The mimetic politics of lone-wolf terrorism

Written at a time of crisis in the project of social and political modernity, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1864 novel Notes from Underground offers an intriguing parallel for the twenty-first century lone-wolf; it portrays an abject, outcast, spiteful unnamed anti-hero boiling with rage, bitter with resentment and on the verge of radicalisation. A Girardian reading of the poetic truths contained in Dostoevsky’s work is able to provide important keys to explain the contemporary transformation from ‘fourth-wave’ religious terrorism to ‘fifth-wave’ lone-wolf terrorism. Such a reading argues that it is mimetic rivalry – rather than much-trumpeted forms of religious violence or cultural differences – that fuels the triangular relation between governments, terrorists and civilian victims at heart of terrorist acts. This approach is further able to blend social inquiry with an account of the individual, in fact anthropological, conditions of lone-wolf terrorism by tracing the globalisation of resentment and the individualisation of violence to the hyper-mimeticism characterising the globalisation of late modernity. Finally, a mimetic reading of ‘fifth-wave’ terrorism accounts for the turbulence of a global politics in which victimhood and scapegoating no longer have the ability to stabilise social order and warns against a future where violence proliferates and escalates unchecked

Lifestyle gambling, indebtedness and anxiety: A deviant leisure perspective

While once subject to wide-ranging state control, gambling has successfully culturally embedded itself within the normalised and legitimised forms of leisure such as the night-time economy, sports fandom and online forums of socialisation. Consequently, this article argues that existing research which conceptualises gambling as separate from everyday life is largely obsolete in the contemporary context. We argue here that gambling has become an integral feature of the wider masculine weekend leisure experience, intimately connected to an infantilised consumer identity that is peculiar to late-capitalism. This article, drawing upon ongoing ethnographic research among what we term ‘lifestyle gamblers’, utilises a deviant leisure perspective to problematise the myriad harms that emerge from this relationship, situated within a broader critique of consumerism and global capitalism. While social gambling is defended fiercely by the industry, this article argues that an identity-based culture of sports-betting that attaches fragile social and cultural capital to the allure of the gambling win encourages the chasing of losses and impulsive betting. Underscored by a culture of readily available and high-interest credit, we explore how gamblers in a technologically accelerated culture develop a pathological relationship to money as it becomes desublimated and loses its symbolic value. Such processes, exacerbated by the promise of consumer culture, have the potential to cast these young adults into a paralysing reality of indebtedness that is fraught with depression, stress, domestic instability and destructive behaviours of consumption

The Data-doppelganger and the Cyborg-self: Theorising the Datafication of Education

In this paper, I use the notion of the data-doppelganger (Williamson, 2014) as a theoretical lens through which to view the datafication of education. The data-doppelganger is the version of the self which exists in the significant quantities of data collected about both children and teachers. A psychoanalytic analysis of the literary genre of the doppelganger identifies the role of the double as a second self, which completes the ego, expresses the repressed desires of the id and regulates the subject as the superego (Dolar, 1991). Using this psychoanalytic understanding of the double, I explore the role of data in the policy document Bold Beginnings (Ofsted, 2018). I find that data holds a mirror up to the child, repositioning it as a normalised pupil; play can be understood as a dangerous, chaotic practice which must be suppressed and data functions as a regulatory device to objectify and control both teachers and children