Pub Date : 2021-04-22DOI: 10.1177/09213740211011190
E. Walther
Due to their mediating position between two antagonistic entities, brokers are often attributed a suspicious moral ambiguity, but also autonomy and creativity. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in two Slovak refugee support organisations, I examine these assumptions in relation to ʻintegration brokers’. Actors in Slovak refugee care services struggle with accusations of being partisan either to the refugees’ or state authorities’ side. By showing how refugee supporters switch between seemingly opposing moral paradigms, I problematise a popular understanding of the broker as a potent and autonomous agent and focus instead on the process of layering constraints that characterises the in-between.
{"title":"Brokers in straitjackets: The moral quandaries of refugee support organisations in Slovakia","authors":"E. Walther","doi":"10.1177/09213740211011190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09213740211011190","url":null,"abstract":"Due to their mediating position between two antagonistic entities, brokers are often attributed a suspicious moral ambiguity, but also autonomy and creativity. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in two Slovak refugee support organisations, I examine these assumptions in relation to ʻintegration brokers’. Actors in Slovak refugee care services struggle with accusations of being partisan either to the refugees’ or state authorities’ side. By showing how refugee supporters switch between seemingly opposing moral paradigms, I problematise a popular understanding of the broker as a potent and autonomous agent and focus instead on the process of layering constraints that characterises the in-between.","PeriodicalId":43944,"journal":{"name":"CULTURAL DYNAMICS","volume":"33 1","pages":"316 - 330"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/09213740211011190","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46527353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-22DOI: 10.1177/09213740211011192
Birgit Bräuchler
Putting forward a synergetic combination of three concepts – brokerage, indigeneity and resonance – this article investigates how brokers in Indonesia support indigenous communities in their struggle for citizen and human rights. It investigates the emergence of broker chains and multi-scalar activism that are needed to translate from the local – in this case the Aru Islands in Eastern Indonesia – to the global and vice versa. It engages with established and tracks the emergence of new brokers and analyses their strategies to produce resonance and mobilise for resistance on various scales, with media, arts and religion being main fields of engagement, and studies the challenges they face. The article thus explores the concept of brokerage within new fields and uses brokerage as an analytical lens to explore processes of mobilisation, relationship-building and identity construction.
{"title":"Facilitating resonance: Brokerage in indigenous activism","authors":"Birgit Bräuchler","doi":"10.1177/09213740211011192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09213740211011192","url":null,"abstract":"Putting forward a synergetic combination of three concepts – brokerage, indigeneity and resonance – this article investigates how brokers in Indonesia support indigenous communities in their struggle for citizen and human rights. It investigates the emergence of broker chains and multi-scalar activism that are needed to translate from the local – in this case the Aru Islands in Eastern Indonesia – to the global and vice versa. It engages with established and tracks the emergence of new brokers and analyses their strategies to produce resonance and mobilise for resistance on various scales, with media, arts and religion being main fields of engagement, and studies the challenges they face. The article thus explores the concept of brokerage within new fields and uses brokerage as an analytical lens to explore processes of mobilisation, relationship-building and identity construction.","PeriodicalId":43944,"journal":{"name":"CULTURAL DYNAMICS","volume":"33 1","pages":"382 - 400"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/09213740211011192","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42322312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-21DOI: 10.1177/0921374020988161
Gladys Mitchell-Walthour, Fernanda Barros dos Santos
We examine the impact of class and racial discrimination on Afro-descendant women social welfare beneficiaries in Brazil and the USA. We focus on the cities Salvador, São Paulo, Charlotte, and Milwaukee. We find that in all these cities, more than a majority of social welfare beneficiaries ate dark skinned thus showing that both countries are pigmentocracies where disadvantage is based on skin color, class, and gender. We find that of those admitting they experienced skin color discrimination more than a majority ate dark skinned. Women in the USA are generally more likely to acknowledge skin color discrimination while women in Brazil are more likely to acknowledge class based discrimination.
{"title":"Afro-descendant women Bolsa Familia and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and women, infants, and children beneficiaries’ perceptions of skin color and class discrimination in Brazil and the United States","authors":"Gladys Mitchell-Walthour, Fernanda Barros dos Santos","doi":"10.1177/0921374020988161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374020988161","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We examine the impact of class and racial discrimination on Afro-descendant women social welfare beneficiaries in Brazil and the USA. We focus on the cities Salvador, São Paulo, Charlotte, and Milwaukee. We find that in all these cities, more than a majority of social welfare beneficiaries ate dark skinned thus showing that both countries are pigmentocracies where disadvantage is based on skin color, class, and gender. We find that of those admitting they experienced skin color discrimination more than a majority ate dark skinned. Women in the USA are generally more likely to acknowledge skin color discrimination while women in Brazil are more likely to acknowledge class based discrimination.</p>","PeriodicalId":43944,"journal":{"name":"CULTURAL DYNAMICS","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138542122","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-11DOI: 10.1177/0921374021992993
J. Winters
In this piece, I respond to Sarah Cervenak and Molly Farneth’s generous readings of Hope Draped in Black. Regarding Cervenak’s moving piece, “High Under The Pew,” I focus on the apposition of apparent oppositions—such as elevation and being underneath, or social life and black death. I also draw attention to the relationship between style of writing and ethics that Cervenak enacts in her comments. I then engage Farneth’s reflections on the ritualization of melancholy. While melancholy is expressed and performed in aesthetic and political practices (song, dance, vigil), we must be alert to the ways that civic rituals convert loss and anguish into opportunities to affirm and bolster imperial projects.
{"title":"Alongside gratitude and anguish","authors":"J. Winters","doi":"10.1177/0921374021992993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374021992993","url":null,"abstract":"In this piece, I respond to Sarah Cervenak and Molly Farneth’s generous readings of Hope Draped in Black. Regarding Cervenak’s moving piece, “High Under The Pew,” I focus on the apposition of apparent oppositions—such as elevation and being underneath, or social life and black death. I also draw attention to the relationship between style of writing and ethics that Cervenak enacts in her comments. I then engage Farneth’s reflections on the ritualization of melancholy. While melancholy is expressed and performed in aesthetic and political practices (song, dance, vigil), we must be alert to the ways that civic rituals convert loss and anguish into opportunities to affirm and bolster imperial projects.","PeriodicalId":43944,"journal":{"name":"CULTURAL DYNAMICS","volume":"33 1","pages":"438 - 443"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0921374021992993","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44614563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-11DOI: 10.1177/0921374021992928
Molly Farneth
Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black insists on the ethical imperative of resisting closure. Drawing on examples from Black literary and artistic traditions, Winters describes an ethos of “melancholic hope” that dwells in loss while remaining vulnerable to others and an unknowable future: a wound and an opening. Winters is captivated by the repetitions and ruptures that frustrate easy assumptions about healing or progress. In these reflections on Winters’s work, I consider the ambivalent role of repetition in practices of mourning untimely and unjust death, and suggest the possibility of rituals that create and perform melancholic hope.
{"title":"The wound and the opening","authors":"Molly Farneth","doi":"10.1177/0921374021992928","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374021992928","url":null,"abstract":"Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black insists on the ethical imperative of resisting closure. Drawing on examples from Black literary and artistic traditions, Winters describes an ethos of “melancholic hope” that dwells in loss while remaining vulnerable to others and an unknowable future: a wound and an opening. Winters is captivated by the repetitions and ruptures that frustrate easy assumptions about healing or progress. In these reflections on Winters’s work, I consider the ambivalent role of repetition in practices of mourning untimely and unjust death, and suggest the possibility of rituals that create and perform melancholic hope.","PeriodicalId":43944,"journal":{"name":"CULTURAL DYNAMICS","volume":"33 1","pages":"432 - 437"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0921374021992928","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43397186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-11DOI: 10.1177/0921374021992927
S. Cervenak
“High Under the Pew: A Critical Meditation on Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black” thinks Joseph Winters’s text in relation to critical poetics, Black studies and Black feminist thought. In particular, I trace how Winters’s philosophical engagement with the concept of “melancholic hope” in Black literary production extends these above-named intellectual traditions’ critiques of the post-enlightenment subject. More precisely, Winters dwelling with “melancholic hope” as it manifests in Black aesthetic and political thought attends to modes of being inassimilable to racist, heteronormative, ableist and capitalist narratives of space-time and progress.
{"title":"High under the pew: A critical meditation on Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black","authors":"S. Cervenak","doi":"10.1177/0921374021992927","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374021992927","url":null,"abstract":"“High Under the Pew: A Critical Meditation on Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black” thinks Joseph Winters’s text in relation to critical poetics, Black studies and Black feminist thought. In particular, I trace how Winters’s philosophical engagement with the concept of “melancholic hope” in Black literary production extends these above-named intellectual traditions’ critiques of the post-enlightenment subject. More precisely, Winters dwelling with “melancholic hope” as it manifests in Black aesthetic and political thought attends to modes of being inassimilable to racist, heteronormative, ableist and capitalist narratives of space-time and progress.","PeriodicalId":43944,"journal":{"name":"CULTURAL DYNAMICS","volume":"33 1","pages":"426 - 431"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0921374021992927","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48579995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1177/0921374020934517
J. M. Gully, L. Itagaki
This essay examines parallels between the resolidification of German identity and reconfigurations of German national space and nation-state time. From recurring events (refugee-guided tours) to temporary installations (a private home’s garden memorial), these performances by and about those excluded or conditionally tolerated define an emerging refugee subjectivity. Each performance stages the dichotomy between transience and permanent residence and engages the public in perpetual enactments of democratic deliberation. We argue that these performances force audiences to recognize how they implicitly define their nations and fellow citizens by both their domestic democratic practices and the exceptions at the border: who is deported and kept out, who are permitted to enter and remain. With growing critical interest in performance and performativity in international relations, we consider the impact of individual and collective pro-migrant protest performances on national identity and electoral politics in Germany and their effects on organizing, resistance, and performance “artivism” globally.
{"title":"Fleeing bodies and fleeting performances: Transience and the nation-state","authors":"J. M. Gully, L. Itagaki","doi":"10.1177/0921374020934517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374020934517","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines parallels between the resolidification of German identity and reconfigurations of German national space and nation-state time. From recurring events (refugee-guided tours) to temporary installations (a private home’s garden memorial), these performances by and about those excluded or conditionally tolerated define an emerging refugee subjectivity. Each performance stages the dichotomy between transience and permanent residence and engages the public in perpetual enactments of democratic deliberation. We argue that these performances force audiences to recognize how they implicitly define their nations and fellow citizens by both their domestic democratic practices and the exceptions at the border: who is deported and kept out, who are permitted to enter and remain. With growing critical interest in performance and performativity in international relations, we consider the impact of individual and collective pro-migrant protest performances on national identity and electoral politics in Germany and their effects on organizing, resistance, and performance “artivism” globally.","PeriodicalId":43944,"journal":{"name":"CULTURAL DYNAMICS","volume":"33 1","pages":"124 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0921374020934517","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47502118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1177/0921374020934837
Áine Josephine Tyrrell
Recent studies in the field of Performance Studies have examined the performativity and spatial practices in refugee camps with particular attention to the political consequences of these psycho-social performances on refugees. This article complements such scholarship by: first, providing a more performance-centric definition of the term “refugee” with recourse to the idea of “transience”; second, by concretizing this (re)definition via analyzes of the socio-political consequences of the architecture of one of the most recently established refugee camps located in Jordan, namely Azraq. The article concludes by framing refugee camps more broadly as biopolitical environments that deprive refugees of their political agency; by homogenizing their inhabitants, they inscribe individuals into a state of perpetual transience.
{"title":"Constructing “purgatory”: How refugee camp architecture inscribes refugees into the a-political, a-historical, and moveable","authors":"Áine Josephine Tyrrell","doi":"10.1177/0921374020934837","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374020934837","url":null,"abstract":"Recent studies in the field of Performance Studies have examined the performativity and spatial practices in refugee camps with particular attention to the political consequences of these psycho-social performances on refugees. This article complements such scholarship by: first, providing a more performance-centric definition of the term “refugee” with recourse to the idea of “transience”; second, by concretizing this (re)definition via analyzes of the socio-political consequences of the architecture of one of the most recently established refugee camps located in Jordan, namely Azraq. The article concludes by framing refugee camps more broadly as biopolitical environments that deprive refugees of their political agency; by homogenizing their inhabitants, they inscribe individuals into a state of perpetual transience.","PeriodicalId":43944,"journal":{"name":"CULTURAL DYNAMICS","volume":"33 1","pages":"82 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0921374020934837","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44670223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1177/0921374020935142
Stefanie A. Jones
Framed by symbolic power as a theory of performance, this essay takes as its subject the state’s use of performance transience for oppressive ends. For Pierre Bourdieu, the symbolic field is about group misrecognition of existing power differentials as legitimate distinctions. Building from this theory, I examine the 2009 US Government Counterinsurgency Guide’s work in the symbolic field. At once a military, social, and performance theory, the Guide creates categorization schemas that differentially define states and people based off of performances of loyalty to US interests. Through the concept of the “non-combatant civilian,” these hierarchies position non-US populations as always already threatening, and acquire social authorization through the threat of further violence. By generating roles for groups of people and framing the means of enforcing those roles, the Guide uses performance transience to structure a symbolic order with deeply racializing consequences.
{"title":"Symbolic power in the US Government Counterinsurgency Guide: US security, (non-) combatant civilians, and the refugee-in-place","authors":"Stefanie A. Jones","doi":"10.1177/0921374020935142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374020935142","url":null,"abstract":"Framed by symbolic power as a theory of performance, this essay takes as its subject the state’s use of performance transience for oppressive ends. For Pierre Bourdieu, the symbolic field is about group misrecognition of existing power differentials as legitimate distinctions. Building from this theory, I examine the 2009 US Government Counterinsurgency Guide’s work in the symbolic field. At once a military, social, and performance theory, the Guide creates categorization schemas that differentially define states and people based off of performances of loyalty to US interests. Through the concept of the “non-combatant civilian,” these hierarchies position non-US populations as always already threatening, and acquire social authorization through the threat of further violence. By generating roles for groups of people and framing the means of enforcing those roles, the Guide uses performance transience to structure a symbolic order with deeply racializing consequences.","PeriodicalId":43944,"journal":{"name":"CULTURAL DYNAMICS","volume":"33 1","pages":"100 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0921374020935142","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48380842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}