« October 2009 | Main | December 2009 »
This weekend for your reading pleasure:
Have a good weekend!
Photo credit: Robert Graham
And on the basis of the number crunching undertaken by the CHE, Politics at Newcastle University was included in the 'Excellence Group' with particular kudos awarded for the volume of publications and the rate at which these are cited by others in the field.
While these academic ranking tables are often a better of reflection of the team doing the measurement than the relative qualities of the departments being measured, it is still nice to have the efforts of one's colleagues publicly recognized as excellent by an independent evaluator.
Photo credit: rselph
On 19-20 November, 2009, Politics at Newcastle University hosted the second annual World Politics and Popular Culture conference. The event was an overwhelming success by all accounts. There were more than 14 panels, 60 delegates, 40 paper presenters, and two keynote addresses. Participants came from far and wide: North America and the Middle East as well as from across the UK and continental Europe. More importantly, it was great to see people from other disciplines within Newcastle University (e.g., English, Media Studies, Sociology, and Geography) lending their support and participating.
Given the diversity on hand, there was a remarkable intellectual energy throughout the event. There was a great mix of world-leading and emerging experts whose research combined theoretical sophistication, methodological innovation, and empirical novelty. Therefore, the quality of the papers presented and the levels of audience engagement--in the form of fair but challenging questions--was tremendous.
Highlights of the two days for me included:
P.S. David Mutimer has offered to host next year's conference at York University in Toronto, Canada. Check out these pages for more details as they become available...
Image credit: david spigolon
This week in the reading round-up:
Enjoy the rest of the weekend!
Photo credit: johnny~BUSYBUSYBUSY
Rumors and urban legends are powerful social phenomena. In part, this is because once rumors are unleashed, their circulation brings about new believers even as old ones become aware of their lack of veracity. Similarly, for anyone negatively represented or implicated in a rumor, clearing one's name is often near impossible. Just ask Richard Gere.
Taking these qualities to the realm of politics, some observers have rightly drawn attention to how rumors contribute to group power dynamics and help not only to legitimize the use of violence against others, but also create the conditions in which harming others is seen as prudential. The argument is that in helping to create the conditions within which violence directed at others is perceived as prudent, rumors are a form of violence themselves.
Over the past few months, rumors have been circulating via mobile phone text, email, and word of mouth in Huddersfield, parts of Wales, the Midlands, Northern Ireland, and the greater Tyne and Wear region about attempted abductions of young girls from local supermarkets. The text that is circulating--and one that we received this week--looks something like this:
The foundation of the rumor is an old one. Stories of child abductions--whether by humans or supernatural beings like faeries-- have formed an integral role in the folklore of the British Isles--and elsewhere--for generations.
Similarly, some of the specifics of the narrative have a long provenance as crucial elements of similar urban legends: an attempted abduction in a local public space, the altering of appearance, and the ultimate foiling of the plot through robust security measures, or an eagle-eyed parent noticing something that the would-be kidnappers overlooked in their attempt to disguise a child. According to Snopes.com, even the long running television series Law and Order has used this legend as the opening premise for an episode.
But there is something significantly different about this rumor that is circulating within the UK. Unlike previous incarnations, the current story specifically identifies the would-be abductors by their nationality and gender: Romanian women.
Why is the addition of specific identity characteristics significant? Well, it boils down to the socio-political context.
For the rumor to work, it needs to sound believable. The utilization of the nationality 'Romanian' works in a way that Canadian, Australian, South African, or New Zealander would not. Immediately, the deployment of Romanian draws attention to how Romanians are represented negatively in other discourses: as charlatans, criminals, human traffickers, and persons of moral disrepute not fit to live in the UK.
Similarly, the gender of the assailants helps to reinforce these negative representations. In general, we tend to assume that it is mainly men who prey upon, abduct, or traffic children. Yet, in this story, the idea that the abductors were women plays against type. And this is important because it accentuates the degeneracy that is being attributed to Romanians.
It is not just that Romanian men are predators or that Romanian women lack the proper maternal instincts. Rather, what the rumor does is present the argument that part of what makes Romanians so dodgy and dangerous is that Romanian women are as predatory as men. Moreover, the story plays into longer-standing ways in which violence perpetrated by women is represented as involving inordinate levels of deception, trickery, and deviousness.
As such, this urban legend is now less a story whose function is keep parents vigilant over the well-being of their children. Instead, I would argue that the narrative has a different function: to foment anti-Romanian, anti-Eastern European, and more generally anti-foreigner views that are gaining a scary amount of political currency, particularly in the geographic areas where this rumor has been circulating
Anti-immigrant sentiment, a distrust of foreigners, and the rise of a reactionary British nationalism as evidenced by the constant tightening of immigration restrictions under Labour over the past four years and the significant inroads made by the fascist British National Party in the recent European Parliamentary Elections have mainstreamed xenophobia. A growing minority feel no shame in proudly proclaiming 'Britain for the British' and denouncing the presence of Asian, African, and Eastern European migrants.
The circulation of rumors like this one will further contribute to xenophobia, racism, and anti-immigrant sentiment even if only a very small percentage of the population actually believe their details--in full or in part. These particular types of rumors and the politics of fear--as well as the politics of hatred--are mutually constitutive. They feed off of each other. Each slowly helps to shift political discourse towards a very frightening and unpleasant place for those of us who may not have been born in the UK but have ended up calling it home.
Photo credit: jamescronin
In this edition of the weekend reading roundup:
And another reason why the web can be a fantastic resource? A short film by No Mas on Doc Ellis' infamous LSD infused no-hitter--in his own words:
Photo credit: pshutterbug
The National Health Service in the UK has developed The Atlas of Risk a publicly accessible internet tool to help people 'better understand risk.' Based on national death statistics compiled on a yearly basis, the Atlas allows one to make adjustments based on '...age, sex, and region to put threats to your health in perspective.'
The Atlas provides sobering realizations. For example, as a male between the ages of 20-44 who lives in the Northeast of England, the biggest risk to my own life is suicide. But why might the Atlas of Risk be interesting from a political perspective?
Well, these kind of analytic tools are representative of the creation of new forms of political classification (or subjectification) that are arising through the structures of contemporary governance tasked with managing public health risks.
As Nikolas Rose has argued, these analytic tools--as political techniques for governing people--shape our expectations with respect to the role that we need to play in the maintenance of our health, well-being, and vitality. In turn, these expectations reconfigure the way that we understand disease, fitness, our relationships with others, our relationships with biomedical authorities, and the way that we conceive of ourselves as variably constrained by the limits of corporeal existence.
To put it bluntly, health, and illness, become linked to an economy that wishes normalize particular forms of behaviour deemed healthy and proscribe those that are not. Normalization can be achieved through the promotion of actions that are understood to lead to desired outcomes as well as through sanctioning undesirable activities by individualizing responsibility for negative outcomes--in this case illness. That other contributing factors like socio-economic status--long considered to be a significant contributing factor to overall levels of health--get left out of these management tools is therefore more than an analytic oversight. It is a political statement.
Photo credit: Photomish Dan
This weekend in the reading roundup:
Have a good weekend and solidarity with everyone who is gutted by the New York Yankees World Series victory!
Photo credit: gjeewaytee
It is often remarked that academia has been designed to produce generations of savants, scholars who know a great deal about very little. The consequences of savantism have extended beyond the tendency for various disciplines or fields of knowledge to isolate themselves from one another. Even within fields--like political science--composite sub-fields are often at pains to demonstrate a common relevance and/or to seriously engage in intellectual exchange with one another. Thus, it is very rare to find a scholar whose work not only speaks beyond their disciplinary home but also has a significant impact across the academy more generally.
Claude Lévi-Strauss was such a scholar. While he could be remembered as arguably one of the greatest mythographers and cultural anthropologists of the twentieth century, this would still be insufficient. A rarity, the implications of his work and the conceptual frameworks that he used reverberated through the social sciences and humanities.
Considered to be the founder of 'structural anthropology', he refused to adhere to ethnocentric perspectives that position tribal cultures as primitive. Rather, he was interested in discovering how our own everyday practices resemble the practices of these cultures--as well as how tribal societies resemble modern forms with which we are more familiar. Ultimately, he was concerned with determining how the meanings that orient societies are commonly established across cultures through these practices. And he argued that the common elements could be linked to the structures of the human mind.
His ideas were certainly controversial and did not escape vociferous critique from the generations of scholars who followed. However, they were recognized as important and worthy of consideration by other leading thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, even as they eschewed much of structuralism itself. There was an intellectual weight to the questions to which he was searching for answers that had--and will continue to have--a wide resonance.
Thus, the work of Lévi-Strauss will remain important for anyone interested in who we think we are, why we act the way that we do, the role of culture and cultural production, the power of ideas, the socio-political significance of myth, and ultimately, what it might mean to be human?
If you are interested in finding out more about Lévi-Strauss, there is a very thoughtful obituary by Maurice Bloch over at the Guardian.
