Subjectivity最新文献

In this article, I explore the interplay of abjection, space and resistance at the example of a protest intervention that reclaims a highly policed urban space in the city of Leipzig (Saxony, Eastern Germany)—the Main Station. Methodologically, I combine ethnographic material collected throughout the process of a performative counter-action attempting to reclaim and re-imagine Leipzig Main Station as a venue and politicized space with a contextual analysis regarding the discursive landscape evolving around and shaping this urban locale. My empirical analysis is structured along the theoretical discussion of abjection: While Butler's theorization (Butler in Bodies that matter, Routledge, New York, 1993) allows me to focus on the formative power of spatial exclusion and the disruptive potential of protest, theoretical accounts in which abjection is conceived as a “threshold zone” or “overlap space” (Sharkey and Shields in Child Geogr 6:239–256, 2008; Vighi et al. in Between urban topographies and political spaces. Threshold experiences, Lexington Books, Lanham, 2014) help me to outline ‘abject space’ as a space of negotiation and contradiction.

Tracing the emergence of the scenario technology and key shifts in how it is used, we argue that scenarios represent a new way of governing future uncertainty. We analyse two of the most influential approaches to the technology—those of Herman Kahn and Pierre Wack. In the first, scenarios emerge as a solution to an ontological problem of future uncertainty—a solution that seeks to use imagination as a form of reasoning about the future (Mode I scenarios). In the second, however, scenarios appear as a solution to an epistemological problem—a way of challenging and changing perceptions, of remediating one’s perception of the world and accepting its uncertainty. That is, scenarios become a way of entering into an uncertain sensibility and a particular mode of experience and practice related to and centred on uncertainty—a new mode of subjectivation. We refer to this as Mode II scenarios.

Currently, municipal schools in Denmark face reforms and political demands for organizational change (EVA in Ledelse tæt på undervisning og læring : erfaringer fra fire skoler med gode ledelsespraksisser, 2015). The perception is now commonly held that it is necessary to radically rethink the entire set up of the institutional school towards a more flexible, adaptable and co-operative organization (Irgens and Jensen in Skolen som kunnskapsorganisasjon. Utdanning, nr.3,1. februar, 2008). This paper explores an empirical case, where a school is implementing a device called ‘flexible timetables’ in an attempt to depart from former fixed structures and private teaching practices. By combining process thought and liminality theory, the paper offers a theoretical framework for understanding some of the dynamics and unintended consequences of this transformation process. In so doing the paper calls attention to some important limits to the vision of flexibility and openness that informs this program of organisational change and subjectivity. Flexible timetables are conceptualized as a liminal affective technology (Stenner and Moreno-Gabriel in Subjectivity 6(3):229–253, https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2013.9, 2013), designed to disrupt structures supporting former institutional practices, and to engender circumstances that are describable in terms of liminal experience. We use the concept of liminal affectivity to describe the collective atmosphere of ambivalence and volatility that is summoned through the intervention. We also draw attention to certain unexpected side effects, as when the participants experience themselves both paralysed by the ensuing paradoxes, and captured in dynamics of polarisation (Greco and Stenner in Theory Psychol 27(2):147–166, https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354317693120, 2017). The paper proposes the concept liminal affective leadership wherein the use of the technology is framed as a continuously sensitive balancing of the volatile liminal affectivity that it induces.

This article explores how childhood memories served as a rich resource in women’s formations as maternal subjects. So affectively loaded is the child figure, and so diffuse and malleable are memories, that the remembered child appeared in women’s narratives in multiple figurations and served multiple functions. These memories incited the intensive multidimensional labors of the middle-class mother while also curbing and critiquing these labors, as well as a resource to imagine being mother otherwise. Women’s childhood memories highlight the ways that neoliberalism’s heightened stakes and increased competition for middle-class reproduction lodge themselves into women’s labors and psyches. Yet they also point to perspectives and desires outside of normative neoliberal femininities associated with the middle-class. Their narratives enrich accounts of being and becoming mom as a field of dreams, desires, and memories where past, present, and future time intersect in non-linear ways.

Female-perpetrated sexual abuse (FSA) is often seen as rare and of little consequence. Confessing to being a victim of FSA is infrequent and often met with incredulity. Identifying as such a victim is thus often a response to an incitement to speak in the mode of confession. Interviews producing the possibility for such confessions were conducted with ten self-identified South African FSA victims and then analysed using a Foucauldian approach. In identifying as victims of FSA the participants drew on psychologised, gendered accounts of damage reflected in trauma, revictimisation, memory loss, the cycle of abuse and deviance. An analysis of these accounts demonstrates how confessional sites, such as the (psychological) interview, anchor victim worthiness in damage so that 'non-normative' victims of violence are able to see themselves in sexual violence discourse as forever compromised subjects whose healing requires rethinking the relationship between gender, sexuality, and violence in contemporary South Africa.