Spaces of Labor Activism, Mexican‐American Women and the Farm Worker Movement in South Texas Since 1966

This paper studies the farm worker unionization experience and the historical development of Mexican‐American women's activism in South Texas to elaborate more precisely the relationship among socio‐spatial practices, political activism and labor's geography. Drawing upon archival documents and interviews, the paper describes how Mexican‐American farm workers used public space for political activity; however, radical unionization efforts also domesticized other spaces for women's activities. The paper chronicles how Mexican‐American women in South Texas transformed the farm worker center from a "domesticated space" into one of empowerment. In short, women in the union made the farm worker center into a space that challenged both the class‐based structure of larger South Texas society and masculinist practices within the larger farm worker movement. The analysis advances the imperative to better understand how workers "make space" to ensure their own survival. The paper advances the study of labor geography by arguing that working class mobilization reconstitutes dynamic social geographies within laboring communities themselves. In arguing this point, the paper illustrates the limitations of activism based solely on the use of public space and argues for more attention to the significance of other socio‐political spaces for labor mobilization.     

Feminism and the Spaces of Transformation

Feminist political theory draws on particular spatial imaginations in elaborating a politics of transformation. This paper establishes this in relation to two familiar accounts of feminist transformation – those of Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray. Respectively I read their work as suggesting that transformation of gender relations takes the form of ubiquitous revolution, taking place everywhere, or a distant dream of an (im)possible future – elsewhere. The paper then turns to discuss the work of Julia Kristeva, often dismissed as not feminist and conservative. I read her work politically, within the frame of feminist theory. She offers a different, heterogeneous account of transformation, as both possible in the present and also limited by the existence and need for social and symbolic orders. In exploring the heterogeneous spatial imagination of her work, the paper suggests that the spatialities of abjection are diverse and productive. Abjection is not simply about devising territories and borders. Moreover, dominant spatialities cannot be described as simply masculine. Finally, drawing links with Lefebvre's account of representational spaces, I argue that Kristeva's work can be extended to inform our understanding of how spaces themselves can be transformed.     

盘龙城遗址废弃的年代下限及相关问题

本文通过对比中原地区中商时期的陶器材料,将盘龙城废弃的年代下限推定在中商三期。此外,本文还进一步考察了与盘龙城关系密切的荆南寺、铜鼓山等遗址废弃的时间,并运用文化因素分析的方法,对盘龙城的废弃与周边地区文化面貌发生变动的关联性进行了探讨。本文的讨论或许可为我们研究盘龙城的性质问题提供一个新的视角。     

Political Theology,Democracy, and the Exception in the Egyptian Revolution

As the sixth anniversary of the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square passes, those uprisings and the events that followed continue pose important challenges not only for students of Middle Eastern and North African politics, but also for students of political theory and political theology. While scholars debate the extent to which the “Arab Spring” has amounted to a truly revolutionary turn of events, it is commonly accepted that the protests that swept the region were exceptional in their unanticipated and profound disruption of ordinary affairs. Under the influence of Carl Schmitt's theory of sovereignty, “the exception” has become a key figure in contemporary reflections on political theology, but attention to events in Egypt suggests that the familiar figure of the exception has not yet been mined for all of its implications for democratic practice. Slipping below grand articulations of the exception as a moment of sovereign decision, or as the suspension of the law, this essay turns its attention to the minor, everyday, background patterns of exceptionality that accompany the emergence of democratic practices outside the purview of the sovereign state. I argue that there is an intimate connection between the forms of exceptionality produced by longstanding practices of Egyptian secularism, the forms of exceptionality peculiar to the 2011 uprisings and their aftermath, and the forms of exceptionality that both make and unmake democratic practices. My argument has three parts: first Egyptian secularism is a process that manages and transforms authorized forms of Islamic practice, while at the same time producing exceptional formations, of which the Muslim Brotherhood is a key example; second that revolutionary politics can be understood as a matter of opening and sustaining the kind of exceptional circumstances that attended the 2011 uprisings, and that this can be usefully framed as an open-ended process of conversion; third that democratic practice requires courting both kinds of exception, despite their challenges, ambivalences, and potential dangers.     

After the Exception: HIV/AIDS Beyond Salvation and Scarcity

Abstract: Access to treatment for HIV/AIDS became a flashpoint for global justice struggles in the late 1990s. An expanding international response, premised to a significant extent on the idea of HIV/AIDS as an exceptional global problem, has since delivered treatment, care and prevention to growing numbers of people. HIV/AIDS exceptionalism, however, has increasingly been questioned, many aspects of the response have been critiqued and donor funding has started to decline. I argue that, having been framed as an exceptional humanitarian emergency, the question of HIV/AIDS as a global problem is increasingly located within a discourse of scarcity. Tracking the growing entanglement of global HIV/AIDS relief with neoliberal governmentality and the emergence of something I term therapeutic neoliberalism, I argue that the shift from a rationality of salvation to one of administration poses new challenges for global health activism. Questioning the discourse of scarcity remains essential to an alternative global health agenda.     

日军遗弃化学武器综考——兼评“5.15”判决书

日军在侵华战争期间违背国际公约进行化学战,战败之际又秘密按埋和丢弃化学武器以掩盖其罪行,在没有向中国方面提供任何资料的情况下,将大量化学武器遗弃在中国。这些遗弃的化学武器战后使众多中国人惨遭伤害,身心备受摧残。同时也造成环境的污染,潜在的危险性日益加重。根据《禁止化学武器条约》的规定,日本有责任销毁这些遗弃的化学武器。近年来,部分中国受害向日本政府提起索赔诉讼,要求日本政府道歉和赔偿,对促进日本社会关于战争历史问题的正确认识有积极的意义。今年5月15日日本地方法庭宣判,承认原告被化学武器伤害的事实,但日本政府不能承担法律责任,驳回原告的诉讼请求。这一判决是毫无道理的,是在寻找种种遁词为日本政府推卸责任。     

Spaces of the political*

In changing geographic locations, metaphorically or otherwise, perceptions change. Drawing inspiration from ancient Peking rather than Leo Strauss’ Athens and Jerusalem changes the compass points of political theory. This is because it moves the centre of gravity away from the tension of reason and revelation toward a city built upon another way of approaching the world, through the channelling and harnessing of vital energy flows, known as qi. Peking is designed, through fengshui, to channel the vital energy know as qi away from intensities and toward productive (harmonious) ends. How have we moderns channeled and harnessed such (political) intensities? This work traces the flow of energy as it takes on modern political forms, expressed through the built environment. Taking the nineteenth-century’s Crystal Palace and a Maoist Museum as contrasting examples, it illustrates the way in which the built environment channels and transforms energy. In terms of the political, it is the dissipation or intensification effect of these machines that becomes the defining characteristic of difference between these two different political worlds. As modern machine-technologies, these two examples also shine a light on the ways ‘modernity’ has encountered and dealt with the telluric.     

Exception beyond the sovereign state: Makhmour refugee camp between statism and autonomy

This paper explores the camp as a space of autonomy within the context of Makhmour refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. It re-examines the relationship between the camp and autonomy by inverting the concept of exception. Drawing on the theoretical opening provided by Khaled Furani (2014), the paper develops a critical understanding of the exception that originates not in the sovereign decision of the state and its juridical apparatus, but in the capacity of political subjects to form autonomous collective life in struggle with, against and beyond the state. Moving the locus of the exception from the sovereign state to the governed allows for a novel conception of the camp as a constituent site for autonomy. The experience of Makhmour shows the emergence of what I will call the “anti-camp” within the spatiality of the refugee camp, providing theoretical and empirical insights into alternative conceptualisation of the camp. While the anti-camp is a political manifestation of will to autonomous world-making, it is a process marked by constant bricolage, negotiation and contestation with the statist form of time and space.     

Aleatory Sovereignty and the Rule of Sensitive Spaces

Addressing life in borders and refugee camps requires understanding the way these spaces are ruled, the kinds of problems rule poses for the people who live there, and the abilities of inhabitants to remake their own lives. Recent literature on such spaces has been influenced by Agamben's notion of sovereignty, which reduces these spaces and their residents to abstractions. We propose an alternate framework focused on what we call aleatory sovereignty, or rule by chance. This allows us to see camps and borders not only as the outcomes of humanitarian projects but also of anxieties about governance and rule; to see their inhabitants not only as abject recipients of aid, but also as individuals who make decisions and choices in complex conditions; and to show that while the outcome of projects within such spaces is often unpredictable, the assumptions that undergird such projects create regular cycles of implementation and failure.     

Spaces of Resistance,Spaces of Respite: Franchise housekeepers keeping house in the workplace and at home

As a contribution to a growing geography of domestic labour, I offer this micro-scale study as a glimpse into the lives of franchise housekeepers. This study sheds light on the ways women cope with their labour both in the workplace and at home. Scrutiny of the women's ordinary actions and reactions to their labour demonstrate how they devise coping strategies through mundane, common, everyday acts and forge spaces of resistance and respite. I discuss these strategies and spaces by drawing on in-depth interviews with 14 women employed in housekeeping services franchises.     

日本在中国的化学战及战后遗弃化学武器问题

20 0 3年 8月 4日 ,黑龙江省齐齐哈尔市发生了中国居民被日本军队遗弃在中国的化学武器伤害的事件 ,引起了人们对日本的化学战以及遗弃化学武器问题的关注。第二次世界大战期间日本违反国际公约在中国战场上使用化学武器这一历史事实 ,在战后被有意地掩盖 ,已经逃避了国际审判。而在战争结束之际 ,日本军队将化学武器遗弃在中国境内 ,继续危害中国的居民与环境。根据新的禁止化学武器公约对有关国家规定的销毁处理义务 ,日本的责任是明确的。所以对日本化学战的责任的追究和对遗弃化学武器的处理 ,都是需要解决的战后遗留问题。而齐齐哈尔市…     

The Exception That Defines the Rule: Marshall's Marbury Strategy and the Development of Supreme Court Doctrine

Analyzing the development of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), Laurence Helfer and Anne-Marie Slaughter argue that in the early years of the court, ECJ justices "borrowed a leaf from Chief Justice John Marshall's book, edging principles forward while deciding for those most likely to oppose them in practice."¹ The most famous example of this paradox in Marshall's jurisprudence can be found, of course, in his seminal opinion in Marbury v. Madison. While asserting the right of the judicial branch to nullify legislation it deemed unconstitutional, Marshall used an implausible construction of the jurisdictional powers given to the Supreme Court in Article III of the Constitution² to deny the petitioner the remedy to which Marshall claimed he was otherwise entitled. While Marbury is generally portrayed as the fountainhead of judicial review in the United States (and therefore in liberal democracies in general), as Mark Graber points out, the decision was in fact a "strategic judicial retreat…in the face of threats by executive…power."³ In order to assert the power of judicial review, in other words, Marshall had to refrain from applying it in the case in question.     

Women and the history of the neurosciences

Since the closing decades of the nineteenth century, women have been contributing in a significant way to the neurosciences. This article looks at the contributions of some of the leading women pioneers in this field. It also deals with women who have written on the history of the neurosciences and the representation of women in the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences, the largest neuroscience history organization. Trends suggest that books and articles from and about women in the history of the neurosciences will increase markedly in the future.