Although higher education is positioned as a site of opportunity for young women in the UK, not all female applicants experience straightforward pathways into this arena. This paper focuses on a group of 16 high-achieving girls from working-class backgrounds who are striving for academic success, in the form of top grades and places at high-tariff UK universities. Against the backdrop of neoliberalism and postfeminism, the stereotype of an academic ‘supergirl’ incites these young women to construct their pathways to (...) high-tariff universities individualistically and to invest in aspirational futures beyond where they grew up. However, this stereotype also places a heavy burden on them, as young women from working-class backgrounds, to take responsibility for their own outcomes. Using Margaret Archer’s concept of ‘autonomous reflexivity’ to analyse the research findings, the paper shows how the girls find themselves pincered between the powerfully enabling and constraining effects of their social class alongside their academic success. It highlights complexities and contradictions of striving to be a high-achieving, working-class girl that are not currently well understood within the research literature or widening access and participation agenda. (shrink)

In this original book, I use a poststructuralist perspective to chart explicit and tacit assumptions about the working class in general and the working-class woman, specifically in the classical texts of prominent political philosophers and social critics, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Rousseau, Marx, Weber, and Bourdieu. Drawing on Michel Foucault, I argue that philosophical discourses that construct these categories as the Other function as disciplinary practices that aim at keeping working-class women either out of (...) or at the margins of academic institutions. I analyze interviews with women from various ethnic origins in New York City’s elite academic institutions, who identified their backgrounds as working class. My analysis foregrounds how these women resist gender, class, and ethnic disciplinary practices in academia. The book contributes to political-theory literature on social injustice and marginalization in academia and challenges and reconfigures the meanings of women and the working class. (shrink)

Guardians have been implicated in the development of children's academic self-regulation. In this case study, which involved naturalistic observations and interviews, the everyday practices of a working class family were considered in the context of self-regulated learning development. The family's practices, beliefs, dispositions and home structures were not aligned with conditions recognized as supporting self-regulated learning development. It is suggested that for the family to adapt or adjust home practices in a way that supports their children's self-regulation means (...) adopting a different logic of parenting, valuing and promoting certain kinds of self-knowledge, forming different kinds of social networks, and mediating and controlling affects of occupational conditions. It is suggested that shifting home practices to teach academic self-regulation in the family's home is value-laden and reflects class-based narrowness. (shrink)

‘Femininity’ is a concept formed by structures of class difference: to be ‘feminine’ is to fit into an idealised higher-class position. Working-class women, without the financial or cultural capital to successfully perform femininity, are regularly cast down into the realms of the grotesque. This ‘fall from grace’ has repercussions on the representation and lived experiences of women who are then defined negatively. Contemporary British media stories are full of demonising depictions of working-class women deemed (...) grotesque for not presenting themselves with sufficiently ‘classy’ femininity. This article provides a rereading of the images made by British photographer Richard Billingham of his mother Liz, against the grain of much classist and misogynistic critical writing. The author discusses what happens when women reject the aspiration to transcend their supposedly faulty working-class femininity, and instead of trying to ‘better themselves’ through class-passing choose to present aspects of a working-class identity that firmly situate them within an undesirable class position. By employing an auto-ethnographic approach, the author offers new receptions of such images that have often been dismissed and discussed derogatorily, by bringing to bear her own lived experience of being a woman from a working-class background to offer narratives rarely explored in academic texts. The author shows that by thinking through an alternative femininity, via an ‘Anti-Pygmalion’ aesthetic, we can reclaim the negative descriptions of working-class women as grotesque, and begin to question the constructions of femininity itself. (shrink)

Anarchist philosophy has often played and continues to play a crucial role in interventions in working-class and labor movements. Anarchist philosophy influenced real-world struggles and touched the lives of real, flesh-and-blood workers, especially those belonging to the industrial, immigrant working classes of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Too often the writings, which were disseminated to, and hungrily consumed by, these workers are dismissed as “propaganda.” However, insofar as they articulate and define political, economic, and social concepts; (...) subject political, economic, and social institutions to trenchant critique against clear and well-defined normative standards; offer logical justifications of their own positions; and advance positive alternative proposals, why should these writings not be regarded as philosophical texts and analyzed accordingly? Obviously they should, and the fact that they have been so long ignored by political philosophers, historians, and other scholars reflects academic prejudice rather than the intellectual and philosophical merit of the writings. This article is a preliminary step toward giving anarchist philosophy the hearing it so richly deserves. (shrink)

ABSTRACTstudies in relation to working-class students at elite universities document on the one hand the role of ‘mundane reflexivity’ in dealing with class domination while on the other indicate a new form of domination and disadvantages working on these working-class ‘exceptions’ – they may achieve academically at university but experience various exclusions and self-exclusions in areas of social life. By drawing on a very small sample of ‘counter-evidence’ and ‘exceptions within exceptions’ – working- (...) class='Hi'>class students who achieve great social accomplishments at elite universities – this paper further explores the role of ‘mundane reflexivity’ in negotiating class domination and the possibilities of transcendence. We demonstrate the creative and transformative ways in which class domination is dealt with and document the prevalence of high-level reflexivity. Furthermore, we distinguish different forms and degrees of reflexivity, which then indicate the ‘contingency’ of reflexivity – the relation of the possibilities of reflexivity to the unequal distribution of social, cultural and economic capitals. We further argue that what appears to be a form of self-emancipation achieved by the ‘transcending group’ in our study also involves the discrete and insidious reproduction of social inequality. (shrink)

This article reconsiders Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons (2012) as a book that helps to discern a necessary relation between Queer Studies and Working-Class Studies, two fields that do not often share a footprint in the US academy. That relation emerges for the author in the unexpected resonance between Object Lessons and Vivian Gornick’s recently republished The Romance of American Communism (2020), a classic text about the politics of passionate longing for a better world. Likewise, Wiegman understands political desire (...) as the animating force behind the field of Queer Studies and other identity knowledges. Brim argues that, alongside this affective threshold of belonging that constitutes the field of US Queer Studies, there exists a material threshold of belonging that renders politically indispensable academic fields as, nonetheless, sites of class-based exclusion. In the increasingly class-stratified and race-sorted academy, disciplines such as Working-Class Studies that are attentive to the material exclusions of knowledge production can help scholars to proactively set material conditions alongside political desire in a future-oriented, sustainable vision of Queer Studies. (shrink)

I enter a debate about state-socialism elite’s reproduction and higher education to propose an implementation of Bourdieu’s hysteresis effect. I argue that the intelligentsia and the interwar university shaped biographical paths of academics stronger than the political factors, which are usually brought to the forefront by contemporary researchers. I analyse academic biographies shaped by the socialist university and reconstruct a model academic biography in the post-WWII period, in particular, in Poland. I compare it with biographies of professors from (...) class='Hi'>working-class and peasant backgrounds, and arrive at the conclusion that the differences are minor. Those who formed a seemingly perfect new intelligentsia were socialized by the traditional academic habitus. A few who entered the new academic world from working class or peasant backgrounds had to embrace the interwar university ethos in order to justify their own merits in belonging. I propose a model of opposite hysteresis vectors to explain tensions between academia and political field. (shrink)

Previous research indicates that students in engineering self-report cheating in college at higher rates than those in most other disciplines. Prior work also suggests that participation in one deviant behavior is a reasonable predictor of future deviant behavior. This combination of factors leads to a situation where engineering students who frequently participate in academic dishonesty are more likely to make unethical decisions in professional practice. To investigate this scenario, we propose the hypotheses that (1) there are similarities in the decision-making (...) processes used by engineering students when considering whether or not to participate in academic and professional dishonesty, and (2) prior academic dishonesty by engineering students is an indicator of future decisions to act dishonestly. Our sample consisted of undergraduate engineering students from two technically-oriented private universities. As a group, the sample reported working full-time an average of six months per year as professionals in addition to attending classes during the remaining six months. This combination of both academic and professional experience provides a sample of students who are experienced in both settings. Responses to open-ended questions on an exploratory survey indicate that students identify common themes in describing both temptations to cheat or to violate workplace policies and factors which caused them to hesitate in acting unethically, thus supporting our first hypothesis and laying the foundation for future surveys having forced-choice responses. As indicated by the responses to forced-choice questions for the engineering students surveyed, there is a relationship between self-reported rates of cheating in high school and decisions to cheat in college and to violate workplace policies; supporting our second hypothesis. Thus, this exploratory study demonstrates connections between decision-making about both academic and professional dishonesty. If better understood, these connections could lead to practical approaches for encouraging ethical behavior in the academic setting, which might then influence future ethical decision-making in workplace settings. (shrink)

Research on academic cheating by high school students and undergraduates suggests that many students will do whatever it takes, including violating ethical classroom standards, to not be left behind or to race to the top. This behavior may be exacerbated among pre-med and pre-health professional school students enrolled in laboratory classes because of the typical disconnect between these students, their instructors and the perceived legitimacy of the laboratory work. There is little research, however, that has investigated the relationship between high (...) aspirations and academic conduct. This study fills this research gap by investigating the beliefs, perceptions and self-reported academic conduct of highly aspirational students and their peers in mandatory physics labs. The findings suggest that physics laboratory classes may face particular challenges with highly aspirational students and cheating, but the paper offers practical solutions for addressing them. (shrink)

The enduring significance of gender and how it intersects with class in the organization of parenting, domestic and professional work has been obscured in contemporary neoliberal contexts. This article examines how Greek academic women conceptualize and enact motherhood and the classed and gendered strategies they adopt to reconcile ‘good’ motherhood with notions of the ‘good’ academic professional. It draws on semi-structured interviews about the career narratives of 15 women in Greek medical schools in the aftermath of the Greek recession. (...) The analysis presented in this article is informed by a feminist post-structuralist paradigm and an emic approach to intersectionality. Motherhood emerged in the data as a dynamic concept, and a network of practices both constrained and enabled by gendered and classed family and work cultures. Drawing on a neoliberal ‘DIY’ and ‘having it all’ discourse, Greek mothers claimed that they could achieve almost anything professionally, if they organized their private lives sensibly. They drew on idealized discourses of motherhood, but they also contradicted these notions by doing non-traditional forms of motherhood, such as remote or transnational motherhood, afforded by their privileged social positioning and academic careers. Further research is required to investigate configurations of classed motherhood in less prestigious professions. (shrink)

Although this article examines the problems facing modern universities such as their loss of independence and shortage of funding, similar problems faced universities throughout the 20th century. The focus is on the post-war generation, the creation of new universities and the political and economic changes that were brought about by Thatcherism. In the growth period between 1945 and the 1970s, many working-class children gained social mobility through the expansion of the university sector. This period also attracted large numbers (...) of exiles from Europe. The contemporary demographic challenge to universities in terms of the shrinkage of the population of eligible students is critical. Universities have responded by recruiting primarily Chinese and Indian students. This challenge joins other modern problems: bureaucracy, managerialism, rising costs, the loss of academic independence, stagnant wages, declining opportunities and the threat of AI. Can we imagine and build the post-university? Is the cafe as a meeting place a possible model of a global online intellectual hub? (shrink)

In this chapter, I draw on Michel Foucault to explain the mechanisms of marginalization of women from working-class origins in academic institutions in the context of the U.S.A. Next, I explain how the discursive construction of the working classes as “the Other” in academic knowledge production is part of a disciplinary power that functions to keep women from working-class origins either out or at the margins of academic institutions. In academic institutions, disciplinary power aims to (...) discipline the bodies and minds of working-class women into the norm of bourgeois and male subjectivity. Finally, I suggest strategies that counter gender and class disciplining in academia. (shrink)

The present study assessed business students’ responses to an innovative interactive presentation on academic integrity that employed quoted material from previous students as launching points for discussion. In total, 15 business classes ( n = 412 students) including 2nd, 3rd and 4th year level students participated in the presentations as part of the ethics component of ongoing courses. Students’ perceptions of the importance of academic integrity, self-reports of cheating behaviors, and factors contributing to misconduct were examined along with perceptions about (...) the presentation. Discussion sessions revealed that academic misconduct is a complex issue. For example, knowledge of what constitutes misconduct was not consistent across domains (e.g. exam contexts versus group work), penalties were not wholly known, and there was variation in perceived responsibility for reporting and representing academic integrity. Survey measures revealed that self-reported academic misconduct was more prevalent than expected with only 7.5% of students indicating they had never cheated in any way. Furthermore, results showed gender and year of study as predictive factors for issues related to academic misconduct. In general, students were receptive to this form of presentation. The implications of such instructional interventions for enhancing ethical behaviors in higher education classrooms are discussed. (shrink)

Using the classroom as the unit of analyses, the current article discusses the methodological issues surrounding the literature with regard to the study of academic misconduct. Arguing for a shift in research, the present empirical investigation assesses the relationship between students' perceptions of classroom environment and academic misconduct by utilizing valid and reliable multidimensional measures with established constructs. By utilizing the classroom as the unit of analysis, a better understanding of the unique variance in academic dishonesty across classes may be (...) established in relation to variation in students' perceptions of teaching practices. One hundred twenty-eight classes participated in the current study, with 3,151 students completing the Students' Perceptions of Teacher Effectiveness survey and Academic Misconduct Survey. Although students' overall perceptions of teacher effectiveness were not related to the rate of academic misconduct across classes, results do suggest that the lower the difficulty and workload of the course is perceived as being, the more likely students report cheating on exams, taking credit for others' work, using false personal excuses, and creatively padding their work. Reasons for these relationships are explicated, and suggestions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Engineers create airplanes, buildings, medical devices, and software, amongst many other things. Engineers abide by a professional code of ethics to uphold people’s safety and the reputation of the profession. Likewise, students abide by a code of academic integrity while learning the knowledge and necessary skills to prepare them for the engineering and computing professions. This paper reports on studies designed to improve the engineering student culture with respect to academic integrity and ethics. To understand the existing culture at a (...) university in the USA, a survey based on a national survey about cheating was administered to students. The incidences of self-reported cheating and incidences of not reporting others who cheat show the culture is similar to other institutions. Two interventions were designed and tested in an introduction to an engineering course: two case studies that students discussed in teams and the whole class, and a letter of recommendation assignment in which students wrote about themselves three years into the future. Students were surveyed after the two interventions. Results show that first-year engineering students appreciate having a code of academic integrity and they want to earn their degree without cheating, yet less than half of the students would report on another cheating student. The letter of recommendation assignment had some impact on getting students to think about ethics, their character, and their actions. Future work in changing the student culture will continue in both a top-down and bottom-up manner. (shrink)

In December 1984 Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson, two founding members of Feminist Review, published an article assessing contemporary British feminism and its relationship to the left and to class struggle. They suggested that the women's movement in general, and socialist-feminism in particular, had lost its former political sharpness. The academic focus of socialist-feminism has proved more interested in theorizing the ideological basis of sexual difference than the economic contradictions of capitalism. Meanwhile the conditions of working-class and (...) black women have been deteriorating. In this situation, they argue, feminists can only serve the general interests of women through alliance with working-class movements and class struggle. Weir and Wilson represent a minority position within the British Communist Party (the CP), which argues that ‘feminism’ is now being used by sections of the left, in particular the dominant ‘Eurocommunist’ left in the CP, to justify their moves to the right, with an accompanying attack on traditional forms of trade union militancy. Beatrix Campbell, who is aligned to the dominant position within the CP, has been one target of Weir and Wilson's criticisms. In several articles from 1978 onwards, and in her book Wigan Pier Revisited, Beatrix Campbell has presented a very different analysis of women and the labour movement. She has criticized the trade union movement as a ‘men's movement’, in the sense that it has always represented the interests of men at the expense of women. And she has described the current split within the CP as one extending throughout the left between the politics of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’: traditional labour movement politics as against the politics of those who have rethought their socialism to take into account the analysis and importance of popular social movements – in particular feminism, the peace and anti-racist movements. In reply to this debate, Anne Phillips has argued that while women's position today must be analysed in the context of the capitalist crisis, it is not reducible to the dichotomy ‘class politics’ versus ‘popular alliance’. Michèle Barrett, in another reply to Weir and Wilson, has argued that they have presented a reductionist and economistic approach to women's oppression, which caricatures rather than clarifies much of the work in which socialist-feminists have been engaged. To air these differences between socialist-feminists over the question of feminism and class politics, and to see their implications for the women's movement and the left, Feminist Review has decided to bring together the main protagonists of this debate for a fuller, more open discussion. For this discussion Feminist Review drew up a number of questions which were put to the participants by Clara Connolly and Lynne Segal. (Michèle Barrett was present in a personal capacity.) They cover the recent background to socialist-feminist politics, the relationship of feminism to Marxism, the role of feminists in le ft political parties and the labour movement, the issue of racism and the prospects for the immediate future. The discussion was lengthy and what follows is an edited version of the transcript. (shrink)

The present study is quantitative applied educational research that first analyzes a theoretical framework that affirms that the academic performance of students constitutes a central element in university education since it represents a measure of the learning achieved by individuals and, at the same time, an indicator of the quality of higher education institutions and systems. Likewise, it is specified that the problem of the study is: How does the academic performance of university students’ impact in the Peruvian context? Considering (...) that there are factual realities that need to be reviewed in a relevant way, such as difficulties in grades and GPA, difficulties in-class participation, difficulties in delivering assignments and projects on time, inadequate interaction with professors and classmates, and absenteeism. A case study was used, selecting 106 students from a private university in Lima through a non-probabilistic and intentional sampling. The technique applied was the survey and the instrument was a questionnaire. A total of 20 questions were asked considering a work structure called "Construction and Validation of the RAU scale of University Academic Performance" composed of three dimensions (contribution to academic activities, dedication to study, and lack of organization of teaching resources). As a main result, the importance of formative management of students' motivation became evident. It is concluded that it was possible to obtain two dimensions resulting from the model, which are the formative metacognitive dimension and the formative socio-humanistic dimension. (shrink)

Both the music and subculture of punk historically arose from disaffected working-class youth. This socio-economic starting point was absolutely crucial for making punk what it is. However, along with this standpoint came various levels of class consciousness that we can see evidence of in the lyrics and in various practices of people within the scene itself. I divide this consciousness into 3 specific levels of structural understanding and agency. Inspired by Georg Lukacs' analysis of class consciousness (...) and Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony, I demonstrate how punk as a subculture and musical art form is a notable demonstration of "proletarian culture". But just as the revolutionary potential of the proletariat hinges on a unified ideology and consolidated and consistent praxis, so too does the revolutionary potential of punk. [This text was written for a non-academic, general audience] . (shrink)

Creative Class, Creative Economy, and the Wisdom Society as a Solution to their Controversy The paper briefly introduces the notion of creativity, linking the concepts of creative class and the related creative economy that are considered by Florida and his followers as the driving force of the current social and economic development. The concept of creative economy and its quantification in form of the Creative Class Index 3T or the Euro-Creativity Index were submitted to strong critique.The critics (...) overturn some key issues of the concept of creative class with an indication that the creative people give priority in choosing the work from the place; and there is no or almost nil correlation of a perceptual representation of the persons of homosexual orientation and the high-tech growth which confirms the opinion that the assertion about higher creativity of homosexual persons is a myth only. The purpose of the article is the examination of propriety of the concept of creative class and its quantification at one hand, and the rightfulness of their critique at the other. The analysis of the axiology of the concept of creative class is the method of examination. From point of view of axiology probably the most significant characteristic of the creative class is its accompanying destruction of thee social capital of creative people and it substitution of the creative capital. The rise of creative class takes place in parallel with the implosion of values at which basis our Jewish-Christian civilization is established. To this Florida expresses rather vague attitude by a statement that all socio-cultural changes that accompany the rise of the creative class will have no favorable impact on society.Florida labeled creativity as a basic human law, furthermore, he announced the need for a new live style in which the quality of life will increase and people become better men. The concept of creativity as an instrument of urban planning evolved into a left-liberal ideology with elements of social engineering that is the most important finding of the axiological analysis. The second finding is the need to accept the meaning of creativity. By implication of the two findings there arises a proposal for wisdom as a new driving force of social and economic development. The conclusion is the contribution is a requirement for formulation of the concept of wisdom society that is currently likely absent in the academic world, and the statement that if the West will not create the wisdom society, it will lose the raison d'être of its existence. (shrink)

A team of philosophers and scientists at Dartmouth College worked for three years to create, train faculty and pilot test an adequate and exportable class in research methods for graduate students of science and engineering. Developing and testing methods for evaluating students’ progress in learning research ethics were part of the project goals. Failure of methods tried in the first year led to the refinement of methods for the second year. These were used successfully in the pilot course and (...) in one university setting external to Dartmouth. The process of development and justification for the final methods are discussed here. (shrink)

This article examines a post-war generation of academics in the United States and in Britain, who, coming from lower-class families without any previous experience of university education, became internationally famous but nevertheless continued to feel out of place in the academic world. Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of habitus, field and doxa is useful in studying the world of such outsiders and exiles who shaped post-war sociology. Without an established canon of sociology, these students typically developed critical and creative perspectives (...) on society. In Britain the post-war welfare state was the foundation of this new breed of academics. John O’Neill is the classic example. In America ‘The Disobedient Generation’ were influenced by race, the Vietnam War, and the draft. William Connolly and Stephen Turner provide two case studies of highly successful academics who were often subjectively outsiders. ‘Event’ and ‘hazard’ imply that successful careers are in fact merely accidental. Neoliberalism may have closed off such accidental careers. (shrink)

Background: Organizational climate refers to an individual's perception and experience of the climate of the work environment, and it is the most important environmental variable that affects individuals’ work performance. This study aims to classify characteristics of transformational leadership among kindergarten principals and examine their relationship to organizational climate. Methods: Convenience sampling yielded 498 kindergarten principals who completed the “Questionnaire on the Principal’s Transformational Leadership Behavior” and “Questionnaire on Organizational Climate.” Ethics approval was obtained from the Academic Ethics Committee of (...) the College of Psychology of Northeast Normal University prior to starting the study. Results: Three latent classes were identified, including the high-level (68.8%), care-virtues (35.7%), and virtues groups (5.3%). There were significant differences in support, directive, restrictive, colleague, intimate, and disengaged behavior scores between groups. In terms of support, colleague, and intimate behavior, the high-level group had the highest scores, followed by the care-virtues group and virtues group, respectively. Regarding restrictive and disengaged behavior, the highest scores were received by the virtues group, followed by the care-virtues and high-level group, respectively. Conclusion: The study suggested that principals’ transformational leadership could be classified into three latent classes that are related to organizational climate. (shrink)

This article analyzes articles appearing in True Story from 1920 to 1985 that concern women's grief after pregnancy and child loss. They are discussed as a historical link between nineteenth-century consolation literature and current psychological and academic discussions of grief. True Story is a confession magazine marketed for working-class women, whose reproductive losses have generally been minimized or ignored by previous literary and current professional and journalistic treatments of maternal grief. Articles are examined within the constructs of confession (...) literature and within the larger context of women's popular literature. Like working-class women's experiences of reproductive loss, these areas have been largely overlooked, dismissed, or denigrated by literary scholars and sociologists. The moral tone of True Story gives women's first-person narratives about infant death and pregnancy an ambiguous prescriptive quality, in that both self-empowerment and self-blame are recommended. True Story reinforces traditional notions of motherhood and femininity, but subtly challenges patriarchal class relations in American society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.3 (2001) 15-29 [Access article in PDF] Globality, Organization, Class Samuel Weber 1 Although one could hardly imagine a topic more far-ranging than "Theory, Globalization, and the Remains of the University," it can be argued that it does not range far enough. Or perhaps ranges too far. For the questions suggested by this concatenation of terms cannot be limited to the fate or future of "theory" in (...) whatever will remain of the "university" in a globalized world. And yet it is no doubt significant that "theory" leads the parade—significant but also perhaps part of the problem. For not just etymology links "theory" to notions such as detached contemplation, spectatorship, and appropriation through vision. The history and practice that have been associated with this term continue, even today, to be indebted to the dualist paradigm of an underlying subject—today reformulated as "agent" or "position"—confronting and comprehending an ob-ject. And yet, if we are still discussing "theory," here and today, it is by virtue of a series of texts that have persistently and powerfully questioned the subject-object paradigm that has dominated theoretical discourse at least since Descartes, and sought to elaborate alternatives to it. Those alternatives have almost always involved a reflection upon language as the medium of a practice that is no longer "theoretical" in the traditional sense, because it no longer works within the parameters of the subject-object model of cognition and truth. From Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, de Man, and Derrida, the subject-object model of cognition has been reinterpreted as an effect of the medium of language, a medium that articulates itself through the reading, writing, and repetition of texts, understood as concatenations of significance that both respond to and address an irreducible alterity.The "university" has always occupied an equivocal position with respect to this "linguistic" problematization of the subject-object model of cognition and truth: not only because "the university" as such has never existed—not at least as the singular universal implied by the definite article—but even more, because of the traditional claim of universities to serve as places where universally valid cognition is both transmitted and produced. In this sense, notions such as "the globalization of the university" simply continue the universalizing claims built into universities and promoted by them in order to justify their social existence and dependency.The very notion, or rather figure, implied in the notion of "globalization" tends to strengthen such universalism. Coming after the struggle between Communist and Capitalist camps in the Cold War, "Globalization" stresses that there is no place left on the "globe" where the capitalist system, its values, its power, and way of life can be contested. The "globe" is all there is, and despite its diversity, it is to have a single future, prolongation of the prevailing relation of forces. Globalization is thus the successor to the notion of "One World," itself a recent offshoot of the "universal history" that was the Enlightenment heir of the Christian eschatological narrative. [End Page 15]But the university has also been one of the few places in modern society where such universalizing and homogenizing tendencies have also been reflected, reworked, and criticized, if not resisted. Thus, if the names mentioned above have any credence at all in the English-speaking world, it is in large part by virtue of its universities, which have extended a certain hospitality to their writings. Like all hospitality, however, that of the universities has rarely been a neutral one. There, as elsewhere, writings are admitted as legitimate "objects" of study only under the double condition, first, of being linked to "proper names," and second, of being received and validated by existing disciplines. In short, writings are received for study in universities on the condition that they be certified as proper "theoretical objects" for "theoretical subjects" defined and validated through their appurtenance to the existing academic division of labor. This division of labor founds its disciplines in the subject-object model of cognition and of truth.This is why the hermeneutic and poststructuralist turn (back) to language as a signifying medium rather than... (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have urged those working in Christian higher education to attend more purposefully to student spiritual and character formation. Anchored by the belief that college is a formative time for the development of values, commitments, identity, and life purpose, these calls have taken many different forms. One consistent theme, however, has been the need to expand character formation beyond ethical training and moral decision-making. While such tools are necessary, these scholars note, there is also a pressing (...) need for the development of righteous virtues, affections, commitments, and patterns of living rooted in a right understanding of God and self. How can professors encourage spiritual attentiveness and transformation within the academic setting of a college classroom? What assignments foster spiritual focus and growth into Christlikeness? What helpful practices from the historic Christian tradition can be included in syllabi and course experiences? As professors committed to educationally-based spiritual formation, we are concerned with how to best encourage student spiritual growth. This article is the culmination of conversations, as well as trial and error in our classrooms, in an attempt to answer these questions. (shrink)

At present, the concept of «social class» is in a pauperized cultural state, fully integrated within political channels that are unfavorable to its identification, understanding and acceptance. As it has been defined in two previous works by the present author, the concept can only be associated with territorially undelimited and specialized societies, originated in postindustrial western Europe, under a division of labor based on productive objectives rather than professional roles. The notion of «social class» is nowadays subsumed within (...) the communicative peculiarities channeled by the ruling class, so that it has been practically abolished from the mass communicative scene. Given this social conjuncture, which deeply affects both its academic and popular conception, the present research intends to offer a critical and final vision, after the two previous works, of its contemporary sense. First of all, the pauperization and collapse of the concept will be addressed, to later expose the reasons that make social classes perpetual and, finally, to delineate its role within the world-system as it was defined in the second half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

The “embeddedness” of economic life in social relations has become a productive analytical principle and the basis of a penetrating critique of economic orthodoxy. But this critique raises another important, social and historical question, of how the economy became “disembedded” in the first place – how the multitude of transactions designated (somewhat arbitrarily) as economic were abstracted from the rest of social life and reconstituted as an object, the economy, which behaves according to its own logic. This article investigates the (...) social sources of some innovations in economic thought that contributed to the emergence of the economy, particularly statistical indicators and mechanical models. By examining the redefinitions of the object of economic research developed by Irving Fisher and Wesley Mitchell in the 1890s and the first decades of the twentieth century, I argue that the abstraction of the economy from the remainder of social life was a strategy linked to the position of these innovators within the field of economics, conceived as a social structure. Possessing a specialized scientific cultural capital, but lacking upper class background, contacts, and dispositions that characterized the founders of academic economics, Fisher and Mitchell elaborated new definitions of their discipline's object of study, and a new type of economic expertise. (shrink)

What does the development of a truly robust contemporary theory of domination require? Ashley J. Bohrer argues that it is only by considering all of the dimensions of race, gender, sexuality, and class within the structures of capitalism and imperialism that we can understand power relations as we find them nowadays. Bohrer explains how many of the purported incompatibilities between Marxism and intersectionality arise more from miscommunication rather than a fundamental conceptual antagonism. As the first monograph entirely devoted to (...) this issue, »Marxism and Intersectionality« serves as a tool to activists and academics working against multiple systems of domination, exploitation, and oppression. (shrink)

In this article I chart an indirect if not oblique path through my own theoretical formation as a social and feminist art historian, informed by Marxist cultural studies but deeply engaged with issues of difference and gender, to the response Zygmunt Bauman made to a book I gave him that I had reason to believe would resonate with his work. It did not. Indeed, my kind of theoretically informed visual and cultural analysis was indecipherable despite the influence of his writing (...) after 1989 on my work. Gender was not a topic for Bauman. Feminist theory remained an impenetrable territory. Art (as opposed to culture) was not to be theorized. Yet, in his later work on liquid modernity, Bauman incorporated the idea that we are all now artists of life. Here I recognized an oblique and unjustified if not misdirected dismissal of the working-class British artist Tracey Emin. My article concludes with my reading of her video work, Why I Never Became a Dancer, which poignantly and defiantly exposes the social violence and violations of class, race and gender in British society which she experienced. I seek to demonstrate how Bauman’s acute, but often academically devalued, attentiveness to the vernacular and quotidian forms of cultural experience and its ability to register and reveal changing social forms and forces should have enabled him to see Emin’s work as equally acute and culturally significant. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Activists and writers on injustice have highlighted as a structural problem that injustice is experienced differentially. What injustices of privilege lie hidden in my daily academic life? Three deeply discomforting moments relating to Class, climate, and Whiteness privilege, form the core of an account of gradually admitting to my passive acceptance of injustice in the form of privileges from which I benefit. My ignorance has perpetuated privilege despite this not being my conscious will. From this crisis, the paper (...) explores the inner work for healing injustice individually, and the outer work of changing collective habits of dominance within the Academy. A starting point is befriending my will to injustice and facing up to my privileges. Effort needed from White, Middle Class academics ‘like me’ includes uncovering ways in which we benefit from privilege whether or not we want to. Proposals are made for inner growth through building community among academics. (shrink)

Back to Kant is a study of the rise of the neo-Kantian movement from its origins in the 1850s to its academic preeminence in the years before World War I. Thomas E. Willey describes early neo-Kantianism as a reaction of scientists and scientific philosophers against both the then discredited Hegelianism and Naturphilosophie of the preceding era and the simplistic and deterministic scientific materialism of the 1850s. "Back to Kant" was the slogan of a revolt against theories of knowledge which seemed (...) inadequate to recent discoveries in thermodynamics, physiology, optics and other fields. Because Immanuel Kant was the philosopher who placed Newtonian physics on new epistemological foundations and demonstrated the possibility of universal scientific truth, he was the right thinker for a generation of scholars living through a new scientific revolution in Germany and dissatisfied with both speculative idealism and crude materialism. The second wave of neo-Kantians continued to discuss problems of scientific epistemology in the 1880s and after, but they also showed a keen interest in political and social matters, attempting to bridge liberalism and socialism with Kantian ethics. Neo-Kantians had to face questions of socialism, the place of the working class in society, the phenomenon of social welfare, the challenge of political democracy. Willey uses the biographical approach to develop the relationship between unity and diversity in the movement, and to underscore the importance of personality in history. While individual dissertations and monographs have been written on various thinkers and schools within neo-Kantianism, this is the first wide-ranging history of the entire phenomenon. Willey observes that the movement did succeed in reasserting ethical values and in separating humanistic studies from the methods of physical science. He also discusses the possibility that a wider acceptance of neo-Kantian ideals among bourgeois intellectuals and socialist leaders might have reduced class antagonisms and sustained a stronger feeling of community between Germany and the West. (shrink)

I have suggested elsewhere that, when we wander out of our own academic and First-World enclosure, we share something like a relationship with Senanayak's doublethink.2 When we speak for ourselves, we urge with conviction: the personal is also political. For the rest of the world's women, the sense of whose personal micrology is difficult for us to acquire, we fall back on a colonialist theory of most efficient information retrieval. We will not be able t speak to the women out (...) there if we depend completely on conferences and anthologies by Western-trained informants. As I see their photographs in women's studies journals or on book jackets, indeed, as I look in the glass, it is Senanayak with his anti-Fascist paperback that I behold. In the inextricably mingling historico-political specificity with the sexual differential in a literary discourse, Mahasveta Devi invites us to begin effacing that image.· 2. See my "Three Feminist Readings: McCullers, Drabble, Habermas," Union Seminary Quarterly Review 1-2 , and "French Feminism in an International Frame."Mahasveta Devi teaches English at Bijaygarh College in Jadavpur, India, an institution for working-class women. She has published over a dozen novels, most recently Chotti Munda ebang Tar Tir, and is a prolific journalist, writing on the struggle of the tribal peasant in West Bengal and Bihar. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. The translator of Derrida's De la grammatologie, she has published essays on Marxist meminism, deconstructive practice, and contemporary literature and is currently completing a book on theory and practice in the humanities. (shrink)

Young women’s identities are an issue of public and academic interest across a number of western nations at the present time. This book explores how young women attending an elite school for girls understand and construct ‘empowerment’. It investigates the extent to which, and the ways in which, their constructions of empowerment and identity work to overturn, or resist, key regulations and normative expectations for girls in post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultural contexts. The book provides a succinct overview of feminist theorisations of (...) normative femininities in young women’s lives in western cultural contexts. It includes familiar sexist discourses such as sexual double standards, as well as more recent commentary about the regulation of young women’s subjectivities in neoliberal, post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultures. Drawing on ethnographic research in the context of an elite girls’ secondary school, the author explores how empowerment for young women is constructed and understood across a range of textual practices. From visual representations of young women in school promotional material, to students’ constructions of popular celebrities, the question of how girls’ resistance to normative femininities begins to develop is examined. This rich empirical work makes a unique contribution to the study of elite schooling within the sociology of education, drawing on important insights from the field of critical girlhood studies, and posing a challenge to popular feminist notions about media literacy, young women and empowerment. It will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in the areas of gender studies, sociology, education, youth studies and cultural studies. (shrink)

John Kelly has replied to my assessment of his Rethinking Industrial Relations published earlier in this journal in a fraternal and constructive manner. Here, I wish to undertake two tasks. The first is to assess the response of other academics and writers to his book, in terms of reviews and the use of his work by others. The second is to engage with the points he makes to take the debate further forward.

continent. 2.3 (2012): 218–223 Vijay Prashad. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter . Oakland: AK Press. 2012. 271pp, pbk. $14.95 ISBN-13: 978-1849351126. Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the complexity and erudition of his style. He has since authored a number of classic books that have gained recognition throughout the world. The (...) Darker Nations , a peoples’ history of the Third World, sent defibrillating shockwaves through an academic world that had almost forgotten the epic scope and historic dignity of the non-aligned movement and post-colonial struggles. In his recent, award-winning work, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , Prashad delves into his capacious knowledge of the Third World to excavate the discourses and narratives surrounding the upheavals of 2011. “Revolutions have no specific timetable,” states Prashad in the opening line of this exciting and provocative look at contemporary events. Instantly, an atmosphere of suspense emerges. The reader is alerted to the problem of history. Does the making of history then involve a suspension of historical time, or is it a continuous narrative structure into which events must eventually be integrated? Arab Spring, Libyan Winter shows that the answer to the question, “How is history made?” lies just as easily in the asking. The first half of the book works through the events that transpired to bring about the explosive popular uprisings of Arab Spring: Tunisia and Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. But the events are not put together in a cohesive, chronological fashion. Using an uncommonly gripping style more akin to the folk-story motif of the djeli than to traditionally Orientalist academia, Prashad suspends a given situation, points out its components, and traces back the characters and genealogies that define each link before resuming a narrative. Every moment is an end to itself, and an origin of something different. Thus, the making of history becomes the suspension of its own progress, it’s catastrophic 'stability,' in a process of differentiation through inclusion. Empirically, one might suggest that history is a condition of time, and by extension, of the subject, but history is also an eminent producer of the Subject and her concept of time through memory and narrative. Hence, history is often overdetermined by a dominant narrative of the sovereign. The apparently chaotic composition of Prashad’s historicity is, then, an interstitial morphology of resistance. It illustrates that the time to act for the revolutionary lies in the gaps within the dominant historical realities. It points out the sorties of signifiers constituting nothing in the obliterated ruins of history. Through such illuminations, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter breaks through “the surface of history” to elaborate revolution’s snapping synapses, exploding interruptions and breaches, connecting flows. Messianic Politics It is tempting to think, 'History is either singular, or it is diffuse. It is either one coherent factual narrative, or it is comprised of the aletheia of the multitude.' Yet the reader finds Prashad examining the structure of history on multiple levels. For Prashad, world history is shaped by geographically defined political movements, such as communism or national liberation, with historical agents like the working class for the former and the nationalist militant for the latter. Religion, however, is another matter: “Religion has an unshakable eschatology which a post-utopian secular politics lacks.” Within the telos of religion, there appears on the horizon the image of Benjamin’s thoughts on messianic time—time as “a small fissure in the continuous catastrophe,” a break with history, may contain an ultimate redemption of the human beyond the political power struggle. Succoring the split between geo-political and utopian-religious (messianic) time in the context of Arab Spring, Prashad indicates that the base of “the deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy” is forged by the affinity between eschatological Islamist politics with the People. To think about the Subject of messianic time in the context of the lack of a “coherent timetable” for emancipatory politics, it is perhaps best to return to the modern tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose prefigurative blending of liberation theology and emancipatory politics became most important during his works of 1963, the climactic year of “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In “The Letter,” King states the point bluntly: Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The timing of rebellious action must not be a part of history. It must change history. The kairos appears spontaneous and untimely in its convulsive, shocking presence, yet it is, deeper still, a path, a longue durée , forged through diligent and rigorous praxis. King put a finer point on the path of historic liberation in his declaration in his 1963 speech at Western Michigan University: “[T]ime is neutral.... Somewhere along the way we must see that time will never solve the problem alone but that we must help time. Somewhere we must see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.” Time, then, exists in “the neutral,” while action must turn to the kairos , not only of taking time, but taking the right time. By turning our relation to time into kairos , we move time from its context within history to a duration between histories—the longue dure?e of Messianic time. The implementation of neutrality in this context suggests a broad space of time to extend through the valley of positive and negative. In Roland Barthes’s lectures from 1978, the neutral takes place in this minimal distance of non-conflict that exists outside of two extremes. It is, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-specific.” For Blanchot, the neutrality of time permeates life as death, impassive and beyond control; such is the neutrality of messianic time, which permeates the charge of history, changing the "I" into the "one." The neutrality of time therefore implicates history in a case against extremism, showing that the work of the radical is not to tend to any particular side, but to have the time to navigate through the terrible terrain of history by altering its course, its patterns and rhythms of movement, connection, sociality. Hence, one does not simply “make history,” one alters the course of history in accordance to “the right time.” The historical path toward emerging power is transmitted as a gesture to the outside of history, against history; a gesture as simple as reaching out. Thus a counterhistory, to use Foucault’s term, is brought forward as the guide of time past a point of no return, a Rubicon, the point where the normal path of history falls to the past. The subject, who must be the only true agent of history, facilitates time through helpfulness, and both the Subject and her history become decentered in relation to one another. Yet history negates the neutrality of time. As Barthes discloses, although the neutral is the “thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard.” Engaged with history, time is charged with a destiny, and becomes an opposition. As Prashad insists, “For Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old.” The emergence of the Subject during Arab Spring did not conceive of a new history, but changed the path of history toward a different destiny. “Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.” The negativity of this charge toward “revolutionary destiny” rendered control, as a positive force, seriously lacking. The lack of control lies in the problem that the Subject is not totally detemporalized or timeless, but untimely in her presence. The Subject is untimely, because her work is visionary, and it is only through such visionary work that the Rubicon can be crossed. Still, the crossing of this border is haunted by anxiety over an impending disaster that lays in wait. It is only through the form of what Benjamin calls divine violence, captivated not with the justice of the means, but the ends—the transformation of history—that a revelation of history’s traumatic foundations can be liberated, and patterns and rhythms of time developed throughout obscured traditions awakened. In this situation, the Subject appears to be outside of right, but setting the state to rights. Because her position is correct, in-so-far as the rebelling subject rebels due to a lack of recognition, her representation appears outside of the norm, which is mistaken as right. Therefore, such visionary work must be carried out through obscured traditions, underground, away from the surveillance of empire. Explaining his method from the start along the lines of Marx’s metaphor of the mole, Prashad insists, “It is the burrowing that is essential, not simply the emergence onto the surface of history.” Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a book on uncharted networks of time, spread out over the 252 pages like an elaborate spider’s web of passages intertwining with and overwhelming the machinery of the state. Although untimely, Arab Spring was not a flash in the pan, or a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Prashad notes that the government’s suspension of these tools led to further radicalism by furthering communications through face-to-face encounters. In existential terms, Arab Spring might be thought of as a revolution of Being over techne , an uprising of the unchartable, infinite potential of the Other. The name of this Other is found in Chance. The faith of the revolution lies in the proper decentering of the subject, its giving to the Other of time, for only with respect to time does history actually appear on the horizon of the subject, rather than as an imposition. This time of historical agency appears as a moment when anything can happen—a revolutionary truth event where everything comes into question while being realized in its Otherness as a community of the people begins anew in the streets amidst discourse, friendship, reconfigurations of hegemony, and a becoming of a constituent power. Throwing a wrench into the gears of the “cobwebbed tradition” of Orientalism, the decentering of history in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a defining quality of its impassioned revolutionary cry. But perhaps the most paradigmatic points of the book emerge from the unexpected voices. To make the connection between the particular manifestations of revolutionary demands to the general historic terms of revolution, Prashad quotes an anonymous young Egyptian in Tahrir Square, who reminds us, “[T]he French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” Far from timelessness, the historicization of Arab Spring must exist precisely within the most uncanny appearance of time, as something that does not appear to come from the natural state of time as we know it, but in arriving has completely transformed the way that we understand time. Strange Monsters Revolution is never as simple as a revolt from below against a rusting structure of elites trying to remain in power. As with the French Revolution, Arab Spring consisted of complex familial ties, outside interests, and religious factions fighting alongside, often in awkward juxtaposition to, liberals, working class parties, farmers, and students. It is perhaps because of this historically difficult and incongruous composition that the Arabic word for revolution is thawra , referring to the image of the bull, or thawr , which has religious significance as a pagan deity for the Ancient Semitic tribes and Cartheginians. If Daniel Guérin was correct in saying, “Anarchism and Marxism drink from the same spring,” then it is quite a different oasis that drove the thirsty beast of revolution through what Prashad calls, “the Libyan labyrinth.” Recalling Bataille’s Acéphale, the intestinal labyrinth gains significance as the mode of metabolism and rumination in which, “(the Acephale) has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.” Unraveling the discourse of the revolution, the flows of power and hegemony—from Qaddafi’s nationalist coup in 1969 to the wars with Chad from 1978 to 1987, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s to, finally, the War on Terror—we find that the metabolic process of Libyan Winter ends in the production of oil. In a process of what Prashad calls “involution,” Qaddafi’s bellicose policies, along with his attempts to nationalize Islam together with oil, mutated the source of his power, turning his house against itself. Already a divided nation, with its two major cities on opposite geographic sides of the country, Libya became split between two opposed political powers—liberal reformists and staunch nationalists—as Qaddafi’s political disengagement manifested through what can only be described in psychoanalytic terms as a recursive passage a l’act (mysteriously calling Wikipedia “Kleenex,” declaring that opponents drank hallucinogens with their instant coffee, and so on). Prashad declares, “The mercurial style that Qaddafi adopted was not about his personality alone, but also a leader’s natural response to a system that relied upon power brokers whose own loyalty… did not have any ideological commitment to the system.” As in the case of other nations during Arab Spring, the true expression of revolt was an outward exposition of what had inwardly been happening in microcosmic societies throughout the realm—from indigenous tribes to political parties, for a century, the people, partly motivated by (and in resistance to) economic impositions of development, had been changing the traditional social compositions and participating in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls, “the relative autonomy of the movement from the leaders.” It was this empowerment of political reconfigurations taking place under the context of new democratic assemblages that shocked the elites and evoked such a powerful response. Unlike Qaddafi’s awkward policy choices and rants, real acts of power from the West were clear and decisive. Prashad sets the stages of war and diplomacy, far removed from the deserts, mountains, and cities that forged the backdrop of popular politics. Taking place under the now-classic architecture of the “four pillars” of US interests—oil, the War on Terror, Israel, and the circumvention of Iranian hegemony—we find elites rubbing elbows in “Heliopolist cocktail parties and hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya” as well as the Concorde-Lafayette hotel in Paris, which provides the setting for a meeting of anti-Qaddafi figures consolidating their power. These scenes are buttressed with the careful portraiture of key historical actors. As Prashad brings the stage of history to life, we find the diplomats and liberals like Frank Wisner, whose career has brought him from Enron in the late 1990s to the Obama Administration, under the aegis of which he was meeting with Mubarak about military support during Arab Spring. We spy the provocateurs, for instance, gauche cavalier , Bernard Henri-Levy, who telephones Sarkozy from Benghazi about the need for more NATO air strikes. We follow the rebel military establishment as it suffers mysterious deaths and even more mysterious assents (like that of apparent CIA cohort, Khalifa Hifter). In each of these intriguing characters, we find different representations of the security state biopolitique: an oil-injected reification that drives Arab Spring from the resentment of rising food prices to the brink of implosion in Libyan Winter. Reminiscent of the scenes of Cold War soirées represented in old Bond films, the aristocratic fight for oil against democracy that was Libyan Winter presents a harsh truth that the new global crisis is simply the continuation of the old history: the global exploitation of capitalism waged against the imagination of the people. As Benjamin laments, “The labyrinth is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination. This destination is the marketplace.” Yet, “(t)he labyrinth is the habitat of… a humanity (a class) which does not want to know where its destiny is taking it.” Thus, the labyrinth leads, like the desert, only further into itself. As Blanchot explains, “The desert is even less certain than the world; it is never anything but the approach to the desert.” Only the visionary can take time out of the involution toward oblivion. It is here, in this approach to and escape from history, that we find ourselves within Benjamin’s Golgotha, Blanchot’s desert: A space of indeterminate uncertainty where we become familiar only with our own exile. Blanchot writes, “For the moderated and moderate man, the room, the desert, and the world are strictly determined places. For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” The desert, as allegory, provides an eschatology, a mortality in the destiny of Arab Spring. But any allegory of nature might lead to a labyrinthine eschatology (for example, in Bachelard, the forest presents "a limitless world"); the prescience of the untimely is always an uncanny acceptance of the infinite within the finite—the outside of what is understood. Transgenerational and occupied with the image of the future, the untimely makes otherness its home as it proceeds toward liberation. In the work of helping time navigate this dangerous passage of history, Prashad illustrates that the more violent break with history may have occurred in the peaceable struggles of Tahrir Square, and not in the military clashes of Qaddafi with his former Generals who defected to the CIA and NATO countries. It might be possible to suggest, then, that in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, the historical subject of the people was drawn together in a Dionysian dance of different rhythms in the marvelous realm of the ancients, while we fear that the case of Libya suggests an Apollonian future where time, itself, may lay dying under the machinic hand of history. The properly Nietzschean inversion would follow: time is dead, for history has killed it. Yet, if time is dead, struck down in Golgotha, exposed in the desert, mauled by the thawra , it is only in the present sense that it is rendered impossible outside of the context into which the untimely has thrown us. Thus, if history becomes an art of revolution, life as being-towards-death (death as the provocation of the neutrality of time) becomes what Benjamin calls “the allegory of resurrection” through the glorious ruins of history. Prashad ends his work with a rousing finale: “The time of the impossible has presented itself. In Egypt, where the appetite for the possibilities of the future are greatest, the people continue to assert themselves into Tahrir Square and other places, pushing to reinvigorate a Revolution that must not die… For them the slogan is simple: Down with the Present. Long live the Future. May it be so.&rdquo. (shrink)

ENLIGHTENMENT AND POLITICAL FICTION: -/- THE EVERYDAY INTELLECTUAL -/- (New York/London: Routledge, 2016). -/- Abstract -/- Advanced, theoretical ideas can be found in the most unlikely books. A handful of books—sometimes surprising ones—not only entertain the reader but also contribute to new ways of seeing the world. Indeed, some theorists explicitly cite literature. Adam Smith, for example, makes repeated references to Voltaire, and Marx later claims numerous literary sources, including Don Quixote. Why, though, should an historian of ideas direct sustained (...) scholarly attention to literature? And what, exactly, beyond high entertainment, should anyone not in literary studies expect when reading great fiction? -/- To address these questions, I examine the particular textures and peculiarities of thought in five famous works of fiction, written from 1600-1850. I have found a web of text-based, interrelated ideas that are attributed to the Enlightenment, and yet that existed considerably before the early-modern period, and, in many cases, that lasted well into our own time. Ideas ascribed to later thinkers—for example, John Locke, in the late seventeenth century, on private property—can be found in much earlier works of fiction. In this case, however, Locke himself acknowledged his debt to Cervantes, but this has been forgotten, as few modern readers read both the theory and the fiction of the past. The five works of fiction examined here, from five different languages, therefore, not only reflect European Enlightenment thinking, but in some cases they helped to create it. -/- Overall I argue that access to political and economic theory by way of fiction made it possible for any person, even someone beyond traditional scholarly circles, to become part of an ongoing, vital academic debate. Enlightenment and Political Fiction: The Everyday Intellectual is designed as an homage to E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) by telling the story of the making of the everyday intellectual. The stress here is on the abstract theory to be found in a few famous works of fiction, ideas presented in a format highly attractive to contemporary (and later) readers, yet also exhibited in a manner that showed respect for the intelligence of the average reader. Extrapolating from Thompson, I argue that it was not passive reception but active participation of readers—including those who listened to the book read out loud—that fostered Enlightenment from below. The decision to engage in this intellectual debate, grounded in ideas often first found in fiction, and much of it featuring less-than-gifted central characters, allowed everyday people—the vast majority of whom were wholly removed from both salons and universities—to participate in the questioning and eventually the decision-making of their own states. This led to greater political participation, which is often cited as one of the indicators of the shift to the modern age. -/- Looking at fiction alongside philosophy, political theory, and the history of economic thought enriches our notion of theorizing, and shifts our understanding about which texts should be addressed. Authors, in the midst of developing theories, take their source materials from ideas in their own cultures and then systematize particular concepts. In some cases, nascent political and economic ideas appear first in literature, as in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and, in other cases, theorists deliberately used literature to propound their theories to a much wider audience, as in Voltaire’s Candide, which might be considered a novelization of moral theory. It is not that the former case—abstract ideas breaking through first in fiction—is the rule in this period, and the latter—theorists manipulating fiction for their own purposes—the exception, but rather that there is a dialectical relationship between fiction and theory in the long eighteenth century. -/- See: http://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Political-Fiction-Intellectual-Routledge/dp/1138954179 AND https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138954175. (shrink)

The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, “I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club.” Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, Russ Castronovo turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture—civic reformers, anarchists, (...) novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors—to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking. B eautiful Democracy explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, Castronovo argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Kant and Schiller, Beautiful Democracy ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally suppose. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:130 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Laura Bisaillon, Alana Cattapan, Annelieke Driessen, Esther van Duin, Shannon Spruit, Lorena Anton, and Nancy S. Jecker Doing Academia Differently: “I Needed Self-Help Less Than I Needed a Fair Society” A great deal of harm is being done by belief in the virtuousness of work. — Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness” We are committed to doing (...) academia in particular ways, and not in others. — Brocher Foundation Feminist Collective I had decided that becoming a university professor might be a good fit; friends and colleagues had suggested that I would be valuable to a university, so I prepared for a restructuring of my family life.1 I read Tokarczyk and Fay’s Working-Class Women in the Academy and Babcock and Laschever’s Women Don’t Ask to gather understandings of the milieu I was entering. I now see that my preparations had not shined sufficient light on the social and structural factors that organize the contemporary university.... As it turns out, the restructuring of our lives within the working conditions, priorities, and rationalities of this professional milieu triggered unanticipated and painful effects.... Had Mountz published her article “Women on the Edge” before I decided on a career migration into the university system and, had I been fortunate enough to discover it, I would have made other career choices.2 1. The authors, who describe themselves as the Brocher Foundation Feminist Collective, indicate their personal narratives in this text using italics. 2. Michelle M. Tokarczyk and Elizabeth A. Fay, eds., Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Bisaillon et al. 131 Introduction: Personal, Professional, and Political We are seven women who met at the Brocher Foundation in Hermance, Switzerland, in July 2017, where we had been selected to spend a few months as research fellows. This competitively awarded opportunity is open to persons fluent in English, from graduate students to senior scholars, with or without academic appointment, whose scholarship advances knowledge about the ethical, legal, and social implications of health and biotechnologies.3 When we found ourselves on the shores of Lake Leman with the gift of time, we began opening up to each other in unexpected, compelling ways. Whatever our vantage point in the hierarchy of the university system, we discovered that there was remarkable overlap in our experiences as women in academia. When we began writing, our authoring team was composed of two graduate students, four faculty members at the assistant professor rank, and one full professor, residing in Canada, the Netherlands, Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our plural subject position led us to underexplored and imaginative responses to broader social issues, which we share in this article as the “Brocher Foundation Feminist Collective.” We analyze our experiences from our standpoint as women health researchers laboring in the academy. Our similarities and differences were exciting entry points for discussion and analysis: we are all of eastern or western European descent. We have different countries of birth, mother tongues, ages, disciplinary training and career trajectories, relationships to chronic illness and disability, marital status, and experiences with parenthood. We bring the troubles and contradictions we experience as academics into conversation with each other. We seek to productively illustrate and emphasize that the tensions we see around us, and also feel within us, arise as a result of how the academic system is organized, produced, and sustained across time, place, and space. Press, 2003); Alison Mountz, “Women on the Edge: Workplace Stress at Universities in North America,” The Canadian Geographer 60, no. 2 (2016): 205–18. 3. We experienced this fellowship as a valuable opportunity. But we also recognized that our access to it was mediated by social, economic, or other obligations. As countries in the global north continue to tighten their national border regimes, marginalized academics, especially those from the global South, were less likely to succeed in getting a Swiss visa or securing relevant temporal and economic resources. 132 Bisaillon et al. The promise here, we posit... (shrink)

‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher.’ It is with this seminal sentence that Leszek Kolakowski begins his great work on The Main Currents of Marxism: its Rise, Growth and Dissolution. Both the two terms in the predicate expression are crucial. It is most illuminating to think of Marx as originally a philosopher, even though nothing in his vastly voluminous works makes any significant contribution to philosophy in any academic understanding of that term. It is also essential to recognize that for (...) both Marx and Engels philosophy was always primarily, indeed almost exclusively, what they and their successors called classical German philosophy. This was a tradition seen as achieving its climactic fulfilment in the work of Hegel, and one which they themselves identified as a main stimulus to their own thinking. Thus Engels, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, claimed that ‘The German working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy’. (shrink)

For more than two millennia the development of philosophy in what is called the West has been the province of men who trace their intellectual heritage to men in ancient Greece. Within “the development of philosophy” I include the training of philosophers as well as publishing and preserving philosophical work in libraries. Thus I regard philosophy as a very material as well as spiritual enterprise. My focus here is on the spiritual impact, actual and potential, of recent changes in the (...) material base of philosophy and the material impact of recent changes in the spiritual focus of philosophers. Before the Twentieth Century, the most significant transitions in the development of Western philosophy were its coming under the domination of Christian religious institutions and then its becoming relatively freed from such domination. Since the advent of the Twentieth Century, the most significant transitions may come from the increasing access to academic institutions of the middle and working classes, of people of color with histories of oppression by white societies, and of women from all classes and ethnic backgrounds—people who do not always or only trace their intellectual heritages to men of ancient Greece. What differences might these changes make to, and call for in, the development of philosophy?What I have thought about most are differences made by women and differences that have drawn in women to academic philosophy in Western democracies, such as the United States. Twentieth Century women in these contexts have published substantial bodies of philosophical inquiry with feminist agendas . I want to comment on two features of such inquiry that often make it attractive to women less readily engaged by the traditions defined by privileged men. These features are holism and what I call “historical particularism.” I begin with “particularism.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rita Gross as Teacher, Mentor, FriendKathleen M. ErndlI have been asked to speak about the work of Rita Gross from the point of view of someone who was once her student. Not only was I her student, I was one of her very first students. She was my first teacher of religious studies during my first semester of college in the first semester of her first full-time academic position. (...) The year was 1971; the place was New College, a small, alternative liberal arts college in Sarasota, Florida. As the eldest child in the second generation of a working-class immigrant family, I was the first person in my family to pursue higher education. While none of my grandparents had completed high school, both of my parents were high school graduates and my father had risen to a professional level as an engineer through on-the-job training and his own diligence, so my attending college was perhaps the next logical step in achieving the "American dream." However, my choice of college was a bit unusual.New College, as might be expected by its name (though I later discovered was named after a college at Oxford), was new and relatively unknown, lacking a football team and an engineering school, which my parents, with their limited knowledge of higher education, considered essential. But by this time I was somewhat of an educational radical, having been influenced by Angela Davis and Paolo Freire.1 A local newspaper article of the time described New College students as "rich, radical, and hedonistic" (I can only attest to ever having been one of the above). The Underground Guide to the College of Your Choice2 described New College as a place where students taught the classes and where "chicks suffer from underwear famine." While this was somewhat of an overstatement, it was the kind of place where students initiated courses, were largely free from required courses, conducted unusual independent research, came to class barefoot, and sat on the floor. In any case, as the first in my working-class immigrant family to attend college and as an idealist who had chafed against a system that I felt, to paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, allowed schooling to interfere with education, I was excited to be in any college and especially in one with a reputation for experimental modes of learning.When I went to meet my assigned faculty advisor to figure out my schedule and negotiate a "contract" of study, I was told that I had been reassigned to a new faculty member who was "young and full of energy." This, of course, was Rita Gross. Asian religious and cultural traditions place a strong significance on the first meeting with [End Page 57] one's teacher. To be honest, I do not remember much about our first meeting, but I can say in retrospect that it was life changing. After meeting with her, I decided to take her course, Indian Religions I, as well as courses in philosophy, literature, and constitutional law. On my first day of college, my initial plan had been to major in philosophy, with a focus on legal philosophy, with the eventual goal of law school and practicing constitutional, civil rights, or public interest law. But my experience in that Indian Religions I course changed that plan forever. I subsequently took Indian Religions II, then Indian Religious III, and by that time I was hooked. I took several other courses with Rita, including East Asian Religions and a tutorial on Primal Religions. In January of my second year, at Rita's encouragement, I went to Sri Lanka on a study program, doing a project under Rita's direction on lay Buddhist practices. By the time I returned to New College for my third and final year, Rita had already left for the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, but that was not the end of our association. We have stayed in contact for almost forty years now, meeting at the AAR, visiting each other's homes, and talking about each other's work and lives. I have hosted lectures or workshops by Rita at all three institutions where I have taught. I... (shrink)

High school students are at risk for increased sedentary behavior due in part to a decrease in physical activity throughout adolescence and to required sedentary behavior during much of the school day. The purpose of the current study is to examine the impact of using activity workstations in a high school English class for struggling readers. Twenty high school students participated in the study. The participants completed a 16-week study where each participant used an activity workstation for 8 weeks (...) and a traditional desk for 8 weeks in a crossover design for a 40-min period during normal class. They responded to a series of subjective questions about reading and schoolwork at the beginning and end of each 8-week session and followed the READ 180 program designed to help struggling readers during the study. The results indicated that academic performance increased in both desk conditions during the study and from the beginning to the end of the study. In addition, there was a significant improvement in items in the subjective survey related to reading, motivation, and schoolwork in both desk conditions across the study. The current results suggest that using an activity workstation in the classroom did not negatively affect academic performance or students’ perceptions of working on academic assignments compared to the traditional desk condition. These results indicate that activity workstations could be implemented in classrooms to provide students with a non-sedentary option during the school day thus increasing physical activity in students. (shrink)

Last summer I was given the opportunity to work closely with an extensive exhibition of Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings at the National Gallery of Canada. I focused my research for the class on unpacking the significance of an unorthodox painting in the show entitled The Large Plane Trees, which presents Jean François Millet-inspired digging figures in a markedly diminished and experimental way. Looking to the overt spirituality of Van Gogh’s personal writings, Van Gogh’s curious obsession of copying (...) Millet’s agrarian figures, the influence of Ukiyo-e Japanese woodblock prints, and nineteenth-century politics regarding the depicting of the rural and working classes, this paper gives readers a chance to understand a small portion of the pedagogy, and aims of an artist whose aspirations have been wildly misconstrued by popular and academic media. (shrink)