Somatic pedagogies: Critiquing and resisting the affective discourse of the neoliberal state from an embodied anarchist perspective.

This paper takes as its context widespread feelings of anxiety within neoliberal society caused by a combination of material and discursive factors including precarious access to work and resources. It is argued that the state uses ‘discourses of affect’ to produce compliant subjects able to deal with (and unable to desire beyond) neoliberal precarity and anxiety. Critical education theorists have argued that discourses of ‘well-being’, emotional support and self-help have gained increasing purchase in mainstream education and in popular culture. These discourses are dangerous because they are individualized and depoliticized, and undermine collective political struggle. At the same time there has been a ‘turn to affect’ in critical academia, producing critical pedagogies that resist state affective discourse. I argue that these practices are essential for problematizing neoliberal discourse, yet existing literature tends to elide the role of the body in effective resistance, emphasising intellectual aspects of critique. The paper sketches an alternative, drawing on psychoanalytic and practiced pedagogies that aim to transgress the mind-body dualism and hierarchy, in particular Roberto Freire’s work on Somatherapy.

‘Is there a right time for gender just peace? Feminist anti-war organising revisited’

This paper addresses the question of totalising gender power relations that have led to and shaped the wars of the 1990s in Yugoslavia and the emerging ethno-national states on the ‘periphery’ of Europe. I argue that the same type of gender power relations continue to dominate the region, notably Serbia, and to perpetuate gender inequalities and gender based violence in its many everyday and structural forms, causing profound levels of human insecurity. My analysis aims to set in motion a debate on how to tackle these continuing gender inequalities and GBV in post-war societies. In so doing, I propose a shift from focusing on the hierarchy of victimisation that has characterised much of the feminist analyses, activism and scholarly work in relation to these (and other) conflicts, to a relational understanding of the gendered processes of victimisation in war and peace, that is - of both women and men. Such an approach holds a potential to undermine the power systems that engender these varied types of victimisation by ultimately reshaping the notions of masculinity and femininity, which are central to the gender power systems that generate gender unjust peace.