scholarly journals Changing the Subject: Archives, Technology, and Radical Counter-Narratives of Peace

2016 ◽  
Vol 105 ◽  
pp. 11-22
Author(s):  
J. Ashley Foster ◽  
Sarah M. Horowitz ◽  
Laurie Allen

This article argues that performing the recovery of pacifist art and actions through archival research of the modernist era encourages students to engage in radical ethical inquiry.  Based on four sections of a writing class at Haverford College, this article walks the reader through the construction of a student digital humanities and special collections exhibition, Testimonies in Art & Action: Igniting Pacifism in the Face of Total War, which ran from October 6 to December 11, 2015 in Haverford College’s Magill Library.  The exhibition placed archival materials in conversation with the major modernist pacifist documentary projects of Langston Hughes’s Spanish Civil War poetry and dispatches, Muriel Rukeyser’s “Mediterranean,” Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas.  This undertaking was driven by the questions, “How does one respond ethically to total war?” and “How can archival and special collections research do the works of peace?” Built around the work of these classes and materials from Haverford’s Quaker & Special Collections, Testimonies in Art & Action allowed students to deeply interrogate a variety of pacifisms and become producers of a critical discourse that challenges the status quo position that violence is perpetually necessary and the most important aspect of world history. 

Author(s):  
Jennifer Knust

The pericope adulterae (John 7:53–8:11) is often interpreted as an inherently feminist story, one that validates women’s humanity in the face of a patriarchal order determined to reduce sexual sinners and women more generally to the status of object. Reading this story within a framework of queer narratology, however, leads to a different point of view, one that challenges the consequences of seeking rescue from a god and a text that are both quite willing to forge male homosocial bonds at a woman’s expense. As the history of this story also shows, texts and their meanings remain unsettled and therefore open to further unpredictable and contingent elaboration. Pondering my own feminist commitments, I attempt to imagine a world and a story where a woman is a person and Jesus is in need of rescue. Perhaps such a world is possible. Or perhaps it is not.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Rachel A. Schwartz

ABSTRACT The coexistence of predatory informal rules alongside formal democratic institutions is a defining, if pernicious, feature of Latin America’s political landscape. How do such rules remain so resilient in the face of bureaucratic reforms? This article explicates the mechanisms underlying the persistence of such rules and challenges conventional explanations through process-tracing analysis in one arena: Guatemala’s customs administration. During Guatemala’s period of armed conflict and military rule, military intelligence officers introduced a powerful customs fraud scheme that endured for more than 20 years, despite state reforms. Its survival is best attributed to the ability of the distributional coalition underwriting the predatory rules to capture new political and economic spaces facilitated by political party and market reforms. This illustrates that distributional approaches to institutional change must attend to how those with a stake in the status quo may continue to uphold perverse institutional arrangements on the margins of state power.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 4339
Author(s):  
Aditi Khodke ◽  
Atsushi Watabe ◽  
Nigel Mehdi

In the face of pressing environmental challenges, governments must pledge to achieve sustainability transitions within an accelerated timeline, faster than leaving these transitions to the market mechanisms alone. This had led to an emergent approach within the sustainability transition research (STR): Accelerated policy-driven sustainability transitions (APDST). Literature on APDST asserts its significance in addressing pressing environmental and development challenges as regime actors like policymakers enact change. It also assumes support from other incumbent regime actors like the industries and businesses. In this study, we identify the reasons for which incumbent industry and business actors might support APDST and whether their support can suffice for implementation. We examine the actor strategies by drawing empirical data from the Indian national government policy of mandatory leapfrog in internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle emission control norms, known as Bharat Stage 4 to 6. This leapfrogging policy was introduced to speed up the reduction of air pollutants produced by the transport sector. A mixed-methods approach, combining multimodal discourse analysis and netnographic research, was deployed for data collection and analysis. The findings show that unlike the status quo assumption in STR, many incumbent industry and business actors aligned with the direction of the enacted policy due to the political landscape and expected gains. However, the degree of support varied throughout the transition timeline and was influenced by challenges during the transitioning process and the response of the government actors. The case suggests we pay more attention to the actors’ changing capacities and needs and consider internal and external influences in adapting the transition timelines. This study contributes to the ongoing discussion on the implementation of APDST, by examining the dynamism of actor strategies, and provides an overview of sustainability transitions in emerging economies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Muhammad Akrom Adabi ◽  
Neny Muthi'atul Awwaliyah

AbstractThe Qur’an, which has the status of a Muslim holy book, is experiencing "alienation" because it is considered unable to make practical contributions to various new challenges that arise. Al-Qur’an and Pancasila, which are the two important handles of Indonesian Muslims, are expected to not only keep up with the times. More than that, the al-Qur’an and Pancasila must really be able to fill the void and give an active role through its values, to bring the progress of Indonesia with a distinctive personality in the face of the Industrial 4.0 era. This paper tries to review the strengthening of Muslim Hub as a strategy in dealing with Industry 4.0 through contextualization of the values of the Koran and Pancasila. This study uses Max Weber's theory of Protestant ethics. In a book entitled The Protestant Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism, Weber has done a thorough analysis of the relationship between capitalism and religion. AbstrakAl-Qur’an dan Pancasila harus betul-betul mampu mengisi kekosongan dan memberi peran aktif melalui nilai-nilainya, untuk membawa kemajuan Indonesia dengan kepribadian yang khas dalam menghadapi era Industri 4.0. Tulisan ini mencoba mengulas seputar penguatan muslim hub sebagai strategi dalam menghadapi Industri 4.0 melalui kontekstualisasi nilai al-Qur’an dan Pancasila. Dalam penelitian ini ada dua bukti empiris yang pertama order monastic, dimana orang saleh ternyata juga memiliki prestasi yang gemilang dari sisi material. Kedua sekte protestan yang memiliki prestasi yang gemilang dalam fase awal munculnya kapitalisme modern. Penelitian ini menggunakan teori Max Weber tentang etika Protestan. Dalam buku yang berjudul The Protestan Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism, Weber telah melakukan analisa yang mendalam mengenai relasi kapitalisme dan keagamaan yang menunjukkan betapa agama memiliki pengaruh kuat dalam pembentukan karakter pemeluknya. Jika ditarik ke kajian yang lebih luas, maka ideologi memiliki peran kuat dalam mempengaruhi perilaku pengikutnya, baik ideologi keagamaan maupun ideologi kenegaraan. Kata Kunci: Kontekstualisasi, Al-Qur’an, Pancasila, Industri 4.0.


2021 ◽  
pp. 251660692110572
Author(s):  
Mohammad Omar Faruk ◽  
Sanjeev P. Sahni ◽  
Gerd Ferdinand Kirchhoff

Though a few provisions for the victim of crimes were indirectly recognized since the nineteenth century, from 2000 onwards, legal entitlements for crime victims are realized in Bangladesh with a specific focus on women and children. So far, few analyses are found to be performed mainly by the legal experts, emphasizing legal rights and remedies with recommendations for legal reform. However, studies on the status of victims’ rights seem to be incomplete without considering administrative as well as social reality—dominated by colonial legacy and traditional practices—beyond the written clauses in the law books. This study is one of the pioneering attempts in Bangladesh to understand the status of crime victims against the backdrop of recent legal changes and to examine the argument whether the legal provisions itself are enough in providing victims with intended benefits without simultaneous social and administrative changes. Within the theoretical framework of balancing victim’s rights and informal social control (victim blaming), this qualitative study (through content analysis) reviewed all criminal laws and research findings related to victim’s rights within a socio-legal approach in terms of victim’s access, participation, protection, services and compensation. Along with the rights legally granted to victims, available research findings were interpreted in connection to those particular rights. It is found that there are unsupportive social milieu, administrative subculture and political practices, where victims of crime are strongly restrained from enjoying their rights. Particularly, the status of crime victims is found to be undermined in the face of corruption, low public confidence on enforcing agencies, gross withdrawal or discharge of criminal cases on political grounds, limited geographical coverage of victim support services and shelter homes, lengthy process for compensation and unavailability of rules or guidelines to enforce the rights.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-38
Author(s):  
Sonia Zarco-Real

The first literary manifestations to emerge in the context of the Spanish Civil War endeavored to create a legitimizing discourse for each of two contending Spains, the National Spain and the Republican Spain, by means of poetic appropriation of urban spaces. Nevertheless, this was not a Spain divided only in two, between leftists and rightists or Socialists and Cedistas, but rather a territory comprised of many parallel wars sparked prior to 1936. According to historian Enrique Moradiellos, the nuclei of three disparate and opposing political agendas arose from the physical foundation of these two Spains, ‘the reformist-democratic, the reactionary-authoritarian and the revolutionary-collectivist [agendas] that responded to the same triad of models that emerged in Europe in the wake of the devastating impact of the Great War of 1914 and that competed to achieve political and institutional stabilization’ (2004: 125). This ‘reform, reaction and revolution’ triangle that acted as the protagonist of the Great War would also settle into the fratricidal spaces of Spain and its cultural products. In this context, my essay will analyse the mechanisms of appropriation of Madrid’s spaces employed by each of these three political agendas as they are presented in Madrid, de Corte a Checa (1938) by Agustín de Foxá. Following the map of the capital we will see how both, the agenda of a modern anti-traditional space driven by the Second Republic and the anti-bourgeois revolutionary agenda that stood for the destruction of the status quo and the implementation of a Communist Orthodox regime, present a threat to the conservative ideal that represented the monarcho-Catholic centralism of the third agenda. This threat is manifested in the dismantling of Madrid through the ‘de-Hispanicization’ (Foxá) of the mythical spaces of the sacred (churches and convents), historic (statues and palaces) and domestic (house interiors) cityscapes.


Author(s):  
Ronen Pinkas

This article raises the question why is it that, despite Jewish tradition devoting much thought to the status and treatment of animals and showing strict adherence to the notion of preventing their pain and suffering, ethical attitudes to animals are not dealt with systematically in the writings of Jewish philosophers and have not received sufficient attention in the context of moral monotheism. What has prevented the expansion of the golden rule: »Love your fellow as yourself: I am the LORD« (Lev 19,18) and »That which is hateful to you do not do to another« (BT Shabbat 31a:6; JT Nedarim 30b:1) to animals? Why is it that the moral responsibility for the fellow-man, the neighbor, or the other, has been understood as referring only to a human companion? Does the demand for absolute moral responsibility spoken from the face of the other, which Emmanuel Levinas emphasized in his ethics, not radiate from the face of the non-human other as well? Levinas’s ethics explicitly negates the principle of reciprocity and moral symmetry: The ›I‹ is committed to the other, regardless of the other’s attitude towards him. Does the affinity to the eternal Thou which Martin Buber also discovers in plants and animals not require a paradigmatic change in the attitude towards animals?


Soundings ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (75) ◽  
pp. 55-65
Author(s):  
Cheraine Donalea Scott

The recent sounds of BLM protests can be thought of as reconstituting George Floyd's extinguished voice - amplifying his solitary protest against restraint through creating a ruckus that interrupted the wider silencing of Black voices. UK Grime and Rap music is another way in which these silences are being challenged today, in the face of all the attempts to police it and close it down, and to restrict the artistic freedom of young Black musicians, especially as expressed in Drill music. Policing Black sound is part of the wider policing of the black body - and restrictions on Black music are discussed in relation to the many laws on anti-social behaviour that have been enacted since New Labour's first creation of ASBOs. David Starkey's fear about whites becoming black is linked to a long-held fear on the right about the potentially corrupting effect of Black music on white listeners, and its perceived threat to the status quo - the spread of a 'dub virus'.


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