Interview with Rebecca Hope Dirksen

Isabel Machado interviews Rebecca Hope Dirksen on After the Dance, the Drums Are Heavy: Carnival, Politics, and Musical Engagement in Haiti (2020). Interview date: Mar 17, 2021 Dr. Rebecca Dirksen is an ethnomusicologist working across the spectrum of musical genres in Haiti and its diaspora. Her research concerns cultural approaches to development, crisis, and disaster; sacred ecologies, diverse environmentalisms, and ecomusicology; and applied/engaged/activist scholarship. She is a professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington and a founding member of the Diverse Environmentalisms Research Team (DERT).

Down from Liberalism

A review of Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay's "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity–and Why This Harms Everybody."

Intellectuals and their problems

This statement frames Gavin Smith’s thoughtful, complex text Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics: Essays in Historical Realism. Indeed, you could call the book a manual for the forming of a problem from this kind of perspective and with this motivation. To give a comprehensive discussion of how this might happen, Smith brings in a whole range of questions: What is an intellectual? How do intellectuals reach audiences? How are counter-politics situated within time and space, and how should they be studied? By including the domains of intellectuals, political actors, publics, and the constraining tendencies of structure—of “capital’s fierce demands”—in his analysis, while always recognizing the porous and fluctuating boundaries between these domains, Smith (2014: 11) frames the question of activist scholarship and the ongoing historicity of politics in a way that attempts to grasp their changing, tangled, and slippery nature. The result is an immensely rich book that provides a nudge along the path to a complex account of arrangements of capital and political mobilization that it reveals.

The Study of Human Rights Practice: State of the Art

This essay offers a ‘state of the art’ of the study of human rights practice. It begins with delineating human rights practice as an academic perspective, defining its distinct research questions and approaches, and noting in particular the influence of sociological and anthropological standpoints on its development. The essay proceeds by exploring the study of human rights practice as a form of activist-scholarship—bridging the world of academia and practice—and the strengths and risks that such a position entails, and later by characterizing this type of research as a self-critical project, utilizing an insider perspective to identify the weaknesses of the human rights framework but also to avoid abstract gloomy generalizations. The concluding section identifies the themes of pragmatism and radical hope and introduces the contributions to this special issue.