Browsing by Author "Ward, Shelby"

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    The 21st Century is Lacanian: Thoughts in Reading Élisabeth Roudinesco's Lacan: In Spite of Everything
    Bejan, Raluca (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2017-09-08)
    Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Lacan: In Spite of Everything. Verso Books, 2014. Paperback. £12.09 ISBN: 9-781-78168162-6
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    Artist Statement
    Neumann, Catherine (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2017-09-08)
    The piece represents my thoughts about how I teach, urge on and encourage my students and how my students teach, urge on and encourage me. My students teach and inspire me in their ability to critically think, transcend assumptions and function well in complex, increasingly polarized contexts. This piece came as an artwork, as opposed to words, as the sentiment is meant to be ethereal/abstract to indicate the connectedness, agency and ability of people.
  • Artist's Statement
    Khraish, Alessandra (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2016-04-14)
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    Between Hospitality and Inhospitality: The Politics of Migrants Protection in Germany
    Safouane, Hamza (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2017-09-08)
    In Europe, the public discourse on migration opposes narratives of endangered national identities and sovereignties to utilitarian arguments that migrants can restore fiscal balance and demographic dynamism. The notion of hospitality as the foundational basis for granting protection is, however, absent from the debate. In Germany, the initial spirit of organized popular solidarity with refugees and asylum seekers that came in during summer and fall 2015 were soon disillusioned by the unpreparedness of the bureaucracy in processing all asylum claims. As a result of the massive streams of migrants in the recent years, resentment towards migrants, while still marginal in Germany, has become more outspoken. The state’s duty to provide protection to refugees and asylum seekers has become fraught with political considerations that serve bureaucratic interests. Consequently, the provision of protection paradoxically developed into inhospitable practices that disenfranchises migrants and hinders the provision of protection to incoming displaced populations. This article proposes a re-discovery of hospitality by integrating the analyses of Derrida and Hallie. It argues for a politicization of hospitality that can achieved by enabling migrants themselves to enter discourse and fill it with their subjective outlook on their own mobility. Hospitality, as a discursive act that relates the host and the guest on a basis of equality, demarginalizes migrants in the reception country as they are invited into the public space to express their own voices on the migratory processes that they experienced.
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    Biocolonialism: Examining Biopiracy, Inequality, and Power
    Breske, Ashleigh (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2018-09-19)
    Colonialism has for centuries been a driving force for territorial expansion and economic gains. In today’s globalized economy, there is a continuation of colonial exploitation in areas with great biodiversity through the act of taking indigenous knowledge and biodiversity for profit, also known as biopiracy. Biopiracy is a practice of economic exploitation by powerful multinational corporations (MNCs). These MNCs taking on the identity and power structures of nation-states, and biopiracy becomes a tool of these transnational corporations. The established laws protect those corporations that obtain patents or intellectual property rights more readily than the original indigenous knowledge holders. Biocolonialism has been established through neoliberal trade practices and the whittling away of indigenous control over indigenous knowledge. This is done on the premise that indigenous knowledge is communal knowledge, and not privately ‘owned’, and therefore available to be used by everyone. These communal intellectual property rights have allowed MNCs to coopt indigenous knowledge for profit. Biopiracy can extend to multiple forms of practice. This paper will look at it in the context of drug patents, agricultural gene manipulation, and genetic cell lines.
  • Black Cultural Heritage and the Subversion of the Stereotypical Images of the Black Woman in Toni Morrison's Sula
    Sahyoun, Mona Faysal (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2016-04-14)
    One consequence of American slavery was the de-gendering of female slaves, divesting them of a traditional feminine gender identity that their White mistresses were encouraged to assume, thus rendering female slaves sexed yet genderless females. The female slaves are constructed as "breeder" rather than "mother" and promiscuous rather than chaste. While Angela Davis states in Women, Race & Class that, from the perspective of slaveholders, female slaves were no more than "breeders", Eugene D. Genovese records in Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made that Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were appalled by the sexual traditions of West Africans and were persuaded that West Africans lacked morals and sexual restraints. The slavery system also fostered the later constructions of Black women as "mammies", "matriarchs", and the most recent stereotypes of "welfare mothers", and "hoochies". Such constructions revealed the dominant group's concern that Black women maintain a subordinate position. In this paper, I argue that Morrison in Sula draws on the tradition of other-mothering and community other-mothering, notions adapted from West African societies, as well as the practice of biological mothering in ways that successfully disrupt negative stereotypes about Black womanhood originating from slavery.
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    Black Feminist Thought and why it Matters Today
    Hein, Lindsay (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2017-09-08)
    As tensions based on race, gender and class continue, I believe it is imperative for scholars reexamine Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought. Collins uses an intersectional approach to describe the unique oppression which women of color in the United States face. Although the book was published over a decade ago, I believe it can aid one in understanding current oppression women of color still face today. Furthermore, Black Feminist Thought can help to facilitate meaningful dialogue around topics of racism and sexism which are happening across the country. As women continue to be at the forefront of activism against the current division and oppression in the United States, Black Feminist Thought will aid in establishing an inclusive and educated movement.
  • The Changing Landscape of Online Pornography: Translocal Networks and Transcultural Practices
    Martin, Jessica A. (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2016-04-14)
    Pornography's massive growth online in the last 25 years, and the emergence of technologies such as broadband, webcams and smartphones, has led to fundamental changes in the ways people encounter, consume, and relate to online porn. Pornography has undoubtedly infiltrated the Western mainstream; it is now woven into the fabric of ordinary life and everyday online multitasking. The ways porn is accessed and consumed continue to evolve, keeping pace with broader changes in Web use. While there is much work being done in contemporary porn studies which examines these changes, there is an aspect of porn's evolution online that has for the most part been neglected: the ways it is linked to globalization and the spread of ideas across nations and borders. Processes of globalization, the Internet, and developing media technologies have facilitated global access to pornography. Pornography now moves across geographic space, transcends national borders and links global communities – spreading narratives, norms, and social texts across global contexts. Despite these changes, contemporary porn studies has, for the most part, remained insulated from the theoretical work coking out of transnational studies. Conversely, transnational theory—as well as the theoretical positions developing out of transnational theory, such as translocal and transcultural theory—has all but ignored pornography as one of the flows of information that increasingly moves between and connects global spaces, and that has specific impacts on relations of intimacy, sexuality and desire. This paper explores how, when taken together, each of these approaches has the potential to broaden the scope of the other, and potentially answer some important questions around the ways globalization is impacting sexualities.
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    Critiquing Resilience: Interview with Julian Reid
    Alphin, Caroline; Khreiche, Mario; Ward, Shelby (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2018-08-28)
    SPECTRA met with Julian Reid at Virginia Tech on September 12, 2017.During the interview, we talk to Julian about his perspectives on resilience, sovereignty, political theory, academic life, writing, and the arts.
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    Exploring the Aesthetic Turn: An Interview with Michael J. Shapiro
    Khreiche, Mario; Shapiro, Michael J.; Ward, Shelby (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2019-03-28)
    During the ASPECT Conference in April 2017, SPECTRA met with Michael J. Shapiro to discuss his work as a writer, the social sciences, and the inspiration he draws from aesthetic theory, cinema, and the everyday. Mike is a Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Among his most recent books are Cinematic Geopolitics (2009), The Time of the City: Politics, philosophy and genre (2010), Studies in Trans-disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn (2012), War Crimes: Atrocity, and Justice (2015), Politics and Time: Documenting the Event (2016), and The Political Sublime (2018). The keynote address for the ASPECT conference included a piece from this latest work, and can be accessed on YouTube: “When the Earth Moves: Towards a Political Sublime.”
  • Finding a Better Society: The Work of Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism
    Ryan, Mary (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2016-04-14)
    This is a book critique of Lauren Berlant's 2011 book Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press). In this book, Berlant explores how people in Europe and the United States survive neoliberal postwar restructuring. This review defines the term cruel optimism which Berlant has created to describe the process of survival individuals undertake. Next, this review critiques the shortcomings of Berlant's discussion as well as highlights the important contributions that cruel optimism presents in political and performative literature. Through a detailed discussion of the good life, Berlant introduces a compelling examination of social thought on topics related to sovereignty, slow death, capitalism, and queer theory. Berlant delineates the good life as relating to four areas: promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy. Berlant draws from examples across disciplines and within numerous genres to make a strong societal critique of why and how people cling to false promise. This review also briefly pinpoints a few drawbacks or challenges to Berlant's book. Ultimately, this review concludes that Berlant's book is valuable call to action in the humanities and social sciences which utilizes numerous historical and cultural sources to paint a troubling critique of individual lives in post-war societies.
  • Fiscal Austerity and Innovation in Local Governance in Europe
    Panknin, Benedikt (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2016-04-14)
    In 2007, when the consequences of the financial breakdown where barely visible, no one could foresee the consequences of those economic turmoils for the European Union (EU). Even today the full effects of the crisis remain unclear and comprehensive analysis are hardly feasible. Specific empirical research on a smaller scale such as regional studies are hence extremely important. The political scientists Carlos Nunes Silva and Jan Bucek have edited the volume Fiscal Austerity and innovation in local Governance in Europe in order to provide such an empiric compilation. This article provides a review of the edited volume. After sketching the foundations of European regional politics and discussing the central aspects of Europe's regional agenda, the book's content is critically revised and discussed. The disciplinary array of the volume's articles ranges from urban studies, policy analysis and regional studies to jurisprudential articles. While a critical revision is at the core of the review, the content of each chapter is only briefly presented. The value of the reviewed volume lies in its rich, topical and informing content, but the lack of analytic sharpness of the framing chapters made a critical discussion of the volume necessary. While the editors of the volume suggest that the crisis has deeply impacted European politics and somehow transformed its core values, they are not concerned enough about the quality of this transformation. The emergence of anti-libertarian, socially regressive and politically narrowing policy agendas remain notes in the margin. While those weaknesses may create a wrong impression about the effects of the European crisis, a critical revision of the volume fosters new insights on the subject matter and elucidates new starting-points for further research. From this perspective the volume provides a rich content of diverse articles, which enable further examination of the subject. This article provides the reader with several approaches towards regional policies in the EU.
  • L2 Learners Find the South Bronx: Hip-Hop, Globalization, and Identity Construction
    Lucia, Brent (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2016-04-14)
    In Pennycook's, Global Englishes, Rip Slyme, and Permativity, he argues for a critical stance on the globalization process, looking beyond the notion that standard forms of English are only tied to certain "limiting domains." English is actually transforming its identity through the globalization process, constructing languages in various ways within local communities. However, the varieties of English that are being transplanted through globalization are not acting simply as hegemonic languages, or seamlessly entering into a culture's Identity. Local identities are being transformed, raising questions regarding community and language influence. An exploration of the globalization process in relation to language needs to take place in order to discover English's affect on individual's identity, specifically second language learners. How are globalized Englishes influencing second language learners and what are the implications? My paper explores this question by examining Hip-hop culture as a vehicle for the English language, focusing on Hip-Hop pedagogy and its relation to second language acquisition. Hip-hop has helped give rise to the notion of glocalization: engaging the intersections of global and local dynamics that reframe cultural forms through local appropriations of a globally acceptable cultural model which then transform into a new social context. This new social context engages language-learning contexts, generating new languages that are outside of the local community. By reviewing Pennycook's notion of Performativity and Ibrahhim's argument on Hip-Hop as a platform for "positive identity formation," my manuscript explores the relationship L2 learners have with Hip-Hop within a local community and its pedagogical implications.
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    Letter from the Editors
    Alphin, Caroline; Khreiche, Mario; Ward, Shelby (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2018-08-28)
    In recent years, the discourse around resilience has generated controversy among activists and scholars.Construed as adaptability and capacity to resist external pressures, resilience has often been rendered an admirable feature of indigenous populations, readily appropriable to neoliberal narratives and practices.In this context, Julian Reid has advanced a critical intervention in the discourse, challenging the pervasive assumption that resilience is an unequivocally desirable quality and, ultimately, questioning whether it remains a useful concept today.SPECTRA decided to dedicate issue 6.2 to the topic of resilience, not so much to resolve the question, but rather to present resilience as a multilayered term interfacing with global struggles, precarious subjectivities, and aesthetic representations.
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    Letter from the Editors
    Ward, Shelby; Khreiche, Mario (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2017-09-08)
    For the first issue within our tenure as editors, we decided to not release a call with a defined theme. Instead, we chose to let those researchers whose work fits within the scope of SPECTRA (the Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Theory Archives) to develop the direction(s) of issue 6.1. The contributions are current and insightful both on their own terms and, we think, in juxtaposition with one another. In typical SPECTRA fashion, the present issue features integrative theoretical explorations, innovative philosophical analyses, imaginative empirical research, and pertinent political science. We find the articles to be especially timely, given the current political and social atmosphere. We are proud that SPECTRA continues to draw a wide array of researchers who apply critical lenses to ongoing concerns.
  • Letters From the Editors
    (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2016-04-14)
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    Making Sense of Resilient Life at the International Center of Photography Museum in New York City
    Debrix, François (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2018-08-28)
    This critical essay reviews two recent simultaneous exhibits at the International Center of Photography Museum in New York City in order to place the concept of resilience in the contemporary context of human insecurity and violence.It shows how the notion of resilient life is uncritically espoused by some contemporary artists and photographers in a way that renders the concept of resilience commonplace, expected, and unproblematic and, as such, incapable of offering a necessary challenge to various forms of violence against bodies and lives today.
  • On Hannah Arendt's Relevance for Sociology: A Test Case
    Kuhnert, Johannes (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2016-04-14)
    Hannah Arendt has hardly ever been recognized as a source for sociological research. She herself has criticized the discipline for its alleged complicity with totalitarianism. Her analysis of society in The Human Condition, however, has found much acclaim in other disciplines. Following Seyla Benhabibs characterization of Arendts thought as a phenomenological essentialism, the author suggests that Arendts conceptual framework can still inspire sociological thinking if applied cautiously. Using excerpts from an extended field study of a German multi-level marketing financial planning company, the author demonstrates that Arendts distinction of practical human activities into "labor," "work," and "action" can still guide interpretative sociological research. The category of "labor" fits the way clients feature as statistically determinable beings within the representations produced by financial planners. The sales process as a whole, in turn, appears as "work" to the financial planners. Following Italian philosopher Paolo Virno, the author argues that this specific type of communicative work in a post-Fordist company is marked by an instability and precariousness that Arendt did not predict. With reference to the distinction between "fear" and "anxiety," the author explores ways in which this "industry of means of communication" (Virno) structurally undermines the stability of this social relation. A series of structural features, as well as the importance of story-telling and the "cultivation of the self" (Foucault) lead the author to conclude that forms of "action" have infiltrated the way this particular practice is organized. Through this exercise the author hopes to convince the reader that the topography of Arendts phenomenological essentialism can be turned into a more sociologically fruitful topology when we are ready to relate her concepts in a new fashion.
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    Philologia, Volume 4 : 2012
    Kays, Holly; Ward, Shelby; Minogue, Tom; Griffin, Amanda; Gibbs, Andrew; Pandick, Kate; Washburg, Stephanie; Anderson, Thomas; Graves, Justin; Smith, Adam; Cunha, Anne; Coe, Katherine; Robertson, Kate; Lower, Erika; Santini, Sammi; Donohue, Allie; Gillenwater, Chelsea; Faut, Nicole; Sutherland, Michelle (Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, 2012)
    The journal was created for the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech and accepts liberal arts research from all thirteen Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) universities. It is an annually published, multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal.
  • A Politics of the Commons or Commoning the Political? Distinct Possibilities for Post-Capitalist Transformation
    Hollender, Rebecca (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2016-04-14)
    The Commons is celebrated for its role in linking anti-capitalist struggles across the world, as demonstrated by the myriad local and regional attempts to reclaim shared access and decision-making over collective resources, spaces, and knowledge. However, despite its success as a rallying point for diverse initiatives, the Commons faces critique from within the anti-capitalist Left. First, there is evidence that Commons initiatives are vulnerable to cooptation by capitalism's pervasive political forms and do not impede its continued expansion. Second, there is doubt as to whether the radical political principles and practices embraced by Commons movements, including open-endedness, pluriversality, and prefigurative politics are sufficient for spurring system change. Despite the soundness of these critiques, this paper argues that it is both possible and worthwhile to defend the Commons as one of many strategies for moving beyond capitalism. Doing so necessitates distinguishing between transformational and non-transformational variants of the Commons. The paper will delineate and contrast two ideal-typical variants of Commons approaches, thereby responding to critiques and emphasizing the Commons' potential. The first variant, a "politics of the commons," includes initiatives that bring people together to build collective forms for sharing resources, spaces, and knowledge, in response to situational threats to survival or well-being. This non-transformational variant faces temporal and geographical limitations and is vulnerable to cooptation because it does not confront structural, long- term, and systemic causes of enclosure and expropriation. In contrast, in the second variant, "commoning the political," what is held in common is the anti-capitalist political processes itself. This second approach goes beyond traditional state-based, Euro-centric, or universalistic Leftist models to allow for a pluriversal and long-term transformation by combining radical political processes with antagonistic strategies for confronting capitalist domination.