In this introduction to the themed section, we begin to explore how queer and precarity might be used to analyse how vulnerabilities are constituted across diverse spaces. We situate the contents of the themed section in relation to the context in which it was worked on, defined by the Covid-19 pandemic and the increased precarisation of Higher Education workers in the United Kingdom, as well as current literature on queerness and precarity. The interdisciplinary articles that follow are the work of early career feminist and queer scholars. We introduce them as grappling with a range of manifestations of precarity and their intersections with various categories of identity that might be recognisable as queer. Foregrounding navigations of embodied and structural aspects of precarity, these articles highlight the practices and relationalities that can emerge from being ‘out of place’, as well as specific opportunities and limitations of the aesthetic, and share a concern with the masking of difference as a function of precarity, including via broad analytic categories such as ‘precarious’ and ‘queer’.

The international college classroom provides a rich setting for inclusive education. And while the vital role of teachers is acknowledged in the literature on inclusive education, most research is focused on student learning and on teacher-training. We reverse this lens and ask what benefits inclusive practices have for the teachers involved. This under-researched impact of inclusive teaching practices points to an untapped potential for academic scholarship. In Study 1, by analyzing their syllabi, we established that the college teachers in this study use inclusive practices. In Study 2, we interviewed these teachers about their teaching practices and show that the diverse classroom is a source of scholarly learning for them. We report differences that depend on the discipline taught: teachers in social sciences and humanities more often than those in sciences utilize and benefit from students’ diverse perspectives in the classroom. Recommendations for research and implications for practice are discussed.

ABSTRACT 2020 emerged as a ‘crisis in the world of work’. Reflections upon how the pandemic would accelerate pervasive joblessness and changes in the workplace abounded, while academics and technocrats alike have translated its predicaments as a catalyst for a rapidly coming postwork future. Using illustrative vignettes from our own work on labour in South Africa and Romania, we discuss how the current labour/technology crisis has moved along structural axes of inequality and disempowerment in the world of work. We suggest that, as historians documenting the shifting nature of work and its relationship with technology, we should go against the grain when chronicling the current pandemic as a series of dramatic shifts and spectacular snapshots, and affirm non-eventful ways of writing history.

This essay investigates the representation of traumatic loss in Goliarda Sapienza’s Destino coatto, a collection of short narrative fragments published posthumously in 2002. I explore these texts by focusing on the original representation they offer of temporality in relation to trauma and loss, refracting a condition of death-in-life into temporal and spatial images. In particular, the night, accompanied by images of immobility and enclosed spaces, is a key signifier that represents a protective shield from the destructive force of life. Reflecting the liminal state of a subject in crisis, several texts are set on the threshold between day and night, and between indoor and outdoor spaces. Against the endless re-enactment of trauma, Sapienza stages a quest for immobility, a state of death-in-life that at the same time rejects and protects life.

The connection between images and anorexia, orthorexia, bulimia, binge eating, and other forms of food consumption deemed ‘disordered’ is controversial and often over-simplified. Frequently it is reduced to the idea that glamorous images, particularly the heroin chic style of the 1990s, create a dangerous imaginary that young women - statistically the main target of eating disorders - emulate. This article wants to challenge this issue by exploring three aspects of the intricate relationship between eating disorders and images: 1) The fear of contagion that haunts images exposing bodies that suffer by eating disorders; 2) As a time-based medium, film offers a privileged set of perceptive tools to account for the ways eating disorders interfere with time – as perceived, lived, shared; 3) One more aspect that is relevant to observe since it predominately occupies the current debate is the question of the right way to represent certain medical conditions and their experience. The reasons at the core of this debate are extremely vital and prove how photos and moving images have tragically contributed to building and constructing gender and racial bias as well as the stigmatization of certain diseases. Though when speaking of misrepresentation there is the risk of embracing a deceptive idea of good mimesis at the cost of the ambivalence that the experience of certain conditions inherently carry and which should not disappear in the fictional dimension.

This paper is based on the lecture held on 11th May 2022 in the context of Maska seminar at Nova Pošta and it examines general conceptual distinctions at work in the history of the life sciences (namely agency, form, force, and form) and how these have been emphasized or neglected in the various ontological and ecological turns within the humanities (from the critical humanism of Marxism to post-humanism and the nonhuman). More specifically I look at the work of Sylvia Wynter and how her project of decolonising the notion of ‘Man’ makes the possibility of a counter humanist uptake of a politically critical philosophy of biology.

AbstractThis article analyses some of the transformations in economic vocabularies, practices, and institutions that accompanied the turn towards high value-added and technology-driven industrialization in late socialist Romania. It investigates the challenges posed by increasing integration of the country’s commodity production into the world market in the 1960–70s and assesses the measures adopted by its economic executives as a response to these challenges: the reorganization of production; the reconfiguration of planning mechanisms; and the strategies of keeping labour cheap. This article shows that planners behind the Iron Curtain wrestled with similar problems to their Western counterparts. It demonstrates that the solutions of the socialist economic executives not only mirrored, imitated, and translated Western managerial ideologies and practices but also represented creative local responses to the challenges of the world market. I argue this constellation of solutions constituted a fully fledged form of ‘socialist flexibility’. Analysing how these flexible solutions paralleled the neoliberal deregulation in the capitalist core helps us question the analytical separation between centrally planned and market economies and the still powerful narrative of 1989 as a historical fracture.

AbstractThis paper proposes an ethnographic theorization of the relationship between naming, translation, and subject constitution via the analysis of forms of interpellation in colonial Angola. It engages critically with systemic/structural renderings of colonial society that portray social positions as oppositional to argue for a deconstructive approach attentive to historical disjunctions between naming and social positioning. Dwelling on core signifiers in Portuguese and Umbundu, the paper describes the iterative chain of substitutions through which subjects have been constituted, that is, reduced and transformed. For instance, how are the Umbundu status signifiersocimbunduandocindelereduced in their respective translations as “black” and “white”? How can translation both re-enact and challenge the constitution of racialized and ethnicized categories of difference? How is this related to transformations in Angolan history? The argument put forth challenges the conventional understanding of social categories in the context of Portuguese colonialism in Angola by arguing that the performativity of naming and translation constitutes subjects via both fixation and displacement. Therefore, the possibility of transformation does not lie in the intentional action of subjects, but in their capacity to operate within the fractures of the relationship between language and society by drawing on disjunctions between signifier and signified, names and social positioning, subjective constitution and sociopolitical context.

This chapter discusses the ambivalent attitude of German critics concerning tricks on the stage and on the screen. Starting from a transformation scene in Goethe’s Faust, it discusses the difference between an early French performance of the play in 1828, which makes use of all the possibilities it offers to recur to spectacular effects, and later German productions that shun what critics at the time called “mechanical artifices.” With respect to cinema, however, German critics rather praised its capacity to transcend the laws of causality and to depict the fantastic events in fairy tales as one of the medium’s specific qualities.