Contemporary Contestations Research Articles

Latin America: Weak academic freedom within strong university autonomy

Abstract In Latin America, the notions of academic freedom or the freedom of science have not had the overarching influence in defining the prerogatives of scholars and the university that we see them exerting over the experiences of Western Europe and the Anglosphere. The governing notion, from whence all other freedoms emerge, is that of university autonomy. In Latin America, university autonomy evolved over the twentieth century as a protection of the university against the encroachment of governments – often authoritarian or outright dictatorial – so they could carry out their missions as they defined them. In Latin America, the locus of what in Europe is understood as scientific freedom is vested in the universities, not in the professoriate. It is assumed that free universities will foster an environment of academic freedom within. The contemporary contestations of university autonomy in Latin America fit squarely into the liberal script, as they seek to make universities more responsive to policy goals in the areas of higher education quality and accountability, efficiency and productivity, expansion of public or private provision, access and equity. Often, universities and their associations have raised autonomy as an objection to these policy agendas.

‘God-professor’: recovering the meanings of a contested concept in Australasian university history

ABSTRACT This article seeks to recover the contested early history of the term and concept ‘god-professor’. Scholars of the histories of Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand universities and their disciplines have often used ‘god-professor’ descriptively, referring to nineteenth and twentieth-century professors said to have held absolute scholarly authority within and beyond the academy. It has been less commonly noticed that when the term ‘god-professor’ emerged in Australian academia in the early 1960s, it was not a historical and descriptive term but one used polemically in contemporary contests over academic authority. The rapid expansion of postwar Australian higher education made tractable the problems then debated. The article examines the emergence of the ‘god-professor’ concept within these debates, not to suggest the primacy of originary meanings but to foreground questions of academic authority and autonomy lost in many later descriptive uses, which are resonant for debates over academic collegiality and managerial governance today.

Runaway train? Decentralised finance and the myth of the private platform economy

ABSTRACT According to one view, the decentralisation of finance [‘DeFi’] is the next phase in the constitutionalisation of money, while others highlight the actual asymmetry between those who can benefit from the evolving technology and those who find themselves further descending into cycles of debt and self-exploitation. DeFi’s protagonists maintain that a non-hierarchical, access-controlled system of financial transaction, housed in technology rather than in institutions, will lead to universal inclusivity and transparency. Skeptics question DeFi’s alleged autonomy and point to the public nature of money and the financial system – while acknowledging its shortcomings for its most vulnerable users. Contextualising DeFi’s democratisation promise of platform money within broader contemporary contestations of democratic practices and the role of law in them, the paper critically interrogates DeFi’s ability to provide a framework not only for individual financial inclusion but for collective pursuit of transformative, democratic governance of economic and financial transaction.

Understanding Conservation Conflicts in Uganda: A Political Ecology of Memory Approach

Political ecologists have linked conservation conflicts in post-independence Africa to the continuities and legacies of colonial policies that displaced and dispossessed people to create ‘wild places’. This paper introduces a political ecology of vernacular memory to discuss the Basongora people’s vernacular memories of their historical dispossession to create the Queen Elizabeth National Park (QENP) in Uganda. It explores how these events spurred multidirectional memories of resilience, heroism, victimhood, and resistance that the Basongora pastoralists deploy to reclaim social-political autonomy and agency. Using archival data and historical ethnography, I examine how the Basongora mobilise vernacular memory in contemporary contestations with the state and conservation authorities in QENP. Vernacular memory provides a moral authority that helps subordinated groups contest the hegemonic dominance of conservation authorities. A political ecology approach to vernacular memory reveals how people use memory politics to legitimise their claims in contested environments—an essential fact of contemporary conservation conflicts. This paper is the first to conceptualise how vernacular memories can legitimise the decolonisation of conservation narratives and community resistance against conservation.

Traditional Hierarchies of Zamindars and Kammis in Pakistani Punjab: Contemporary Contests Through Vartan Bhanji

This article challenges the traditional understanding of the role of landownership in rural Punjab in the context of recent socio-economic restructuring of Pakistani society. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork of contemporary practices of gift exchange ( vartan bhanji) in a village, we argue that the Kammi biraderis, once considered lower class, now assert their elevated socio-economic status through vartan bhanji on important social occasions like marriages. Zamindars now see themselves in competition both with Kammi biraderis and each other for social prestige and superior status, as new claims made by different biraderis challenge traditional hierarchies created through historically structured socio-economic inequalities.

Christianity in (South) Sudan: Historical backgrounds, contemporary contestations, and future directions

AbstractChristianity has played an integral part of Sudanese life through colonialism, postcolonialism, civil wars, and secession. Through it all, writers from a variety of disciplinary and denominational backgrounds have recorded the diverse experiences of Christian individuals and organizations. This essay maps past and present work on Sudanese Christianity, offers assessments of the field, and offers conjecture on the directions that future scholarship on the subject may trek. Given religion's central role in Sudan's recent past, such a task is necessary to understand its possible futures.

Migration control entangled with local histories: The case of Greek–Turkish regime of bordering

Migration and border studies have reconceptualized and examined borders as sites of contestation, stressing the productive effects of (illegalized) migration control on established notions of citizenship. These accounts have predominantly focused on illegalized migration and on contemporary contestations around these mobilities. This article expands these efforts by suggesting that migration control and contestations (and the limits thereof) can be understood only by considering the dynamic yet historically and geographically specific modes of any given border, which I aim to capture through the concept of regime of bordering. This concept refers to the fact that contemporary borders against illegalized migration are founded on pre-existing regimes of citizenship, bilateral relations, and migration. My historically informed ethnographic research on both sides of the Greek–Turkish border in Thrace demonstrates the continuing impact of unresolved bilateral disputes and centralized state power in a highly militarized region to align state and nonstate actors with migration control at an “external border” of the EU. Studying politics of migration control from a long durée perspective and as part of a composite regime of bordering takes us beyond a “presentist” view on recent contestations around illegalized migration, deepening our understanding of (the lack of) local acts of citizenship.

Editorial Note

The four articles, two review essays, various book reviews, and obituary contained in this issue all revolve around contestations of Islamic authority. Notably, two of these articles are drawn from the AJIS symposium on Maqāṣid whose first set of essays were featured in the previous issue (38:3-4) dedicated to the topic. These four articles and the remaining elements of the issue foreground contemporary contestations of Islamic authority. Read together, they also offer a set of terms for thinking productively about its contours, limits, affordances, and possibilities.

Nomos and Narrative in International Criminal Justice

Abstract This article grounds contemporary contestations over the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the constitutive moment of the 1990s, when the Court was a global idea that took shape around a set of key concepts and related understandings of world order. It studies the positions communicated by 129 states during the negotiations of ICC establishment, applying Robert Cover’s narrative law and its pluralist notion of legal meaning to a systematic content analysis. Contrary to the founding ‘epic’ of ICC creation, which centres on the Like-Minded Group and its Others, the analysis identifies two competing and fairly coherent visions for the ICC: A compulsory and a consensual vision. Both aim to build an effective and independent Court, but understand these terms differently and consequently envisage different ICC regimes. The consensual vision has rarely been analysed, but is typically portrayed as the scattered ideas of an undecided majority. Given the Court’s profound lack of universality, however, it is useful to revisit the ideas that animated a large share of international society.

Memorializing monuments: State space and state rollback under neo-liberalization in Mexico

Recent contributions to urban geography have considered state space by innovatively focusing on specific cases of the city built environment. Examples could include here Karl Schlögel’s slicing through the spaces of state power in Moscow 1937 or Yuri Slezkine’s methodological cue to read the saga of the Russian Revolution across time in The House of Government. This article adds to the methodological insights of urban researchers by honing in on the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, in order to consider its role as a socially produced, conflictual and dynamically changing site in the struggle over public space and its memorialization. Since its opening in 1938, the Monument to the Revolution at Plaza de la República has been a pivotal fulcrum of state power in abetting the changing geography of state space. Equally, the site has experienced contradictions and differences stemming from socially produced space across time, in the form of periods of state crisis and, most recently, state ‘rollback’ and ‘rollout’ under neo-liberalization. This article addresses both neo-liberalizing and differential structures of feeling as they bear on the space at the Monument to the Revolution. It does so by situating the Monument to the Revolution within the urban question and how neo-liberalization has unlocked local and aesthetic meanings that have become commodified, not least through the extraction of monopoly rents. Further, the article spotlights simultaneous contemporary contestations of state power and impulses of socio-spatial struggle over difference articulated in and around Plaza de la República at the monument. In so doing, the article contributes an important pedagogical focus on both homogenizing and differential structures of feeling inscribed in spaces of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

Lakes as Rebellious Landscapes: From ‘Fishing Rebels’ to ‘Fishy State Officials’ in DR Congo

Lakes are rarely considered to be political spaces in the literature on the inter-linkages between landscapes, authority, and armed conflict. Scholars mainly focussed on the role of mountains, forests, and mud fields, in war and resistance, and examine how a variety of state(-like) actors try to make these ‘unruly’ spaces legible. This article discusses the frictions that emerge when the management of Virunga National Park in eastern DR Congo tries to retake control of Lake Edward through infrastructural and military interventions. These interventions not only encounter resistance from multiple rebel groups that hold various fishing villages along the shores of Lake Edward, but also from other state authorities present in the area—‘fishing rebels’ and ‘fishy state officials’. Drawing on a longue durée perspective to understand contemporary contestations allows us to move beyond focussing on practices of illegal fishing in conflict areas and, instead, embed such issues within the broader historically shaped political and social landscapes of power. Park authorities aim to carve the lake into ‘enclaves’—to counter subversion and render fishing sustainable—neglecting the ways in which the lake is interconnected. This article argues that we should abandon the dichotomy of landscapes as either producing subversive politics/rebellion or as controlled by ‘the state’. Instead of approaching landscapes in conflict areas —in this case lakes— as ‘rebel landscapes’ they should be approached as ‘rebellious landscapes’, as they are controlled fluidly amongst different de facto authorities.

Sounding Out: Nathaniel Mackey's Ontological Archive in Fugitive Run

Sounding Out:Nathaniel Mackey's Ontological Archive in Fugitive Run Robin Tremblay-McGaw (bio) Stridewas our true country, native ground Nathaniel Mackey, Splay Anthem In the early seventies Nathaniel Mackey was a doctoral student at Stanford University working on his dissertation Call Me Tantra: Open Field Poetics as Muse, his poetics developing temporally and geographically within the San Francisco Bay Area during the emergence of Language writing and New Narrative. Mackey has described his relationship to the Bay thusly: "It was in the larger Bay Area that my earliest bondings with people on the basis of being an aspiring writer took any significant form. […] It was really my trips to San Francisco and the East Bay that were most formative" (qtd. in Rosenthal 164), introducing Mackey not only to numerous writers but also to musicians such as Cecil Taylor. Language Writer Ron Silliman included Mackey in his selection of eight experimental poets in the Socialist Review in 1988, a group Silliman introduced by asserting that these writers have distinct audiences and readers while also suggesting that, for some, their relationship to literary experimentation, particularly vis-à-vis formal innovations and the construction or deconstruction of the subject, is "more conventional." Silliman did this by setting up a dichotomy between the "subjects of history" who are largely white, heterosexual males [End Page 326] and others who have been history's objects—women, people of color, lesbians, and gays ("Poetry" 63). While tending to stay outside of the "turf wars going on" in the Bay Area (qtd. in Rosenthal 165), Mackey addressed and responded to facets of these contestations, including Silliman's reductive assertions about who writes and reads what. Mackey's critique is incisive and razor sharp: "the distinction between a formally innovative willingness to incur difficulty, on the white hand, and a simple disclosure of innovative content, on the black, is a simple or simplistic one, but telling nonetheless" (Paracritical Hinge 241). Mackey's work troubles and exposes the distinctions framed by uncritical whiteness. This essay locates Mackey's work within the context of the San Francisco Bay Area writing ecologies and contestations, between the emergence of Language Writing and the parataxis of the New Sentence and the set of performative, narrative, and other practices elaborated by gay and lesbian New Narrative writers. I argue that Mackey improvises a unique and asymptotic course through these and many other territories; in fact, his poetics resists an American romance with place and identity, conjuring instead an ensembled present and possible future (not without 'rub') by way of an ontological archive in "fugitive run," a phrase I am deriving from Mackey's myriad and dynamic invocations of each individual word. Mackey's texts and we, his readers, are headed out far beyond the borders of the US and Europe, where western categorical fantasies of sovereign subjectivity are left for elsewhere, nowhere, everywhere (Paracritical Hinge 212). San Francisco Bay Area Writing Contestations In one origin story of the San Francisco Bay Area 'poetry wars' of the late twentieth-century, Robert Duncan is a pivotal and provocative point of reference. On an evening in 1983 when a young Language Writer, Barrett Watten, gave a talk on Louis Zukofsky's "A," maestro of ceremonies, sixty-year-old Robert Duncan, offered an alternate reading. The event has since been mythologized. More useful than the hyperbole around it is perhaps the way it makes clear some of the contemporary contestations about poetics: the methods, goals, theories, and aspirations for reading and writing practices. In the 1980s in the Bay Area, deeply suspicious of narrative, Language Writers rejected Duncan's reverence for the mythic, the personal, [End Page 327] and the emotive, while New Narrative writers, particularly Robert Glück and Bruce Boone, found in Duncan a source of permission for feeling, for the value of the "made-up" as a source of depth and as a means for wrestling with the urgent question, particularly for gay and lesbian writers, "what kind of representation least deforms its subject?" (Glück, "Long Note" 18). Duncan is a significant figure for Nathaniel Mackey too, in part because of Duncan's refusal of prevailing orthodoxies and prescriptive and delimiting parameters around what...

A reflection on Vuyani Vellem’s longing for liberation: A spirituality of life and freedom

Vuyani Vellem was insistent on fostering a spirituality that could ground and sustain resistance of death as expressed in multiple unfreedoms, and the quest for life and freedom in abundance. After naming a number of themes evident in the life of Vuyani – ranging from racism and pigmentocracy to the managerialist university and the shackled church – this article traces his reflections on a spirituality that embraces the cross, resurrection as rebellion and imvuselelo [revival] as the iziko [fire] that births a new political community. It considers the imvuselelo as both an exorcism and a reconstruction. In conclusion, the intersectionality of violences and oppressions, increasingly addressed in his work, is touched upon. And the charge he left us with, to connect spirituality and liberation – as moral imperative and integrative force – is considered for embrace. Contribution: This article contributes an appreciative reflection on the spirituality of Vuyani Vellem that undergirded his Black Theology of Liberation. In contemporary contestations and discourses on race and racial justice, whiteness and oppression, and decoloniality, what is often absent is a clearly articulated spirituality of black liberation. Vellem helps us with that.

Introduction to ‘Antisemitism, Anti-Racism and Zionism: Old Debates, Contemporary Contestations’: Reflecting Back on My Article ‘Zionism, Antisemitism and the Struggle Against Racism: Some Reflections on a Current Painful Debate Among Feminists’, Spare Rib, September 1984

Introduction to ‘Antisemitism, Anti-Racism and Zionism: Old Debates, Contemporary Contestations’: Reflecting Back on My Article ‘Zionism, Antisemitism and the Struggle Against Racism: Some Reflections on a Current Painful Debate Among Feminists’, <i>Spare Rib</i>, September 1984

Extraction Contracting: The Struggle for Control of Indigenous Lands

This article outlines the contemporary dynamics of “consent by contract,” argued to be a mode of governance that attempts to define the social, political, ecological, and economic relations regarding the use of Indigenous lands solely through confidential bargaining and agreement-making between private extraction companies and First Nations, but in fact affords the state a key role in setting the terms. Ultimately, it is not only that the settler state law sets the context for what can be negotiated between the parties, but also that state actors actively facilitate the agreement-making, influence the parameters of the deal, and are invested in the outcomes. Crucially, the settler state also draws inferences adverse to Indigenous land interests from the very fact of these negotiations. The phenomenon of “extraction contracting,” purported to be a mode of private governance, in fact engages crucial public and constitutional governance questions. I conclude that the contracts are not so much proliferating through autonomous actors seeking to fill a void in the public law regime as the settler law is holding open the gap for the private law mechanisms to fill, because the contractual regime serves a purpose in the settler state’s interests. Specifically, the private contractual regime normalizes and facilitates the state’s provision of access to Indigenous lands for extractive capital. Extraction contracting, then, is a crucial node in the contemporary contest over jurisdiction between the settler state and the surging Indigenous resistance.

Shi’i clerical networks and the transnational contest over sacred authority: dynamics in London’s Shi’i Triangle

This article explores the transnational contest over sacred authority in contemporary Shi’i Islam as it plays out between contemporary maraji’ (sources of emulation) and the Iranian Supreme Leader, and in practice between their respective networks. It engages with existing assessments of the marja’iyya as an institution in crisis and argues instead that the marja’iyya has structural capacities that help maintain its potential in the face of the power exerted by the Supreme Leader. This in turns shapes the nature and outcome of the contest, including the need for the latter to accommodate with competing religious authorities. In the first part, the article offers a conceptualisation of the marja’iyya’s potential on the basis of three of its intrinsic features: its polycephalic nature and the broad temporal and geographical scope of a marja’’s authority. The second part offers a case study of the transnational contest over sacred authority in a specific locale. It maps the various (institutionalised) networks associated with Middle Eastern authorities, the Supreme Leader included, in London. Networks are however not hard-bound entities, as illustrated by the cross-networks navigation of their members. Furthermore, networks operate not only in competition but also in collaboration with each other. The contemporary contest over Shi’i authority is thus not a zero-sum game.

#Kashmir 2016: Notes toward a media ecology of an occupied zone

ABSTRACT This paper explores the necessity of understanding contemporary Kashmiri contestations of hegemonic Indian state, media and social media discourses through a media ecology framework. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of Kashmiri usage of social media. Analysis of this usage offers an insight into the ways in which Kashmiris and their allies have been able to offer counter-narratives to Indian state and media narratives which have historically underreported, even silenced, dissenting Kashmiri perspectives. A media ecology framework also conveys a sense of the affective publics as Papacharissi notes, involved in deeply polarized debates regarding the relationship between the Indian nation-state and the region of Kashmir (5). Building on an earlier cultural representation framework, this paper argues for a media ecology framework as a way of understanding evolving polarized discourses in the context of Kashmir as an occupied zone.

Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene by Dominic Boyer, and: Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene by Cymene Howe

Reviewed by: Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene by Dominic Boyer, and: Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene by Cymene Howe Anna J. Willow Dominic Boyer, Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 249 pp. Cymene Howe, Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 241 pp. We live in troubling times. Our climate is changing rapidly. A sixth great extinction is well underway. We are approaching—or have already surpassed—countless critical ecological thresholds (if you still need convincing, see Steffen et al. 2015). Alongside other conscientious scholars, anthropologists are searching for constructive ways to contribute to an uncertain new world in which humans play a dominant (and largely destructive) role in influencing global climate, landforms, and ecosystems (Crutzen 2002). Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe are among those who have stepped up to chart an innovative and inspiring course. Their Wind and Power in the Anthropocene duograph revolves around a central paradox of the Anthropocene epoch. Arguing from distinct but complementary theoretical perspectives, Boyer and Howe examine how it is that something we hoped could solve our most pressing problems can fail [End Page 1261] to achieve any significant transformation. Specifically, these books are about how wind power—a renewable, non-carbon energy source—can reproduce the inequitable and unsustainable structures of the neoliberal extractive economy. Boyer and Howe take readers to the towns and terrains of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where they conducted 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork. Here, air moving from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean passes through a gap in the Sierra Madre mountains, making southeastern Oaxaca the windiest place in Mexico as well as one of the windiest in the world. Identified by developers as an ideal location to harness the wind, “power” in this case refers not only to generated electricity, but also to the political struggles invoked by efforts to convert moving air into a commoditized resource. This conjoined pair of books invites readers to enter emerging conversations about wind power and extractivism, climate change and post-millennial precarity, natural resource developments and disputes, and anthropology’s potential roles in navigating the complex realities that await. In their co-authored preface, Boyer and Howe tentatively define a duograph as a “conversation between researchers that materializes in two texts, which do not require analytic synthesis or consensus” (viii). By adopting an experimental ethnographic form that demands readers’ active engagement, the authors aim to reveal “the multiplicity of stakes and attentions existing within the practice of research collaboration” (viii). While Wind and Power in the Anthropocene draws on long-term participant-observation, hundreds of interviews, and a door-to-door survey conducted as a team, it thus consists of two separate books that are intended to be read in tandem.1 Boyer and Howe worked together to obtain a comprehensive understanding of wind power in Oaxaca, taking the views and actions of multiple stakeholders throughout the region into account. However, the authors engage with separate theoretical frameworks and deploy different textual structures in their quest to advance their overlapping arguments. Dominic Boyer’s book, Energopolitics, takes impetus from theories of capital, biopower, and energopower—a neologism he proposed and defined in an earlier review as “a genealogy of modern power that rethinks political power through the twin analytics of electricity and fuel” (2014:325)—with the goal of generating “an anthropological theory of political power for use in the Anthropocene” (xi). Boyer correctly [End Page 1262] maintains that making sense of contemporary contestations over wind power in Oaxaca requires tracing the region’s history of land tenure, labor, sovereignty, and colonial imposition. He takes up the challenge of reforming anthropolitics (an inevitably human-centered understanding of political practice) in a way that facilitates addressing the unique conditions and challenges evoked by the Anthropocene context (1). Thus, while his examination of energy inevitably expands into the environmental realm of the more-than-human, his central focus is deeply and explicitly political. Following a richly theoretical introduction, Boyer opts to show rather than tell, demonstrating what an anthropology of Anthropocene power can look like through a detailed ethnographic account that only occasionally...

Genocide, Oppression, Ambivalence: Online Narratives of Identity and Religion in Postcolonial Nigeria

<p class="p1">Digital media platforms have emerged as important socio-cultural sites that enable the engagement of historical and contemporary contestations around religion and identity against the background of ethnoreligious conflicts and social tensions in Nigeria. The post-election violence of 2011 and subsequent mass killings of mostly Christians in rural Southern Kaduna saw the emergence of several online groups and practices contesting these, and other forms of oppression and violence (real or imagined) in Southern Kaduna. This article details a study that applied a postcolonial perspective to analyse the content of one such online forum. It identified two dominant narratives on the forum. In the first, users represent Southern Kaduna Christians as oppressed and experiencing genocide; and in the second, forum users reveal an ambivalence of admiration and revulsion in the ways they construct the identity, religion and privileges of Hausa-Fulani Muslims, viewed as the oppressor. The study also shows that forum users were more likely to be critical of religion during conversations about preferences regarding political candidates and elections. I argue, among other things, that the self-descriptions of Southern Kaduna people as oppressed and endangered, are more than mere descriptions of experiences but can also be viewed as forms of identity. Thus, to better understand peoples such as Southern Kaduna and their experiences in the context of social conflicts, their identities need to be analyzed beyond the usual limited focus on religion and ethnicity.

Addressing the Heterogeneity of Heart Failure in Future Randomized Trials.

The aim of review is to describe the essential role of study designs beyond RCTs in contemporary contest of HF patients giving perspectives on its evolving. The article concludes with concern about the support of observational studies for future randomized clinical trials. With the aging population and spectacular advance in cardiovascular therapy, the clinical syndrome comprising heart failure (HF) is increasingly in complexity of heterogeneity. It remains among the most challenging of clinical syndromes with a magnitude of proposed pathophysiological mechanisms involving the heart and the interplay with cardiac and non-cardiac comorbidities. In this epidemiological scenario, randomized clinical trials are suffering from growing failed treatment, so that a deeper understanding of heterogeneity represents a major unmet need. This field also is greatly in a more nuanced comprehension about the applicability in clinical practice of trials' results derived from well-selected HF population. Thus, we need to reflect on trials failures and the translation of previous trials in clinical practice in order to redirect the future trial intervention.