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Publics and Counterpublics
TLDR
The idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life as mentioned in this paper, and it has powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern lives involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations.Abstract:
Most of the people around us belong to our world not directly, as kin or comrades, but as strangers. How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in common publics. Indeed, most of us would find it nearly impossible to imagine a social world without publics. In the eight essays in this book, Michael Warner addresses the question: What is a public?According to Warner, the idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life. Publics have powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations. The idea of a public contains ambiguities, even contradictions. As it is extended to new contexts, politics, and media, its meaning changes in ways that can be difficult to uncover.Combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extensive case studies, Warner shows how the idea of a public can reframe our understanding of contemporary literary works and politics and of our social world in general. In particular, he applies the idea of a public to the junction of two intellectual traditions: public-sphere theory and queer theory.read more
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Rethinking publics in Africa in a digital age
TL;DR: The digital transformations taking place across the African continent present an urgent need for fresh thinking in the study of publics as discussed by the authors, and this introduction lays out the impetus and contribution of t...
Queering Images of Citizenship: Rhetoric, Representation, and LGBTI Refugees
Abstract: In the following dissertation, I consider how the legal challenges faced by LGBTI refugees might compel reflection on and revision to traditional conceptions of citizenship in the United States. Specifically, I explore the question of how queer refugees and asylum seekers might alter – or queer – the meaning of “citizenship” in the United States. This project contributes to the conversation about citizenship in the field of rhetoric in multiple ways: (1) It highlights tensions between the cultural construction of citizenship and its legal parameters, (2) It expands rhetorical citizenship scholarship through attention to the intersection of identification, marginalization, and the political imaginary, and (3) It reveals tensions between norms of civic and sexual identity. It does this by tracing rhetorical precedent through a case study of sexual orientation and gender identity asylum in the United States. I argue that LGBTI refugees and asylees can shape a queered discourse of citizenship, but that the discourse produced is limited based on narrow definitions of sexual orientation and identity categories. To make this argument, I analyze the precedent-setting case involving Fidel Armando Toboso-Alfonso, in which I address how the establishment of that case as precedent set in place norms of sexual identity that persist in the adjudication of LGBTI asylum cases today. Next, I look to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration training module for handling LGBTI asylum claims in order to make sense of the ways the norms set forth in the precedent-setting case have become codified and interrogated in current efforts to adjudicate LGBTI asylum claims. Finally, I compare visual representations of LGBTI asylum seekers to other refugees in order to understand how photographs of LGBTI asylum seekers fit within or rupture the genre of refugee photography. Taken together, these case studies provide insight into how citizenship is discursively imagined when access to citizen status is predicated on simultaneous normative and non-normative performances of sexual identity. INDEX WORDS: Rhetoric, Citizenship, Asylum, Immigration Policy, Queer Theory, LGBT QUEERING IMAGES OF CITIZENSHIP: RHETORIC, REPRESENTATION, AND LGBTI REFUGEES
Limits of Conversion: Islamic Dawa, Domestic Work and Migrant South Asian Women in Kuwait
Attiya Ahmad,Katherine Ewing +1 more
Abstract: .......................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ix Preface...........................................................................................................................................xiii
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Why do we believe in competition? A historical-sociological view of competition as an institutionalized modern imaginary
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify the particular type of competition that is at the heart of the modern faith in competition and develop a sociological research perspective on this kind of competition.
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The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society
Jürgen Habermas,Thomas Burgerm +1 more
TL;DR: A preliminary demarcation of a type of Bourgeois public sphere can be found in this article, where the authors remark on the type representative publicness on the genesis of the Bourgois Public Sphere.
Book
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
TL;DR: Althusser's "For Marx" (1965) and "Reading Capital" (1968) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship as mentioned in this paper.
Book
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
TL;DR: Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig shows how code can make a domain, site, or network free or restrictive; how technological architectures influence people's behavior and the values they adopt; and how changes in code can have damaging consequences for individual freedoms.