The invisibility of undocumented migrants in 9/11 relief and commemoration is a symptom of their wider social and political isolation

Despite their lack of recognition, undocumented immigrants are not immune from the disasters and tragedies that occur in the U.S. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011 were no exception. Alexandra Délano and Benjamin Nienass look at how, in the wake of 9/11, the undocumented immigrants that were involved in the tragedy and their families were practically ‘invisible’ to state and non-state institutions who would have otherwise provided assistance and recognition. They argue that this failure of public life for undocumented immigrants is down to their own fears about coming forward due to their legal status, procedural requirements which called for documents that they did not possess, and the post 9/11 associations between immigration, security and terrorism

Making Sense of and with “Profound Regret”: Howard County Board of Education’s Apology for a Racially Segregated Public School System

In November 2012, the Board of Education of Howard County, Maryland approved a proclamation that expressed “profound regret that the Howard County Public School System maintained segregated and unequal public schools both prior, and subsequent to” Brown v. Board of Education. The proclamation describes Howard County’s slow response to comply with the 1954 decision, such that the school system was not officially desegregated until eleven years later in 1965. Through the analysis of stakeholder interviews and board meetings, we explore the various ways and the extent to which the Board of Howard County’s apology was bestowed with meaning. We argue that the apology was utilized as a narrative device to define the role of the Board, delineate the injustice committed, establish (dis)continuity between past and present injustices, and work out who has been wronged. Stakeholders used de jure segregation as a lens to understand contemporary de facto segregation and reflected on its continuing harm to current members of the community. We conclude by discussing the potential of public apologies as forms of governance that mold responsible and responsive public officials

[Review of the book What about me?: The struggle for identity in a market-based society, Paul Verhaeghe, 2014]

In his book What about me? The struggle for identity in a market-based society, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist Paul Verhaeghe tries to elucidate the link between neo-liberal society, identity, and mental health. Verhaeghe starts from the observation that our identity is shaped by the norms and rules of the society we live in; in short, “our self is…of external origin” (page 22). What kind of identity do people acquire in modern western society? According to Verhaeghe, a competitive, meritocratic society that is focused on maximizing material consumption confers the ideal of individual success and perfection on people, combined with an individual responsibility to achieve these goals. In his view, this combination is toxic for mental health. The rat races that we are exposed to from the earliest school days and throughout our work lives have only a few winners, but many losers. Moreover, individualized notions of responsibility for success and perfection put the burden of failure firmly on the individual. In the past, people might have been worse off in many ways, but expectations and interpretations of success in terms of individual effort lead to novel “disorders,” often directly defined in terms of failure to perform according to standards of success (e.g., ‘attention deficit’). Subsequently, as Verhaeghe argues, current ideology attempts to lift this burden by falsely interpreting many of these disorders in genetic or biological terms. In contrast, Verhaeghe claims that these disorders display abnormality only from the vantage point of neo-liberal norms of success and responsibility, which he describes as the new “Social Darwinism in economic guise” (page 119)

Memory Protest and Contested Time: The Antimonumentos Route in Mexico City

This article examines the corridor of Antimonumentos (antimonuments) in Mexico City. In a context of more than 110,000 enforced disappearances and hundreds of thousands of deaths since the start of the “war on drug cartels” in 2006, the Antimonumentos are one of the ways in which memory activists seek to mark significant events of violence and state neglect, and expressly confront both the government and society by voicing public demands for justice, accountability, and non-repetition. They occupy public spaces anonymously, without permission, and establish a link between past and present instances of state violence, thereby drawing attention to intersecting forms of violence. We examine how these countermonuments exemplify a protest against a specific regime of temporality, and how they also allow us to reflect on the temporality of protests

Silence, Screen, and Spectacle : Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information

https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/all_books/1247/thumbnail.jp

Borders and the Politics of Mourning

Volume 83, No.2, Summer 2016 of Social Research, an International Quarterly.https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/all_books/1248/thumbnail.jp

The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism

https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/all_books/1563/thumbnail.jp