Fractious Relationship Research Articles

Who Is the Subject of Gender Self-determination?

This essay poses two critical questions about trans politics as elaborated in the Global North today: Who is the subject of gender self-determination? And what, precisely, is mobilized by tying political sovereignty to gendered persecution and ethical world-making, trans or otherwise? To answer those questions, both liberal and antistate iterations of gender self-determination are read through the lens of Judith Butler’s writing on the fractious relationship between ethical responsibility and politics. Focusing on Butler’s engagement with Emmanuel Levinas through a Jewish tradition, the author argues that trans politics have grounded claims to liberal individual and radical collective sovereignty alike in a diasporic metaphor of displacement from a rightful home. In the final analysis, Butler’s work outside of the theory of gender’s performativity helps make clear that gender, as a vector of self-determination and political assembly, advances colonial and settler interests—even when trans.

Integration and Disintegration in Europe: A Study on Brexit

Regionalism is the creation of political, economic, or social structures loyal to a detailed analysis of a Geographic area with a similar population in terms of ideology and culture. Capitalism and state-to-state diplomacy are fundamentally based on regional integration. The ideas emphasize how interdependent and geographically significant states are. These nations are widely acknowledged as a single commercial bloc and are pursuing more ambitious political and economic goals. To accomplish this, member states' capitalism and intergovernmental systems come together. The European Union (EU) is Europe's attempt to become a regional organization, the most significant effort to establish regionalism in markets in the 20th century. The United Kingdom (UK) will leave the European Union on March 29 2019, leading to a new course in the world. When on June 23 2016, a majority voted in favour of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union (EU), it generated a host of unknowns. Over to the referendum, all are focused on anticipating the impact and implications of Britain's withdrawal from the European Union. This paper will add another piece to Brexit and its emergence. This paper tries to explain regionalism in Europe and European integration, the UK's Withdrawal referendum, and its Exit and also traces the importance of the political parties in Britain. Afterwards, it briefly introduces Britain's historically fractious relationship with the EU. In light of Britain's historical role, the remaining part of this paper goes on to estimate the background and impact of Brexit on the regional organization like European Union, which members and institutions within the organization emerges (the EU 27) will be best able to benefit from the strategic vacuum created the Brexit in the Globalized era.

Bells and whistles: listening between the lines in sixteenth-century Exeter

Abstract In an attempt to counteract the silence of Exeter’s late sixteenth-century cartographic representation and to explore further the idea of urban social relations expressed in auditory terms, this article investigates the issues involved in the ringing of Exeter’s civic bells, some of which may reflect a fractious relationship between two sources of authority within the city walls. It sets out some of the challenges to recreating this city’s broader sonic identity and outlines the results of initial attempts to do so.

The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing

The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing

The Search for the First Americans: Science, Power, Politics. By Robert V. Davis Jr.

The question of who the First Americans were continues to evolve as new sites are found and dated, sometimes in previously unexplored regions (e.g., the continental shelf), and new technologies employed. Robert Davis offers a fresh take on the extensive and sometimes contradictory literature, on contentious claims, and on different ways of ways of knowing the past. As a non-archaeologist (a Ph.D. in science and technology, and a career in public service with the federal government), he has no vested interest in any particular interpretation. This volume, however, is not a review of the facts, but rather an interrogation of what various beliefs (Indigenous) and lines of evidence (Science) offer—to use Davis’s dichotomy here. He notes “This examination of the search for the First Americans is a case study in the complex relationships between the biological findings of science and the social importance of cultural beliefs” (p. x). This frames his approach, but he states equal interest in the “often fractious relationships across the sciences” and the “hegemonic and often racist assumptions… embedded in how science has been conducted” (p. x). Clearly there is a packed agenda in this volume.

Linguistic fieldwork at the end of empire: British officials and American structuralists in Anthony Burgess’ Malayan trilogy

ABSTRACT In 1959 Anthony Burgess published Beds in the East, a novel set in Malaya in 1957, the year the Federation of Malaya achieved independence. Towards the end of the book, Burgess introduces a new character, Temple Haynes, a professional linguist from a US university who is studying the phonology of Temiar, the language of one of Malaysia’s indigenous ethnic minorities. This paper examines Burgess’ depiction of Haynes and his sometimes fractious relationship with the British ‘Assistant Protector of Aborigines’, Moneypenny (also a speaker of Temiar). It is interesting to examine this fictional representation because it uses material familiar to students of the History of Linguistics to develop a certain picture of imperialism and decolonisation, one that shifts questions about the politics of western intervention onto the US but also worries about the personal investments of British representatives in colonised and decolonising space. Thus Burgess’ text offers the reader a dramatic portrait of the practice of linguistic fieldwork as part of a particular vision of Malaya at the ‘end of empire’.

From Haunted Houses to Housed Hauntings

This paper is oriented around moments of crises and kinship ambivalence within the home of a merchant family on the outskirts of a small town in central Sri Lanka. The problems explored play out in two registers. The first outlines relations between men that become problematic and result in disharmony at home and at work, while the second deals with a situation in which the house itself becomes the site of disorder and vulnerability. Bringing fractious relationships between men into conversation with an established literature on spirit possession in South Asia explores how families manage (haunted) houses in a way that centers around the ritual authority maha gedera. In so doing, it makes a case for the mutual interplay of relationality between people, houses, and ghosts that haunt. At another level, the article offers a critical reflection on kinship’s agrarian history (and political death) in Sri Lanka and considers the stylistic predilection for interpretive narratives of possession in anthropology.

Counter-Cultural Groups in the Age of Covid: Ravers, Travellers and Legal Regulation

The Covid-19 pandemic once again brought into sharpened focus the contested relationships of marginalised groups in the criminal law sphere, and the liminal (re-)regulation of space. Over the course of the last four decades, the law has borne witness to an episodic yet regular intertwining of the fortunes of arguably two elements of Britain's counterculture: ravers and travellers, specifically ‘new age’ travellers. The two groupings of peoples have had a long, complex and often uncomfortable and fractious relationship both with English law, and also its enforcement agencies. This is perhaps particularly evident in the criminal law provisions and sometimes questionable enforcement of the Public Order Act 1986 and the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, through to the social and environmental provisions of the Caravan Sites Act 1968, Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act 1990, and subsequent provisions. Both the groupings of ravers and travellers have been faced with a series of legislative and administrative measures that, directly or indirectly, curtail or otherwise restrict their choices as to activities, lifestyles and behaviours. The article analyses how the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has led to some long-established legal and regulatory themes being once again played out in relation to these two counter-cultural groups.

Securing the Future: Transformative Justice and Children ‘Born of War’

Children born as the result of conflict related sexual violence often embody painful memories of war-affected communities. As a result, children ‘born of war’ experience abuse and neglect, social isolation and a sense of never-belonging. Existing scholarship grapples with the challenges of seeking justice for children ‘born of war’ given the complex ways their suffering is entangled with that of so many other victims. In post-conflict northern Uganda, a community-based organization composed of survivors of forced marriage and motherhood collectively seeks justice for their children in a process locally referred to as child tracing. The Women’s Advocacy Network brings together differently affected victim groups to help identify the paternal relatives of their children, mediate conflict and transform fractious relationships in order to secure a future for their children. Through this process, children who once divided communities, propel a collective reach towards justice.

Tasmania July to December 2019

Australian Journal of Politics & HistoryVolume 66, Issue 2 p. 356-361 Political Chornicles Tasmania July to December 2019 Michael Lester, Michael Lester Institute for the Study of Social Change, Politics and International Relations, University of TasmaniaSearch for more papers by this authorDain Bolwell, Dain Bolwell Institute for the Study of Social Change, Politics and International Relations, University of TasmaniaSearch for more papers by this author Michael Lester, Michael Lester Institute for the Study of Social Change, Politics and International Relations, University of TasmaniaSearch for more papers by this authorDain Bolwell, Dain Bolwell Institute for the Study of Social Change, Politics and International Relations, University of TasmaniaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 12 July 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/ajph.12688Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume66, Issue2June 2020Pages 356-361 RelatedInformation

Perceiving precarity and extremism in Nuruddin Farah's North of Dawn

Somali citizens, both at home and abroad, have been reduced to a life of uncertainty, instability and insecurity. This article considers Somalis as part of the ‘precariat’ (as theorized by Pierre Bourdieu, Guy Standing, and others). Drawing on critical terrorism and trauma scholarship, the article gauges the experiences of the precariat subject, highlighting how these experiences affect the daily lives of the Somali migrant community in Nuruddin Farah’s North of Dawn (2018). The aim of this article is to consider the relationship among precarity, extremism and the postcolonial émigré with regard to the contingent and fractious relations established by and between the Somali migrant characters and their hosts in the novel. Whereas predominant framings of precarity are characterized by labor insecurity, lack of any stable economic identity, and the fear of losing what one has, my argument in this article is that extremism is both a response to and attendant agent of precarity as presented in the novel. My contention is that Farah engages the precariat as extremist in the narrative present of the novel, highlighting the ways in which those that face social identification and marginalization are both at risk and risky to others.

Past as Prologue? Historical Patterns and Discontinuities in Modern Trade Wars

International trade law is under siege. We face imminent stasis in WTO dispute settlement. Substantively too, the rapid outbreak of unilateral deployment of tariffs by the U.S (and then retaliation by China) is putatively WTO-illegal. These developments have shocked the community of practitioners and scholars of the WTO. Against this backdrop, it is tempting to position the current trade wars as a unique threat to both globalization and its institutional manifestations, like the WTO. To my mind, that claim deserves, at the very least, serious assessment. This is not the first time in its modern history that the system of international trade law has been subject to escalating resort to unilateral protectionism by its dominant power. There are important lessons from past trade conflicts that can guide our prescriptions on productive (and even likely) future outcomes, while bearing in mind differences in degree and orientation. A logical comparator here is the dramatic rise of Japan as an economic competitor to the U.S through the 1970s and 1980s (in a period that both preceded and tracked the Uruguay Round negotiations) and the shift in unilateral and multilateral strategies employed by the U.S to manage trade conflict with Japan. This comparator is routinely dismissed by most commentators, largely because of the role of the U.S as a guarantor of Japanese security. While that security umbrella is an important difference when considering the fractious relationship between the U.S and China, there are thick undercurrents in commonality (both substantively and sociologically) that transcend points of variance.

Pornographic intersections: race and genitalia in South African political art in the age of digital media

Post-Apartheid South Africa has been characterized by fractious relationships between the races that compose this society and also between the rulers and the ruled. Society has devised many strategies to cope with, understand, resist, and oppose this, but also to bring about change. One of these strategies is the expression of personal viewpoints through elections, social media, protests and humour. This paper is concerned with the deployment of near-pornographic satirical humour in South African politics, satire created to challenge the powerful. Using critical discourse analysis of paintings, citizens’ comments and news media reports, this paper questions the use of ‘genital art’ and offers different readings of these images in the broader context of South African identity politics. Race seems to be the most dominant lens through which the paintings that are the foci of this paper are read. In a racially charged South Africa race is not a funny subject. The paper concludes that the refusal to see humour in South African race relations might be due to the shocking manner of aesthetic representations in these paintings. That the artworks capture the grave levels of the socio-political and economic situation is indisputable but what remains contested could be the modes of representing these situations. All this seems to interplay with race politics and South Africa’s problematic Apartheid past.

'Pursued steadily, quietly, unfalteringly': The Work of Wild Bird Protectionists in Britain during World War One

Abstract This article assesses the conduct of bird conservationists, particularly Britain's premier wild bird conservation agency, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), during World War One in Britain. Drawing on the journals and annual reports of the RSPB, newspaper articles and correspondence, the agricultural press and publications of the Board of Agriculture, this essay shows how the RSPB firstly used the war to its advantage as it campaigned against feathered millinery and then claimed to initiate a new branch of British manufacturing. However, as the article then shows, the pressures of war led to problems for wild birds, as an increasingly hungry populace targeted them; the public were discouraged from providing bird-food; and species regarded as vermin, especially sparrows, were targeted in the drive to maximise agricultural output. These issues led to parliamentary action, drew comment from newspapers and their readers and led to an increasingly fractious relationship between agricultural interests and conservationists. Significantly, as this essay demonstrates, the RSPB defied the Defence of the Realm Act and through its journal it denounced official government policy, a most unusual stance given that the Society's supporters were titled and influential persons. Environmental historians have recently taken a keen interest in the environmental consequences of warfare, with sharp focus upon the direct results of fighting and its aftermath. This article argues that the 'home front' and the impact of warfare on fauna should not be neglected.

‘Utopian Topics’: Ruskin and Oxford

2019 MARKS THE BICENTENARY of John Ruskin’s birth. I want to take this opportunity to reconsider his dealings with Oxford – what the university did for him, what he did for the university, what the connection tells us about Oxford, about nineteenth century education, and about education more generally. As it happens, Corpus Christi College, the college which generously hosts the F. W. Bateson Memorial Lecture, is the perfect place for a talk on this subject. It was Corpus Christi that provided Ruskin with a home during his years as the university’s first Slade Professor of Fine Art. He was grateful, and he developed real affection for the college. But Corpus Christi was not where the story begins. Christ Church, Corpus Christi’s grand neighbour, was the college that admitted him as an eccentric 18-year-old undergraduate, in 1837 – the year in which Victoria, born like Ruskin in 1819, became queen. He left Oxford for the last time in 1884, by then very much out of patience with the university. It was a long and often fractious relationship. Tensions between Ruskin’s aspirations and the objectives of the university ebbed and flowed through the decades, but they never disappeared. He was both insider and outsider. At times he seemed an irrelevance, even a joke. Now, however, his thinking about our shared responsibility for the environment, or the necessary connections between disciplines, or the need for students to take an active part in their education, or the importance of an outward-facing and ethically grounded approach to academic life, look less utopian, and more mainstream, than was once the case. So too does the way in which his work challenged the gendered identity of the university, and of its intellectual authority. Ruskin was among those who helped to build the Oxford that we know today, but he did so from a position of mingled allegiance and dissent.

On national dress and the problem of authenticity in Ulysses

ABSTRACTThis article considers James Joyce’s representation of Irish dress, arguing that his ambivalent treatment of it accurately reflects his fractious relationship with the Irish Revival movement. The article begins with a discussion of the metaphor of performance and relates this to issues around “authenticity”. From here, it discusses Douglas Hyde’s thoughts on dress, as presented in “The Necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland”, contextualising these within a brief history of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Irish dress history, and recognising the important work of women in this. Assessing Joyce’s depictions of Irish dress, especially in “Scylla and Charybdis”, “Cyclops” and “Circe”, this article argues that Joyce sees Irish dress as a contingent and fragile cultural performance.

The International Criminal Court and Africa: A fractious relationship assessed

The International Criminal Court and Africa: A fractious relationship assessed

Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation, ed. James E. Kelly and Susan Royal

This book is the outcome of the first international bi-annual symposium on early modern Catholicism that was jointly run by the University of Durham and the University of Notre Dame in 2013. The two editors, James E. Kelly and Susan Royal, state in the introduction that the purpose of the collection is to establish that early modern English Catholicism can be defined through three key themes—identity, memory and counter-reformation—and this aim is generally achieved throughout the volume. The first part of the book deals with how English Catholics sought to preserve their religious and national identity. Brad Gregory’s essay on situating early modern English Catholicism asserts that English Catholic identity was affected by chronology, geography and the sociological and theological aspects of Catholicism in the early decades after the Reformation, affirming that ‘English Catholicism’ included Welsh, Irish and Scottish Catholics. Gregory’s central claim is that English Catholicism can only be understood by seeing it as a part of European history, and he disputes John Bossy’s hypothesis that post-Reformation English Catholicism did not exist until 1570. Gabriel Glickman’s chapter examines how Catholics explored the concept of British identity in the long eighteenth century. Glickman convincingly demonstrates that, despite the complex relationship between England, Scotland and Ireland which pre-dated the Reformation, mutual cultural relations between these countries allowed networks, commerce and devotional ideas to be exchanged domestically and internationally. The other two chapters scrutinise the ways in which religious orders constructed English Catholic identity. James E. Kelly’s chapter describes English convents in Europe offering an avenue for nuns to preserve their English Catholic identity by acting as receptacles for the growing demand in relic collecting; he provides numerous examples of nuns rescuing relics from destruction, which they then used as aids to memorialise the Catholic Church’s history. Thomas M. McCoog’s chapter on the Society of Jesus and the vicars apostolic contends that the English secular clergy exploited the suppression of the Jesuits in Liège and St Omers for the benefit of their own seminaries, which showed how these fractious relationships had an impact on English Catholic identity.

Barrack Yard Politics

Taken together, C. L. R. James’s 1933 political pamphlet The Case for West-Indian Self Government and 1936 novel Minty Alley reveal the author’s competing visions of relations between Africans and Indians in the British West Indies. In The Case for West-Indian Self Government, James proclaims that West Indian societies are fit to govern their own affairs because they are modern and harmonious. However, James’s argument contradicts his literary sketches of the barrack yard in Minty Alley. The novel features a fractious relationship between Benoit and Mrs. Rouse, the owners of the yard. Mrs. Rouse responds to Benoit’s infidelity by remarking, “My blood and coolie blood don’t take.” They fight over ownership of No. 2 Minty Alley, but when Benoit dies, Mrs. Rouse buries him at the yard. Minty Alley portrays a barrack yard politics made through the combined—if tense—efforts of African and Indian descendants.

38 seconds above the 38th parallel: how short video clips produced by the US military can promote alignment despite antagonism between Japan and Korea

Abstract The effectiveness of public diplomacy is now increasingly the subject of scientific measurement and testing by researchers in the field of International Relations. While there are variety of empirical efforts to uncover the power of public diplomacy, extant studies have mostly focused on the activities initiated by the ministries in charge of external relations. In this article, rather than external relations ministries and agencies, we focus on the effectiveness of public diplomacy by the military. Specifically, we argue that figures, pictures and indeed videos created by military forces have power in changing perceptions among the receivers of the information. In this particular study, we show that a 38 second video made by the US military induces positive feelings for cooperation which would otherwise be difficult to sustain between South Korea and Japan — two countries which have suffered highly fractious relations, yet which are indispensable allies to the US in countering the rising threat from North Korea.