Digital Commons Network^™

Why Orientalism Still Matters: Reading ‘Casual Forgetting’ And ‘Active Remembering’ As Neoliberal Forms Of Contestation In International Politics, Shiera S. Malik

Shiera S el-Malik

Waiting For Giorgio, Ananya Vajpeyi

Ananya Vajpeyi

No abstract provided.

The Myth Of The White Minority, Andrew Pierce

Andrew J. Pierce

In recent years, and especially in the wake of Barack Obama’s reelection, projections that whites will soon become a minority have proliferated. In this essay, I will argue that such predictions are misleading at best, as they rest on questionable philosophical presuppositions, including the presupposition that racial concepts like ‘whiteness’ are static and unchanging rather than fluid and continually being reconstructed. If I am right about these fundamental inaccuracies, one must wonder why the myth of the white minority persists. I will argue that by re-envisioning whites as a minority culture struggling against a hostile dominant group, and by promoting …

Rattling The Binary: Symbolic Power, Gender, And Embodied Colonial Legacies, Shiera S. Malik

Shiera S el-Malik

In 2009, the 18-year-old South African runner Caster Semenya was accused of being male and forced to undergo gender testing. After much obfuscation and misreporting, Semenya was cleared to compete as a woman. Semenya’s experience exposes the problematic ways in which masculinity and femininity are harnessed to the categories of male and female as well as the ways in which they are embodied by men and women. This paper contemplates how binaries are mobilized and boundaries maintained – as is contemporarily evident in responses to Semenya’s gender troubles. It reads Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power against an example of …

Intercultural Conflict And Dialogue In Transnational Digital Networks - Migration And Gender, Athina Karatzogianni, Nelli Kambouri, Nicos Trimikliniotis, Oksana Morgunova, Olga Lafazani, Grigoris Ioannou

Athina Karatzogianni

The three case studies involve intercultural conflict between migrants and the host society, but also conflicts between migrants of different origin or culture, and intra-communal conflict. These conflicts occur in digital networks and are influencing and are influenced by what is called here by the different research teams interchangeably as ‘real’, ‘offline’, ‘material’ or ‘physical’. Nevertheless, the intention of the research design and philosophical standpoint is to integrate virtuality and materiality as far as this is possible in the analysis. In Cyprus, urban spaces are contested by migrant and anti-migrant groups and played on-line and off-line in an interplay that …

Reconstructing Race: A Discourse-Theoretical Approach To A Normative Politics Of Identity, Andrew Pierce

Andrew J. Pierce

This paper aims to get clear on the normative implications of the idea that race is a “social construction,” not just for political practice in non-ideal societies where racial oppression remains, but in “ideal” (presumably non-racist) societies as well. That is, I pursue the question of whether race and/or racial identity would have any legitimate place in an ideally just society, or to state it another way, whether the concept of race can be extricated from the history of racial oppression from which it arose. The position I defend is a version of what has come to be called a …

The Childhood Of Human Rights: The Kodak On The Congo, Sharon Sliwinski

Sharon Sliwinski

Jeremy Bentham And Daniel O’Connell: Their Correspondence And Radical Alliance, 1828–31, James E. Crimmins

James E Crimmins

No abstract provided.