Critical Intellectuals Research Articles

Housing by people and work

Housing by people and work

Ecofeminism: Encouraging Interconnectedness with Our Environment in Modern Society

Ecofeminism, like the social movements it has emerged from, is both political activism and intellectual critique. Bringing together feminism and environmentalism, ecofeminism argues that the domination of women and the degradation of the environment are consequences of patriarchy and capitalism. Any strategy to address one must take into account its impact on the other so that women's equality should not be achieved at the expense of worsening the environment, and neither should environmental improvements be gained at the expense of women. Indeed, ecofeminism proposes that only by reversing current values, thereby privileging care and cooperation over more aggressive and dominating behaviors, can both society and environment benefit. This article considers the heritage of ecofeminism as a multiply braided political praxis and an intellectual position. It examines key critiques of earlier perspectives, before exploring its more recent developments. It considers its relationship with, and potential to enhance other feminist and environmental approaches, particularly those concerned with feminist political ecology and environmental justice.

Intellectual Paraphilias: Oscar Wilde and Cultural Critique as Transgression in the Early Alfonso Reyes

From early works such as Cuestiones estéticas (1911) up until the end of his prolific critical career, the figure of Oscar Wilde constituted a constant presence in the writings of Mexican intellectual Alfonso Reyes. In particular, during his formative years as a member of El Ateneo de la Juventud, Alfonso Reyes found in Wilde’s essayistic production an intellectual model that vindicated cultural critique not only as a dignified practice comparable in its creativity to literature, but as a space of intellectual transgression. This view of critique as a form of bohemian intellectualism epitomised by Wilde’s relentless cultivation of the paradox found expression in Alfonso Reyes’s concept of “el espíritu crítico” in his collection of essays El suicida (1917). In this paper, I will show how through this concept, the Reyes of the 1910s vindicates a radically nonconformist paradigm of intellectual freedom strongly inspired by Wilde’s intellectual critique. Written at a moment of significant professional and economic distress in his career, Reyes’s meta-discursive engagement with the figure of the intellectual in this book was followed by a gradual change in his own professional development from the early 1920s onwards. Unable to harmonise Wilde’s view of cultural critique as an act of bohemian transgression with his own professional aspirations, Reyes renounced this bohemian form of cultural critique, embracing instead a new model of institutional intellectualism strongly linked to political power and state sponsorship.

Jorge Zalamea y León de Greiff en la bohemia y las tertulias literarias de Bogotá (1920-1976)

El problema analizado en este artículo se centra en la amistad que se tejió entre Jorge Zalamea y León de Greiff, dos escritores colombianos de la primera mitad del siglo XX, independientes de las vanguardias artísticas y literarias. Las fuentes abordadas comprenden la correspondencia del archivo personal de Jorge Zalamea, además de revistas literarias y prensa de época. La metodología utilizada implicó, primero, ubicar las cartas entre los personajes estudiados, su contextualización en la historia colombiana y en las biografías intelectuales de ambos, así como reconstruir el itinerario de su amistad. Se pudo concluir que, en el campo literario colombiano, Zalamea y De Greiff formaron parte de un grupo de intelectuales críticos, cercanos a las causas sociales y pacifistas convencidos que se articularon en torno a los cafés y las tertulias, Los Nuevos, quienes se confrontaron en el plano político e intelectual con Los Centenaristas, defensores del statu quo. Por ello, Zalamea, De Greiff y sus contertulios fueron objeto de persecución policial y pagaron con cárcel sus rebeldías. Su obra literaria es la expresión de quienes fueron y continúan siendo acallados por la censura, la exclusión política y social y la violencia.

Initial Teacher Education: Appropriate Models for a Knowledge Society?

: Teacher education and professional development of teachers are a crucial issue for any country, since the quality of the teaching staff is one of the main factors influencing the level of students' academic achievements. The conditions in which teachers work today are drastically different from the ones of the early 20th century, whereas the structure and organization of initial teacher education has not changed significantly. Although the course content, the duration of study, and learning and teaching strategies have changed, the main teacher training models, regardless of the differences between them, still include course content related to individual professions, course content from pedagogy and psychology, didactic and methodology training, and in-service teacher training. This paper analyses initial teacher education models with regard to the presence of the said elements and the manner in which they are distributed in the structure and organization of the study programme. On the basis of a conducted analysis, the authors conclude that there is not a single initial teacher education model which proposes a paradigm shift that would yield more successful results in comparison with other models in the preparation of teachers for work in a postmodern era. To navigate the complex social requirements, the most suitable initial teacher education model is the one which integrates different types of knowledge and skills, and produces teachers who are capable of research and reflection – a model which would allow teachers to become critical intellectuals capable of acting autonomously and competently.

Housing by people and work

Housing by people and work

Relativizing Universality: Sociological Reactions to Liberal Universalism

This essay offers an appraisal of the relationship between sociology and philosophy grounded in a critique of the former discipline’s failure to contend with the dominance of neoliberalism in the run up to the financial crisis. In the first instance, it considers the prevailing philosophical ethos after the end of the Cold War and what Francis Fukuyama (1992) called the ‘End of History.’ It observes the emergence of an increasingly unchallenged political monad around the conjoined principles of liberal democracy and neoliberal economics and its ascendance to the status of socio-historical universality despite becoming increasingly problematic. The second half of the essay then carries this political-philosophical analysis into an exploration of contemporary sociology and its approach to the intellectual critique of dominant ideas and structures. It proposes that an emergent strain of philosophical relativism has inadvertently moved us away from some of the critical responsibilities of the traditional intellectual and eroded our capacity to offer practical alternatives to overwhelmingly neoliberal governance. The article ends on the hopeful note that a slight change in tack might push us toward reclaiming responsibilities and revitalising the debate on social transformation.

Review: Austin Harrington, German Cosmopolitan Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar

Austin Harrington’s monumental investigation into the ‘radical centrists’ of the Weimar Republic is discussed in terms of key themes such as universalism, cosmopolitanism, and the critique of Eurocentrism that still resonate with recent debates. Contrasting the voices of lesser known critical intellectuals from this period such as Karl Jaspers and Kark Mannheim with the political writings of Max Weber and Georg Simmel, as well as with the reactionary positions of Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, Harrington’s book affords a useful critical perspective on ‘protesting the West’, yesterday and today.

Anime in Academia: Representative Object, Media Form, and Japanese Studies

The transcultural consumption of Japan-derived popular media has prompted a significant amount of academic research and teaching. Instead of addressing globalization or localization as such, this article investigates the interplay of anime research and the institution of Japanese studies outside of Japan, addressing recurrent methodological issues, in particular, related to representation and mediation, intellectual critique and affective engagement, subculture and national culture. The inclination towards objects and representation in socio-cultural as well as cinema-oriented Japanese-studies accounts of anime is first introduced and, after considering discursive implications of the name anime, contrasted with media-studies approaches that put an emphasis on relations, modalities, and forms. In order to illustrate the vital role of forms, including genre, similarities between TV anime and Nordic Noir TV drama series are sketched out. Eventually, the article argues that the study of anime is accommodated best by going beyond traditional polarizations between text and context, media specificity and media ecology, area and discipline.

일제강점기 대만 지식인에게 비친 조선

This study examines Joseon travel notes written by Taiwanese intellectuals during the period of Imperial Japanese occupation. This study collects and analyzes data on Joseon travel notes of Taiwan intellectuals, Chen Housheng and Ye Rongzhong in the early 20th century, which have not been covered well so far by Taiwan and Korean academia. This study attempts to consider the exchange of Taiwan and Joseon and Taiwan intellectuals’ perception of Joseon in that era.BR Chen Housheng stayed in Joseon for about two months from early July 1926. After he returned to Taiwan, in November 1926, he published the “Joseon Travel Review” in No. 132 of “Taiwan People News,” where he introduced Joseon’s houses, clothing, education, and policies, etc. Ye Rongzhong visited Joseon for about two weeks from October 3, 1933, to study Joseon’s advanced local municipal system. After his visit to Joseon, he left 16 poems and wrote “Joseon Autonomous System Inspection Report” and published it in “Taiwan Xinmin Daily”.BR Chen Housheng and Ye Rongzhong belong to the modern Enlightenment philosophers who paved the way of so called progressive, critical intellectuals. By introducing Joseon’s society and culture to the people of Taiwan, they provided a ground of opportunity to understand and familiarly approach Joseon. Chen Housheng and Ye Rongzhong looked at Joseon as ‘Tasanjiseok (Learn from Others)’ in a stance of trying to learn. Through this study, it is possible to get a glimpse of the various views of Chen Housheng and Ye Rongzhong upon Joseon.

Desiring Blackness: A Queer Orientation to Marvel’sBlack Panther, 1998–2016

AbstractThe socially symbolic figure of the superhero comes into close contact with vernacular intellectual critiques of race and modernity through the much-anticipated film adaptation of Marvel’s Black Panther comics. This article analyzes the implications for queer approaches to black popular cultural production of the knowledge practices that inspire Black Panther’s depiction of an African utopia. The intertexts involved include histories, travel writings, and other comics. Focusing on the divergent treatments by authors Christopher Priest (1998–2003) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (2016) of the title character’s black female comrades-in-arms, this reading interrogates how race consciousness and colonial legacies inform the discourses of desire operating within the text. The term desiring blackness describes an orientation to reading that defers to African Americanist and black diasporic considerations to ground the task of interpretation in conditions that elicit compromise among disparate lines of theoretical inquiry: queer phenomenology, decolonial epistemology, Afrofuturism, and queer of color critique.

SAYYID QUTB AND THE CRISIS OF CULTURE IN LATE 1940S EGYPT

AbstractThis article focuses on the writings and literary networks of the Egyptian intellectual and activist Sayyid Qutb during the late 1940s. Scholars have tended to explain Qutb's political radicalization and joining of the Muslim Brotherhood during the subsequent decade via aspects of his personality or personal life, such as his quick temper, conservatism, or frustration over unfulfilled aspirations to become a writer. Drawing on three periodicals published respectively by leftist, Islamist, and independent aspiring writers, I instead place Qutb's criticism of political, economic, and cultural elites in the context of an emerging generation of critical intellectuals. By shedding light on intellectual cooperation between Qutb, Muslim Brothers, Marxists, and independent writers, this article challenges established scholarly narratives that locate the Islamist project outside the Egyptian intellectual field.

On the Political Genealogy of Trump after Foucault

How would Foucault have viewed Trump as President, and Trumpism in the US more generally? More realistically, how can we discern and insightfully apply genealogical insights after Foucault to better comprehend and act in relation to our current political situation in the US? Questions of factuality across a base register of asserted falsehoods are now prominent in American politics in ways that put assertions of scholarly objectivity and interpretation in yet deeper question than previously. The extent, range, and vitriol of alt-Right assertions and their viral growth in American media provoke progressivist resistance and anxiety, but how can this opposition be most productively channeled? This paper examines a range of critical perspectives, timeframes, and topical optics with respect to Trump and Trumpism, including nationalist, racist, sexist, class-based, and oligarchical dimensions. These are considered in relation to media and the incitement of polarized subjectivity and dividing practices, and also in relation to Marxist political economy, neoliberalism/neoimperialism, and postcolonialism. I then address the limit points of Foucault, including with respect to engaged political activism and social protest movements, and I consider the relevance of these for the diverse optics that political genealogy as a form of analysis might pursue. Notwithstanding and indeed because of the present impetus to take organized political action, a Foucauldian perspective is useful in foregrounding the broader late modern formations of knowledge, power, and subjectivity within which both Rightist and Leftist political sensibilities in the US are presently cast. At larger issue are the values inscribed through contemporary late modernity that inform both sides of present divisive polarities—and which make the prognosis of tipping points or future political outcomes particularly difficult. As such, productive strategies of activist opposition are likely to vary under alternative conditions and opportunities—including in relation to the particular skills, history, and predilection of activists themselves. If the age of reason threatens to be over, the question of how and in what ways critical intellectualism can connect with productive action emerges afresh for each of us in a higher and more personal key.

Relational, structural and systemic forms of power: the ‘right to justification’ confronting three types of domination

This article investigates the nature of intellectual critique and social criticism Rainer Forst’s critical theory of justification enables. I introduce a taxonomy of three forms of power – namely, ‘relational’, ‘structural’ and ‘systemic’ – and related to them types of domination, and assess the capacity of Forst’s conceptual framework to address each of them. I argue that the right to justification is a potent tool for emancipation from structural to relational forms of domination, but claim that Forst’s particular conceptualisation of power prevents him from addressing injustices generated by ‘systemic domination’ – the subjection of all actors to the functional imperatives of the system of social relations.

Reimagining GIScience for relational spaces.

A mismatch between largely absolute Newtonian models of space in GIScience and the relational spaces of critical human geography has contributed to mutual disinterest between the fields. Critical GIS has offered an intellectual critique of GIScience without substantially altering how particular key geographical concepts are expressed in data structures. Although keystone ideas in GIScience such as Tobler's "First Law" and the modifiable areal unit problem speak to enduring concerns of human geography, they have drawn little interest from that field. Here, we suggest one way to reformulate the computational approach to the region for relational space, so that regions emerge not through proximity in an absolute space or similarities in intensive properties, but according to their similarities in relations. We show how this might operate theoretically and empirically, working through three illustrative examples. Our approach gestures toward reformulating key terms in GIScience like distance, proximity, networks, and spatial building blocks such as the polygon. Re-engaging the challenges of representing geographical concepts computationally can yield new kinds of GIS and GIScience resonant with theoretical ideas in human geography, and also lead to critical human geographic practices less antagonistic to computation.

Labour and the ecological crisis: The eco-modernist dilemma in western Marxism(s) (1970s-2000s)

The article offers an intellectual critique of Marxist political ecology as developed in western Europe between the 1970s and 2000s, focusing on the labour/ecology nexus. My critique is based on the intersection of two levels of analysis: (1) the historical evolution of labour environmentalism, focusing on what I will call the eco-modernist dilemma of labour; (2) the meaning of class politics in relation to the politics of the environment, with a special focus on the production/reproduction dialectic. Focusing on the work of four Marxist intellectuals whose ideas resonated with various social movements across the Left spectrum (labour, environmentalism, feminism and degrowth), the article shows how the current entrenchment of labour within the politics of eco-modernization hides a number of internal fractures and alternative visions of ecology that need to be spelled out in order to open the terrain for a rethinking of ecological politics in class terms today.

Extinction and democracy: wildness, wilderness, and global conservation

As the extinction crisis deepens, global conservation efforts have been troubled by important social and intellectual critiques. To work through these problems, genuine cross-cultural dialogue is needed to reflect diverse ways of relating to nature that generate democratic and politically legitimate conservation regimes. The concept of wildness - as distinguished from wilderness, and strict approaches to protected areas (PAs) generally - holds special potential to support such dialogue. This is because wildness can speak effectively to the hybrid character of new ecological politics that link claims of ecological and social justice as questions of democracy. Wildness should therefore be amplified as a 'keystone concept' for 21st century conservation. Without wildness, connections between humankind and other-kind threaten to unravel further, with grave consequences for future ecologies and human communities.

Détourning the Chimera: Toward a Global Critical Practice

Détourning the Chimera:Toward a Global Critical Practice Christopher Leigh Connery (bio) The variants of neoliberalism east and west of the Pacific—China’s “state neoliberalism” and the more epistemologically totalitarian version that has long been ascendant in the United States1—while providing cyclical alterations of anachronistic stick waving with the kind of symbiotic chumminess on display during Xi Jinping’s visit to Davos, do not portend any serious systemic fissures at the commanding heights of the global economy. The latest indications (June 2017) suggest that Donald Trump is, as many of us always thought he eventually would, falling into line. There is considerably more work to be done, however, in the ranks of the opposition. For US-based scholars and critics, an anticapitalist intellectual project that seeks to be global in its scope and orientation requires articulation with comrades in China.2 This is not because China is emerging as the new frontier of capital accumulation, coming to the rescue of a global system that may be nearing its structural limits in Europe, Japan, and the United States—a speculative proposition at best—but out of what must be a collective concern with our common humanity, in which, demographically speaking, China looms large. I take among the aims of this special issue to include a contribution to this project, as well as a contribution to a more properly global critical culture, and it is in that spirit that I offer some perspectives on the institutional and ideological character of contemporary Chinese critical practice. As is the case elsewhere in the world, the overwhelming majority of critical China-based intellectuals work in universities. Higher education in China has been the site of massive expansion since the beginning of the reform period (1978), and there are currently over twenty-five hundred institutions of higher education enrolling over thirty million students. The numbers continue to grow. Placing a high priority on institutional ranking, central government initiatives for higher education have included the multibillion-dollar-funded 211 project—devoted to the strengthening of about one hundred of the top-ranked universities in China—and the 985 project, aimed at strengthening the international rankings, global reputation, and global impact of thirty-nine of [End Page 541] China’s top universities, and the latest iteration of the campaign, the recently announced “double first class” (shuang yiliu) program, prioritizing the creation of more universities and disciplines in the higher echelons of the global rankings. Although the “double first class” program aims to spread resources more broadly, to date most resources have been channeled to an elite tier of universities, as is the case elsewhere in the overdeveloped world, and this has correlated highly with the creation and reproduction of a socioeconomic elite, whose members are the initiatives’ primary beneficiaries.3 For university academics, however, particularly those outside the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, conditions are grim. Chinese academics are, in PPP (purchase power parity) terms, among the worst-paid academics in the world, with an average monthly salary of $720 and starting salaries averaging $259, at the bottom of world rankings.4 Universities are administered in a top-down manner, and administrators, even those with doctorates, are drawn largely from an administrative track. There is no tradition of faculty self-governance, and academics’ choices of courses to teach, dissertation, research, and grant topics are commonly not wholly their own. Advancement up the ranks is dependent on quantitative evaluation that makes the UK and US systems look benign. Normally, promotion depends on publication in one of the over five hundred publications listed in the “key publication list” (hexin kanwu), successful application for nationally sponsored research grants (on topics or in areas specified by the state), study or research abroad, and examinations, and all hires and promotions must be reviewed at the provincial Ministry of Education. The “key publications” do not include many of those critical analytical journals that have the most intellectual impact in the humanities and analytical social sciences such as Tianya, Nanfang chuang, or Refeng xueshu, and it is very difficult to add publications to the list. Often, academics have to pay to publish in the key publications. I could find...

International Terrorism and the American Dream: A Dialectical Fairytale

Today’s framing of terrorism in the international system is part of our contemporary dreamworlds of mass consumption set against images of the American Dream. These dreamworlds provide the hegemonic discourses of a European universalist foreign policy that kills huge numbers of innocent non-combatants for political purposes, acts of terrorism, while denying that such acts constitute terrorism. The violence used is represented as a necessary and shared sacrifice for the American Dream, suggesting a unity, otherwise lacking, supposedly in “self-defense” against terrorism. In reality, what is being consumed are not actions against terrorism and aggressive war, but aggressive war and terrorism themselves masquerading as a defense of the imagined communities of the nation and “the West”. The focus of this article is especially on media and Hollywood films, including social media. The work draws on both world-systems analysis, international relations scholars, and theorists of culture, media and communication to analyze the uses of terrorism today. Simultaneously the article draws on critical theorists and public intellectuals, from Edward Said to Judith Butler to Pope Francis, to critique the binary Orientalist oppositions of today’s pan-European discourses on international terrorism, in ways that expose their complexities and realities, historically and currently.

Critiquing participatory video: experiences from around the world

Over the past decade there has been a growing interest in participatory video, but accounts have often been celebratory and uncritical. At the same time there has been an ever‐increasing multiplicity of interpretations, thus making participatory video seem ‘nebulous’ and ‘perplexing’. This special section seeks to develop some of the critiques developed over the past five years, by bringing together a series of provocative thought pieces. Through this special section we seek to continue to develop a critique of participatory video as both a methodology and method. We also call on researchers, practitioners and participants to commit to engaging in rigorous public debate and intellectual critique in order to strengthen the field.