Nation, Migration, Identity: Learning from the Cross-Strait Context

It has been argued that globalisation, with its flexible landscapes of production, consumption and mobility, has favoured the emergence of new forms of belonging and identity that are not necessarily built on such principles of the nation state. In this paper, we argue that this process is more likely to happen when movements occur between states that are not in conflictual relations with each other. When the relations between two nations are shaped by conflicts, for instance due to disputes about sovereignty over a territory, nationalism may remain a crucial factor shaping identification and belonging of those who move between the two territories. In this paper, by taking the case of migrants moving between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, we will shed light on how the issue of “unresolved sovereignty” may eventually lead these actors to reinforce nationalist ideals and identities in their daily narratives and practices, instead of favouring the generation of hybrid identities

Validar a guerra: a construção do regime de Expertise estratégica

This article is intended to contribute to the interpretative analysis of war. For that purpose, it investigates how some apparatuses located in strategic thinking help to make modern war a social practice considered both technically feasible and, at the same time, legitimate for soldiers. In so doing, it makes use of two different but closely related theoretical fields, pragmatic sociology (finding inspiration in the work of scholars such as Luc Boltanski, Nicolas Dodier and Francis Chateauraynaud), and the sociology of scientific knowledge (based mostly on the work of Bruno Latour). On the one hand, the sociology of scientific knowledge has developed a productive questioning of the construction of scientific facts that is particularly relevant to the present research. On the other hand, pragmatic sociology generates a compatible framework able to describe collective actions. The combination of both approaches allows the description of the formation of a strategic expertise regime that supports the technical legitimacy of the use of military force. Together, the sociology of scientific knowledge and pragmatic sociology bring a particularly relevant perspective to research pertaining to war.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

A Reply to My Critics: The Critical Spirit of Bourdieusian Language

Drawing on my article “Bourdieusian reflections on language: Unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation”, this paper provides a detailed response to the above commentaries by Lisa Adkins, Bridget Fowler, Michael Grenfell, David Inglis, Hans-Herbert Kögler, Steph Lawler, William Outhwaite, Derek Robbins and Bryan S. Turner. The main purpose of this “Reply to my critics” is to reflect upon the most important issues raised by these commentators and thereby contribute to a more nuanced understanding of key questions arising from Bourdieu’s analysis of language