A collective biography of joy in academic practice

Changing working conditions at many universities over the past decade have meant longer hours, intensified record-keeping, and more precarious employment. Despite these changes, many academics still insist that we enjoy our jobs. Our inquiry is oriented toward spaces and practices that bring us joy in our daily work and help us withstand the negative effects of working in academia. This article reports on our exploration of some moments of joy at work as part of our own academic practice. Through a feminist methodology known and developed as collective biography, we wrote individual memories of joy in our teaching, publishing, and collaborating, together at a writing retreat. As we analyzed these recalled moments, we came to realize that joy emerges through a turbulent process fueled by a cocktail of emotions. In fact, we came to understand joy as affect, with affect seen as a certain sort of excess, generated around and through sensations that might contribute to feelings such as celebration, happiness, or surprise as well as fear, anger, or embarrassment. We conclude that joy does things, that it can be transformative, and that cultivating joy in academia is part of a radical praxis.     

Rock Hyraxes (Procavia capensis) from Middle Stone Age Levels at Blombos Cave,South Africa

The ～100 ka Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave, southern Cape, South Africa, contain numerous rock hyrax (Procavia capensis) remains. It is often ambiguous to interpret rock hyrax remains from archaeological deposits deriving from cave and shelter sites in southern Africa as the agent or agents of accumulation may be difficult to establish. In this paper, the different taphonomic signatures separating anthropogenic from natural accumulations at Blombos Cave are considered. The analysis indicates that although a few specimens show evidence for raptor and carnivore accumulation, there is also substantial evidence that suggests humans preyed on these small mammals during different times of the year.     

Work Design and the Labouring Body: Examining the Impacts of Work Organization on Danish Cleaners’ Health

Globalization and neoliberalism are having significant impacts upon the cleaning industry, as in the drive for greater work “efficiency”. One way in which cleaning companies have sought to increase efficiency is through the introduction of new equipment and forms of work organization. However, such moves appear to be having negative impacts upon cleaners’ bodies, and many report significant work‐related health problems. In light of this, here we explore the bodily consequences of two possible strategies for giving cleaners a healthier workday—increasing variation within cleaners’ current work tasks or allowing them to engage in a broader range of tasks through job enlargement. Drawing upon a literature review performed as part of a recent European Union project concerning the degree of physical strain to which cleaners are exposed during cleaning, a Danish laboratory study focusing on the loads to which cleaners’ shoulder muscles, backs, and hearts were exposed by different cleaning tasks, and a field study investigating the effects of job enlargement in Danish hospitals, we show that cleaning work is characterized by repetitive work for the muscles of the body's upper extremities and by high levels of dynamic and static force upon these muscles, regardless of which modes of cleaning (old or new style of cleaning tools) are used. Equally, monitoring of heart rates and assessment of the psychosocial environment suggest that simply interchanging current cleaning tasks does not provide sufficient variation in cleaners’ work to prevent work‐related musculoskeletal or cardiovascular damage, nor to create a less mentally stressful work environment. Although introducing greater work variation through job enlargement (such as combining cleaning with kitchen and portering tasks) is often presented as an effective way to minimize musculoskeletal and cardiovascular damage, our field study shows that even this does not provide sufficient variation in physical work conditions, although improvement in some cleaners’ mental health was noted. Therefore, we conclude, prevention of musculoskeletal and cardiovascular disorders demands a much more comprehensive strategy of work redesign than that proposed by some employers and government agencies. Whether this is likely, given competitive pressures towards increased outsourcing and privatization, is, of course, the question.     

Gendered Visibilities and the Dream of Transparency: The Chinese‐Indonesian Rape Debate in Post‐Suharto Indonesia

How does the seen produce the unseen? And what happens when the unseen makes a bid to emerge from its occlusion? This paper examines the gendered visuality of the Reformasi crisis in Indonesia in 1998, juxtaposing the visibility of male‐on‐male violence at student demonstrations with the invisibility of violence against (feminised) Chinese‐Indonesians and, in particular, raped Chinese‐Indonesian women. The discussion focuses on activists’ attempts to establish ‘proof’ that these rapes did occur, government attempts to discredit their evidence, and the circulation of false photographs of the rapes on the internet. (An unremarked irony of this falsification of evidence was that it was made possible by the pre‐existence of an archive of sexually violent images on pornographic sites depicting ‘Asian schoolgirls’.) The paper argues that this particular debate over credibility, witnessing and proof needs to be seen within a wider popular Indonesian discourse on the status of evidence, the privileged place of the photograph within it, and the archive of images of (male) students and heroic male‐on‐male violence that helped shape what people could ‘see’ as meaningful political action and recognisable state violence. It also comments on the evidentiary status of witnessing and embodied experience in the age of mechanical and digital reproduction.     

León Rozitchner’s Mass Psychology

Argentinean philosopher León Rozitchner theorized the political potential of the Peronist movement through a unique analytical matrix drawing upon Marxism, psychoanalysis and phenomenology. This essay will explore how Rozitchner’s interpretation of Freud’s theory of group psychology in Freud y los límites del individualismo burgués (Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism, 1972) approaches the figure of the mass in ethical, political and historical terms. I argue that Rozitchner articulates these three dimensions of the mass by viewing its libidinal constitution through a unique historical-materialist lens. Freud y los límites… thus asks us to consider the question of the drive’s sublimation at stake in Freud’s theory as a technique of social reproduction and, simultaneously, as a directly productive form of labour. In this sense, the organization of libidinal investment that constitutes the mass also holds the key to its potential social emancipation. Furthermore, while Rozitchner’s view of subjectivity often appears as transhistorical in scope, his approach to the productive activity of the drive in Freud y los límites… asks us to consider the ethical stakes of sublimation in relation to a specific historical moment of capitalist exploitation. Read through this tension, Freud y los límites… thus ultimately underlines the historical conditions of the ethical transformation it demands.     

Emplacing Current Trends in Feminist Historical Geography

In this article, the authors assess some of the major trends within anglophonic feminist historical geography appearing in the decade since Rose & Ogborn called for the development of an explicitly feminist approach to the subfield. In examining the 'geography' of feminist historical geographies, three main categories of scholarship are evident: a 'new' historical geography of North America, portions of which are informed by feminist theories and methods; a British school of feminist historical geography with a focus on the discipline of geography, geographical knowledges and colonialism/imperialism; and feminist historical geography interventions in cultural politics of space and place. A diversity of feminist methods and epistemologies appears across the literature. In an attempt to avoid a reading of these trends as better or worse approximations of historical 'progress', the authors conceptualize them as emplaced within a number of specific social and spatial contexts. Most recent work is concerned with the production of gender differences as they are worked through economic, political, cultural and sexual differences in the creation of past geographies. The continued need simply to write women into historical narratives and geographies, however, is also evident. The work of feminist historical geography questions and challenges geography's masculinist historical record.