The Potential of Friendship: A Case for Social Resilience and New Care Optics

In this article, we call for greater recognition of friendship as a basic social relation that should play a pivotal role in re-imagining social resilience if it is to be future-proof in the face of social upheaval, such as the current pandemic. Drawing on existing research and early scoping of emergent information about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, we suggest that friendship is an important component of heterogenic social realities. The specific focus of our discussion is twofold. Firstly, attention is paid to the narrow lens of social policy that privileges particular familial set-ups and living arrangements, and in doing so marginalises groups which are already disenfranchised; secondly, we consider the dangers of nationalism and Eurocentrism as they relate to these issues. We suggest that thinking in terms of friendship can open up new avenues of academic and political imagination, offering strategies with greater potential for building socially resilient communities.

Review of Andreas Musolff. 2021. National conceptions of the body politic. Cultural experience and political imagination. Cham, Springer. ISBN 978-981-15-8739-9 ISBN 978-981-15-8740-5 (eBook)

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Thinking Otherwise: Speculative Imagining in PfC

<p>In the face of looming ecological catastrophe, ever-expanding neoliberalism and the ongoing integration of our lives into virtual spaces, there is an urgent need to expand people’s political imagination and responsiveness to these challenges. Engaging with philosophy outside the academic sphere – for example, in school and community contexts – can contribute to addressing this political need. Using the example of Philosophy for Children (PfC), an international educational movement, this thesis explores the potential for cross-paradigmatic approaches to philosophical inquiry. It observes that adherence to particular philosophical paradigms, as has largely been the case in PfC, binds the imagination to particular epistemic and political parameters and precludes ideas that contradict paradigmatic assumptions. Invoking the sensibility of Gillian Rose, I argue that we need a philosophy that permits people to imagine radically different political worlds in a manner that actively resists political ‘bubble-think’. This thesis illustrates how Rose’s cross-paradigmatic approach, speculative negotiation, can help to address some of the limits of paradigm thinking by inspiring a more transformative philosophy in contexts such as PfC. In doing so, this thesis contributes both to an expansion of the PfC programme and to questions surrounding the concrete practise of Rose’s rich theoretical oeuvre.</p>

Thinking Otherwise: Speculative Imagining in PfC

<p>In the face of looming ecological catastrophe, ever-expanding neoliberalism and the ongoing integration of our lives into virtual spaces, there is an urgent need to expand people’s political imagination and responsiveness to these challenges. Engaging with philosophy outside the academic sphere – for example, in school and community contexts – can contribute to addressing this political need. Using the example of Philosophy for Children (PfC), an international educational movement, this thesis explores the potential for cross-paradigmatic approaches to philosophical inquiry. It observes that adherence to particular philosophical paradigms, as has largely been the case in PfC, binds the imagination to particular epistemic and political parameters and precludes ideas that contradict paradigmatic assumptions. Invoking the sensibility of Gillian Rose, I argue that we need a philosophy that permits people to imagine radically different political worlds in a manner that actively resists political ‘bubble-think’. This thesis illustrates how Rose’s cross-paradigmatic approach, speculative negotiation, can help to address some of the limits of paradigm thinking by inspiring a more transformative philosophy in contexts such as PfC. In doing so, this thesis contributes both to an expansion of the PfC programme and to questions surrounding the concrete practise of Rose’s rich theoretical oeuvre.</p>

Of Passport and Politics: Faith and Politics Among the ‘Neo-Salafis’ of South India

There is a major assumption regarding the politics of the neo-Salafis in South India (especially in Kerala) widely shared in the political, media and academic circles; their everyday life and religiosity do not provide a conscious address to things such as state and politics and they are confined to the social and religious sphere rather than the political one . The recurring question in this study is, therefore, how to make sense of the political expressions of a group, which apparently shows no direct inclination towards the ‘mainstream’ politics. This study also tries to address the ambiguity about the role of Salafi ideology in everyday conduct of politics among the neo-Salafis. What is the position of Salafism in the scheme of political thinking and how it relates to the political imagination of neo-Salafis, are examined taking cues from the experience of some of the neo- Salafist groups, which keep a strong open disbelief in the secular polity.

Temple Run

Amongst young people in Freetown, ‘Temple Run’, a mobile phone game that requires the player to run for their life across treacherous obstacles, is used as code for the perilous journey that an increasing number of young Sierra Leoneans made to Europe via Libya. Through ethnographic accounts, the article discusses the role of dreams of migration in Freetown youths’ articulations of a distinctive political imagination through which they at once critique and re-imagine their relation to the state and assert their identity and expectations as Sierra Leonean citizens. These narratives are rooted in everyday experiences of neglect and state violence but also embody a long history in the region of intersections between migration, insecurity, and contestations of power. Exploring migration as discourse, separate from practice, the paper shows how migration imageries become incorporated into expressions of presence rather than simply longings for absence and into normative ideas of citizenship.

Radicalism, Respectability, and the Colour Line of Critical Thought: An Interdisciplinary History of Critical International Relations

The epithet ‘critical’ has become both coveted and contested. A long-established lodestone of personal, political, and professional commitment within academia, its meanings are multiple, and its histories are poorly understood. This article reconstructs an interdisciplinary history of debates concerning what it is to ‘be critical’, beginning in the 1930s but focusing on the late 1960s to the late 1990s. It argues the significance of the category ‘critical’ to be that it can connote political radicalism while allowing for a degree of professional respectability. Furthermore, the article shows that claims and counterclaims upon the parameters of criticality have privileged certain thought traditions. In particular, while contemporary discourses of ‘anti-wokeness’ caricature critical academics as being prepossessed with issues of coloniality and race, traditions of thought dealing with these issues have, until recently, been rather marginalised. The enduring ‘colour line’ of critical thought is not only unjust but also deleterious to political imagination.