This essay establishes a philosophical connection between James Baldwin and the philosopher William James by investigating how the pragmatist protocol against “vicious intellectualism” offers Baldwin a key resource for thinking through how anti-black racism might be dismantled. While Richard Wright had earlier denounced pragmatism for privileging experience over knowledge, and thereby offering the black subject no means for redressing America’s constitutive hierarchies, uncovering the current of Jamesian thought that runs through Baldwin’s essays brings into view his attempt to move beyond epistemology as the primary framework for inaugurating a future unburdened by the problem of the color line. Although Baldwin indicts contemporaneous arrangements of knowledge for producing the most dehumanizing forms of racism, he does not simply attempt to rewrite the enervating meanings to which black subjects are given. Articulating a pragmatist sensibility at various stages of his career, Baldwin repeatedly suggests that the imagining and creation of a better world is predicated upon rethinking the normative value accorded to knowledge in the practice of politics. The provocative challenge that Baldwin issues for his reader is to cease the well-established privileging of knowledge, and to instead stage the struggle for freedom within an aesthetic, rather than epistemological, paradigm.
institutions of the post-war liberal order. But, at the same time, the expansion of American power was itself decisive in the (military) resurgence of Russia and the economic growth of China – two powers that began to use the very rules and institutions of liberal order to challenge American hegemony and destabilise the notion of unipolarity. And Iran, Turkey, North Korea and various other countries today use ‘Westphalian diplomacy’ and the ‘geopolitics of nations’ – European inventions – to question the hierarchy of this European system led by the US. From
innovation embodies this cybernetic goal. Optimising precariat behaviour to strengthen decision-making, improve health, employment, life-style choices and, importantly, motherhood and child-rearing practices, is central to the post-social humanitarian regime currently in formation ( World Bank, 2015 ). Humanitarian innovation, moreover, not only targets the behaviour of the precariat, reflecting late-capitalism’s antipathy to professional hierarchies; it also seeks to change the attitudes and mindsets of humanitarian aid workers as well. In justifying
identifies a hierarchy of technology literacy – from the ability to receive calls to the ability to liaise with telecommunications providers. However, the refugees’ resettlement in Australia marked a point of departure, since the initiatives taken as part of the resettlement process emphasise computer skills. While technology literacy was essential for individuals from refugee backgrounds to fulfil their communication needs during forced displacement, it was of little value in Australia, where
International Operations Directorate, the relationship with operational managers from headquarters and the field was functional, not hierarchical. Security Advisor, 2012–16 Task One: Training the Heads of Mission Two months after I started as MdM’s security advisor I travelled to Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan. I discovered very different security practices and cultures, reflecting the experience of each head of mission. There was no MdM ‘security method’. Different heads of mission used different
disaster occurred within a context of deeply entrenched views of social hierarchy. Given that a high proportion of people affected by the earthquake were from vulnerable and marginalised groups (Dalits, Indigenous peoples, female-headed households and senior citizens), the capacity of the international humanitarian response system to reach these groups was significantly affected ( Ferretti et al. , 2016 ; STC, 2015 ). The Structural Challenge The fourth aspect limiting the potential for
This book is an ethnographic study of the internal dynamics of a subcultural community that defines itself as a social movement. While the majority of scholarly studies on this movement focus on its official face, on its front stage, this book concerns itself with the ideological and practical paradoxes at work within the micro-social dynamics of the backstage, an area that has so far been neglected in social movement studies. The central question is how hierarchy and authority function in a social movement subculture that disavows such concepts. The squatters’ movement, which defines itself primarily as anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian, is profoundly structured by the unresolved and perpetual contradiction between both public disavowal and simultaneous maintenance of hierarchy and authority within the movement. This study analyzes how this contradiction is then reproduced in different micro-social interactions, examining the methods by which people negotiate minute details of their daily lives as squatter activists in the face of a funhouse mirror of ideological expectations reflecting values from within the squatter community, that, in turn, often refract mainstream, middle class norms.
1 Beyond the witch trials Marking (dis)order Marking (dis)order: witchcraft and the symbolics of hierarchy in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Finland Raisa Maria Toivo What do witchcraft and witch trials tell us about power and social hierarchy? Witch trials have often enough been explained in terms of social relations and schisms, particularly in local contexts. In a highly competitive world, disagreements resulted from and caused both attacks by suspected witches and accusations made against them. It has often been noted that in Sweden and
3 Power positions: theorising Arctic hierarchies International relations scholars of the twentieth century operated primarily with a conception of states’ interrelations as little more than billiard balls bouncing and crashing in trade, war and other forms of encounter. They posited anarchy as the only option in the absence of formal authority at the international level (Milner, 1991). In more recent history, IR scholars have sought to envision the international order as something more than anarchic and explain structured, repeated modes of interaction
principles of hierarchy and authority. The church had always possessed its leaders and its followers; that was both a practical necessity and God’s plan. Both had to be accommodated in permanent rules that would preserve the church until the end of time. While this projection of episcopal leadership was to provoke opposition from some quarters, many reformers rose to the challenges that it had identified by building on its platforms of hierarchy and reform. Leading theologians and reformers embarked on extended explorations of what ‘reform’ meant and how it could be
