‘Black Is’ and ‘Black Ain’t’: Performative Revisions of Racial ‘Crisis’

Abstract

Race is rigorously policed through, and predicated on, a crisis of maintaining a claim to supposed racial ontology. The language of crisis pervades race; yet crisis is only brought into focus – shows itself – when racial ontology is called into question or threatened as an axiomatic reality. This essay argues, however, that it is crisis, in the form of the imperative regulatory call to race or the intricate operations of racialising discipline that constitutes raced subjects. The crisis is one of belonging or of successfully representing a ‘racial truth’. The objective of this analysis is to demonstrate that it is when race is viewed as performative that crisis becomes evident as the ever‐present condition of racial identity formation. From this vantage point, the concept of crisis as a point of danger can be revised to be seen as a turning point when an important change can take place: then, crisis might be envisaged as a positive means through which to imagine and realise new enactments of racial being.     

‘Just-in-Time’ Disease

Disease and profits make for interesting bedfellows in modern factory farming, especially where poultry is concerned. Profitable, cheap factory-farmed chicken is dependent on large-scale, industrial throughput, yet those very same intensive conditions pose real risks for disease outbreaks. Campylobacter in poultry is now the main reported cause of food poisoning in the UK, responsible for more than 100 deaths a year. In this paper, drawing upon fieldwork from across the poultry supply chain, we argue that the intersection of just-in-time pressures, commercial and regulatory, with particular practices of biosecurity on farms and in processing factories, provides prime conditions for the amplification and spread of Campylobacter. We go on to argue that such ecologies of poultry production are best understood as part of a relational economy of disease, and that the very control exercised over the lives of farmed birds risks reversal into ever greater insecurity.     

’98洪灾知多少

1998年夏,中国发生洪水河湖之多,洪峰水位之高,持续时间之久,历史罕见。至今也难以从中国人的记忆中抹去。从1997年11月起,到1998年5月,全国许多地方,尤其南方,持续多雨,不少地方出现了罕见的冬汛、春汛,造成长江中下游江湖水库水位高涨。进入6月,长江洪水的字眼频频出现在各种传媒上,进入中国公众的视觉。6月份起,长江流域出     

Livin’ with the MTA

Although the push to get universities to accumulate IP by commercializing their scientific research was a conscious movement, dealing with the blowback in the form of contracts over the transfer of research tools and inputs, called materials transfer agreements (MTAs), was greeted by universities as an afterthought. Faculty often regarded them as an irritant, and TTOs were not much more welcoming. One reason universities could initially ignore the obvious connection between the pursuit of patents and the prior promulgation of MTAs was a legalistic distinction made between intellectual property and contract law, which of course is of direct concern to a lawyer, but should be less compelling for anyone trying to understand the big picture surrounding the commercialization of academic science. However, as a subset of scientists were increasingly drawn into the commercial sphere, they tended to attach MTAs to research inputs requested by other academics; and this began a tidal wave of MTAs which shows no sign of abating. Furthermore, many IP-related restrictions have been loaded into individual MTAs, including the stipulation that the existence and content of MTAs themselves be treated as secret and proprietary. The paper closes by looking at recent arguments that the growth of MTAs has not actually harmed the research process, and rejects them.

A test of Rosen’s and Adler’s theories of superstars

This article compares and contrasts Adler and Rosen’s theories regarding the stardom and popularity of musical artists through the impact of local linguistic policies on consumers’ decisions to buy recorded music (CDs). Spain, with local linguistic policies implemented in Catalonia and the Basque Country, serves as an ideal quasi ‘natural experiment’ for testing these theories. The authors’ predictions are addressed within a multilevel regression framework, with two main results: first, contrary to Rosen’s predictions, the impact of local linguistic policies on the probability of buying music CDs is positive; second, local linguistic policies seem to contribute to increasing the production of music CDs in local languages, increasing the popularity of local artists with their audiences.     

The ‘Negotiated Space’ of University Researchers’ Pursuit of a Research Agenda

The paper introduces a concept of a ‘negotiated space’ to describe university researchers’ attempts to balance pragmatically, continually and dynamically over time, their own agency and autonomy in the selection of research topics and pursuit of scientific research to filter out the explicit steering and tacit signals of external research funding agencies and university strategies and policies. We develop this concept to explore the degree of autonomy researchers in fact have in this process and draw on semi-structured interview material with research group leaders in Finland and the UK, in the former in seven research fields, in the latter in two fields. First, the analysis reveals that topic selection is strongly filtered by the intra-scientific factors. In topic selection researchers have more leeway, a broader negotiated space than in research content, that is, in the ways in which they pursue their research, which are more affected by funding opportunities and other contextual matters. Second, the ways which affect researchers’ agency include individual- and more aggregate-level acts and factors: at the individual level, researchers resort to different strategies to create a negotiated space, but at the more aggregate level field-specific factors play a role. In fields with multiple funding opportunities, which we call ‘shopping mall’ fields, researchers can have a broader negotiated space than in fields where funding is more based on ‘lottery’. In the latter, the researchers’ negotiated space is narrow and contingent on the outcome of the funders’ decisions.     

From the Obligation of Birth to the Obligation of Care: Esposito’s Biophilosophy and Recalcati’s ‘New Symptoms’

This essay addresses the controversial status of subjectivity in Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics and articulates it using Recalcati’s psychoanalytical theory, with the aim of promoting a non-vitalistic affirmative biopolitics. In biopolitical theory in general, and in Esposito’s especially, subjectivity has a problematic status: while life precedes intersubjectivity, it is not clear whether subjectivity is regarded as a consequence or as the precondition of intersubjectivity (and thus of life). Esposito acknowledges such an aporia, the subjectum suppositum, but fails to recognise it in his own reasoning, ultimately envisioning a powerful interpretative and transformative paradigm – affirmative biopolitics – whilst leaving at its core a life-less subject. In this essay, I read Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics through Recalcati’s clinical approach to the ‘new symptoms’, with the aim of envisioning a subjectivity compatible with the ontogenetic primacy of life posited by biopolitical theory. Ultimately, the aim of this article is to suggest that an affirmative biopolitics, grounded on the promotion of neither a pre-subjective bare life, nor of a lifeless subject, but of a fully subjective life, a living subject is possible.     

‘TONY SOPRANO ON MANAGEMENT’

This article develops the concept of ‘alternative cultural tourism’ through an in-depth study of the Prague Fringe Festival (PFF). In doing so, it argues that existing approaches to cultural tourism often fail to differentiate between different forms of culture (i.e. alternative versus mainstream), whilst also interrogating the criteria by which festivals can be understood as examples of alternative cultural tourism. Utilising a combination of both quantitative and qualitative data, involving audiences, festival performers and workers/volunteers, it is asserted that the PFF brings together a diverse mix of cultures, and seeks to create a more participatory and engaging tourist experience. Additionally, its more egalitarian organising structure produces different kinds of work and social relations in the production of art and culture – particularly between various groups working within the festival, but also in the creation of different ideas about audience engagement, performer relations, and engagement with the local community (through the idea of the ‘festival participant’). The article concludes by briefly exploring the potential of alternative cultural tourism to provide more meaningful and sustainable models of urban cultural development.     

Zhao Chants Master’s Songs

~~Zhao Chants Master’s Songs@David     

Revisiting ‘Weinberg’s Choice’: Classic Tensions in the Concept of Scientific Merit

Alvin Weinberg’s classic and much debated two articles in Minerva, “Criteria for Scientific Choice” (1963) and “Criteria for Scientific Choice II – The Two Cultures” (1964), represent two of the first and most important attempts to create a meta-discourse about priority setting in science policy, and many of the points advanced remain relevant. The goal of this paper is to elaborate on the relevance of some of Weinberg’s original arguments to priority setting today. We have singled out four issues for attention: The tension between scientific and institutional choice, the assumptions behind the triad of scientific, technological and social merit, the elusive ‘externality from size’ argument for funding promoted by Weinberg, and finally the problems involved in the idea of basic science as an ‘overhead cost’ for applied science, and applied science as an ‘overhead’ on a sectoral mission. These four issues will be elaborated from a policy perspective and connected to present day challenges for science and technology policy.     

Redefining Resistance: Seeking Fanon's Subject Between ‘the Unified’ and ‘the Dispersed’

Abstract

This essay reads two differing conceptions of subjectivity in Frantz Fanon's work as corresponding to a shift in subjective orientation in certain moments of crisis, from what I term a unified individual – the subject of psychoanalysis – to a dispersed subject, the frenzied participant in collective activity. I believe that such a potential duality within the subject is best adopted when analysing Fanon's oeuvre, as well as when examining a subject's behaviour as participant in forms of unstructured collective protest such as rioting. Whereas the unified subject of psychoanalysis best expresses the consciously self-reflective individual in society, the dispersed subject expresses a subjectivity operating in excess of individualism. This dispersed subject acts collectively, as an object moving in tandem with other objects, without individual reflection. I argue that this shift comprises the initial spark of insurrection suggested in Fanon's work, the moment in which he sees the people pitched ‘in a single direction, from which there is no turning back’; and what Jean-Paul Sartre calls the explosive moment of ‘conflagration’. The two subject positions between which the subject shifts exist as two potential sides of every subject and comprise the ‘Manichean’ world in which Fanon's subject is entrenched.     

Bourdieu’s Cleft Sociology of Science

The paper examines Pierre Bourdieu’s extensive writings on the production of scientific knowledge. The study shows that Bourdieu offered not one but two - significantly different - approaches to scientific knowledge production, one formulated in his theoretical, or programmatic, writings on the subject, the other developed in his empirical writings. Addressing the question as to the relevance of Bourdieu’s work for science studies, the analysis argues that the former of these two approaches is at once very visible in Bourdieu’s work but characterized by limitations from the standpoint of scholarship in STS, whereas the latter approach is less conspicuous but of broader empirical value.     

九江举办’96庐山国际旅游节

为配合庐山申报世界自然与文化遗产,抓住京九通车机遇,九江市决定于今年10月6-8日举办’96中国庐山国际旅游节暨招商洽谈会。在旅游节期间,九江市将精心组织一批集旅游、文化、艺术为一体的综合游览项目,市旅游局也对全市新老景点景区进行合理编排,向海内外游客推出15个旅游系列,它们是:     

Aesthetics Guru’s Passion for Rocks

~~Aesthetics Guru’s Passion for Rocks@David     

Facelift Restores Buddha’s Tang Glory

~~Facelift Restores Buddha’s Tang Glory@David     

Tea Party Celebrates Wang’s Dedication

~~Tea Party Celebrates Wang’s Dedication@David