In comparative perspective: the effects of incarceration abroad on penal subjectivity among prisoners in Lithuania

This article looks at how global flows of people and policies affect penal subjectivity among prisoners in Lithuania. Those who had previously been incarcerated abroad perceive their punishment in Lithuania’s reforming penal system in comparative terms. We find that international prison experience may either diminish or increase the sense of the severity of the current punishment. Respondents often felt more comfortable in a familiar culture of punishment in Lithuania that emphasizes autonomy and communality. Moreover, internationalized prisoners perceive prison reform emulating West European models as a threat to this culture and are able to articulate comparative critiques of this reform and contest its effects

Privacy in the age of Snowden: The Affective Infrastructure of Late Liberalism.

In 2013 NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked thousands of documents to journalists from The Washington Post and The Guardian. These leaked documents exposed the inner working of the surveillance industrial complex in the United States. Moreover, these actions created a disruption in the smooth affective order connected to liberalism and broader neo-liberal forms of governmentality. This project begins the process of tracking this disruption

The Metropolis and Evangelical Life: Coherence and Fragmentation in the ‘Lost City of London’

This article examines the interplay of different processes of cultural and subjective fragmentation experienced by conservative evangelical Anglicans, based on an ethnographic study of a congregation in central London. The author focuses on the evangelistic speaking practices of members of this church to explore how individuals negotiate contradictory norms of interaction as they move through different city spaces, and considers their response to tensions created by the demands of their workplace and their religious lives. Drawing on Georg Simmel’s ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, the author argues that their faith provides a sense of coherence and unity that responds to experiences of cultural fragmentation characteristic of everyday life in the city, while simultaneously leading to a specific consciousness of moral fragmentation that is inherent to conservative evangelicalism

Bodily relations and reciprocity in the art of Sonia Khurana

This article explores the significance of the ‘somatic’ and ‘ontological turn’ in locating the radical politics articulated in the contemporary performance, installation, video and digital art practices of New Delhi-based artist, Sonia Khurana (b. 1968). Since the late 1990s Khurana has fashioned a range of artworks that require new sorts of reciprocal and embodied relations with their viewers. While this line of art practice suggests the need for a primarily philosophical mode of inquiry into an art of the body, such affective relations need to be historicised also in relation to a discursive field of ‘difference’ and public expectations about the artist’s ethnic, gendered and national identity. Thus, this intimate, visceral and emotional field of inter- and intra-action is a novel contribution to recent transdisciplinary perspectives on the gendered, social and sentient body, that in turn prompts a wider debate on the ethics of cultural commentary and art historiography

Materiality in the future of history: things, practices, and politics

Frank Trentmann is professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London. From 2002 to 2007, he was director of the £5 million Cultures of Consumption research program, cofunded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). He is working on a book for Penguin, The Consuming Passion: How Things Came to Seduce, Enrich, and Define Our Lives, from the Seventeenth Century to the Twenty‐First. This article is one of a pair seeking to facilitate greater exchange between history and the social sciences. Its twin—“Crossing Divides: Globalization and Consumption in History” (forthcoming in the Handbook of Globalization Studies, ed. Bryan Turner)—shows what social scientists (and contemporary historians) might learn from earlier histories. The piece here follows the flow in the other direction. Many thanks to the ESRC for grant number RES‐052‐27‐002 and, for their comments, to Heather Chappells, Steve Pincus, Elizabeth Shove, and the editor and the reviewer