Anthropology in conversation with an Islamic tradition : Emmanuel Levinas and the practice of critique

Funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland This research was funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. I would like to thank Arnar Arnason, Alison Brown, Tim Ingold, Jo Vergunst, and the anonymous JRAI readers for their critical feedback, which greatly improved the quality and coherence of this article.Peer reviewedPostprin

Avatars of Eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace

Recent scholarly critiques of the so-called liberal peace raise important political and ethical challenges to practices of postwar intervention in the global South. However, their conceptual and analytic approaches have tended to reproduce rather than challenge the intellectual Eurocentrism underpinning the liberal peace. Eurocentric features of the critiques include the methodological bypassing of target subjects in research, the analytic bypassing of subjects through frameworks of governmentality, the assumed ontological split between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘local’, and a nostalgia for the liberal subject and the liberal social contract as alternative bases for politics. These collectively produce a ‘paradox of liberalism’ that sees the liberal peace as oppressive but also the only true source of emancipation. However, the article suggests that a repoliticization of colonial difference offers an alternative ‘decolonizing’ approach to critical analysis through repositioning the analytic gaze. Three alternative research strategies for critical analysis are briefly developed

Counterparts: Clothing, value and the sites of otherness in Panapompom ethnographic encounters

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Anthropological Forum, 18(1), 17-35, 2008 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00664670701858927.Panapompom people living in the western Louisiade Archipelago of Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, see their clothes as indices of their perceived poverty. ‘Development’ as a valued form of social life appears as images that attach only loosely to the people employing them. They nevertheless hold Panapompom people to account as subjects to a voice and gaze that is located in the imagery they strive to present: their clothes. This predicament strains anthropological approaches to the study of Melanesia that subsist on strict alterity, because native self‐judgments are located ‘at home’ for the ethnographer. In this article, I develop the notion of the counterpart as a means to explore these forms of postcolonial oppression and their implications for the ethnographic encounter

Engaging with issues of emotionality in mathematics teacher education for social justice

This article focuses on the relationship between social justice, emotionality and mathematics teaching in the context of the education of prospective teachers of mathematics. A relational approach to social justice calls for giving attention to enacting socially-just relationships in mathematics classrooms. Emotionality and social justice in teaching mathematics variously intersect, interrelate or interweave. An intervention, usng creative action methods, with a cohort of prospective teachers addressing these issues is described to illustrate the connection between emotionality and social justice in the context of mathematics teacher education. Creative action methods involve a variety of dramatic, interactive and experiential tools that can promote personal and group engagement and embodied reflection. The intervention aimed to engage the prospective teachers with some key issues for social justice in mathematics education through dialogue about the emotionality of teaching and learning mathematics. Some of the possibilities and limits of using such methods are considered

Global inequality, human rights and power: a critique of Ulrich Beck's cosmopolitanism

This article is a critique of Ulrich Beck's advocacy of a cosmopolitan approach to global inequality and human rights. It is argued that cosmopolitanism does not bring a new and unique perspective on global inequality. In fact Beck's proposals on migration would reinforce inequality and anti-cosmopolitanism. It is argued that his `both/and' perspective on hybridization and contextual universalism is undermined by inequality, conflict and power that are glossed over in Beck's approach. I argue that human rights interventionism as advocated by Beck falls short of cosmopolitanism, in ways which are shown by qualifications about power and inequality that Beck himself makes in his arguments

Attitudes towards the ‘stranger’: negotiating encounters with difference in the UK and Poland

Due to recent intensification in international mobility in Europe, its citizens are exposed to a much wider range of lifestyles and competing attitudes towards difference. Individuals are, therefore, increasingly likely to encounter ‘strangers’ and are, therefore, required to negotiate discontinuities and contradictions between the values that are transmitted through different sites. In response, the article explores the concept of the ‘stranger’ through original data collected in the UK and Poland. The article highlights that the construction of who is a stranger depends on national historical contexts, core values and related visions of the society. The UK and Poland have very different histories and experiences with social diversity, impacting on the ways in which individuals negotiate strange encounters. In both countries, the ‘stranger’ is often seen in a negative way and in relation to the minority groups that are perceived to be visibly different, distinct or ‘unknown’ in contemporary times. In Poland, this is now largely articulated through sexual prejudice (homophobia), whilst in the UK, attitudes towards the ‘stranger’ are largely conveyed through religious prejudice (Islamophobia). As such, the article offers a means of understanding how encounters with difference ‘produce’ strangers in different contexts

Britain and globalization

Many perspectives on globalization see it as differentiated in its effects and reception, culturally driven, either pre-modern or post-modern, best captured by globalist or sceptical perspectives, and an equalising phenomenon. This article discusses the British experience of globalization in the light of such approaches and argues that looking at this case gives an alternative view. Six themes on globalization are explored across four areas of the British experience of globalization. It is argued that in Britain globalization is, in contrast to the approaches outlined above, differentiated but also generalising, economically driven, modern, best understood with a mix of globalist and sceptical perspectives and structured by power, inequality and conflict. It is also argued that the British experience of globalization is a specific one and that Britain is a very globalized and globalizing country, economically, culturally and politically

Whose knowledge, whose voices? Power, agency and resistance in disability studies for the global south

Meekosha (2011) maintains that research and theories about disability derive mainly from the global North. Disability Studies rarely include non-metropolitan thinkers. Even when they do, these studies tend to be seen as context specific, and the social theories which emanate from these studies are rarely refered to in research theorizing disability in the North. This chapter sets out to investigate how this one way transfer of knowledge affects the way Disability Studies is conceptualised - whose experiences are incorporated within these studies; and whose are left out. Multilateral debate and dialogue between Disability Studies academics and activists in different locations around the world would help add on to the knowledge already available in the field, while keeping others informed about what is taking place in 'similar' situations elsewhere.peer-reviewe

The lacuna of capital, the state and war? The lost global history and theory of Eastern agency

In this article I seek to constructively engage Alex Anievas’s seminal book that is deservedly the subject of this forum. For Anievas has become a key figure in the revival of Trotskyism in IR and his is one of the first book-length treatments of the New Trotskyist theory of the international. My critique is meant merely as a constructive effort to push his excellent scholarship further in terms of developing his non-Eurocentric approach. In the first section I argue that his book represents a giant leap forward for the New Trotskyist IR. However, in the following sections I argue that although undeniably a brave attempt nevertheless, in the last instance, Anievas falls a few steps short in realising a genuinely non-Eurocentric account of world politics. This is because while he certainly restores or brings in ‘the lost theory and history of IR’ that elevates class forces to a central role in shaping world politics, nevertheless he fails to bring in ‘the lost global theory and history of Eastern agency’ that constitutes, in my view, the key ingredient of a non-Eurocentric approach to world politics. I also argue that while his anti-reductionist ontological credentials are for the most part extremely impressive, nevertheless, I argue that these are compromised in his analysis of Hitler’s racism. Finally, in the conclusion I ask whether the theoretical architecture of the New Trotskyism in IR is capable of developing a non-Eurocentric approach before concluding in the affirmative with respect to its modern revisionist incarnation of which Anievas is in the vanguard