The poetics of justice: aphorism and chorus as modes of anti-racism

This article revisits accounts of the black radical tradition as a critique and alternative to institutionalised modes of knowledge and learning, reprising Harney and Moten’s concept of the undercommons to think about the constraints of the university and the possibility for thinking differently together. The deployment of linguistic and conceptual difficulty as a tactic of political speech is linked to Sutherland’s discussion of Marx’s poetics, leading to the suggestion that the repetitive interspersing of poetic or theoretical fragments in the public speech of social justice actors operates to create a shared rhythm that establishes mutuality. The piece ends with a discussion of the refashioning of Audre Lorde as a voice punctuating the assertion of anti-racist and intersectional consciousness via social media

Global social theory: building resources

There has been an intensification of student protests around the world addressing issues of racial exclusion and racialised hierarchy within the university, including its teaching and research practices. These movements point to urgent concerns about what and how we teach and research, and how the resources of universities might be used to support the amelioration of injustice rather than its reproduction. This short piece focuses on the curriculum and points to actions that we can take to build resources for a more dynamic and adequate curriculum within our universities. In particular, it discusses one collaborative initiative that all the authors have been involved in, the website Global Social Theory. This site provides resources for the diversification and expansion of the curriculum for those teaching and studying social theory

Reviewing research evidence and the case of participation in sport and physical recreation by black and minority ethnic communities

The paper addresses the implications of using the process of systematic review in the many areas of leisure where there is a dearth of material that would be admitted into conventional Cochrane Reviews. This raises important questions about what constitutes legitimate knowledge, questions that are of critical import not just to leisure scholars, but to the formulation of policy. The search for certainty in an area that lacks conceptual consensus results in an epistemological imperialism that takes a geocentric form. While clearly, there is a need for good research design whatever the style of research, we contend that the wholesale rejection of insightful research is profligate and foolhardy. A mechanism has to be found to capitalise on good quality research of whatever form. In that search, we draw upon our experience of conducting a review of the material available on participation in sport and physical recreation by people from Black and minority ethnic groups. The paper concludes with a proposal for a more productive review process that makes better use of the full panoply of good quality research available. © 2012 © 2012 Taylor & Francis

Voicing ambiguities in the Ilizwi Lenyaniso Lomhlaba co-creator collective

This article considers youth co-production in the context of Global Challenges Research funded project, Changing the Story. The participatory project conceives of ‘voice' as research data, turn of phrase, and character by engaging with the work produced by South African co-creator collective Ilizwi Lenyaniso Lomhlaba, who contribute to voicing issues related to land, stewardship and futures. Developing Linda Tuhiwai Smith's five dimensions of decolonial theorisation, the article considers ‘voice' as a complex and dynamic formulation including regimes of power: funding, legacies of dispossession and ongoing marginalisation and highlighting the achievements of young people’s formulation of the stories of their world

Questions of presence

This article considers some of the ways in which ‘the black woman’ as both representation and embodied, sentient being is rendered visible and invisible and to link these to the multiple and competing ways in which she is ‘present’. The issues are engaged through three distinct but overlapping conceptualisations of ‘presence’. ‘Presence’ as conceived (and highly contested) in performance studies; ‘presence’ as conceived and worked with in psychoanalysis; and ‘presence’ as decolonising political praxis among indigenous communities. I use these conceptualisations of presence to consider the various ways in which the black woman as figure and as embodied/sentient subject has been made present/absent in different discursive registers. I also explore what is foreclosed and how this is itself linked to legacies of colonial ‘worlding’. I end with consideration of alternative modes of black women’s presence and how this offers a resource for new modes of sociality. Keywords Black women; presence; colonial violence; de-gendering; psychosocial; triangular spac

Social work and gender::An argument for practical accounts

This article contributes to the debate on gender and social work by examining dominant approaches within the field. Anti-discriminatory, woman-centered and intersectional accounts are critiqued for reliance upon both reification and isolation of gender. Via examination of poststructural, queer and trans theories within social work, the author then presents accounts based upon structural/materialist, ethnomethodological and discursive theories, in order to open up debates about conceptualization of gender. These are used to suggest that social work should adopt a focus on gender as a practical accomplishment that occurs within various settings or contexts

Disenchanting secularism (or the cultivation of soul) as pedagogy in resistance to populist racism and colonial structures in the academy

This paper explores pedagogic strategies for resisting the racism of contemporary populism and age-old coloniality through challenging secularism in the academy, especially in social theory. Secularism sustains racism and imperialism in the contemporary academy and is inscribed, in part, through the norms of social theory. Post-secular social theory has been positioned by some as the decolonial answer, but often replicates the most problematic aspects of secularism. Whereas post-secularism affirms the previously denigrated side of the secular vs religious dualism, I am more interested in unworking those classificatory schemas, setting the critical thought of religious teachers in relation with ‘secular’ social and political theorists such that boundaries erode. The ambition in this is to resist the hierarchical orderings of knowledge that pit Islamic, indigenous, and feminised subjectivity as backwards, dangerous or intrinsically inferior to secular, Christian, rational knowledge. It is also to disenchant the secular Gods (progress, money, growth, health) and hold open space for critical play in relation to the transcendental - to create a permissive, legitimising, space for students’ spiritual dimension, conocimiento, or the cultivation of soul. The paper draws theoretical inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Sylvia Wynter. It also draws on a practical experiment in disenchanting secularism through teaching an undergraduate module in social theory called Capitalism and Religion

Rethinking the Interplay of Feminism and Secularism in a Neo-Secular Age

The need to re-examine established ways of thinking about secularism and its relationship to feminism has arisen in the context of the confluence of a number of developments including: the increasing dominance of the 'clash of civilizations' thesis; the expansion of postmodern critiques of Enlightenment rationality to encompass questions of religion; and sustained critiques of the 'secularization thesis'. Conflicts between the claims of women's equality and the claims of religion are well-documented vis-à-vis all major religions and across all regions. The ongoing moral panic about the presence of Islam in Europe, marked by a preoccupation with policing Muslim women's dress, reminds us of the centrality of women and gender power relations in the interrelation of religion, culture and the state. Added to postmodern and other critiques of the secular-religious binary, most sociological research now contradicts the equation of modernization with secularization. This article focuses on the challenges that these developments pose to politically-oriented feminist thinking and practice. It argues that non-oppressive feminist responses require a new critical engagement with secularism as a normative principle in democratic, multicultural societies. To inform this process, the author maps and links discussions across different fields of feminist scholarship, in the sociology of religion and in political theory. She organizes the main philosophical traditions and fault lines that form the intellectual terrain at the intersection of feminism, religion and politics in two broad groups: feminist critiques of the Enlightenment critique of religion; and feminist scholarship at the critical edges of the Enlightenment tradition. The author argues that notwithstanding the fragmented nature of feminist debates in this area, common ground is emerging across different politically oriented approaches: all emphasize 'democracy' and the values that underpin it as the larger discursive frame in which the principle of secularism can be redefined with emancipatory intent in a neo-secular age.peer-reviewe

Writing as skin:Negotiating the body in(to) learning about the managed self

We draw on the notion of ‘skin’ to discuss the ways in which writing in management and organisation studies wrestles with two drives in its endeavour to represent the reality of our ‘organised’ lives: the drive to share internal lived experience, and the drive to externalise and abstract. Through exploring skin as a metaphor for a negotiating interface between these forces in our writing, we (a) argue that both are critical parts of writing, needed in order to learn about management and organisation and (b) explore different ways in which they might be brought into contact. Reviewing, synthesising and building on critiques of ‘scientific’ writing that have been made from within management and organisation studies, and on creative commentary from the arts, we think reflexively about the ways in which writing mediates learning by being both representative of experience and an experience in itself. A collaboration between management scholar and creative writer, the text of this article is a critical-creative experiment that outlines the experiential ‘skin-text’ while simultaneously producing an example of such a text.</p