Working against and with the State

A handful of Canadian church congregations provide sanctuary to failed asylum seekers. Many also participate in resettling refugees through a government program called private sponsorship. Both sanctuary and sponsorship arise as specific modes of hospitality in response to practices of exclusion and inclusion under national migration regimes. Sanctuary engages oppositional politics, whereby providers confront and challenge state authority to exclude. Refugee sponsorship embodies a form of collaborative politics, in which sponsorship groups partner with government in settlement and integration. I demonstrate how the state’s perspective on asylum versus resettlement structures the relationship between citizen and state and between citizen and refugee. I also reveal that there is more collaboration in sanctuary and resistance in sponsorship than might be supposed.

A history of lesbian politics and the psy professions

This article explores the relationship between lesbian activists and the “psy professions” (especially psychology and psychiatry) in England from the 1960s to the 1980s. We draw on UK-based LGBTQIA+ archive sources and specifically magazines produced by, and for, lesbians. We use this material to identify three key strategies used within the lesbian movement to contest psycho-pathologisation during this 30-year period: from respectable collaborationist forms of activism during the 1960s; to more liberationist oppositional politics during the early 1970s; to radical feminist separatist activism in the 1980s. Whilst these strategies broadly map onto activist strategies deployed within the wider lesbian and gay movement during this time, this article explores how these politics manifested in particular ways, specifically in relation to the psy disciplines in the UK. We describe these strategies, illustrating them with examples of activism from the archives. We then use this history to problematise a linear, overly reductionist or binary history of liberation from psycho-pathologisation. Finally, we explore some complexities in the relationship between sexuality, activism and the psy professions.

Anthropology and the Educational Encounter

This chapter focuses on the author's experiences teaching, researching, and moving between different spaces in Education City, Doha, as it developed and changed during the period of the author's fieldwork. It looks at how Qatar Foundation responded to criticisms, primarily from segments of the citizenry that felt left out of knowledge economy development, through the development of Hamad bin Khalifa University (HBKU). HBKU's formation reconfigured space within the Education City compound and changed the author's everyday mobility within it, as it did her students' and colleagues'. The chapter explores these changes in order to consider how anthropological categories of difference and the university's approach to incorporating oppositional politics migrated along with American institutions, disciplinary formations, and faculty and administrators. While many of these changes, such as moves to segregate formerly coeducational spaces, may have appeared to Western academics as a backlash that fit into their exceptionalizing ideas of Qatari culture and gender norms, or failure of liberalism in illiberal space, oppositional logics were not always pegged to conservative religiosity but rather part of critiques of broader imperial practices within certain, and not all, parts of the country.

Mood work and political spaces: A consideration of the relationship between affect and political collectivity in grassroots urban activism

This essay, based on a ‘militant ethnography’ of the small radical grassroots activist group Our London,1 outlines the importance of mood in developing political collectivity in oppositional politics. Applying Gilbert’s notion of affect as key to sociality, Highmore’s discussion of mood and mood work and Dean’s concept of affective infrastructure, I develop an account of Our London’s activities, and in particular its organisation of public events, that argues for the production of mood in political spaces as key to mobilising political collectivity. The significance of this work is in showing how oppositional political practices, as opposed to mere rhetoric or discourse, can develop forms of political collectivity and action; this is also a study of how forms of class politics can be performed and practised despite the difficulty of articulating such politics discursively – or even conceptualising society in class terms – in the context of a fragmented, neoliberal, post-Fordist city like London.

The Politics of Transgender Asylum and Detention

Immigration procedures related to asylum and detention are based on sex/gender binaries. Such binaries frame the bodies of undocumented transgender asylum seekers as unintelligible to immigration law and subject them to intense trauma. The experiences of trauma and death of transgender detainees within detention centers is a spatialized experience. The assignment of detention cells based on birth gender, denial of hormones and live saving treatments constitute a racialized and gendered torture upon the body of the transgender detainee. The article attends to the narratives of transgender detainees within detention cell by analyzing the script of “ Tara's Crossing,” a play based on the narratives of transgender detainees and asylum seekers. The play was produced by LGBTQ immigrant right activists soon after the attacks on 9/11 and the intensification of detention and deportation as a part of national security procedures. Drawing upon the script of Tara's Crossing, along with activist archives such as flyers, newsletter articles, and radio interviews of Balmitra Vimal Prasad, the protagonist of the play, the article analyzes the ways in which the sex/gender binary is reiterated within the detention cell, as well as asylum procedures. I turn to the activism around Tara's Crossing and the present-day activism of transgender immigrants in order to show how trauma experienced by transgender detainees holds potential for creating coalitional oppositional politics.

Exhausted Montage

This essay argues that the conditions of contemporary finance capitalism have exhausted the revolutionary potential of political modernist aesthetics. The global ’68 conjuncture generated many of the fundamental concepts that continue to underscore how contemporary radical film practice is understood. As such, montage continues to occupy a central place in today’s radical aesthetic imagination, its model of active spectatorship still accepted as a vital expression of an autogestive oppositional politics. However, the economic and political landscape has changed significantly over the last fifty years such that the radical potential of political modernist aesthetics needs to be reevaluated. To this end, this essay examines how the shift from industrial to finance capitalism transforms montage and its concomitant investment in spectatorial autonomy into a conservative affirmation of the neoliberal subject. Now resembling the pattern hunters of speculative finance, the active spectator of political modernist cinema is today compromised by the new conditions of volatility, instability, hyperindividualism, and privatization that demand the same cognitive labor. In exploring how neoliberal ideology has absorbed and reframed the driving logics of 1968, this essay argues that montage’s radical political potential has been exhausted by the conditions of contemporary finance capitalism and instead calls for alternative modes of aesthetic engagement better equipped to at once express and oppose these new conditions of exploitation.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of entrepreneurial citizenship. Entrepreneurial citizenship promises that citizens can construct markets, produce value, and do nation building all at the same time. It attempts to hail people's diverse visions for development in India—desires citizens could channel toward oppositional politics—and directs them toward the production of enterprise. In this way, entrepreneurial citizenship becomes one attempt at hegemony, a common sense that casts the interests of ruling classes as everyone's interests. However, this entrepreneurialism is not only a project of the self but also a project that posits relations between selves and those they govern, guide, and employ. Champions of innovation and entrepreneurship often leave this hierarchy implicit or deny its existence, leaving the problems it raises unaddressed. This book depicts the practices by which institutions, organizations, and individuals selectively invest only in some people, some aspirations, and some projects in the name of development.