This book is about science in theatre and performance. It explores how theatre and performance engage with emerging scientific themes from artificial intelligence to genetics and climate change. The book covers a wide range of performance forms from the spectacle of the Paralympics Opening Ceremony to Broadway musicals, from experimental contemporary performance and opera to educational theatre, Somali poetic drama and grime videos. It features work by pioneering companies including Gob Squad, Headlong Theatre and Theatre of Debate as well as offering fresh analysis of global blockbusters such as Wicked and Urinetown. The book offers detailed description and analysis of theatre and performance practices as well as broader commentary on the politics of theatre as public engagement with science. It documents important examples of collaborative practice with extended discussion of the Theatre of Debate process developed by Y Touring theatre company, exploration of bilingual theatre-making in East London and an account of how grime MCs and dermatologists ended up making a film together in Birmingham. The interdisciplinary approach draws on contemporary research in theatre and performance studies in combination with key ideas from science studies. It shows how theatre can offer important perspectives on what the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has called ‘cosmopolitics’. The book argues that theatre can flatten knowledge hierarchies and hold together different ways of knowing.
The book explores the relationship between violence against women on one hand, and the rights to health and reproductive health on the other. It argues that violation of the right to health is a consequence of violence, and that (state) health policies might be a cause of – or create the conditions for – violence against women. It significantly contributes to feminist and international human rights legal scholarship by conceptualising a new ground-breaking idea, violence against women’s health (VAWH), using the Hippocratic paradigm as the backbone of the analysis. The two dimensions of violence at the core of the book – the horizontal, ‘interpersonal’ dimension and the vertical ‘state policies’ dimension – are investigated through around 70 decisions of domestic, regional and international judicial or quasi-judicial bodies (the anamnesis). The concept of VAWH, drawn from the anamnesis, enriches the traditional concept of violence against women with a human rights-based approach to autonomy and a reflection on the pervasiveness of patterns of discrimination (diagnosis). VAWH as theorised in the book allows the reconceptualisation of states’ obligations in an innovative way, by identifying for both dimensions obligations of result, due diligence obligations, and obligations to progressively take steps (treatment). The book eventually asks whether it is not international law itself that is the ultimate cause of VAWH (prognosis).
In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps.
redistribution see claims for the recognition of differ- MCK5 1/10/2003 10:25 AM Page 87 Nancy Fraser 87 ence as ‘false consciousness’, a hindrance to the pursuit of social justice. Conversely, some proponents of recognition reject distributive politics as part and parcel of an outmoded materialism that can neither articulate nor challenge key experiences of injustice. In such cases, we are effectively presented with an either/or choice: redistribution or recognition? Class politics or identity politics? Multiculturalism or social equality? These, I have argued
identity category more generally. Such was the case with the early gay rights movement in America, which celebrated ‘unity in diversity’ and displayed the breadth of gay identities through gay pride parades. Contemporary ‘post-black’ identity politics is another example of a multivalent recognition politics; the post-black movement aims not to do away with blackness, but instead to
justify the monarchy and the empire well into the twentieth century. At the same time, as the coronation durbar demonstrates, these ritual practices, which were limited and unstable from their inception, were increasingly undermined, delegitimised, and challenged by emerging mythologies of belonging and identity politics. * * * Royal tourists, colonial subjects
, this approach simultaneously resists equating the power of vulnerability with identity politics or reducing it to a ‘politics of pain’. The pull of the neoliberal, individualistic narrative of ‘from vulnerability to resilience’ is forceful both in feminist academic discussions and contemporary public discussions and media cultures. However, in this book we want to follow up on Butler’s call for understanding vulnerability as restraint as well as responsiveness, a concept rife with paradoxes, but also potential. Furthermore, we want to stress vulnerability
, because of its origins in sex and sexuality, also seems to license a constant reduction of ‘difference’ back to the supposed basics of sex and sexuality. Is there a hierarchy within ‘differences’? Are sex and sexuality more central to human political identities than, for example, race/ethnicity or religion? If not, what concerns then allow or circumscribe an intelligible and predictable politics of identity? Political theory
) has sparked a small academic discourse of recognition theory and its application to identity politics, questions of moral and political rights and issues of global justice. While aspects of recognition theory have been adopted in interesting ways within feminism and postcolonial studies, perhaps the predominant branch has been utilized by liberal political theory with rather
victime (Paris: Flammarion, 2011). 27 G. Gatti, Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay: Identity and Meaning (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 28 C. Merli and T. Buck, ‘Forensic identification and identity politics in 2004 post-tsunami Thailand: negotiating dissolving boundaries’, Human Remains and Violence, 1:1 (2015), 3–22. Bibliography Anstett, É. and J.-M. Dreyfus (eds), Destruction and Human Remains: Disposal and Concealment in Genocide and Mass Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014) Anstett, É. and J.-M. Dreyfus (eds