Language as Power: Construction of Social Reality on Riffat Abbas Poetry "A Dream on the Intersection of Past and Future"

The poetic approach to constructing social reality is a significant source of reflection on the livedexperience of voiceless ordinary men and women. Poetic expression becomes a source of power andresistance expressed through language. Social reality expressed in poetry constructs a vision of historybeyond time. The civilizational heritage of Multan dates back to the time of Rag Ved. The City's richesattracted many conquerors, subdued but never defeated. As Poet himself is the product of land andculture, Riffat Abbas's poetry expresses all the imprints that land has carved on his Cognition. His poetryrepresents the phenomena of continuity and preservation of cultural heritage in the face of all historicalupheavals. The paper aims to analyze the social reality constructed in Riffat Abbas's poetry opting forthe method of discourse analysis given by Mitchel Foucault to study the progressive trends on socialattributes, societal relations, and socio-political system.

Religious Dimensions in Transhumanist and Posthumanist Philosophies of Science

The article discusses transhumanism and posthumanism as marginal trajectories of the modern philosophy of science, which, however, distinctly influence the mainstream narrative of science and societal relations. Among the decisive determinants of this impact is trans/posthumanism’s para-religious content that replenishes a conceptualised process of cutting-edge scientific practices and ideals. In particular, transhumanism and posthumanism evolve as ideological exploiters of seemingly obsolete forms of religiosity, for they simultaneously exploit and reinvent the entire apparatus of the scientific, political, and moral activity in Western societies. Avant-garde secular worldviews tend to be religious in the sense that their ultimate quest is the transformation of humans into certain historical entities, which are capable of rearranging their own systems of order.

The Who? Didactics, differentiation and the biopolitics of inequality

The three didactic questions – what?, how? and why? – are increasingly supplemented with a fourth: who? Drawing on Therborn’s distinction between difference and inequality, as well as on biopolitical theory, the present paper engages critically with the didactic who?-question. The paper situates the who?-question in broader discussions of educational differentiation, suggesting that it encompasses a tension between the recognition of difference and (re)production of inequality. Arguably, this tension becomes visible, and possibly more navigable, when we pose “Therbornian questions”. The paper further suggests that the who?-question can be understood, in biopolitical terms, as a technique for constructing various student populations as appropriate for different kinds of education. Such management of difference, the paper warns, can easily slip into a biopolitics of inequality. Despite our critical observations, we conclude that there might still be radical potential in the who?-question, provided that it is handed over to the students and that careful attention is paid to societal relations.

Resilience unwanted: Between control and cooperation in disaster response

This article conceptualizes resilience as an emergent and contingent practice that shapes societal relationships in unexpected ways. It focuses on the case of the 2013 floods in Dresden, a city that witnessed three major floods within 11 years. Emergent volunteer activities on the ground and on social media played a significant role during the flood emergency response efforts. Drawing on Philippe Bourbeau’s definition of resilience as a process of patterned adjustment, the article regards these emergent structures as incidents of resilience. In the case of Dresden, not only was resilience not explicitly requested by the state, but it was in several incidents actively not wanted. While most of the volunteering activities arising from social media platforms intended to support the disaster management authorities, the case shows how subversive forms of resilience were mobilized to resist official plans. They finally urged authorities to adapt to a new social and technological reality in order to render unaffiliated volunteering governable. Resilience thus emerges as an adaptive process that shapes and is shaped by societal relations. The article thus seeks to add another facet to the debate on resilience by demonstrating how resilience helps us to make sense of complex and interdependent adaptation processes.

Theorizing large-scale societal relations through the conceptual lens of cross-border assemblages

The concept of assemblage has recently become fashionable in studies of cross-border, global and transnational relations. In addressing the most important elements of this approach, the article provides an analytical vocabulary for analysing the processes of societalization in the context of global and transnational realms. After critically reflecting on the classical sociological approaches to society and social differentiation, the article argues that, because of its poststructuralist basis, the concept of assemblage is the appropriate conceptual tool for studying societal macro-relations of power and inequality while avoiding the modernist heritage of classical social theory. Furthermore, by synthesizing poststructuralist thinking, intersectional theory and multiscalar approaches to space, the article suggests that the assemblage theory can be used to better understand the current forms of cross-border social inequalities in the multiple and partly overlapping contexts of postcolonialism, postsocialism and the EU political project. In a nutshell, it is not a plea to adopt the assemblage approach as a new ‘grand theory’ but rather as a flexible conceptual tool that allows an inductive theory-building.

Reverberating Historical Privilege of a “Middling” Sort of Settler Family

Critical family history illuminates societal relations of inequality through focusing on the experiences and trajectories of particular families. Here, I focus on unequal relations between white settler colonizers and indigenous communities within Aotearoa, New Zealand. I use data gathered from family wills and archival research to sketch aspects of the economic privilege of branches of my own ancestral families in contrast to the economic dispossession and injustices faced by the Māori communities alongside whom they lived. The concept of historical privilege forms the analytic basis of this exploration, beginning with the founding historical windfalls experienced by the Bell and Graham families through their initial acquisition of Māori lands and the parallel historical trauma experienced by Māori at the loss of these lands. I then explore how these windfalls and traumas underpinned the divergent economic trajectories on both sides of this colonial relationship, touching on issues of family inheritance and structural and symbolic privilege. Neither the Bells nor the Grahams accumulated significant wealth, but the stories of such “middling” families are helpful in illuminating mechanisms of historical privilege that we inheritors of such privilege find it difficult to “see” or remember.

Transnational securitisation of identity: distinctions between securitisation and ‘othering’ of Shias in Bahrain and Pakistan

This paper aims to shed light on the phenomenon of transnational securitisation of identity and how it influences state-level securitisation and communal ‘othering’. We propose a more nuanced understanding of state-societal relations by viewing ‘othering’ as a by-product of various types of securitisation of identities, as opposed to the normative assumption within existing scholarship that applies these concepts interchangeably. This provides a more discernible lens through which certain cultural processes of discrimination are articulated, manifest and evaluated. The basis for our analysis is presented by comparing the persecution levelled against Shia communities within Bahrain and Pakistan, respectively. In the case of Bahrain, transnational securitisation amplifies pre-existing state securitisation, with external agents – in this context, Saudi Arabia – harnessing the hard power tactic of military intervention, as witnessed during the 2011 uprisings. Whereas in the case of Pakistan, transnational securitisation is performed by utilising soft power mechanisms, namely the legacy of petro-dollar wealth that has been used as a form of extremist proselytisation. The proliferation of jihadist non-state actors that pose an existential threat to Shia communities in Pakistan in recent years is a testament to this. In this way, the process bypasses state institutions to induce bottom-up, communal ‘othering’.

The local translation of global indigeneity: A case of the Chittagong Hill Tracts

Indigeneity, a concept and construct, is increasingly gaining currency in academia, in the political sphere, and in public debates. Indigeneity as an active political force with international support has become a resource in identity politics. This article focuses on the dynamics of how the transnational idea of indigeneity has been nationally installed and locally translated within the context of the ethnohistory of an Indigenous movement that stemmed from local–societal relations with the state. The idea of indigeneity is seen as both local and global because it is globally circulated but locally articulated as well as globally charged but locally framed. Focusing on the Chittagong Hill Tracts, in the borderlands of South and Southeast Asia and home to 11 Indigenous groups in Bangladesh, the article argues that the local translation of global indigeneity is necessary for ensuring the rights and entitlements of Indigenous Peoples.