The many travels of Dopdi Mejhen: Women, borders and the Indian state
by Abhijit Roy
Essay to be published in a collection tentatively titled 'Women & Literature: Different Faces Different Voices' ed. Nandini Jana and Swati Mitra, Stree, Calcutta. (forthcoming, 2012)
Extract:
The grand discourse simultaneously legitimizing coercion and communicative rationality in dealing with... more
Extract:
The grand discourse simultaneously legitimizing coercion and communicative rationality in dealing with the forces threatening the state apparatus is the statist discourse of ‘security’. While coercion is endorsed in the name of security for the citizens, the communicative (and reformative) modes of negotiation with the ‘other’ are apparently also for the security of the outlaw, enabling the state to pose as ‘democratic’ or sensitive to the rights of both the ‘citizen’ proper and the outlaw willing to be part of a citizenizing process. It doesn’t take much strain to identify the imbalance in such apparently symmetrical propositions: the right and privileges of the citizen proper are unquestionable and due, while the same on the other side of the line are debatable and a matter of generosity. Brutal state repression can then be justified by the double logic of citizen’s security and parallel “humanitarian” negotiation. In a majoritarianist system that is Democracy, the project of communicative rationality and reform in the negotiation with a minority group, parallel to coercion, would therefore always more successfully legitimize state violence than contradicting it.
Re-framing education as a thirdspace: neonarratives of pedagogy, power and transformation
by Janice Jones
Jones, Janice Kathleen (2011) Re-framing education as a thirdspace: neonarratives of pedagogy, power and transformation. [Thesis (_PhD/Research)]
Educational practices are ideologically informed, socially framed, and culturally contested. Historically, these... more
Educational practices are ideologically informed, socially framed, and culturally contested. Historically, these forces have impacted upon how far and how swiftly education can respond to national and global challenges. In the 21st century the tension between Platonic and Aristotlean philosophies of education, and how those dissonant epistemologies are embodied in curriculum and pedagogy continues to inform contemporary debate about the purposes and practices of formal education. Platonic beliefs in education as a means of strengthening the state are consistent with Firstspace ideologies of testing and reporting, benchmarking and competitive practice. This is in contrast with Secondspace ideologies that emphasise education for the individual, and for cooperative communities.
This study is situated in the troubling and troubled borderland or Thirdspace between two ideologies. They are Firstspace ideologies and practices of education that seek to create a skilled but malleable workforce for a competitive economy, and Secondspace ideologies that promote individual learner autonomy for lifelong and life-wide learning and global citizenship. Transformative or critical pedagogies are described by both ideologies as pivotal: for governments they are presented as strategic to the achievement of a competitive edge in a global economy, and for postcolonial theorists they are the means for subverting epistemologies of difference and inequities of power.
The organising argument of this study, that critical pedagogy has the capacity to democratise and subvert dominant and colonising ideas and practices of education, is balanced by two supporting arguments. They are, first, that reflective, critical and transformative pedagogy belongs to a Thirdspace epistemology, whose purpose is to trouble, rather than to serve beliefs and practices of education that re-inscribe the dominant culture. Second, that the dominant culture employs bureaucratic and hegemonic force to subvert the potential for change that results from critical and transformative praxis. Hence, the transformative educator seeks to effect change in fields that are inherently resistant to change.
A bricolage of narratives gathered over a three-year period informs this study of transformative praxis in the context of education. The data are constituted from notes, diaries, children‘s and pre-service teachers‘ writings and feedback, and films and interviews gathered by the researcher and participants. Narratives from an alternative play-based community primary school, undergraduate pre-service primary educators and self-as-teacher-educator constitute ‗tales from the field‘, locating participants in the study as post-colonial voices.
The process of writing upon writing reveals and re-presents the views of participants as subtexts from the field. The findings of the study are presented as neonarratives, indicating shared perceptions between the school community, pre-service teachers and the researcher of dissonances between contemporary theories of education and constraints impacting upon transformative pedagogy in practice. These findings have implications for the researcher‘s personal and professional practices of pedagogy as an educator of pre-service teachers as well as more broadly for government policy, the implementation of change within established systems; and for parents seeking a transformative education for their children.
Download (.pdf) Borders and status-functions: An institutional approach to the study of borders
(Co-authored): Cooper, A. Perkins, C. (2012) 'Borders and status-functions: An institutional approach to the study of borders'. European Journal of Social Theory, 15(1), pp. 55-71.
This article develops an institutional understanding of borders. Drawing on constitutive constructivism and theories... more This article develops an institutional understanding of borders. Drawing on constitutive constructivism and theories of practical communication we argue that bordering as a process is a form of sorting through the imposition of status-functions on people and things, which alters the perception of that thing by setting it within a web of normative claims, teleologies and assumptions. Studying any border, therefore, extends to include the rule structure that constitutes it as well as the sources of that structure’s legitimacy. Furthermore, rule structures are both restrictive and facilitative and importantly they overlap while retaining different sources of legitimacy: actors bring different constitutive perspectives on the border depending on the particular rule structure they are drawing on in order to make legitimate claims about what that border produces. This recognition sensitizes analysis to the interplay between different sense-making regimes and their authoritative underpinnings. Methodologically it points researchers towards the practical and discursive methods actors use when making arguments about what a particular border can and does do.
“NAFTA and Cross-border relations in Detroit, Niagara, Vancouver, and Tijuana"
“NAFTA and Cross-border relations in Detroit, Niagara, Vancouver, and
Tijuana" Journal of Borderland Studies Vol. 21.2, (Fall)
Power, Politics and Governance of Borderlands – the Structure and Agency of Power
“Power, Politics and Governance of Borderlands – the Structure and Agency of Power,” in Harlan Koff, Theorizing Borders Through Analyses of Power Relationships, Peter Lang.
Walls as technologies of government: the double construction of geographies of peace and conflict in Israeli politics, 2002present
Since 2002, consecutive Israeli governing coalitions have been building a separation wall in the West Bank for the... more
Since 2002, consecutive Israeli governing coalitions have been building a separation wall in the West Bank for the declared purposes of security and separation from the Palestinian population. Building on earlier phases of control, which relied on military orders, cantonment, roadblocks, and checkpoints, the wall functions as a regime of government that colonizes Palestinian life by regulating every nexus of body and space and population and territory. Rather than establishing peace, the wall’s regime of government uses separation as a double
construction of peace and conflict that isolates peace on the Israeli side and conflict on the Palestinian side.
Bordering Loss and Forgetting: Resecuring "Canada" Post 9/11
MA Thesis, Graduate Program in Women's Studies, York University (September 2005)
The Liquid Border: Subjectivity at the Limits of the Nation-State in Southeast Europe
Myrivili, Eleni. 2003. The Liquid Border: Subjectivity at the Limits of the Nation-State in Southeast Europe. Dissertation in Anthropology. Columbia University, NY, NY.
Abstract
This is a study of power at the limits of the nation-state: an examination of the institution of... more
Abstract
This is a study of power at the limits of the nation-state: an examination of the institution of the national border that focuses on the practices of the border people, from the perspective of cultural and performance theory. The site of this study is the trilateral border region of Prespa, where Albania, Greece and Macedonia/FYROM meet over the waters of two lakes. This ethnography offers an analysis of the discursive ways in which the border, a materialization of state power, affects the lives of the people who live around it, forming among them particular subjectivities. These border subjects are both formations of the territorial nation-state power, and sites of its articulation. With their negotiations and representations of identity, their haunting by past violence, their excesses and their secrecy, they carve out the border as a material sphere essential to the legitimacy of nation-state authority. The border provides the nation-state with a state of exception. The Prespa borders, as all national borders, are subtended by violence that is instrumental to the institution of the nation-state and the legitimation of its power.
The border is theorized in this study as the space of distance between the Nation and the Subject, the no-man’s land where both the nation and its subject, stripped bare, institute and reiterate each other anew, locked in confrontation: the border is primarily a space of threat. My investigations used participant-observation and oral history techniques to document a broad range of practices of daily life in Prespa. I accommodate modes of representation such as storytelling, historical narrative, and theoretical analysis to take up challenges that the category of “performance” poses upon writing.
Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders: Introduction to the Dossier
Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe. “Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders: Introduction to the Dossier”, Journal of Borderlands Studies 25.1 (2010): 39-49.
The cultural production of borders can be as read as referring to part of the economy, as an aesthetic site of... more The cultural production of borders can be as read as referring to part of the economy, as an aesthetic site of creativity and border negotiation, and a cultural factor in the bordering process. The need to understand these cultural dimensions of borders and borderlands has lead to interdisciplinary interest in narratives, aesthetic forms, and cultural memory. Border poetics and related forms of spatial poetics can provide fruitful approaches to specific literary texts, films and other artworks, as well as to bordering in general. This special dossier for the Journal of Borderlands Studies presents papers from the 2008 ABS European conference in Kirkenes, which had “Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders” as its theme and which brought together a wide range of researchers from both the social sciences and the humanities, raising questions about the role of culture in borderlands and also focusing on borders in Sub-Arctic Europe. The following selection of papers addresses films, poetry, novels and cultural heritage connected to specific topographical borderlands.
Border Order, Border Muddles, Split Little Peas: Review Article
Johan Schimanski. “Border Order, Border Muddles, Split Little Peas: Review Article”, Orbis Litterarum 64.4 (2009): 339-48.
Grensen - litterært faktum med romlig form
Johan Schimanski. “Grensen - litterært faktum med romlig form”, Gränser i nordisk litteratur / Borders in Nordic Literature. Eds. Clas Zilliacus, Heidi Grönstad and Ulrika Gustafsson. Åbo: Åbo Akademis förlag, 2008. 19-37.
Crossing and Reading: Notes towards a Theory and a Method
Johan Schimanski. “Crossing and Reading: Notes towards a Theory and a Method”, Nordlit 19 (2006): 41-63.
Entry Points: An Introduction
Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe. “Entry Points: An Introduction”, Border Poetics De-limited. Eds. Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2007. 9-26.