In this article, I argue that concern with the public sphere and the necessary conditions for a genuine democracy can be seen as a central theme of Jurgen Habermas's work that deserves respect and critical scrutiny in the contemporary moment, when throughout the world liberal democracies are in crisis. My study intends to point to the continuing importance of Habermas' problematic of the public sphere and its relevance for debates over democratic politics and social and cultural life in the present (...) age, in an era in which the Occupy Movements, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the Trump Resistance Movement, and Ukraine and Palestine Solidarity groups use social media to struggle against multiple forms of oppression. At stake is delineating a concept of the public sphere which facilitates maximum public participation and debate over the key issues of the contemporary era and which consequently promotes the cause of radical democracy and social transformation. (shrink)

There has been an outpouring of research on right-wing populist conservatism since the advent of the Trump presidency and right-wing movements in Europe. Yet, little research has been devoted to divisions among conservatives themselves, especially among conservative academics. Although Trump has maintained remarkable unity within the Republican Party for electoral reasons, he has fostered sharp divisions among conservative intellectuals and academicians. This article compares 102 politically conservative professors who are Trumpists and 80 conservative professors who are anti-Trumpists. All (...) 182 function as public intellectuals who advocate their views in print and digital media. Drawing on recent research in the sociology of intellectuals and particularly Pierre Bourdieu’s analytical field perspective, this article proposes a fielding political identities and practices framework to show how these two groups of professors (Trumpists and anti-Trumpists) differ in where they teach, their intellectual orientations, their scholarly productivity, where they network with think tanks, scholarly professional associations, and government agencies, and their stances on key issues surrounding the Trump presidency. The academic Trumpists embrace the right-wing populist wave mobilized by Trump and the conservative academic critics resist this move. This polarization of views between these two groups of conservative professors is enduring and rooted in two distinct social networks that connect positions in the academic field to affiliations with think tanks, government agencies, and professional associations in the field of power that reinforce their respective political identities. This research contributes to political sociology, the sociology of intellectuals, and the sociology of conservative politics in American higher education. (shrink)

Social opposition to instituted policies and practices marks the sites of resistance that populate the contemporary political landscape. Animated by the prospects of a better and more just world, the emancipatory ambitions of social and political movements bring to the fore discrepancies between ideologically congealed power relations and habits of thought and the subversive function of utopian expectations. Paul Ricoeur reminds us that our participation in society is invariably punctuated by our experiences of reality’s noncongruence with imaginative alternatives we (...) can project and upon which we can act. After explaining how literary fictions open spaces for reworking reality, I set out the imagination’s analogous power on the political plane. The struggles with which social and political movements are engaged seek to transform established conventions. Hence, like literary works, these movements aim at refashioning the existing order of reality from within. Protest movements attest to how struggles for recognition combat systemic injustices by holding out the prospect of a different and better future. Consequently, these movements exemplify the power that springs from individuals acting in consort, as evidenced by recent protests against the Trump administration. Conversely, violence destroys power. In view of the way that future expectations animate the force of the present, I therefore argue that dystopic representations of authoritarian regimes in Margret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s 1984 fulfill a critical, social function as apocalyptic harbingers of political corruption and deceit. As such, these dystopian novels intensify the force that the present has as a time of crisis and decision. (shrink)

This article explores rage in the context of Korean feminist movements. Rage as a corporeal force can be combined with other emotional modalities to achieve consistency, durability, efficiency, and intensity. These modalities are interdependent, and rage, in relation to indignation, becomes a revolutionary affect that changes power dynamics. Women's indignant rage challenges the patriarchal value system and increases women's agency. Korean women deploy the politics of rage to “Escape the Corset” and free themselves from the oppressive devices—patriarchal family structures and (...) traditional notions of femininity and beauty—that oppress women's bodies. The “Escape the Corset” movement, driven by indignant rage, materializes the possibility of resistance and creation that puts an end to the phallic economy of desire and meaning, and it elaborates a new modality of women's life cycle and relation to the world. Unlike indignant rage, a feminist revolutionary tool, rage combined with hatred is a conservative affect that annihilates the possibility of change and maintains the status quo. The politics of rage promotes a deconstruction of the patriarchal system, joining with a subversive and cathartic joy that contains hope for a more just future. (shrink)

This paper draws from the work of Michel Foucault to understand how the user/survivor movement exists within the context of a political mental health services apparatus. Such an analysis puts power at the center of mental health, and highlights the way in which specific relations of power—between the psychiatrist and patient,1 for example—work to produce discourse, which in turn works to reproduce these same relations of power. The first section of the paper briefly discusses how, for Foucault, psychiatry is (...) a self-perpetuating apparatus, built around the power of the psychiatrist to define what constitutes valid knowledge. This theoretical framework makes clear that, within the apparatus, there will be alternative... (shrink)

This paper proposes a framework for understanding and analysing online social resistance movements based on Hilde Lindemann’s concept of counterstories (Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair, 2003). This framework is based on the premise that we shape our identities in shared social spaces, and that such shared spaces are structured according to so-called ‘master narratives’. Master narratives define the ‘realm of possible identities’ that we can assume, and form the basis for either recognizing or denying recognition to various social groups in (...) specific roles that they might occupy. Social oppression occurs when master narratives preclude or forbid a certain form of self-expression, or alternatively force members of a specific social group into a determinate societal role (say, women who receive recognition only in the roles of mother or housewife). Counterstories serve as a corrective to these aspects of oppression by challenging the oppressive facets of master narratives. Based on this framework, I propose an interpretation of the #MeToo movement as a counterstory that aims to change the oppressive aspects of the patriarchal master narrative that (partially) structures many shared social spaces in the modern Western world. I end this paper by applying the framework to consider potential obstacles #MeToo may encounter as a distinctively online movement. (shrink)

The Trump presidency has been remarkable in its attacks on many mainstream institutions. It has tapped populist sentiment that reflects little confidence in the key decision-making centers in American society. Higher education has not escaped this attack. Indeed, criticism of the academy has gone well beyond the debated policies of affirmative action and political correctness to the very status of expert knowledge itself, questioning what is legitimate knowledge. Claims of “false data” and “alternative facts” parade in the public arena (...) without the benefit of reasoned scholarship that might separate fact from fiction. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the attack on science, particularly scientific research focusing on environmental issues and climate change. Nonetheless, a small number of academicians—supposed arbiters of truth—advocate for Trump. How does one explain this apparent anomaly? Why would scholars support a president and populist movement that attack the very foundations of their professional life: knowledge and expertise? I have identified 103 such professors who offer their public support of Trump through blogs, essays, op-ed pieces, public lectures, tweets, YouTube videos, and even a couple of trade books. These are public intellectuals who intervene beyond the classroom and laboratory to promote a political agenda that is supportive of Trump. They are public advocates for Trump: academic Trumpists. Who are these individuals? Where do they teach? What do they teach? What kinds of connections external to the academy do they cultivate? How do they justify their support of Trump? This article offers some answers to these questions. It draws inspiration from Bourdieu’s field analysis of the politics of higher education and the sociology of conservative intellectuals. (shrink)

During India’s Emergency, anti-state poetry of a decidedly amateurish quality proliferated. Anti-Emergency poetry did little to bring about the restoration of democracy, nor could it have reasonably been mistaken for great art. So what was the purpose of writing resistance poetry if it was not meant to directly influence politics nor to be great art? Poetry as politics has a long history in the Islamicate world, dating back to the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula. While until the 19th century Islamicate poetry (...) was tied to the Caliphates who employed poets to extol the virtues of the ruling classes, after the so-called ‘Rise of the West’ Islamicate poetry became associated instead with anti-colonial and anti-state movements across the Islamicate world from Morocco to Indonesia and from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. In this essay, I argue that the utility of resistance poetry in anti-state movements in South Asia has been to build solidarity among social movement participants. The sociology of social movements has long placed emphasis on the role of affective bonds and solidarity building for predicting social movement success, and poetry, in the Islamicate context especially, I argue, does exactly that. By circulating poems, social movement participants inform the reader that resistance and opposition exist, they inspire participants and would-be participants and calm fears that participants might have, especially in moments of political repression. These poems generate emotional and cultural bonds among social movement participants by linking anti-state movements to the centuries-old tradition of Islamicate poetry, thereby fostering solidarity and providing a firm basis for collective action. (shrink)

Why have so many people responded to the insecurity, exploitation, alienation, and isolation of precarity capitalism by supporting the far right? In this timely book, Claudia Leeb argues that psychoanalytic and feminist critical theory illuminates how economic and psychological factors interact to produce this extreme political shift. Contesting the Far Right examines right-wing recruitment tactics in the United States and Austria, where people discontented with the status quo have turned to far-right parties and movements that further cement capitalism’s adverse effects. (...) Leeb contends that Freudian psychoanalytic theory and early Frankfurt School Critical Theory provide analytical tools to explain this apparent contradiction in psychological terms. Living under precarity capitalism generates feelings of failure and anxiety, which people experience as non-wholeness, because it has become difficult if not impossible to live up to the fetish of economic, interpersonal, and bodily success, and the far right preys on such feelings. Its psychologically oriented propaganda tactics produce the illusion of wholeness and a positive sense of self while leaving the socioeconomic conditions that cause people’s suffering intact. At the same time, they remove the inhibitions that keep people’s repressed aggression and racist and sexist attitudes in check. To demonstrate the workings of this process, Leeb compares cases including Trump and the alt-right in the United States and the Freedom Party and the identitarian movement in Austria. At once theoretically rich and politically engaged, this book also offers ways to resist the far right and counter the psychological appeal of its propaganda techniques. (shrink)

This article studies anti-globalization activities in South Asia, and specifically the Indian subcontinent, and discovers that the common people have begun a new form of civil disobedience in the country, to counter the machinations of multinational corporations. Many of the eminent writers and activists at the forefront of the movement are Indian women, a fact that may come as a surprise to some, but is part and parcel of the movement's basis in sustainable development and resistance to (...) patriarchal hegemony. (shrink)

This paper attempts to describe the present situation in the women's movement in Serbia and Montenegro and to tackle questions about its future, on the basis of a sociological study of newly formed women's groups. In the past, the women's movement in these societies has surged several times, only to be completely annulled, and its proponents falling to oblivion. Now, for the first time ever, the seeds of the movement originating from the long gone period of the (...) socialist regime in Yugoslavia have survived the turmoil of disintegration and wars, and are germinating as women's groups and networks spring up alongside are being formed. The crucial task for the future will be strengthening this fragile and diffused network structure and laying down solid foundations for a movement with proper institutional mechanisms on a nation/state level. This investigation examined the prerequisites for this: firstly by examining the visibility and distinguishing features of women's groups and their activities in their current local environment; and secondly, by assessing activists’ clear acceptance of feminist (and their groups’) self-determination, which confront existing social attitudes towards feminist identities. In both respects, considerable advances towards a broader and clearer recognition of the aims and essence of women's groups’ activities are identified, in spite of the ever-present traditional and ideological resistance to this type of women's engagement. (shrink)

The problem of two relativistically-moving pointlike particles of constant mass is undertaken in an arbitrary Lorentz frame using the classical Lagrangian mechanics of Stückelberg, Horwitz, and Piron. The particles are assumed to interact at events along their world lines at a common “world time,” an invariant dynamical parameter which is not in general synchronous with the particle proper time. The Lorentz-scalar interaction is assumed to be the Coulomb potential (i.e., the inverse square spacetime potential) of the spacetime event separation. The (...) classical orbit equations are found in 1 + 1 spacetime dimensions in the hyperbolic angle coordinates for the reduced problem. The solutions to the reduced motion in these coordinates are the spacetime generalizations of the nonrelativistic Kepler solutions. and they introduce an invariant eccentricity which is a function of other known constants of the motion for the reduced problem. Solutions compatible with physical scattering are obtained by the assumption that the eccentricity is a given function of the ratio of the particle masses. (shrink)

The classical two-body system with Lorentz-invariant Coulomb work function V = -k/ρ is solved in 3+1 dimensions using the manifestly covariant Hamiltonian mechanics of Stückelberg. Particular solutions for the reduced motion are obtained which correspond to bound attractive, unbound attractive, and repulsive scattering motion. A lack of perihelion precession is found in the bound attractive orbit, and the semiclassical hydrogen spectrum subsequently contains no fine structure corrections. It is argued that this prediction is indicative of the correct classical special relativistic (...) two-body theory. (shrink)

In the classical Stueckelberg-Horwitz-Piron relativistic Hamiltonian mechanics, a significant aspect of evolution of the classical n-body particle system with mutual interaction is the method by which events along distinct particle world lines are put into correspondence as a dynamical state. Approaches to this procedure are discussed in connection with active and passive symmetry principles.

In December 1967, Louis Washkansky, a grocer living in South Africa, became the first person to awaken after a heart transplant. Some accounts say that his first words were, “I am the new Frankenstein.” Others claim that Christiaan Barnard, his transplant surgeon, uttered these. Much as people have long mixed up who Frankenstein is—creature or creator?—in Mary Shelley's novel, so patient and surgeon, repaired and repairer, are confused in retellings of this post‐op Frankensteinian moment. Whether Washkansky identified with Frankenstein's monster (...) or not, he was probably feeling a bit monstrous after taking the donor heart of Denise Darvall into his chest. I know I was, over thirty years later, standing naked before a mirror and gazing at my shorn and bloated torso for the first time since a kidney transplant. My boundaries had been rearranged: a crescentic scar marked the frontier between me and not‐me. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article makes the case for the continued relevance of former U.S. president Barack Obama's conception of social hope. To present this conception, I compare it with the views of hope developed by two prominent political philosophers: Immanuel Kant and Richard Rorty. Kant, Rorty, and Obama all espouse the idea that progress must be founded on hope since hope motivates action. Yet the three differ on the grounds of hope. Kant believes that social progress depends on our shared humanity. (...) Similarly, Obama regards progress as founded on a set of values shared by all Americans. Given our divisions today, however, Obama's premise appears implausible. Rorty's philosophy of hope provides a way out of this worry: progress need not depend on an essential feature shared by all but can be achieved by “stitching together” coalitions between groups that share interests. Still, this does not imply that we should abandon Obama's conception of hope altogether. The idea of audacious hope implies that we should have the courage to resist the temptation to let divisions quell our efforts toward political progress. Obama's conception of hope, with the Rortian corrective I defend, holds much promise in our current political climate. (shrink)

In the covariant Hamiltonian mechanics with action-at-a-distance, we compare the proper time and dynamical time representations of the coordinate space world line using the differential geometry of nongeodesic curves in 3+1 Minkowski spacetime. The covariant generalization of the Serret-Frenet equations for the point particle with interaction are derived using the arc length representation. A set of invariant point particle kinematical properties are derived which are equivalent to the solutions of the equations of motion in coordinate space and which are functions (...) of either the proper time or the dynamical time. Expressions for the quantities are given for the example of the covariant harmonic oscillator and comments are offered regarding the measurability of the dynamical time. (shrink)

This essay reviews the possibility of the space of appearance under the authoritarian nationalism that has been ushered in by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. For those working in and around higher education, I propose that the tasks with which we should begin are: decolonizing the curriculum; emptying the museum; and opening theory. Each of these categories has both a history in past resistance and liberation movements and a present-day dynamic that is explored here from the (...) South African Rhodes Must Fall movement via Occupy Wall Street to the Free University and Antiuniversity. (shrink)

The American Indian Movement, founded in 1968 in Minneapolis, burst into that turbulent time with passion, anger, and radical acts of resistance. Spurred by the Civil Rights movement, Native people began to protest the decades--centuries--of corruption, racism, and abuse they had endured. They argued for political, social, and cultural change, and they got attention. The photographs of activist Dick Bancroft, a key documentarian of AIM, provide a stunningly intimate view of this major piece of American history from (...) 1970 to 1981. Veteran journalist Laura Waterman Wittstock, who participated in events in Washington, DC, has interviewed a host of surviving participants to tell the stories behind the images. The words of Russell Means, Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, Eddie Benton Banai, Pat Bellanger, Elaine Salinas, Winona LaDuke, Bill Means, Ken Tilsen, Larry Leventhal, Jose Barreiro, and others tell the stories: the takeovers of federal buildings and the Winter Dam in Wisconsin, the founding of survival schools in the Twin Cities, the Wounded Knee trials, international conferences for indigenous rights, the Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan and the Longest Walk for Survival, powwows and camps and United Nations actions. This is the inside record of a movement that began to change a nation. Dick Bancroft has been the unofficial photographer for the American Indian Movement since 1970. He has traveled the world to take these photographs. Laura Waterman Wittstock, a writer and media consultant, covered the early years of the American Indian Movement as a journalist. Rigoberta Menchú Tum, recipient of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, is an activist for indigenous rights in Guatemala. (shrink)

This essay aims to clarify the value of developing systematic studies of ignorance as a component of any robust theory of knowledge. The author employs feminist efforts to recover and create knowledge of women's bodies in the contemporary women's health movement as a case study for cataloging different types of ignorance and shedding light on the nature of their production. She also helps us understand the ways resistance movements can be a helpful site for understanding how to identify, (...) critique, and transform ignorance. (shrink)

This article considers understandings of nonviolence within the Catholic Worker movement and their embodiment. The aim is to make the Worker's position theologically understandable, demonstrating how this drives their methods for action. The article argues that a particular ethic of nonviolence can be found within the movement, grounded within the aims of its founders and the current practices of the movement today, drawing on the example of the Jubilee Ploughshares 2000 from which the London Catholic Worker was (...) founded to illustrate this. By exploring the movement's theological foundations for the practice of grassroots, active nonviolence, it will seek to present an important example of Catholic nonviolent practice questioning how this may challenge contemporary Catholic thinking on war and peace. (shrink)

Efforts to protect endangered species by regulating the use of privately owned lands are routinely resisted by appeal to the private property rights of landowners. Recently, the 'wise-use' movement has emerged as a primary representative of these landowners' claims. In addressing the issues raised by the wise-use movement and others like them, legal scholars and philosophers have typically examined the scope of private property rights and the extent to which these rights should influence public policy decisions when weighed (...) against other moral considerations. Whether from an anthropocentric standpoint or from a perspective of moral extensionism, the key question seems to be the extent to which prima facie property rights are overridden by other moral interests, not whether such rights claims can reasonably be appealed to at all in public discussions of environmental justice. I argue, however, that a morally extensionist perspective not only introduces more potential defeaters of prima facie property rights, but actually strips appeals to private property rights of their moral significance. Hence, I argue on Rawlsian grounds that appealing to private property rights in the way that the wise-use movement does is unreasonable in a pluralistic society. In so doing, I show that a Rawlsian perspective may be more congenial to the interests of moral extensionists than is typically thought. (shrink)

: This essay aims to clarify the value of developing systematic studies of ignorance as a component of any robust theory of knowledge. The author employs feminist efforts to recover and create knowledge of women's bodies in the contemporary women's health movement as a case study for cataloging different types of ignorance and shedding light on the nature of their production. She also helps us understand the ways resistance movements can be a helpful site for understanding how to (...) identify, critique, and transform ignorance. (shrink)

The events on January 6th should signal to us just how divided the United States is as a country and prompt us to think through some of the challenges we face—as well as what we can reasonably hope for in terms of restoring a belief in the most coveted ideals of American democracy as outlined in the Declaration of Independence, namely, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Upon analyzing Trump’s rise to political power via the (...) lenses of Hannah Arendt’s concept of ideology and Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation, I try to find hope through these dark times through looking at the increased momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Youth Climate Movement, two social movements I interpret through the frame of Johan Galtung’s conception of positive peace, that is, as potential infrastructural social systems aligned with social justice that we should enact to promote human flourishing. (shrink)

When in 2001 Earth Liberation Front activists drove metal spikes into hundreds of trees in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, they were protesting the sale of a section of the old-growth forest to a timber company. But ELF's communiqu on the action went beyond the radical group's customary brief. Drawing connections between the harms facing the myriad animals who make their home in the trees and the struggles for social justice among ordinary human beings resisting exclusion and marginalization, the dispatch declared, (...) "all oppression is linked, just as we are all linked," and decried the "patriarchal nightmare" in the form of "techno-industrial global capitalism." In Total Liberation, David Naguib Pellow takes up this claim and makes sense of the often tense and violent relationships among humans, ecosystems, and nonhuman animal species, expanding our understanding of inequality and activists' uncompromising efforts to oppose it. Grounded in interviews with more than one hundred activists, on-the-spot fieldwork, and analyses of thousands of pages of documents, websites, journals, and zines, Total Liberation reveals the ways in which radical environmental and animal rights movements challenge inequity through a vision they call "total liberation." In its encounters with such infamous activists as scott crow, Tre Arrow, Lauren Regan, Rod Coronado, and Gina Lynn, the book offers a close-up, insider's view of one of the most important--and feared--social movements of our day. At the same time, it shows how and why the U.S. justice system plays to that fear, applying to these movements measures generally reserved for "jihadists"--with disturbing implications for civil liberties and constitutional freedom. How do the adherents of "total liberation" fight oppression and seek justice for humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems alike? And how is this pursuit shaped by the politics of anarchism and anticapitalism? In his answers, Pellow provides crucial in-depth insight into the origins and social significance of the earth and animal liberation movements and their increasingly common and compelling critique of inequality as a threat to life and a dream of a future characterized by social and ecological justice for all. (shrink)

This article examines the rise of the anti-vaccination movement, the proliferation of laws allowing parental exemptions to mandatory school vaccines, and the impact of the movement on immunization rates for all vaccines. It uses the ongoing debate about the Human Papillomavirus vaccine as an example to highlight the ripple effect and consequences of the anti-vaccine movement despite robust evidence of the vaccine's safety and efficacy. The article scrutinizes how state legislatures ironically promote vaccination while simultaneously deferring to (...) the opposition by promulgating broad opt-outs from mandatory vaccine laws. This article concludes by offering an alternative legislative approach to specifically combat the anti-vaccine movement's impact on HPV vaccination rates. Lowering the age of consent has not been widely attempted or proposed and provides an alternative statutory mechanism to push back against vaccine resistance. (shrink)

This chapter argues that gender equality ought to be a primary area of thought and activity for public theology, and, yet, there are very few public theologians engaging with issues of domestic violence, reproductive rights and sexual equality. ‘Public theology’ has been enjoying something of a revival in recent years, with new networks, centres and publications adopting the title; however, there is a substantial imbalance in gender representation amongst them. It seems that public theology still relies upon a notion of (...) the public sphere, drawn from the work of Jürgen Habermas, that employs a concept of reason from which women have frequently been excluded. Consequently, the prevalence of male voices in the public theology canon does little to prioritise women’s voices or issues of concern. Moreover, in so far as public theology fails to acknowledge or critique the patriarchy on which it is based, it falls short of challenging misogyny in church and society. As is all too apparent from the populist presidential campaign of Donald Trump, white evangelical support remained high, despite his overt sexism, racism and lies. His female opponent, Hillary Clinton was clearly held to a higher standard, while Christian forgiveness was poured over each of Trump’s offensive remarks. Thus, partly on the basis of the Republican opposition to abortion, large numbers of white evangelicals, including women, were prepared to cast their vote in favour of a misogynist. While there are some dissenting voices, more churches and public theologians should be speaking out against misogyny in church and society; they should be supporting women, fighting with them for justice and equality. Hence, I will conclude that public theologians need to make a greater effort to hear women’s voices, by recognising that theology takes place outside as well as inside the academy; the current #ChurchToo movement is a prime example here and an opportunity for churches and theologians to respond. (shrink)

Reassesses the Italian Resistance movement, historically conceived, and explores the concept of Resistance within the contemporary cultural context from a multidisciplinary perspective.

in this article, we explore how responsible research and innovation (RRI) interacts with the current political context. We examine the (1) possible consequences for RRI and related agendas if values associated with ‘populist’ movements become more pervasive, (2) the role that a lack of RRI has potentially played in the development of this political context, and (3) how RRI as a concept, practice, and research agenda should respond. We argue that whilst RRI is threatened, it is now more important than (...) ever. We propose that RRI needs to go beyond being a method for facilitating societal input into research and innovation and for highlighting desired impacts. RRI needs to evolve to provide an effective conduit for criticisms and the input of critical thinking and reflexivity into science and innovation, including in terms of economic policy and politics. (shrink)

Lockdowns and quarantines have been implemented widely in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This has been accompanied by a rise in interest in the ethics of ‘passport’ systems that allow low-risk individuals greater freedoms during lockdowns and exemptions to quarantines. Immunity and vaccination passports have been suggested to facilitate the greater movement of those with acquired immunity and who have been vaccinated. Another group of individuals who pose a low risk to others during pandemics are those with genetically mediated (...) resistances to pathogens. In this paper, we introduce the concept of genomic passports, which so far have not been explored in the bioethics literature. Using COVID-19 as an illustrative example, we explore the ethical issues raised by genomic passports and highlight differences and similarities to immunity passports. We conclude that, although there remain significant practical and ethical challenges to the implementation of genomic passports, there will be ways to ethically use them in the future. (shrink)

In ‘Theorizing resistance: Foucault, cross-cultural psychiatry and the user/survivor movement,’ Swerdfager develops a rich argument about the relationship between user/survivor voices, cross-cultural psychiatry, and the emerging discipline of global mental health. The paper questions the future directions of cross-cultural psychiatry in the era of GMH, and discusses the implications for user/survivor voices. This commentary engages with Swerdfager, focusing on the historical development of cross-cultural psychiatry and the discipline’s evolving relationship with GMH, concluding with a brief discussion of recent (...) developments with potential to open up new spaces for user/survivor voices as mental health... (shrink)

In this chapter, we evaluate the politically generative dynamic of urban space. Notably, we put forward the notion of the ‘multiplier effect’ of the urban, referring to its ingrained tendency to multiply resistance to oppression and violence being exerted against subaltern groups and minorities and, in doing so, to turn this multiplied resistance into an active force of social change. We, therefore, look at the twofold valence of ‘resistance’: negative and affirmative. Resistance initially takes form as (...) a defensive response to oppression and violence. When this happens, the urban becomes the living platform for a multiplying dynamic of encounter and, potentially, of inter-group solidarity, thus laying the foundations for a cooperative – rather than competitive, as in neoliberal rationality, or inimical, as in national-populist reason – way of ‘being together’. After having developed this argument against the backdrop of the women’s movement in Tehran and the urban disobedience to anti-immigration policies in Italy, our chapter concludes by reflecting on the multiplier effect of urban resistance within the current context of national revanchism. (shrink)

This paper advances the somewhat unphilosophical thesis that “Trump is gross” to draw attention to the need to take matters of taste seriously in politics. I begin by exploring the slipperiness of distinctions between aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics, subsequently suggesting that we may need to pivot toward the aesthetic to understand and respond to the historical moment we inhabit. More specically, I suggest that, in order to understand how Donald Trump was elected President of the United States and (...) in order to stem the damage that preceded this and will ensue from it, we need to understand the power of political taste (and distaste, including disgust) as both a force of resistance and as a force of normalization. (shrink)

Drawing on several recent studies, and a few personal interviews with leadership, the author reviews the history (1937-1968) of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) in order to demonstrate how this Chicago-based labor movement exemplified radical commitments to social welfare and civil rights, in addition to more traditional concerns with pay and other shopfloor issues. Not only did the union have significant membership among African-American workers, but it also undertook active programs of anti-racism in order to fight racial (...) discrimination with its own ranks. The union also resisted much of the anti-communist politics of the post-Cold War era, resulting in a tradition of racial commitments to “social unionism.” For example, this was one of the first unions to offer financial support to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference soon after the civil rights organization was founded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (shrink)