhov's play “Uncle Vanya”

Litera ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 28-36
Author(s):  
Natalia Gavrilova
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Stage Directors ◽  
Separate Object ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Xix Century

This article is dedicated to the analysis of trends in interpretation of A. P. Chekhov's play “Uncle Vanya” in modern theater. The subject of this research is the four theatrical productions of the play on the national stage: by Rimas Tuminas in Vakhtangov Theatre (2009), by Andrei Serban in Alexandrinsky Theater (2009), by Andrei Konchalovsky in Mossovet State Academic Theatre (2009) by Stéphane Braunschweig in the State Theatre of Nations (2019). These productions reflect the eternal existential questions raised in A. P. Chekhov’s play, as well as the relevant transformations in modern perception of the play. Examination of the aforementioned productions, as well as their analysis in the context of Chekhov's play and modern life realities in comparison with such in the XIX century, has not previously become a separate object of research. The scientific novelty consists in comprehension of the message delivered by play written in the late XIX century for the XXI century, as well as in determination of problems relevant to a contemporary person that are raised in the play. Using the meaning-making topics of the play, stage directors imply death of kindness, deterioration of nature and human, human disunity and misunderstanding. Therefore, the play “Uncle Vanya” indicates its timeliness and everlasting lifelikeness for the XXI century.

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