O Verbo da Nação : movimentos de libertação na África do Sul do século XX

Este trabalho se dedica ao estudo dos movimentos de libertação que atuaram na África do Sul ao longo do século XX em oposição ao regime de segregação racial do apartheid. O objetivo central é refletir sobre os processos de construção simbólica pelos quais passaram esses movimentos, no intuito de compreendê-los como produtores de suas próprias identidades coletivas. Destarte, propõe-se que essa constituição identitária girou em torno de três eixos principais. Primeiro, o multirracialismo, tendo origem na parceria entre diferentes organizações políticas, provenientes de distintos grupos raciais, que buscaram construir uma solidariedade em comum a partir de sua experiência de luta em conjunto na década de 1950. Em segundo lugar há a volorização da negritude enquanto identidade racial, elemento enfatizado pelos movimentos africanistas a partir da década de 1940. Por sua vez, a classe esteve presente desde a formação dos primeiros sindicatos negros na década de 1920, mas assumiu um tom mais político trinta anos depois, no momento de ascensão da luta por libertação. Afirma-se também que a dimensão interativa desses grupos enquanto subjetividades coletivas foi crucial para a delineação de suas identidades nessas bases, através de um complexo e relacional processo de intercâmbio simbólico entre si e o Estado.

O Povo Disciplinar de Geografia e a Tradução na Política de Currículo

Esta dissertação se constitui em uma investigação sobre as políticas de currículo para o Ensino de Geografia no nível médio. Proponho, especificamente, através do significante flutuante interdisciplinaridade, compreender os processos de precipitação da subjetivação da Geografia na tradução da política de integração curricular. Me aproprio de aportes pós-estruturais, marcadamente aproximados à teoria do discurso de Ernesto Laclau, com vistas a pensar a política de currículo como se dando através de lutas discursivas, marcadas pelo antagonismo e pela exclusão. Para pensar estes movimentos, inicialmente busco situar a perspectiva de currículo como texto, como textualização, com foco na interpretação de Lopes e Macedo de que o currículo é produzido na articulação de discursos. Busco, com esta leitura curricular, compreender os sentidos produzidos para/pela Geografia no nível médio, no âmbito de uma construção também discursiva como a do currículo integrado. Em razão da instabilidade inserida à reflexão sobre as políticas de currículo, elementos como a disciplina e as subjetivações constituídas na relação com ela passaram a configurar o cenário de análise que procurei construir. Nesse sentido, problematizo a leitura de comunidade disciplinar de Goodson ao focalizar a perspectiva laclauniana de povo como cadeia de equivalência. Com isso, procuro reconceptualizar a leitura de subjetividade política tendo em vista as demandas que a fazem ser. Este exercício se desdobrou em uma proposta de pensar a construção de um sujeito político disciplinar por meio da decisão frente ao outro, ao que é interpretado como negação de si. Aqui, penso o discurso de integração curricular como um outro possível, que pode ser interpretado como oposição ao currículo por disciplinas e, portanto, como ameaça à Geografia. O movimento estratégico com vistas à compreensão desta tradução se deu por intermédio da abordagem à textualização desta política, através do entrelaçamento do corpus teórico aos textos dos Parâmetros, Orientações Curriculares para o Ensino Médio e de entrevistas realizadas com lideranças, pesquisadores e consultores, envolvidos na produção da política. Estes elementos empíricos são lidos como momentos da política, como distintos contextos de resposta(s), que buscam suplementar a falta do sujeito, do que quer ser. Tendo a interdisciplinaridade como um dos meios pelos quais se significa a integração curricular na área de ciências humanas, onde está a Geografia, discuto o modo como esse significante é traduzido pelo povo disciplinar da Geografia. Uma tradução, resposta, à ameaça de um outro, desconhecido, que é interpretado como algo que expõe a subjetividade, o povo da Geografia, ao risco. Em função dos temores colocados, atento para uma performance de tentativa de blindagem ante ao outro. Tal manifestação é entendida como a tradução da interdisciplinaridade como característica da Geografia, como sua própria feição, como a si mesma. Concluo chamando a atenção para o que interpreto como uma luta pela estabilização do antagonismo, entre a integração e o disciplinar (a Geografia), e focalizo a tradução de sentidos do outro como possibilidade de existir e, nessa leitura, afirmar uma propriedade que se constitui provisoriamente como aquilo que é suposto como questionado pelo outro, algo de que se depende para continuar

Pirateando afetos e produzindo práticas: viagens pelo Centro de Cidadania LGBT

O presente trabalho refere-se a uma pesquisa-intervenção realizada no Centro de Cidadania LGBT da cidade do Rio de Janeiro, que é uma das principais ações do Programa Estadual Rio sem Homofobia executado pela Secretaria Estadual de Assistência Social e Direitos Humanos do Rio Janeiro. As práticas produzidas neste serviço se ancoram nos encontros da Psicologia com o Direito e o Serviço Social e nos encontros entre saber-técnico e saber-militante cujos diálogos produzidos têm causado alguns deslocamentos no campo de discussão acerca da diversidade sexual e de gênero, ao nos convocar à construção de práticas produtoras de novos territórios de existências. A partir de alguns instrumentos da Análise Institucional, em especial a cartografia, inicia-se esta viagem-pirataria que, conduzida pela possibilidade de Ser Afetado, aporta e aposta em práticas produtoras de subjetivações e potencializadoras da Vida a partir da Teoria da Afetividade Humana de Espinosa e do conceito de Ecosofia de Guattari

A resistência na literatura em tempos de globalização

Este trabalho pretende investigar as relações existentes entre o mercado, a globalização, a chamada pós-modernidade e a literatura. Para tanto, inicialmente delineia-se um breve panorama da literatura brasileira contemporânea, com a finalidade de expor uma parte do que ora se produz em termos de crítica e de ficção. Em seguida, trata-se do controverso conceito de pós-modernidade, com atenção especial às divergências terminológicas que vem suscitando, principal tópico objeto das considerações finais. Analisa-se depois o fenômeno da globalização, particularmente no que afeta a formação de novas subjetividades, ponderando-se também seu impacto na conceituação dos valores em geral e dos valores estéticos em particular. Por fim, passa-se ao conceito de resistência, com base em elementos teóricos extraídos de Schiller (o papel do artista), Agambem (a questão do contemporâneo) e Alfredo Bosi (relações entre narrativa e resistência), fechando-se o foco na produção literária, mediante análise sucinta da narrativa Eles eram muitos cavalos, de Luiz Ruffato

Sendo um consumidor consciente: discursos, projetos e subjetividades

Esta tese analisa construções discursivas sobre o consumidor consciente, o qual visa se diferenciar de um suposto consumo regular e/ou consumista. Toma por base inicial as atribuições propostas em guias e manuais pró consumo consciente, em específico aqueles produzidos pela Akatu e pelo Idec, os quais buscam conceitualizar, debater e promover este tipo de consumidor. Compreende este grupo inicial enquanto uma dimensão prescritiva do discurso os quais elaboram indicações de ação e embasamentos do conceito. O desdobramento do trabalho realiza uma análise qualitativa do discurso dos indivíduos de camadas médias cariocas que se identificam enquanto este tipo de consumidor. Observa-se as semelhanças, diferenças e o desenrolar destes conceitos nas falas de indivíduos em relação àquelas prescritas nos manuais. Assim, pautado em entendimentos sobre consumo enquanto construtor simbólico, noções de projetos de vida e construção de si, produções de sentido e significado, relações de sociabilidade e novas modalidades de participação política, a tese se desenvolve nos seguintes aspectos: análise das bases de origem as quais formulam possibilidades de inserção na temática se ser e fundamentos possíveis; elementos constituintes fundamentais na formação do perfil dos entrevistados e seus conceitos de consciência, os aspectos emotivos sentimentais responsáveis pela valorização ou desvalorização da experiência, e expectativas e perspectivas a respeito dos relacionamentos com terceiros, abordando o tema principalmente através das categorias: chatos e radicais. Com isso, aprofundando-se nas bases definidoras dos sujeitos, suas concepções de consciência, seus medos, anseios, prazer e felicidades; procurando compreender como a subjetividade destes sujeitos está sendo produzida e como dialogam seus projetos com o espaço urbano de uma grande cidade.

Community workers' understandings and practices of resistance

This research is focused on Community Workers located in Southern Ireland, and their understandings and practices of resistance. It is an attempt to explore the ways in which community workers’ understandings and practices of resistance are formed and, in turn, inform their sense of identity and their responses to the wider context of community development work in Ireland today. This study is specifically located but also has wider application and relevance because of the extended international reach of neo-liberal and managerial rationalities, and their implications for politics, policy and practice. The study considers resistance in a number of inter-related ways: as a collective oppositional position (with negative and positive dimensions); a personal and/or professional value (associated with the ‘expansion of contention’); a strategy for negotiating unequal power relations (in a range of levels and spaces of power); an identity (in relation to the sustaining of ‘reflexive subjectivities’); a set of practices, (which take into account the interplay between economic, political and cultural influences); and an educational process through which practitioners assess and enact personal and professional agency. Critical theorisations of community development and of the Irish state over time, trace the ways in which neo-liberalism and managerialism has inflected community development practice and the positions of community workers and communities in that process. The study draws on James C. Scott, Gramsci, Barnes and Prior, among others, which enabled the interrogation of resistance in relation to everyday practices through engaging with ‘hidden transcripts’ and spaces. The method chosen was focus group discussions with three groups of community workers located in different counties in Southern Ireland. This method facilitated a deep discourse analysis of practitioners’ encounters with resistance in the field of community work. Key findings relate to the various interpretations of the role of resistance, practices of resistance (including current restrictions), the value of resistance work and the conditions that may be conducive to practising resistance.

Embodied sexualities: Exploring accounts of Irish women's sexual knowledge and sexual experiences, 1920-1970

This chapter explores the ways in which sexuality has been understood, embodied and negotiated by a cohort of Irish women through their lives. It is based on qualitative data generated as part of an oral history project on Irish women’s experiences of sexuality and reproduction during the period 1920–1970.1 The interviews, which were conducted with 21 Irish women born between 1914 and 1955, illustrate that social and cultural discourses of sexuality as secretive, dangerous, dutiful and sinful were central to these women’s interpretative repertoires around sexuality and gender. However, the data also contains accounts of behaviours, experiences and feelings that challenged or resisted prevailing scripts of sexuality and gender. Drawing on feminist conceptualisations of sexuality and embodiment (Holland et al., 1994; Jackson and Scott, 2010), this chapter demonstrates that the women’s sexual subjectivities were forged in the tensions that existed between normative sexual scripts and their embodied experiences of sexual desires and sexual and reproductive practices. While recollections of sexual desire and pleasure did feature in the accounts of some of the women, it was the difficulties experienced around sexuality and reproduction that were spoken about in greatest detail. What emerges clearly from the data is the confusion, anxiety and pain occasioned by the negotiation of external demands and internal desires and the contested, unstable nature of both cultural power and female resistance.

States of play: Irish childhoods, race and belonging

This thesis explores the meaning-making practices of migrant and non-migrant children in relation to identities, race, belonging and childhood itself in their everyday lives and in the context of ‘normalizing’ discourses and spaces in Ireland. The relational, spatial and institutional contexts of children’s worlds are examined in the arenas of school, home, family, peer groups and consumer culture. The research develops a situated account of children’s complex subject positions, belongings and exclusions, as negotiated within discursive constructs, emerging in the ‘in-between’ spaces explored with other children and with adults. As a peripheral EU area both geographically and economically, Ireland has traditionally been a country of net emigration. This situation changed briefly in the late 1990s to early 2000s, sparking broad debate on Ireland’s perceived ‘new’ ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity arising from the arrival of migrant people both from within and beyond the EU as workers and as asylum seekers, and drawing attention to issues of race, identity, equality and integration in Irish society. Based in a West of Ireland town where migrant children and children of migrants comprise very small minorities in classroom settings, this research engages with a particular demographic of children who have started primary school since these changes have occurred. It seeks to represent the complexities of the processes which constitute children’s subjectivities, and which also produce and reproduce race and childhood itself in this context. The role of local, national and global spaces, relational networks and discursive currents as they are experienced and negotiated by children are explored, and the significance of embodied, sensory and affective processes are integrated into the analysis. Notions of the functions and rhetorics of play and playfulness (Sutton-Smith 1997) form a central thread that runs throughout the thesis, where play is both a feature of children’s cultural worlds and a site of resistance or ‘thinking otherwise’. The study seeks to examine how children actively participate in (re)producing definitions of both childhood and race arising in local, national and global spaces, demonstrating that while contestations of the boundaries of childhood discourses are contingently successful, race tends to be strongly reiterated, clinging to bodies and places and compromising belonging. In addition, it explores how children access belongings through agentic and imaginative practices with regard to peer and family relationships, particularly highlighting constructions of home, while also illustrating practices of excluding children positioned as unintelligible, including the role of silences in such situations. Finally, drawing on teachers’ understandings and on children’s playful micro-level negotiations of race, the study argues that assumptions of childhood innocence contribute to justifying depoliticised discourses of race in the early primary school years, and also tend to silence children’s own dialogues with this issue. Central throughout the thesis is an emphasis on the productive potentials of children’s marginal positioning in processes of transgressing definitional boundaries, including the generation of post-race conceptualisations that revealed the borders of race as performative and fluid. It suggests that interrupting exclusionary raced identities in Irish primary schools requires engagement with children’s world-making practices and the multiple resources that inform their lives.

Visual Disobedience: The Geopolitics of Experimental Art in Central America, 1990-Present

This dissertation centers on the relationship between art and politics in postwar Central America as materialized in the specific issues of racial and gendered violence that derive from the region's geopolitical location and history. It argues that the decade of the 1990s marks a moment of change in the region's cultural infrastructure, both institutionally and conceptually, in which artists seek a new visual language of experimental art practices to articulate and conceptualize a critical understanding of place, experience and knowledge. It posits that visual and conceptual manifestations of violence in Central American performance, conceptual art and installation extend beyond a critique of the state, and beyond the scope of political parties in perpetuating violent circumstances in these countries. It argues that instead artists use experimental practices in art to locate manifestations of racial violence in an historical system of domination and as a legacy of colonialism still witnessed, lived, and learned by multiple subjectivities in the region. In this postwar period artists move beyond the cold-war rhetoric of the previous decades and instead root the current social and political injustices in what Aníbal Quijano calls the `coloniality of power.' Through an engagement of decolonial methodologies, this dissertation challenges the label "political art" in Central America and offers what I call "visual disobedience" as a response to the coloniality of seeing. I posit that visual colonization is yet another aspect of the coloniality of power and indispensable to projects of decolonization. It offers an analysis of various works to show how visual disobedience responds specifically to racial and gender violence and the equally violent colonization of visuality in Mesoamerica. Such geopolitical critiques through art unmask themes specific to life and identity in contemporary Central America, from indigenous genocide, femicide, transnational gangs, to mass imprisonments and a new wave of social cleansing. I propose that Central American artists--beyond an anti-colonial stance--are engaging in visual disobedience so as to construct decolonial epistemologies in art, through art, and as art as decolonial gestures for healing.

Longing and (un)belonging: desire and displacement in the cinematic city

This paper explores the spatial conceptualisation of the themes of diaspora, displacement and desire in cinema, particularly in the work of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Uzak) , Fatih Akin (Gegen Die Wand) and Michael Winterbottom (Code 46). All three directors explore the imagined cinematic city as a site of multiple (un)belongings and interrogate how notions of identity are displaced and disrupted by geopolitics, by the city and by cinema itself. Both Ceylan and Akin’s visions of Istanbul are haunted by Beyoglu, both as the site of Istanbul’s contemporary cultural regeneration and by unspoken histories repressed by the Republic’s offical rhetoric of Turkish identity. In contrast Akin and Winterbottom’s heterotopias of the hotel and the hospital provide possible metaphors for these dislocated global identities. This paper will engage with a series of questions. What is the (imagined) place created between the viewer and the screen, or is it a non-place? Do the identities/ memories created there produce a ‘third space’? This paper uses Winnicot, Soja and Bhabha to ask what that third space might be and its consequences for a contemporary global Turkish identity. If these films depict a (Freudian) screen memory of dislocated subjectivities then what is being suppressed and sutured?

Dispossessing bare life: Towards a theoretical framework for examining power relations through economic development at the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa

In the past twenty years an increasing number of Global South nations have vied for the rights to host prestigious and expensive sport mega events. This trend requires significant reflection given the enormous economic costs of these events, which often produce little capital gain for the host nation (Whitson & Horne, 2006). Furthermore, sport mega events are often utilized for their symbolic capital (Belanger, 2009), which sometimes manifests through forcing people from their land for the sake of “beautification” (Davis, 2006). In this project, then, I asked how technologies of power were utilized by FIFA, corporate stakeholders, and the South African government to control people who were marginal to, or impeded the success of, the World Cup in Nelspruit, South Africa. This project consisted of two parts: the first involved constructing a theoretical framework for better understanding power as it operates through sport mega events in general. To this end I employed Marxian notions of the ordering of physical space, Foucauldian conceptions of sovereignty and governmentality, and Agamben’s (1998) state of exception to determine how particular bodies are constituted and controlled through sport mega events. In the second part, I applied this theoretical framework to the events in South Africa to better elucidate how people became displaced and killed because of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. I used South African popular news and documentaries as empirical evidence and conducted a discursive analysis of said news media. Through this coverage it became apparent that the mega event created the conditions in which new forms of rogue sovereign partnerships could arise through a historically and spatially contingent process of capitalism. The rogue sovereigns’ para-juridico-political orders, the discourses and practices of accumulation by dispossession as a tactic and effect of govermentality, and other historical non-capital subjectivities such as racial identity, all contributed to constituting Agamben’s state of exception in which people could be displaced, killed or left to die in the events surrounding the World Cup.

From Bogeyman to Bison: a herd-like amnesia of HIV?

Queer theorists from across a broad range of disciplines argue that we are in a ‘normalizing’ or ‘homonormative’ period, in which marginalized subjectivities strive to align themselves with hegemonic norms. In terms of LGBTQ rights and representation, it can be argued that this has resulted in an increased visibility of ‘desirable’ gays (monogamous – ideally civil-partnered, white, financially-independent, able-bodied) and the decreased visibility of ‘undesirable’ gays (the sick, the poor, the non-white, the non gender-conforming). Focusing specifically on the effects of this hierarchy on the contemporary theatrical representation of gay HIV/AIDS subjectivities, this article looks at two performances, Reza Abdoh’s Bogeyman (1991) and Lachlan Philpott’s Bison (2009/10). The essay argues that HIV/AIDS performance is as urgently necessary today as in the early 1990s, and that a queer dramaturgy, unafraid to resist the lure of normativity or the ‘gaystreaming’ of LGBT representation, is a vital intervention strategy in contemporary (LGBT) theatre.

'Mining money': science, legal technologies & working the borderlands of global finance

This paper explores the roles of science and market devices in the commodification of ‘nature’ and the configuration of flows of speculative capital. It focuses on mineral prospecting and the market for shares in ‘junior’ mining companies. In recent years these companies have expanded the reach of their exploration activities overseas, taking advantage of innovations in exploration methodologies and the liberalisation of fiscal and property regimes in ‘emerging’ mineral rich developing countries. Recent literature has explored how the reconfiguration of notions of ‘risk’ has structured the uneven distribution of rents. It is increasingly evident that neoliberal framing of environmental, political, social and economic risks has set in motion overflows that multinational mining capital had not bargained for (e.g. nationalisation, violence and political resistance). However, the role of ‘geological risk’ in animating flows of mining finance is often assumed as a ‘technical’ given. Yet geological knowledge claims, translated locally, designed to travel globally, assemble heterogeneous elements within distanciated regimes of metrology, valuation and commodity production. This paper explores how knowledge of nature is enrolled within systems of property relations, focusing on the genealogy of the knowledge practices that animate contemporary circuits of speculative mining finance. It argues that the financing of mineral prospecting mobilises pragmatic and situated forms of knowledge rather than actuarially driven calculations that promise predictability. A Canadian public enquiry struck in the wake of scandal associated with Bre-X’s prospecting activities in Indonesia is used to glean insights into the ways in which the construction of a system of public warrant to underpin financial speculation is predicated upon particular subjectivities and the outworking of everyday practices and struggles over ‘value’. Reflection on practical investments in processes of standardisation, rituals of verification and systems of accreditation reveal much about how the materiality of things shape the ways in which regional and global financial circuits are integrated, selectively transforming existing social relations and forms of knowledge production.

Irony as discipline: Self-help and gender in the knowledge economy:Self-help and gender in the knowledge economy

In this article, we explore the role of self-help literature within the knowledge economy. We point to the recent growth of ironic humour within such texts, and examine how this operates to construct gendered and embodied subjectivities that position women according to a masculine gaze. Drawing on empirical data from self-help books for career women published between 1997 and 2007, we analyse the styles of embodiment that these texts promote. We find that career women are encouraged to maintain a stance of constant attention to themselves and their bodily presentations, a position that is in line with wider cultural features of contemporary knowledge economy working. We note that ironic humour is deployed in ways that subtly reinforce existing gender relations within contemporary organizations. Our article contributes to debates on subjectivity within the knowledge economy; while scholars have pointed to an increasing normative emphasis on embodied performances, we provide insights into the mechanisms by which this occurs, with a specific focus upon the growing genre of self-help literature and its recent shift to ironic humour.

Machinic Assemblages: Women, Art Education and Space.

In this paper I explore connections between women, art education and spatial relations drawing on the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of machinic assemblage as a useful analytical tool for making sense of the heterogeneity and meshwork of life narratives and their social milieus. In focusing on Mary Bradish Titcomb, a fin-de-sie`cle Bostonian woman who lived and worked in the interface of education and art, moving in between differentiated series of social, cultural and geographical spaces, I challenge an image of narratives as unified and coherent representations of lives and subjects; at the same time I am pointing to their importance in opening up microsociological analyses of deterritorializations and lines of flight. What I argue is that an attention to space opens up paths for an analytics of becomings, and enables the theorization of open processes, multiplicities and nomadic subjectivities in the field of gender and education.