Duke University Press Research Articles

Composing violence: The limits of exposure and the making of minorities By MoyukhChatterjee. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 184 pp.

Composing violence: The limits of exposure and the making of minorities By MoyukhChatterjee. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 184 pp.

Theorising with the mycelium in the commingled world of young children’s musical play

ABSTRACT Inspired by Sheldrake’s study of fungi [Sheldrake, M. 2020. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. London: Penguin Random House] and Barad’s idea of entanglement [Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press], this paper explores music play with young children and artists, a practice that resists adult-centric approaches. As an embedded researcher within an early years arts organisation, I play with a diffractive methodology to read through ideas of Froebel with posthuman writings. Using slow-motion viewing of a video extract of musical play the vibrant agency of materials and sound emerges in micro-moments of playful music-making. Theorising with the mycelium produces ideas of extravagance, music and sound understood as lively intra-active and wild. It communicates through, and within, living and non-living matter. This view of music asks for artists to ‘do’ and say less, watch more and hold the space for the bursting forth of ripe and ready musical expressions. Through this pedagogical approach, children and adults can experience a sense of becoming with music, with the world.

Gendered fortunes: Divination, precarity, and affect in postsecular Turkey By Zeynep K. Korkman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 276 pp.

Gendered fortunes: Divination, precarity, and affect in postsecular Turkey By Zeynep K. Korkman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 276 pp.

Review of Bettina Stoetzer 2022: Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Review of Bettina Stoetzer 2022: Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Sommer, Doris. The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014)

Doris Sommer's Book The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities must be received as vivid recollections of anecdotal and yielding civic interventions. Most of these celebrated creative social interventions relate either to confident "high-ranking" political leaders or weird grassroots artists in some particular socioeconomic contexts already in paralysis.no doubt, such models of civic initiatives cannot be transposed to other communities; therefore, it is easy to reject Sommer's propositions as over-optimistic and operationally inapplicable. It is also acceptable here to restate the reactions of the Duke Press editors who told Doris Sommer right at the onset that this book "is too much theory" and "no one wants to read theory".1

Unburdening care: Exploring modes of care through post‐productivist thought and Australian parliamentary inquiry representations

AbstractResearch on care increasingly emphasises the “care‐less” or “uncaring” nature of state‐coordinated interventions imposed on marginalised communities. However, these perspectives tend to eliminate discussions about modes of care (Fox, Critical Social Policy, 15, 1995, 107) or the ways in which care is differentially experienced and performed. This paper argues for scholars to think multimodally about care, proposing a typology of four different modes of care: care‐as‐gift, ‐burden, ‐control and ‐cure. The paper makes a case for locating these modes of care within a post‐capitalist political horizon to respond to the demand to “unburden care.” That is, the political demand to provide the economic and social conditions that best enable caregiving and reduce gendered pressures on caregivers. The paper develops these arguments through the post‐productivist thought of Kathi Weeks (2011, The problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press) and a critical discursive examination of care representations made by submitters to two parliamentary inquiries into the Australian “pre‐employment” programme ParentsNext—a labour market activation programme that targets single‐parent caregivers “at risk of welfare dependency.” The paper contributes a critical and multimodal approach to better conceptualise competing framings of care's value and the ways in which the state can (un)burden caregiving.

Seeking help for atrial fibrillation: the role of the body in distributed decision making

We adopt Rapley's (2008) concept of distributed decision making to explore the role of the body in people's decisions to seek medical care. We conducted in-depth interviews with patients diagnosed with atrial fibrillation (AF) who were taking long-term anticoagulants to prevent stroke. We interviewed seventeen patients recruited from English anticoagulant clinics using the biographic-narrative-interpretive method, and conducted thematic, structural and metaphorical analyses. This pluralistic analysis focused on how distributed decision-making was enacted through a range of socio-material, relational and embodied practices. Participants told how they experienced AF-related sensations that fluctuated in intensity and form. Some had no symptoms at all; others experienced sudden incapacitation – these experiences shaped different journeys towards seeking medical help. We draw on work by Mol (2002) to show how the body was differently observed, experienced and done across contexts as the narratives unfolded. We show that as part of a relational assemblage, involving social, material and technological actors over time, a new body-in-need-of-help was enacted and medical help sought. This body-in-need-of-help was collectively discussed, interpreted and experienced through distribution of body parts, fluids and technological representations to shape decisions.RAPLEY T., 2008. Distributed decision making: the anatomy of decisions-in-action. Sociology of Health & Illness, 30, 429–444.MOL A., 2002. The body multiple: ontology in medical practice. Duke University Press: Durham.

Queer theory impossible

ABSTRACT This essay examines the institutional construction of “queer theory” as a field in the United States and its translation and subsequent failure outside the U.S. Despite presenting itself as a critical field of inquiry, queer theory has been centered in the most privileged institutions in the global North, primarily in the U.S. I investigate how U.S.-centric queer theory has built upon the international division between “theory” and “case,” rooted in colonial science and knowledge production, particularly in relation to sexuality and race. To address these issues, I analyze the controversy surrounding the publication and translation of the edited volume, Queer Korea, from Duke University Press’s acclaimed Perverse Modernities series, focusing on research ethics and hegemonic whiteness. I argue that this controversy demonstrates how contemporary U.S.-centric queer theory appropriates and capitalizes on the language of “decentering,” “provincializing,” or “decolonizing” at the expense of marginalized queer lives, struggles, and knowledge outside the U.S.

Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin By BettinaStoetzer, Duke University Press. 2022. pp. 352. $28.95 (paperback)

Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin By BettinaStoetzer, Duke University Press. 2022. pp. 352. $28.95 (paperback)

Review of Schieder, Chelsea Szendi. 2021. Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press

Review of Schieder, Chelsea Szendi. 2021. Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press

Lisa Mitchell: Hailing the State: Indian Democracy between Elections. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. Pp. xviii, 300.)

Lisa Mitchell: Hailing the State: Indian Democracy between Elections. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. Pp. xviii, 300.)

Maintaining Portland’s “progressive dystopia”: housing, carcerality, and the real estate state

ABSTRACT In 2020, a coalition formed between a local real estate developer, a nonprofit, and a senator soon to run for state governor, with the goal of turning a never-used county jail in Portland, Oregon, into a homeless shelter. Reading with abolitionist anthropologist Savannah Shange’s concepts of “progressive dystopia” and “carceral progressivism,” this paper is a case study of Wapato Jail’s redevelopment into the Bybee Lakes Hope Center, serving as an in-depth look at how Portland’s localized real estate state utilizes the logics of “carceral progressivism” to maintain the city as a dystopia that works for them [Shange, S. (2019). Progressive dystopia: Abolition, anti-blackness, & schooling in San Francisco. Duke University Press]. Utilizing data from archival materials, news media, and twenty interviews, I argue that the real estate state, composed of local developers with long-standing stakes in the city, form alliances in an attempt to shift the provision of services away from a Housing First approach and to maintain the city in a state of “just crisis enough” to keep growing profits and property values. Cutting across abolitionist and carceral geographies, I present an engagement with the maintenance and growth of carcerality within the real estate state, particularly as elites get involved with homeless services.

‘There is Beauty in the Way that I Think.’ Exploring Autistic Life Narrative in Cultural Texts of Hannah Gadsby

ABSTRACT Representations of autism in popular culture usually rely on stereotypes about autistic people rooted in clinical discourse of pathology, reproducing gendered, racialized and classed images of white, cis male exceptionalism. The dominant circulating narratives often ignore lived autistic experience and position autism either as a spectacle or as the unknowable other. Personal narrative allows autistic people to ‘story’ autism in its many different forms and create a space of critical interrogation. This article examines two cultural texts of Tasmanian comedian and author Hannah Gadsby, who addresses their late-life diagnosis of autism in their stand-up comedy show Douglas and their memoir Ten Steps to Nanette. By drawing on queer and feminist disability studies, critical autism studies and theories of life writing, this article analyses how Gadsby employs autistic life narrative as a form of ‘diversity work’ [Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press] and tells their story in its tense relation to social and medical notions of normality as well as medical discourse of diagnosis. By doing so, this article argues that Gadsby’s use of life narrative contributes to a more diverse representation of autistic lives and offers a critical interrogation of what is considered social normality.

Reverberations in music education: What does sound ‘do’ in our learning spaces ?

ABSTRACT Bringing together literature from music education, posthumanism, sound studies and ethnomusicology, this article considers what sound ‘does’ in music education spaces. Within posthumanism, the role of sound, as a manifestation of material-human entanglements, is under-theorised. This article, diffractively plays with the literature and evidence from a PhD project and a listening walk with pre-service music teachers, allowing the reverberations (as the continued effects and affects of bringing these materials into contact with each other), to spark generative thinking about how sound in music education is conceived. In doing so, the article presents three reverberations that challenge humanist conceptions of sound/music in education. The first considers all sound (human and non-human) as voice, which is transindividual (Chadwick in Flint [2022]. “More-than-Human Methodologies in Qualitative Research: Listening to the Leafblower.” Qualitative Research 22 (4): 521–541. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794121999028) , the second considers the role of sound as an invitation to ‘world-with’ (Barad [2007]. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press) and the third reverberation explores sound as affect (Gallagher [2016]. “Sound as Affect: Difference, Power and Spatiality.” Emotion, Space and Society 20:42–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.02.004). In thinking with these generative reverberations, this article is a provocation to explore how a posthuman reconceptualisation of sound in music education can help us re-state the importance of music as a curriculum subject.

Hayden, Cori (2023) The Spectacular Generic: Pharmaceuticals and the Simipolitical in Mexico, Duke University Press (Durham, NC and London), xii + 244 pp. $99.95 hbk., $26.95 pbk.

Hayden, Cori (2023) The Spectacular Generic: Pharmaceuticals and the Simipolitical in Mexico, Duke University Press (Durham, NC and London), xii + 244 pp. $99.95 hbk., $26.95 pbk.

Scorched Earth and the Nature of DMZ

Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime against Humanity and Nature, by Emmanuel Kreike (Princeton University Press, 2021) Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ, by Eleana J. Kim (Duke University Press, 2022)

A nimble arc: James Van Der Zee and photography By EmilieBoone, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2023. pp. 288.

A nimble arc: James Van Der Zee and photography By EmilieBoone, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2023. pp. 288.

Chemical heroes: Pharmacological supersoldiers in the US military By Andrew Bickford. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 320 pp.

Chemical heroes: Pharmacological supersoldiers in the US military By Andrew Bickford. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 320 pp.

Torin Monahan (2022) Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Ausma Bernot reviews Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance by Torin Monahan

Working Musicians: Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production. By Timothy Taylor, 2023. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 254 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-1987-9

Working Musicians: Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production. By Timothy Taylor, 2023. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 254 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-1987-9