Political Sense Research Articles

Ruins of the Future: Decaying Urban Landscapes in Richard Jefferies, J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter’s Speculative Fiction (After London, The Drowned World and The Passion of New Eve)

‘Tous les hommes ont un attrait secret pour les ruines’ (Chateaubriand 360) : Chateaubriand’s declaration conforms to his contemporaries’ fascination for the rediscovered ruins of Antiquity, but proves to be still relevant in contemporary speculative fiction. The scopic drive motivating the contemplation of fallen civilizations is centred around the image of decaying city landscapes. If Volney,1 Chateaubriand or Mary Shelley2 are notable example of this phenomenon spanning early to late Romanticism and provide a precedent of the ‘nostalgia for ruins’ (Huyssens, 6), the merging of this type of portrayal with speculative fiction has proved a fertile soil for socio-political and literary explorations of the ‘city’ in its political sense, as the readers get to contemplate the ruins of their present. The posterity of this tradition has acquired new meaning as the decay of the city mirrored contemporary anxieties—nuclear war being a central one after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which inspired numerous science-fiction tropes in both popular and critically acclaimed fiction. As Burton Pike phrases it, the twentieth century literary city came to ‘express the fragmentation of the very concept of community’ (viii). Indeed, the traditional division between the refined, civilised city and the vulgar, violent margins is reversed in contemporary speculative fiction: a ‘relapse into barbarism’3 in the city, pastoral wilderness in the countryside. Those innovative takes on the image of the city lay themselves open to ecocritical, dystopian and ontological readings. To do so, I will provide an analysis of Richard Jefferies’s After London (1911), which delves both into the pastoral description of new wild England and the effect of the traumatic ‘apocalypse’ turning Londoners into barbarians’ tribes; J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World is an example of what he calls ‘inner space’,4 the speculative nature of his story linking the ruins and toxicity of London with the disrupted individual and communal psyche of the survivors. Finally, Carter’s take on another iconic city, New York, offers another perspective on the ruins as symptom and mirror of a decaying humanity, as the apocalyptic metropolis becomes the locus of consumerist and sexual greed, a reversed mirror of John’s New Jerusalem.

Euro as the currency of the EU’s green transition

AbstractStefan Eich’s The Currency of Politics offers us a new way of looking at the EU’s sustainable finance trend, one that allows us to see how the ‘greening’ financial transactions creates “green money” and thus intertwines with questions of justice and democracy. In this contribution I explore how The Currency of Politics can help us understand the significance and the constitutional implications of the transformation of the euro into the ‘currency of the green transition’ as it has been referred to by Eurogroup’s President in 2021. I show how the three trends of EU green bond issuance, granular sustainable finance regulation and the progressive greening of monetary policy are moulding the euro in a political sense as the ‘currency of the green transition’ as much as the legal tender. Euro currency becomes in this sense ‘a governance project’ for the sustainable transition. This perspective offers multiple points of engagement with the themes of Stefan Eich’s important book. For example, the claim of privatisation of money creation must be qualified to reflect on the implications of the granular way in which EU law defines what green money is. At the same time, while a ‘green currency’ creates spaces for engagement and new forms of organising a polity, it still remains largely removed from ordinary citizens as ‘technocratic’ rather than ‘democratic’ self-government.

Review: Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times, edited by Christina Baade and Kristin A. McGee

Review: <i>Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times</i>, edited by Christina Baade and Kristin A. McGee

A Realpolitik of Ethics. Behind the Specificity of the French ART System (1972–1994)

This paper provides a fresh look at the specificity of French ART rules. Re-exploring the genesis of sperm banks and the emergence of ART regulation in the 1970s and 80s involves considering a sequence during which several options were competing and no “national path” was defined. Sperm banking constituted the locus of tensions concerning the social status of doctors, their place within the institutional landscape, and the impact of biomedicine. The Centres d’étude et de conservation du sperme humains (CECOS)’ “victory” did not result from its intrinsic features, but rather from their leader's integrated conception of ART and political sense.

Seeing Like a Native Anthropologist: A Post-Postcolonial Reflection on the Native Turn in Asian Academia

This article aims to delve into the “native turn” emerging in anthropology and broad academia in Asia and the Global South in the last two decades, represented by their growing momentum in decolonization, autonomy, and “indigenization.” There, however, exists a tendency in anthropology, especially among non-Western and “mixed” anthropologists, to dismiss the idea of native(s) or native anthropologists and sometimes replace it with the amorphous notion of “halfies.” I contend that many of the “halfies” scholars, informed by postcolonial and postmodern thoughts, tend to misread the de facto postcolonial conditions in which the West continues to dominate in the existing world-systems. I argue that it is vital to acknowledge the native turn as an ethnographical fact because this recognition is closely associated with the prospect of decolonizing anthropology and Western-dominated knowledge production. Next, I use my experience of the native turn(s) to Tibetan and Chinese sociocultural institutions and political sensibilities to better contextualize and exemplify the examined broad native turn in anthropology and social science in Asia. Furthermore, I propose a multifaceted view of natives or nativeness as a necessary step to engage more constructively with the idea of native(s) and the native turn. In so doing, I advocate a post-postcolonial critique to make a timely and necessary intellectual intervention.

Animals, Angelenos, and the Arbitrary

AbstractMultispecies entanglement has been a major research focus in environmental humanities, aiming to rethink ontological and ethical possibilities, especially in urban settings, by attending to speculative other-than-human futures. This article dwells on already existing entanglements of multiple species of animals in Los Angeles, using empirical data (conversations from the social media platform Nextdoor) to describe these entanglements according to a fourfold framework—spatial, emotional, behavioral, and political. Drawing on the political philosophy of nondomination, it argues that existing entanglements are primarily arbitrary in a political sense, and that moving beyond them will require reducing this arbitrariness, even it if it means restricting human freedom or introducing new forms of control over animals, for a more-than-human city to be just.

Review: Le Complotisme Protestant Contemporain: A propos d’une thèse sur la tribu de Dan (Contemporary Protestant Conspiracy Theories: Concerning a Thesis on the Tribe of Dan), by Christophe Colera

This book performs a rhetorical analysis of the website “Mystery, Babylon The Great: Catholic or Jewish?” (https://watch.pairsite.com/mystery-babylon.html) as part of a sociological investigation of the nature of conspiracy arguments. Christophe Colera positions his argument as a sociological one both by noting the political implications of such arguments—he credits them with a role in the election of President Donald Trump—and by situating it as an element of a social “field” in the sense that the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu proposed it. The introduction provides rationales for a sociologist following the lead of Max Weber to study an obscure website with spurious factual claims and undetermined authorship. There is no evidence apart from the website itself of either “Barbara Aho” or her husband, credited as its authors. They may simply be another fictive element among the imaginings that drive the website’s narrative.Colera is particularly interested in how a born-again Christian applies esoteric literature, such as the writings of Helena Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley, at face value to construct their conspiracy theory. As such, Colera sees the website not only as an opportunity to examine the “doxa” that underlies various YouTube videos that present current events as revealing the Devil’s handiwork, but also, and more tentatively, as a way of understanding the claims of esoteric literature by seeing what they look like when inverted from their original function as writings opposed to Christianity to tools for a born-again Christian to construct secular history as diabolical history.The bulk of the book is a detailed exegesis of the website, which presents an apocalyptic historical narrative that stretches from biblical Israel to the present, using the purported apostasy of the biblical tribe of Dan as an esoteric key to an unholy chronology that leads up to the current era as one that will usher in the Antichrist. Beginning with the apostasy of the Tribe of Dan, going through their absorption of Egyptian esotericism, to their later manifestations in Roman Catholicism, the Merovingians, the Knights Templar, and the Illuminati, Aho’s website presents a linear vision of history as a demonic corruption of God’s plan. Colera’s analysis of this particular Christian narrative often treats “Christianity” as a discernable whole, which he backs up with selective quoting of scripture. His purpose here is to draw the website’s argumentation into closer proximity to Christianity as a whole than most Christian practitioners would care to admit, but this strategy ignores the extent to which contemporary scholarship has dissolved “Christianity” into “Christianities.” At various points, Colera reflects the upside-down logic of the narrative back onto contemporary academic protocols, for example, by treating structuralism and Braudel’s idea of “long history,” as similar exercises in attempting to create meaning beyond the empirically immediate. However, he also maintains an implicit commitment to a secular perspective as, for example, his comparison of the patent ignorance of the website’s author(s) with that of the founders of Islam, Mormonism, and New Age spirituality.This book will be useful to scholars of esoteric religions, Evangelical Christianity, and the place of the Internet in contemporary society. Given that members of the Republican Party focused on questions concerning pedophilia during Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination hearings—which the journalist Amanda Marcotte has taken as sign that the anonymous website QAnon is driving the political agenda of one of the two major American political parties—it remains timely in a political sense. Colera sees his contribution as primarily a disinterested study, although he acknowledges its political implications.My primary criticism of the book is that Colera’s purported objectivity leads him to insist that we must give the authors of the website credit for restricting their antisemitic logic to merely a portion of the Jewish people. He might well have investigated how such a “narrow” antisemitism depends on and legitimates the general antisemitic logic that has fueled violence for centuries. This serious objection aside, the book remains a useful entry into a mode of thinking that is far more pertinent than academic pursuers of reasoned discourse might wish to admit.

TERRITORIAL ISSUES IN RELATIONS OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION WITH THE STATES OF THE BALTIC REGION AT THE PRESENT STAGE

The issues of territorial disputes between the Russian Federation (RF) and the states of the Baltic region (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland) that preceded the signing of interstate treaties on borders after the collapse of the USSR are reviewed. The historical, political, ethnic and economic factors of solving these issues and the formation of borders between the Russian Federation and the states of the Baltic region, starting from 1920, during the Second World War, in the first postwar years and until now, are analyzed. Special focus is made on the status of the Kaliningrad region of the Russian Federation (former East Prussia) in the context of the national interest of Poland and Lithuania (Lithuania Minor). It is claimed that there are currently no territorial problems in the relations of the Baltic states with the Russian Federation in the political and legal sense. However, the very aggressive policy of the Kremlin, especially as a result of the armed intervention against Ukraine, is able to activate them and cause a revision of the borders in the event of a possible expansion of the conflict into this region and the participation of NATO in it.

Communication and ‘revolt’

‘Revolt’ is usually associated with ‘rebellion’, or ‘revolution’ in a political sense, and at an intuitivelevel there is certainly a connection or similarity among these three concepts. The psychoanalyticaltheorist and philosopher, Julia Kristeva, has however developed a notion of ‘revolt’ (and, relatedto it, of ‘revolution’) that goes far beyond the common understanding of the term. Moreover, in herunderstanding of the concept, ‘revolt’ may indeed be a ‘communicational’ prerequisite for contemporary‘globalised’ society to break out of an invidious (and potentially violent) standoff between a dominantworld culture, subject to the logic of the market, on the one hand, and a fundamentalist ideologicalreaction to it, on the other. Kristeva points the way to a creative enlivening of individuals’ lives, aswell as of society at large, through her passionate elaboration on the potential for ‘revolution’ inlanguage and communication, and also her development of the notion of ‘revolt’ as a legacy ofWestern culture – a legacy which is under threat in the present ‘culture of the spectacle’.

‘We’ll be like Che’ Foquismo and sacrificial ethics within the Latin American revolutionary activism

ABSTRACT The article focuses on the double dimension – political and moral – that the Guevarist legacy assumed within the Latin American left in the 60s and 70s. First, it identifies those postulates emanating from Guevarist rhetoric that offered both a language and a political sense to the revolutionary left, thus promoting armed action. What fundamentally stands out, among those postulates, is the inclusion of the revolutionary process in a war on a continental and global scale, as well as the foquist assertion that the armed action from the revolutionaries creates the subjective conditions for the revolution. Secondly, the article approaches a central figure of the revolutionary imaginary erected as a model of conduct: the new man. By addressing this dual legacy, the aim is to illuminate the particular forms in which the thought and action of Guevara shaped a political subjectivity and sacrificial ethics for thousands of Latin American revolutionaries.

DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE OF THE THEORETICAL AND LEGAL PROFILE OF THE LEGITIMACY OF LAW

The subject of the study is the definition of the disciplinary perspective of the theoretical-legal profile of the legitimacy of law. Methodology. The methodological basis of the study are methods of induction and deduction, dialectical-materialistic method, the method of analysis and synthesis, the historical method, which allowed to objectively understand the content and essence of the issues under study. The aim of the article is to investigate the theoretical concept of legitimacy of law in the context of its correlation with the concept of legitimacy in the modern state of law. The results of the study showed that the disciplinary perspective of the theoretical-legal profile of the legitimacy of law is defined. Namely: proposed a modern theoretical and philosophical genesis of the legal understanding of the legitimacy of law and legality; investigated the relationship of legality, legitimacy of law and legal consciousness in the theory of state and law; identified conceptual directions in the study of the phenomenon of legitimacy of law. Conclusion. Legitimacy is both a constructive and a destructive concept. In its strict form, this concept characterizes a certain moment of attitude toward the law and the problems of its effective functioning. However, in philosophy or legal theory, for example, legitimation should thus mean communicating a legitimate-legal character to the law. It appears that this concept, which has a purely legal etymology – legitimate, excludes from the law its value essence, shifting the center of gravity to the practical assimilation of the law in the public and individual consciousness. This gives rise to a rather peculiar construction. Law can be anything, the main thing is that it corresponds to a formal procedure. The right thus legitimized enters a new stage – assimilation and acceptance in the public and individual consciousness. If it is not accepted voluntarily, it does not cease to be a right, but suffers from a lack of legitimacy. In essence, legitimacy captures two essential points: the first is the orientation toward dialogue with society and with each of its members individually, that is, the final sanction in the minds of the people or its majority; but, on the other hand, it is not the law itself that possesses some internal attribute of supreme legitimacy, but only its collective psychological perception and justification. In other words, the central issue in this approach is, on the one hand, the role of individual consciousness and, on the other hand, it creates a very wide scope for technological, in the sociological and political sense, influence on collective consciousness.

GENERALLİKTEN İDAM SEHPASINA (DADAŞ) RÜŞTÜ PAŞA: ASKERÎ VE SİYASİ FAALİYETLERİ

Millî Mücadele yıllarının kurtuluşa odaklanarak tüm farklılıkları ortadan kaldıran kenetlenme süreci Cumhuriyet’in ilk yılları ile beraber bir yol ayrımına dönüşmeye başlamıştır. Bu sürecin ilk evresinde kurtarıcı sıfatıyla hareket eden askeri ve siyasi yöneticilerin birçoğu yeni dönemde köklü devrimler karşısında muhalif bir tavır takınmışlardır. Bu radikal değişimin en önemli örneklerinden birini teşkil eden Rüştü Paşa’nın konu edindiği bu çalışmada onun askeri safhadaki başarılı çalışmalarının ardından siyasi anlamda Mustafa Kemal Paşa’ya başlatılan muhalif çalışmalardaki rolü ve bir suikast planına kadar varan süreci ele alınmaktadır. Düşünsel farklılıkların ve mevcut siyasi atmosferin kendisini muhalefete ittiği bu yıllarda, Rüştü Paşa, bağımsız ve tek başına muhalefet yerine tüm kariyeri boyunca olduğu gibi geri planda kalmayı ancak yine muhalif bir görev edinmeyi ihmal etmemiştir. Askeri faaliyetleri boyunca güvenilir ve sadık bir ikinci adam sıfatını hak eden Rüştü Paşa, Meclis faaliyetlerinde ise sıkı bir muhalif haline gelmiştir. Onu İzmir Suikastı gibi bir olay içinde yer almaya ve dolayısıyla idama götüren süreci ortaya koymak çalışmanın temel hedefidir. Çalışma arşiv belgeleri, gazeteler, anılar ve çeşitli araştırma eserler incelenerek hazırlanmıştır.

World Political Theatre and Performance: Theories, Histories, Practices ed. by Mireia Aragay, Paola Botham, and José Ramón Prado-Pérez

Reviewed by: World Political Theatre and Performance: Theories, Histories, Practices ed. by Mireia Aragay, Paola Botham, and José Ramón Prado-Pérez Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. WORLD POLITICAL THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE: THEORIES, HISTORIES, PRACTICES. Edited by Mireia Aragay, Paola Botham, and José Ramón Prado-Pérez. Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2020. Cloth, €105.00/ $126.00; ebook, €105.00/ $126.00. This volume arose out of the Political Performances Working Group of IFTR, offering fourteen essays concerning political performances in Finland, the United Kingdom, Malta, Turkey, Belarus, Poland, Estonia, South Africa, India, and China. It is the last two that would be of interest to readers of this journal, although the entire volume is interesting and readable. At heart, by "political theatre" the editors here refer to theatre in response to political oppression and social injustice. The volume is divided into two sections. The first considers "the relationship between performance and activism" and the second concerns "current debates in and around political theatre" (p. 4). In part one the Asianist will find two essays of particular interest. The first, Pujya Ghosh's "From Revolution to Dissent: A Case Study of the Changing Role of Theatre and Activism in Bengal," offers an historical analysis of playwrights Utpal Dutt and Debesh Chattopadhyay and the Naxalbari movement in the 1960s in Bengal. Ghosh posits that both artists emerged in the sixties as performers, activists, and intellectuals, using theatre to challenge the political and social status quo. They created a Bengali theatre that was "a component of civil society, a space in which political battles and future dreams would be reflected" (p. 40). However, as the seventies drew on, progressive [End Page 403] politics began to lose their cultural heft. Ghosh then asks, "to what extent can an intellectual/artist with a left political ideology perform his/her 'political' role under the growing pervasiveness of the capitalist order?" (p. 41). The answer, of course, is "it's complicated," but she concludes that "the parameters of theatre and activism have indeed shifted from revolution to dissent," a paradigm that reflects much theatre in the world since the sixties (p. 51). Revolution seems no longer possible and merely pointing out a different path than the status quo is now the aim of political theatre, which ultimately requires us to rethink what the term "left" means in a political sense. As historical analysis, the essay is interesting and informative, as a critique of the history of political performance in Bengal; it offers a means by which to understand the ultimate lack of efficacy in theatre as a force for social change on the macro level. A second essay from the first section, Julia Boll's "Making the Audience Cry: Witnessing Violence and the Ethics of Compelled Empathy" offers a fascinating exploration of two separate plays that each attempt to make an audience cry in response to atrocity. Boll compares the Belarus Free Theatre's 2012 production of Trash Cuisine (a play about state-sponsored violence and genocide) with Yael Farber's 2013 Nirbhaya, a play devised in response to the gang rape of a young woman on a bus in Delhi. The latter piece was devised and workshopped in India under the direction of Farber, a South African playwright best known for her post-apartheid works that engage and deconstruct that nation's historic racial and gender traumas and explore the politics of witnessing and restorative justice. The play was subsequently toured to Edinburgh, Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore. An example of verbatim theatre, using the words and stories of witnesses, the play attempts to evoke empathy, horror, and ultimately tears from the audience. Boll's essay effectively explores the ethics of doing so, and Farber's role as an outsider engaging with an Indian atrocity; Boll then compares it with Free Theatre's show in one of the strongest essays in the volume about the role and purpose of the artist in dealing with political violence, making it as personal as possible, especially for those who have not suffered from it. Lastly, one essay in the second section engages Chinese political theatre. Wei Zheyu's "The Touring Grass Stage: Staging the Site-Specific Dilemma of Globalization...

Grimes’s Hymn to Technocracy, Insolvent Affordances, and the Need for Reparative Organology

This article weaves together futurist electropop, the neorationalist memescape, neoliberal urban planning, and digital finance to illustrate some of the new epistemological and political challenges facing the growing musicological subfield of critical organology. Drawing upon recent studies of financial technology, it argues that calls to erase theoretical abstraction and return to a “common-sense” concern for “tangible things” come dangerously close to endorsing the neoliberal drive to replace public institutions with entrepreneurial competition. The aims are to show that the “affordances” of music technology today are not necessarily discernible when organologists limit their attention to musical instruments’ ontologies alone, and to propose an alternative focused on “repairing” music technology’s capacity for democratization. The first section presents a reading of the Grimes single “We Appreciate Power,” situating the music in relation to an ethnographic account of the scene where Grimes first emerged. The second section seeks a definition of affordance that makes sense of the technological politics at work in things like rationalist meme economies and neoliberal innovation hubs. The concluding section outlines the case for a reparative organology that would both account better for materiality and resolve anxieties around theoretical abstraction.

The Critical Review of the Discourse of North Korean Human Rights and International Anti-corruption: Focused on the Paradox of Human Rights and Sovereignty

The corruption scandal of North Korea has seen by UN reports said the food and humanitarian aid being diverted to corrupt bureaucrat, whereby requesting to open an investigation. Given int'l inquiry, North Korea has responded by the paradox of human rights and sovereignty, which reflected human security and the principle of nonintervention. That is not, however, only North Korea's assertion in which some way analogous to a long-standing claim of the third world : the issue of North and South, and imperialism versus anti-colonialism. From the sense, the analysis has focused the normative issue of human rights and state sovereignty, and has explored the sphere of the notion in which North Korea engaged the Third World enquiring the justice of the core in line with anti-corruption regime's evolvement. Secondly, it evolved to show what attributes the paradoxical logic to North Korean regime's highly rigid political sense, namely sovereign priority.

TÜRK İSTİKLAL HARBİ’NDE BATI CEPHESİ’NDE BİR İHTİYAT KUVVETİ: MECLİS MUHAFIZ TABURU (1920-1923)

By the end of 1918, when the Turkish National Struggle began, there was a military resistance, as well as many organizations in a political sense. While these organizations could make military decisions to organize the National Struggle, they also managed this struggle in a political sense. One of them was the representative committee (Heyet-i Temsiliye) established at the Erzurum Congress. On December 27, 1919, the representative committee that came to Ankara with Mustafa Kemal Pasha carried out its works from here. During this time, Istanbul was occupied by the Entente Forces and the Ottoman Assembly was disbanded. The Grand National Assembly was opened on April 23, 1920, for this reason. Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the leader of the National Struggle, was elected for the speakership of the Assembly. After Mustafa Kemal Pasha became the speaker of the assembly, Lieutenant Ismail Hakkı came to him from Ardahan as a companion officer. Lieutenant First Lieutenant İsmail Hakkı had established the guard battalion of the Grand National Assembly on July 18, 1920, by the order of Mustafa Kemal Pasha. After this battalion was formed, sometimes it served to protect the Assembly and Mustafa Kemal Pasha in Ankara, and sometimes it participated in battles on the Western Front as a reserve force without hesitating to go any front. In this study, the activities of the Assembly Guard Battalion, the first protection battalion of the Grand National Assembly which was opened on April 23, 1920, after the Turkish War of Independence began, on the Western Front were discussed. The main sources of the study in question are the documents obtained from the Archives of the Ministry of National Defense. In addition, various studies in the literature were also used. The documents and information in question were analyzed by qualitative and quantitati methods and the study was put forward.

Post-truth in its political and philosophical sense. Review on the monograph “Post-truth” by Lee Mcintyre mit press essential knowledge series, 2018

A contemporary American philosopher analyzes the content and use of the concept of post-truth, mainly on examples of political situation management by the media, but also on control in the sphere of scientific knowledge with the help of alternative facts.

Making Sense of Populist Hyperreality in the Post-Truth Age: Evidence from Volodymyr Zelensky’s Voters

ABSTRACT Building upon the literature on new information environments, this article explores how citizens make sense of hyperreal politics. To that end, it turns to the particularly illustrative case of Volodymyr Zelensky’s 2019 presidential campaign, characterized by the complex fusion of fact and fiction, unclear truth statements, and prevalence of populist narratives. In 25 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, the article examines how Zelensky’s voters and viewers of the Servant of the People—a television comedy series featuring Zelensky in the role of the Ukrainian President—interpreted the populist hyperreality of the series, navigated between various mediated representations of Zelensky, and evaluated him and his fictional counterpart after the former became the President of Ukraine in reality. The findings show that the populist hyperreality of the series affected not only its viewers’ desire to vote for Zelensky, but also their overall perception of Ukrainian politics by highlighting some of its aspects and ignoring others. The obtained data also suggest that for most interviewees, there was no strict demarcation between the images of Holoborodko, Zelensky-actor and Zelensky-politician. The study points to the need to reassess our understanding of deliberative democracy and informed citizenship in the new information environments.

GENDER, CLASS AND IDENTITY: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE

Fantasy Fiction unifies supernatural elements and life with the help of imagination to build something novel. Though it is considered far removed from the primary world, it remains a reflection to reality. George R. R. Martin, an American Writer, created a whole new world as a setting for his Fantasy Fiction series, A Song of Ice and Fire. This he did, not only in the geographical sense but also in the social, political and religious sense. Martin invented religions, customs, traditions, legal systems, and languages to suit these, in order to make his world authentic. His inspirations from Medieval Europe are seen in the architecture, attire, food, mannerisms, social rules, language, and so on, which he constructed for his texts. The series has a complex structure and plot, with more complex characters. It is meant to be a heptalogy, but two more volumes are yet to be published. Gender, Class and Identity are some major concepts being discussed in academics. In this article, understanding of these key terms will be established. Subsequently, select instances from the text will be used to demonstrate how these concepts resonate in the selected text. For this purpose, Critical Discourse Analysis will be used as a method to examine the language used in the select instances. Critical Discourse Analysis is a transdisciplinary tool developed borrowing thoughts from fields like Sociology, Psychology, Linguistics, and Criticism. It is also a part of Hermeneutics as discourse analysis is used to explore the possible interpretations of a text and is, in itself, not a substantiating theory

Interpreting the Political, Politicizing Interpretation: Doing Politically Sensible Social Science Research

The article outlines a methodological concept of political sensibility, building upon the political difference theory. Merging the ideas of the associative and dissociative theoretical branches of political difference literature, first, an integrated framework of the political condition is presented. From this, analytical dimensions are derived, namely, the associative/dissociative, the political/apolitical/discontentious, the static/processual, and the vertical/horizontal dimensions of the political. Second, the interpretive and ontological turns in social science are conceptualized, according to this framework, as a politicization of science. Taking this motion further, third, ideas to enact a politically sensible science are developed along the methodologically turned dimensions (merging the second and the third to an acknowledging/acting dimension). A political sensibility could deliver analytical categories to look upon political phenomena beyond structurally limited conceptions of “politics.” Methodologically, it could ease designing situated social science research, that is, research that consciously conceives of itself as part of the social realities it studies.