Genealogical Perspective Research Articles

Development of the Liverpool Jewry Historical Database

The Liverpool Jewish community was the earliest to be formed in the north of England (c1745) and for much of the 19th century, it was the largest UK Jewish community outside London. However, examination of this important minority community from a social, demographic, and genealogical perspective has been severely hampered by the lack of a unified source of information about Jewish individuals and families resident in the area during the 18th and 19th centuries. This paper describes how a searchable database of all Jewish persons with a documented connection with the Liverpool area, from the earliest times to 1881, has been produced as a resource for historical, demographic, sociological, and genealogical research. It explains how Jewish individuals were identified by a novel use of distinctive names, occupations, and birthplaces in the secular census and vital records and, in combination with extant records held within the Jewish community, have been used to produce a database of several thousand persons, linked into family groups. It concludes that the principal aim of the project has been achieved, and the approach could act as a template for other religion/ethnicity-based groups.

Bridging the theory-practice gap: a genealogical perspective on the most debated knowledge management challenges

ABSTRACT To address the theory-practice gap in knowledge management research, we identify the most persistent knowledge management challenges and proposed solutions over the past three and a half decades (1991–2023). Based on a systematic literature review combining a bibliometric and a qualitative content analysis, we conceptualise a genealogic (evolutionary) model to map the historical development path of three reappearing root challenges: (1) organisational antecedents to implement a knowledge-sharing culture (2) use of ICT for knowledge transfer and (3) knowledge conversion. We find that while topics 1 and 2 are established topics, topic 3 constantly renews itself by merging with innovation-related research streams. Further, our analysis reveals the general principle that the theory-practice gap opens at the end of the inception phase of a new challenge theme. We conclude that implementing artificial intelligence in knowledge management processes and fostering knowledge creation for sustainable development are the key topics for future research.

Sociopolitical Genealogy of Populist Conspiracy Theories in the Context of Hyperpolitics

The wide circulation of conspiracy narratives and their frequent intertwining with populist rhetoric is both an element of concern and a topic of intense scientific and philosophical debate. The depth of the link between conspiracy theories and populism represents a crucial issue whose comprehension can facilitate understanding their specific nature and the factors behind their diffusion in public communication. To this end, it is necessary to cultivate an interdisciplinary approach and great critical attention, eschewing monocausal explanations. This paper addresses the question of the essentially political nature of conspiracism, confronting the recent epistemological debate that, by putting the positivist paradigm aside, has sought to explore and understand the socio-cultural roots of conspiracy rhetoric, with its sceptical, antagonistic and hermetic traits. By integrating the reflections of epistemologists such as Cassam or Harris with the considerations of political scientists such as Taggart and with Schmitt’s radical reflections on politics, it is perhaps possible to reintegrate the different approaches to populist conspiracism into an overall social genealogical perspective, thanks also to recent demographic elaborations. Thus, we could ascribe the spread of conspiracism to the prevalence in societies of a hyperpolitical discursive regime, i.e., founded on the principle of opposition, without the possibility of compromise, between different groups and interests. At the basis of such Manichaeism, it is plausible to place in the first place the growing inequalities and related social disintegration, which hinder the circulation of trust and recognition between individuals and groups, thus ending up undermining democracy at its roots, as a political system that legitimises and thus peacefully regulates conflict.

Threats, Victims and Unimaginable Subjects of Rights: A Genealogy of Sex Worker Governance in Poland

This paper sketches the emergence of, and shifts within, the social, legal, and political figurations of sex workers in Poland. By adopting a genealogical perspective, I investigate how sex workers have been (re)constituted as subjects of governance and unimaginable social justice claimants in legislation, political debates, and law enforcement strategies. With a broad temporal scope, this article traces continuities, transformations, and disruptions within modes of sex work governance in Poland from the adoption of the first laws relating to sex work enacted during the early 19th century to the present day. Through analysis of policy documents, scholarly work on the history of sex work policies in Poland, and personal accounts by sex workers, I identify and examine two dominant discursive and legal figurations of a sex worker: as a threat, and as a victim in need of rescue and protection. While analysing the emergence of and interplay between these two figurations, this article demonstrates how these seemingly contradictory frames of recognition gradually conjoined within 20th-century Polish sex work governance strategies, rendering sex workers unimaginable subjects of rights and social justice claimants.

Genealogy of Species as a Limit-Concept

Abstract: This essay problematizes "species" at a moment when this concept has become ubiquitous in and indispensable to ecological thought. Through a reading of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Alexandre Kojève—who, I argue, is a key precursor of Chakrabarty's thought—I show how "species" sits in dialectical tension with the category of the "human," and argue that while the latter has been thoroughly problematized across fields, its dialectical relation to "species" has not. I thus attend to "species" as an anthropological "limit-concept," illuminating how this term has been constructed as an antithesis to the historical human that is itself constitutively without history and without speech. I not only question this assumption, but, via genealogy, also trace it back to a colonial matrix that makes clear the ways in which anti-Blackness modulates this dialectic between "human" and "species," consigning Black subjects to the position of the specimen. In genealogical perspective, moreover, one sees that the "species" limit-concept also includes a decolonial counter-analytic, which I locate in the work of Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter. Both thinkers trouble "species" as a category of racialized experience, proposing, in turn, that those forced to inhabit "species" might also interrupt its production of the human as Man. When the movement of the anthropological dialectic is stalled, I claim, it appears now as a material image, an insurgent visuality. Ultimately, then, I contend that critical attention to the history of the (de-historicized and de-historicizing) concept of "species" and to the role of race within it enables us to see our ecological conjuncture otherwise. Deepening our engagement with this history can help us understand what this category has done to the myriad others-to-Man to whom it is addressed, and what they have done in response.

Identifying knowledge evolution in computer science from the perspective of academic genealogy

Academic genealogy (AG) provides valuable insights into the transmission of knowledge from mentors to mentees, revealing the evolution of knowledge within the academic community. This study explores the intricate dynamics of knowledge evolution within academic genealogies, utilizing on a dataset comprising 16,852 computer science researchers, 613,277 papers, and 11,988 mentorship relationships. By focusing on small-scale knowledge units, our analysis aims to uncover patterns of knowledge inheritance and mutation across different subfields of computer science and highlights several aspects of knowledge evolution in computer science. Firstly, computer science is characterized by strong mentorship ties, indicating the significance of knowledge transmission within the field. Additionally, there is a mix of foundational and developing areas, suggesting a field that is growing and diversifying rather than declining, as indicated by linear regression outcomes. Secondly, our research reveals a surge in collaborative knowledge exchange in computer science since 2000, with fields such as Computer-Communication Networks and Software Engineering leading in terms of output and impact. Furthermore, areas like Computer Graphics and Artificial Intelligence stand out for their depth and novelty. Thirdly, we categorize researchers into three types: roots, branches, and leaves, reflecting their role in knowledge transmission. Branch researchers tend to innovate, while leaf researchers show a combination of traditional knowledge uptake and new contributions, illustrating the dynamic flow of ideas within the field. Future research endeavors are encouraged to embrace larger datasets and further fortify our understanding of the topic.

Ethnoarchaeology before Processual Ethnoarchaeology: The First Ethnographic Comparisons

ABSTRACT From a genealogical perspective, this article explores the foundations of ethnoarchaeological research in the context of European colonialism. It investigates methodologies that utilize ethnographic information for reconstructing historical contexts, focusing first on early comparisons during colonial encounters. These comparisons significantly shaped the amalgamation of ethnographic data into archaeology and the formulation of interpretive strategies, encompassing the direct historical method and ethnographic analogy to decipher societies via material evidence using ethnographies of non-western societies. Despite the initial prevalence of ethnographic analogy in the 1950s, ethnoarchaeology progressed by integrating novel data collection techniques into broader scientific discussions. This article critically challenges established historiographical narratives within ethnoarchaeology, asserting that aspects of ethnographic analogy and ethnoarchaeological methodology did not solely emerge as processual innovations in the 1950s, but rather their roots trace back to earlier archaeologists and ethnographers and previous colonial scholars.

Allegories of Immersion

Fish Night, an episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS (S01E12, 2019) based on a 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, can be interpreted as an allegory of the impossibility of immersive experience: if real, it is deadly, because the images are no longer such or ghosts but living beings present in a shared environmental habitat, acting with but also against the subject, in turn no longer a spectator. Comparing the story and film, and ancient ekphrastic literature, I discuss, in a trans-medial imaginary genealogical perspective, the symptoms of this cultural topos and of the regressive desire for immersion and for transparent immediacy that shapes and drives it, dwelling in particular on the ambivalent phenomenological and ontological relations between living bodies, pictures and media as deep time-bending.

Queer Performativities in Pakistan

The essay that follows is part of a larger queer genealogy project that aims to fashion “the theoretical organization and methodological perspective of genealogy” into a tool for understanding how the discursive practices and processes of state and religion (which hinge on conceptions of majority/minority) have turned notions of sexuality and sexual categories (heterosexual, gay, lesbian, transgender), as well as all other “minority” positionalities including religious and sectarian ones (Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Shia, Sunni, Ahmedi), into performative objects of study, analysis, and disciplinary control in the postcolonial, modern Muslim state of Pakistan. A similarly twinning effect occurs via neo-imperial mechanisms mobilized in the so-called liberatory promises marshalled on behalf of formerly colonized queer-identified subjects. To cast a “queer eye” on the dominant landscape of citizenship within Pakistan, then, is to address not only the growing body of work by queer-identified creators, but also to develop a reading practice that allows for an “interrogation of … the limits of a politics of visibility and representation” conferred on unequal citizens of various nation-states. Reading “queerly”, I will, in this essay, situate three exemplary performatives of gendered and sexual citizenship within global circuits of power including social media platforms, reflecting on what constitutes not just Pakistani, but also Pakistani-diasporic identity and its cross-racial, sexual, and feminist transnational promise.

Legal Survivals and the Resilience of Juridical Form

AbstractLegal institutions are created at a certain point in time, intended to be applied to ‘life’ as it is perceived at the specific moment when they are elaborated and cast into legal form. As a result, legal institutions always already refer, in their original design, to a certain normality, but between the moment of creation of a legal institution and its application to future situations there is always a certain time lag. Some legal institutions—referred to in the paper as “legal survivals” –outlive the epoch in which they were created and continue their legal life long after the conditions which lead to their creation had, in the meantime, disappeared. The aim of this paper is to put forward an archaeologico–genealogical perspective on legal survivals not only as a method of studying continuity of law and the resilience of juridical form, but also as a line of enquiry capable of enriching our understanding of the juridical in its relation to the changing circumstances of life. The study of legal survivals allows to combine three aspects of legal continuity: firstly, the continued use of the same legal forms in different circumstances and for different purposes, whereby the same juridical form is filled with different socio-economic substance; secondly, the gradual adaptation of legal forms to new circumstances; thirdly, the emergence of new legal forms in close reference to old ones. The study of legal survivals allows to address the foundations of law’s claims to authority, based on stability and predictability of juridical forms. It also reveals the complex and multilayered nature of legal form which effectively has the structure of a palimpsest.

Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori ed. by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz

Reviewed by: Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori ed. by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz Inge Arteel Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz, eds., Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2022. 200 pp. Scholarship on the Hungarian-born Jewish playwright and director George Tabori (1914–2007) is gaining new momentum, especially under the impulse of Martin Kagel, professor of German literature and culture at the University [End Page 135] of Georgia. After the 2018 publication of a substantial special section on Tabori in Nexus, the essay series in German Jewish Studies, Kagel has now co-edited with David Z. Saltz the book Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori. So far, Tabori scholarship has predominantly addressed the generic and ethical specificities of Tabori's interaction with Holocaust remembrance culture, focusing on his provocative grotesque humor and his radically intertextual rewriting of dramatic and theatrical conventions. In her opening essay, eminent Tabori scholar Anat Feinberg stresses the need to look at other aspects of Tabori's work as well. Feinberg herself gives the example of Tabori's often overlooked experimental directorial practice in the 1970s and 1980s in Bremen and Vienna. Tracing Tabori's legacy means asking how the dramaturgical specificities of Tabori's work relate to theater and performance of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. At stake is first of all the embodied form of the survivor-witness so central to Tabori's dramaturgy. Several contributions tackle this question in a comparative approach. Alice Le Trionnaire-Bolterauer convincingly shows Tabori's connection with the newer avantgarde in confronting the physicality of Tabori's ritual dramaturgy with two theater performances by Israeli artists, Arbeit Macht Frei vom Toitland Europa (1991) by the Israeli Akko Theatre and Yael Ronen's Third Generation: Work in Progress (2008). Rebecca Rovit reads the drama of Tabori's contemporary Charlotte Delbo and two playwrights of the succeeding generation, Yehoshua Sobol and Peter Barnes, through the lens of Tabori's work. Rovit carefully outlines the quite diverse dramaturgical means with which these authors address the question of theater as a space to bear witness. Johanna Öttl, in her comparative reading of Tabori's The Cannibals with Robert Schindel's drama Dunkelstein (2010), shows how we can read Tabori's embodied theater as a way to present victims as singular self-determined subjects, whereas Schindel shows how this self-determination has been reduced to a mere convention in melodramatic cinema. Tabori's nonrealistic aesthetics, including his disturbing and grotesque humor, present a second and maybe even bigger challenge, especially when transposing his work to the formats of popular culture. Peter Höyng's contribution on Urs Odermatt's film adaptation (2009) of Tabori's Mein Kampf shows, though Höyng is careful not to voice too strong a judgment, how the film nullifies every aspect of Tabori's aesthetics. Ironically, it is the failed adaptation [End Page 136] that retrospectively makes Tabori's dramatic "palimpsest" (157) stand out as the highly complex and provocatively grotesque work it is. Barbara Wallace Grossman's chapter on so-called Holocaust musicals asks whether they can provide an equivalent for Tabori's disturbing laughter. The answer is nuanced: melodramatic Broadway productions do not pass the test at all, whereas some more stylized productions do explore musical theater "as an appropriate genre for presenting Holocaust narratives" (182). The challenges of a transcultural transposition in performance practice are touched upon by the director Laura Forti, who discusses the difficulties she faced when staging The Cannibals in Italy in 2002. Her contribution indirectly indicates how rewarding a more encompassing transnational investigation into Tabori's work could be, an approach that would reflect on how Tabori addresses the legacy of the Holocaust as a European one. Other contributions adopt a more historiographical and genealogical perspective. Klaus van den Berg compares two quite diverse stagings by Tabori of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in 1966 and 1978. Van den Berg reads them in relation with Walter Benjamin's thoughts on "image-space" and "performing space," an approach very well suited to trace the shift from...

INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT OF GENERAL ELECTIONS COMMISSION AND THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE 2024 ELECTION

This article explains the General Elections Commission (KPU) institution in facing the 2024 General Election (Pemilu). The main aims to understand the process of forming an election management body and its institutional transformation as well as the readiness of the KPU in facing the 2024 simultaneous elections. This paper tends to use verstehen analysis which developed by Weber, to look within the institution and slightly oriented towards phenomenological analysis developed by Berger and Luckmann. This research employs genealogical perspective as theoretical perspective. In general, this article concludes that to hold clean election, independent and credible institutions are needed. Therefore; First, it is necessary to strengthen the capacity, technical capabilities and the substance of election organizers, support from human resources with integrity is needed to produce elections with dignity; Second, the readiness of regulations and policies related to all stages of the election and election program can be carried out in accordance with the regulations and stages that govern them; Third, strengthening the organizing institutions to encourage voter participation through outreach and voter education in order to have critical, intelligent voters, and those who reject money politics, not easily mobilized and anti-hoax.

Jaeggi, Agamben and the Critique of Forms of Life

ABSTRACT In this paper, I will try to address the question of how to conceptualise a form of life that is better than others, by putting Rahel Jaeggi’s pragmatism inspired critical theory and Giorgio Agamben’s genealogical perspective in conversation. I argue that for both authors the critique of forms of life is intertwined with “the critique of how”. Not restricting itself to ethical abstinence, and without imposing certain norms upon forms of life, “the critique of how” focuses on the reflexive capacity of forms of life, or their ability to question how they become what they are, which gives rise to an increased perception of the connections and continuities of activities in which they are engaged. In this sense, it may become possible to free the present in order to open it to contingency, and to see the glimpses of a better form of life.

Confronting Discrimination: Phenomenological and Genealogical Perspectives. Introductory Remarks

In this editorial for the special collection Confronting Discrimination: Phenomenological and Genealogical Perspectives, we discuss the productive aspects and limitations of discrimination as a concept for social criticism. Insofar as a proper understanding of discrimination must take into account both concrete experience and historical conditions, we propose to combine phenomenological and genealogical methodologies. While phenomenological analyses run the risk of individualizing discrimination, genealogical approaches are often suspected to reduce experiences of discrimination to their social-historical conditions. Dovetailing phenomenology and genealogy allows for mutual instruction and may herald a more comprehensive understanding of discrimination. To this end, we revisit formative phenomenological contributions to the study of discriminatory experiences and recall prominent motifs in the genealogical tradition for investigating discriminatory patterns. Finally, we show how the articles in this collection apply and critically reflect upon this proposal.

Street Art out of Time

The small town of Asilah in the north of Morocco holds an annual international festival of visual and performance arts, including exhibitions, workshops, conferences, and other parallel activities. However, it is best known for the murals that are painted every year anew by invited artists on the facades of old town houses. Founded in 1978, the Arts Festival or Cultural Moussem of Asilah qualifies as the first street art festival in Morocco and has significantly shaped the cultural context for arts to interact with public spaces. It has, in particular, linked street art manifestations to ideas of cultural dialogue and south-south alliances as well as to urban regeneration and social development. At the same time, the Festival has been criticized for using the integrative concept of the moussem, a traditional communal festivity, for cultural marketing and for connecting arts and culture to the power of the monarchy. By focusing on political, aesthetic, and urban aspects of the institutionalization of the Asilah Festival, this article draws a genealogical perspective on entanglements of art, public culture, and urban politics in Morocco. It thereby analyzes the cultural context in which street art finds its place, meaning, and critical potential today.

An Island of (Dis)Agreement Within Modern Turkish Historiography: the Chronic Conquest(s) of Cyprus Through the Turkish Past, Present and Future

Abstract This article discusses how the Turkish historical narratives of Cyprus evolved in mutually antagonistic and constitutive ways from the 1920s to the 1970s. Based on a genealogical perspective and a thematic focus on the conquest(s) of the island, it ultimately questions how and why Islamist authors approached the island’s history and in what ways they reproduced and/or challenged the official historiography and ruling ideology of the Turkish Republic. In doing so, the article attempts to contextualize the development and transformation of modern Turkish historiography, standing at the juncture of possible pasts, presents and futures, along with identity formations, ideologies and political upheavals.

Schools of urban and regional planning evaluation: A genealogical perspective

Schools of urban and regional planning evaluation: A genealogical perspective

Herméneutique dialectique de la réconciliation dans les Amériques. Généalogie de son origine théologique et de sa sécularisation dans l’œuvre de Las Casas

This article starts by following the original itinerary of the project of reconciliation with indigenous peoples. This project is expressed, in the context of the Americas, by the work of Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566), as well as the dialogue to which it was invited by the work of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (~1536-1616). From a transnational and transcultural genealogical perspective and with a dialectical and sociological hermeneutic approach, the aim is to interpret the ontological transformations (subjectivity, truth, power) expressed in these classical and founding texts, in relation to the contemporary problematic of reconciliation in Canada. Finally, the author proposes to arbitrate a conflict of interpretations between Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo about the meaning of Bartolomé de las Casas’ work.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Class Dynamics from Socialism to Post-Socialism

Introduction to the Special Issue on Class Dynamics from Socialism to Post-Socialism

‘Se beber, não transe’: interrogando os discursos na oferta da Profilaxia Pós-Exposição (PEP)

ABSTRACT Post-Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP) for HIV is a biomedical technology, offered in cases of sexual violence and occupational accidents since the early 2000s, with its offer expanded to situations of consensual sexual relations after 2010. Despite being classified as biomedical, its offer and execution is mediated by relational technologies, permeated by socially constructed meanings. This study aimed to question the discourses produced on the offer of PEP among health workers. The research is inspired by Michel Foucault’s genealogical perspective, based on the need to problematize power relations in the discourses and knowledge of health professionals who work with the implementation of PEP in a medium-sized city in the central region of Paraná. Twelve interviews were carried out with managers of the HIV/AIDS policy and workers in the services that offer PEP. The discourses about the PEP are discussed, highlighting both the right to access and expansion of preventive possibilities and the prescriptive discourses permeating and constraining its offer. In conclusion, it is pointed out the necessity to qualify the access to PEP, affirming it as a practice of freedom.