Liberal Project Research Articles

The Failure of Liberal Interventionism: Deconstructing Afghan Identity Discourses of “Modern” and “Tradition”

In Afghanistan, the crisis of liberal intervention unfolded in the failure to establish democratic structures as a solution to terrorism and extremism in the aftermath of 9/11. Following the emergency withdrawal of US and NATO forces from Afghanistan on August 30, 2021, President Ashraf Ghani discreetly left Kabul, enabling the Taliban to regain control and form a new government in the country. The recurrent pattern of intervention and the subsequent return of the Taliban highlights a failure of the liberal project, which is a significant concern addressed in this article as the main question: Why has liberal intervention failed in Afghanistan? The answer lies in deconstructing the hegemonic discourse of “modern” Afghan to understand how it was resisted and replaced by the alternative discourse of “tradition,” subsequently, leading to the failure of the liberal project. The “modern” discourse, rooted in the US social context, aimed to civilise the perceived primitive and traditional Afghans. Conversely, the Taliban, drawing upon the Afghan social context, contested the “modern” discourse with an alternative discourse of “tradition” portraying liberals and their supporters as “occupiers” and “oppressors,” thus, justifying their armed resistance (jihad) against occupying forces. Framed within a critical social constructivism, the text, interviews, speeches, and statements of prominent Taliban leaders and the US presidents, apprise how specific identities have been employed to naturalise the “modern” discourse as justification for intervention. Critical discourse analysis explicates how the “tradition” discourse denaturalised the former and, subsequently, facilitated the establishment of the Taliban’s power in Afghanistan.

Industrial democracy between neocapitalism and postfordism. The political and intellectual trajectory of Bruno Trentin (1926-2007)

During his long political trajectory Bruno Trentin (1926-2007) never ceased to question the relationship between work and democracy. The Italian intellectual and trade union leader denounced the domination of the «productivist ideology» of scientific management over the entire social and political Left. According to this ideology, trade union action was reduced to the animation of distributive conflict, while the political struggle was played out outside the economic sphere, through the conquest of the state. Contrary to this vision, the 1960s were the source of a new self-management political culture, born of the encounter between the Marxist, Christian and libertarian traditions of the labour movement, which aimed to make workers and their unions «political subjects» in their own right by gaining real decision-making power over the organisation of work. The decline of Fordism offers an opportunity for a new "contract" in which work can achieve its political recognition and autonomy within the workplace and not from outside. It is from this history that Trentin draws to defend the actuality of a project of liberation from subordinate «work». In this article I reinscribe Trentin's reflections in the long history of his career as an intellectual, trade unionist and political activist, as well as in the controversies and the impasses that have shaped his life and the history whole Italian and European labour movement during the twentieth century.

Design Thinking in Higher Education: Opportunities and Challenges for Decolonized Learning

This article builds upon current research to understand the value and limitations of teaching and learning design thinking (DT) in higher education. We implemented a mixed-methods study with faculty and students across 23 diverse courses in four higher education institutions in the United States. Findings showed that following structured learning processes, engaging in active listening, and focusing on others’ perspectives were the most valued DT practices across disciplines. In contrast, prototyping and experimentation were the least used DT practices, with widely varying understandings across disciplines. Additionally, we found consistent evidence that DT can support liberatory teaching and learning practices that decolonize students’ perceptions of power, encourage situated and action-oriented empathy, and provide opportunities for co-creation. This is particularly true when faculty intentionally encourage collaboration and project framing focused on critically analyzing dominant ways of knowing and power structures. Our analysis further revealed the challenges and importance of prototyping and conducting experiments with project partners. Ultimately, this approach can significantly enhance liberatory project outcomes and facilitate decolonized learning experiences. Given our findings, we point out limitations and challenges across current DT pedagogical practices and provide recommendations for integrating DT practices across disciplines in ways that center on issues of systemic oppression, social identity, and human-environmental relationships.

Paying lip service to gender inequality – EU rural development policy in Sweden

While research has pointed to the lack of gender mainstreaming in rural and agricultural policy, how rural policy determines what is seen as problems of gender inequality in the first place and how it constructs men and women in relation to rural development remains unexplored. In this article we perform an in-depth analysis of how rural policy constructs gender inequality problems and gendered subjects. We employ the ‘What’s the problem represented to be’ approach to analyse the implementation of the European Union’s Rural Development Policy in one Swedish region, Jönköping County. We conclude that gender inequality is largely left unproblematic in relation to rural development, placing women in the subject position of being uninterested in rural development policy and lacking the ability to take it on. The focus on farmers and ICT broadband positions adult, Swedish-born men as the norm, reflecting a neoliberal emphasis on economic growth through competitive businesses. We also conclude that the policy twists ‘gender mainstreaming’ by claiming that it promotes gender equality, while it in fact takes no action. Paying lip service to gender equality rural policy thereby co-opts feminism, in line with a neoliberal ‘postfeminist’ discourse, which is harmful to the feminist project. Alternative approaches to gender inequalities suggest that there may be broader, and different, ways of discussing them in relation to rural development, making for a broader spectrum of problematisations and subject positions, which may, in turn, allow a transformation towards gender equality.

Re-storying schools as “research sites” of climate change in the Chthulucene: diffractively reading through the land of a primary school in South Africa

Inspired by Karen Barad’s agential realism and Donna Haraway’s use of the Chthulucene, our paper profoundly troubles and unsettles the humanist subject that has been the cause of so much trouble. Re-turning to a government primary school in Cape Town as the “research site,” we adopt temporal and spatial diffraction as a postqualitative research methodology. The colonial practices related to land ownership, are not in the past, but remain in its be(com)ing. Land “use” in South Africa during Apartheid, was, and still is, a form of violence. Thinking-with Neimanis and McLauchlan, we understand a school as not separate from the phenomenon of climate change, but as one of its sites and as a feminist project. A diffractive image articulates aesthetically and politically how the land as the more-than-human is a significant part of the phenomenon and queers school as a concept and “research site.”

IN SEARCH OF SOLIDARITY: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF BELARUSIAN FEMINIST ACTIVIST PROJECTS

The article explores the interlink between the digital transformation process of Belarusian feminist activist projects and solidarity within the feminist community. The article aims to characterize the process of Belarusian feminist activist projects’ digital transformation, as well as to answer the question, how the digital transformation of Belarusian feminist activist projects influences the solidarity of the Belarusian feminist community as an ability to maintain horizontal networking and practices of care, as well as to form autonomous political subjectivities and unite for collective action. The article theorizes the concepts of feminist solidarity, the essence of digitalized activism and approaches to defining feminist civil society in Belarus. Building on existing scholarship and semi-structured interviews results, the article identifies how feminist projects underwent digitalization, presented by sixteen interlocutors, and contributes to understanding feminist solidarity, its challenges, and its further potential. The results provide an overview of the most significant features of feminist projects’ digital transformation in Belarus, including evidence of the uniqueness of the online space for the birth of a new generation of Belarusian feminists and related intergenerational transfer of knowledge both within and outside the community, overcoming the digital divide and boosting the dissemination of feminist values among Belarusians through the digitalization of feminist projects, rethinking the possible ways to strengthening solidarity within the community, and the need to constantly defend the feminist language within the political process of democratization in Belarus highlighted through digital activism.

Peasant Liberation Project of 1857 as Disproof of the Myth about Muravyov as Serfdom Supporter

Peasant Liberation Project of 1857 as Disproof of the Myth about Muravyov as Serfdom Supporter

The Captive New Afrikan Nation, the Politics of Solidarity, and the Ongoing Struggle for Liberation

In 1968, the world was changing. New nation-states were forming as former colonies revised relationships between Africa, Asia, and the “West.” Some fought hard for their liberation, and some were still fighting. From Vietnam to Zimbabwe, bloody struggles against racist settlers and western capital clarified the tenacity of white supremacy and imperialism. Other nations were “peacefully” exchanging white political leadership for parties and personalities rooted in local soil. All excited the US Black left who welcomed the changes as the ideal condition for Black liberation. Among them were activists who, beginning in March 1968, decided to pursue the creation of an independent Black nation-state that would occupy land in the Deep South. Considering Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia as the rightful territory of their Republic of New Afrika, those who championed independence sought to replicate the apparent successes of Tanzania and other newly formed states, while contributing to the complete overthrow of western hegemony. This contribution explores the theory of the New Afrikan struggle for land and independence. It considers how New Afrikans negotiated their African ancestry and colonized status with their distinctly North American position within geopolitics. In asserting their right to self-determination, New Afrikans complicated the meanings of captivity and Third World solidarity in ways unique to the Black Power era. Even as they built on their predecessors from the African Blood Brotherhood, UNIA, and even the CPUSA, New Afrikans helped to frame their era’s political ideas in a manner that continues to guide projects of international liberation and solidarity.

Istoriografiya politicheskoj istorii Rossii v situacii postmoderna pervoj poloviny 1990-h gg.

The article examines the specifics of the development of historiography in the first half of the 1990s on the collapse of the USSR and the formation of a new Russian statehood. In particular, the issues of studying the variability of future political development, specifically, the possibility of implementing the liberal project and democratic transition in the country, as well as the causes of the crisis state of power and society, are discussed.

Contributions of a “Brazilianized” Radical Behaviorist Theory of Subjectivity to the Feminist Debate on Women

An essentialist view of gender and an individualistic concept of subjectivity have distanced psychological theories from emancipatory feminist projects. In Brazil, similar to some other psychological orientations, the behavior-analytic field has sought an interface with feminism. The anti-essentialist vein of radical behaviorism underpins the early movement toward feminism. This essay aims to expand the area of contact with feminism through a theoretical proposal for understanding women’s subjectivity inspired by Brazilian behavior-analytic literature. From a contextualized, multidimensional, pluralized, and politicized view of subjectivity, women’s subjectivation is forged in a tripartite complex of body, person, and “self”, whose relative unity is susceptible to changes and conflicts. In a patriarchal, racist, and cis-heteronormative society, such as the Brazilian one, subjectivation is also an oppressive process. Nevertheless, the essay demonstrates that women’s subjectivation can be a process of emancipatory liberation. This possibility is glimpsed within a virtuous dialectical circuit between disruptive verbal communities (uncommitted to institutional, hierarchical, and oppressive social control) and subversive subjectivities. Thus, behavior-analytic psychology has theoretical tools to situate the process of women’s subjectivation not as a locus of depoliticization but as a crucial ally in constructing a more equitable and just society, as envisioned by feminism.

Waitresses in Action

In the 1970s, women in Toronto created the Waitresses Action Committee to protest the introduction of a “differential” or lower minimum wage for wait staff serving alcohol. Their campaign was part of their broader feminist critique of women’s exploitation and the gendered and sexualized nature of waitressing. Influenced by their origins in the Wages for Housework campaign, they stressed the linkages between women’s unpaid work in the home and the workplace. Their campaign eschewed worksite organizing for an occupational mobilization outside of the established unions; they used petitions, publicity, and alliances with sympathizers to try to stop the rollback in their wages. They were successful in mobilizing support but not in altering the government’s decision. Nonetheless, their spirited campaign publicized new feminist perspectives on women’s gendered and sexualized labour, and it contributed to the ongoing labour feminist project of enhancing working-class women’s equality, dignity, and economic autonomy. An analysis of their mobilization also helps to enrich and complicate our understanding of labour and socialist feminism in this period.

Contesting feminism: pedagogical problems in classical Hollywood cinema, feminist theory, and media studies

ABSTRACT In this essay, I explore the pasts and futures of teaching and researching classical Hollywood cinema in feminist media studies. After outlining some of the problems associated with Laura Mulvey’s influential work on the male gaze, I consider subsequent feminist responses to Mulvey’s work. In particular, I focus on the attempts by post-Mulvey feminist film scholars to reject in their critical practice Mulvey’s conclusion that classical Hollywood cinema is anathema to feminist progress vis-à-vis media representations of women while accepting the theoretical premise that classical Hollywood cinema is inherently misogynistic and patriarchally corrupt at its core. On this point, I discuss the controversial clashes between male and female scholars over this disjunction between theory and criticism. With reference to the films of Otto Preminger, I demonstrate the probative value of an inclusive feminist media studies praxis in which, on the one hand, theory informs rather than distorts criticism, and, on the other hand, male and female scholars are able to assess the contributions—past, present, and future—of men to the project of feminism.

Versatile Black Female Identity in Olympia Vernon’s Eden

Political movements of racism and feminism during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries included monolithic approaches to identity that treated each category of race and gender exclusively. As a result, these movements fail to serve the black feminist liberation project because they do not treat blackness and gender as interlocking aspects that shape their experience. Therefore, this article aims to examine how black women’s intersectional position is represented in Eden(2003), a novel about the American South by Olympia Vernon, and how this examination enhances a powerful, versatile black female identity. Drawing on theories of intersectionality and gendered subjectivity as positionality, this study highlights how black Maddy Dangerfield, the protagonist, navigates women’s racial and gender suppression in the novel. In doing so, Maddy acquires consciousness that problematic racial and gender configurations throughout history do not necessarily hold deterministic powers over her subjectivity. In this sense, versatility as a form of radical black female subjectivity is an outcome of a simultaneous positioning as part of a historical context and detached from the determinism of that context. Maddy uses her positional perspective to create new meanings about blackness and femaleness. This process exposes how values attached to race and gender hold no deterministic power over a woman’s subjectivity. The significance of this study lies in shedding light on how versatile black female identity is part of a non-traditional way of resisting racial and gender domination that enacts engaging intersectionality and positionality

Toward a dialogical sociology: Presidential address – XX ISA World Congress of Sociology 2023

In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the entangled pathologies of late modernity are increasingly revealing themselves in a simultaneous: (1) emergence of authoritarianism in the South and Right populism in the North that is gaining momentum year after year; (2) rising trends of inequality, precarity, and exclusion; and (3) hierarchical social polarizations are emerging in more and more societies. How do, and how should, the social sciences, and particularly sociology, react to these pathologies of late modernity? I would argue that the bulk of the responses of the social sciences and/or sociology to these pathologies are defined as being classically liberal but politically illiberal – I call this peculiar combination ‘Symbolic Liberalism’. To address the inherent problems with Symbolic Liberalism and as an alternative to it, I propose Dialogical Sociology as a form of balance between collective and individual political liberal project.

Eliminating the gendered division of labor: The argument from primary goods

While Susan Moller Okin found much to celebrate in Rawls's earlier articulation of his theory of justice, she worried that his later turn to political liberalism evacuated his theory of its feminist potential. Here, I argue that we need not be so pessimistic: some of the strongest arguments for pursuing certain feminist projects can and should be made from within a politically liberal framework. In advancing this claim, I develop Rawls's idea of primary goods—namely those goods that all citizens need qua citizens—as a key conceptual resource for arguing for the elimination of the gendered division of labor using public reason. Drawing on recent empirical literature, I point out that the gendered division of labor continues to distribute to women an unfair allocation of primary goods. I then advocate for a specific public policy, which I call Gender Egalitarian Daddy Quota—a parental leave policy that sets aside time specifically for fathers to encourage men and women to engage in childcare related leave-taking to similar extents—on the grounds that this policy would help secure a fairer distribution of primary goods, and thus is required as a matter of justice.

The women of Miranda House: Building archival collections, digital humanities and feminist digital history

ABSTRACT These notes are based on an ongoing project for building an archive of a premier women’s college, Miranda House (established 1948), University of Delhi. We begin with a brief overview of the processes and methodologies involved in identifying materials to shape our collection, discuss processes of cataloguing, digitization, planning digital collections and a website. Our collection lies at the cusp of being an institutional archive, women’s archive, archive of college women as well as an archive for doing public history. Despite the challenges of infrastructure, trained staff, technological expertise, digital humanities offer us immensely exciting possibilities. We use social media to reach out to alumni to build our collections, social media presence to showcase our materials, digital tools to widen access, share skills and create awareness regarding the significance of archiving the history of college women. Our attempts at DH have been quite successful. However, as DH opens up a plethora of opportunities, doing digital history also has its methodological challenges as well as conceptual and financial concerns for feminist projects like ours.

Love as Method: Tracing the Contours of Love in Black and African Feminist Imaginations of Liberation

What imaginations of the self are evident in Black and African feminist visions of Black liberation? How is love framed as a centring politics of Black liberation across social and political struggles? These two questions address two features of Black and African feminist social justice politics: first, a re-imagining of the self via routes of the communal self and love of oneself; and, second, a centring of love as fundamental to any project of Black liberation. Exploring these two trajectories, the article engages gendered love in terms of its material and affective registers within feminist struggles for justice and healing. To do this, select readings of African and Black feminist theorising, reflections, and activist works are explored including Pumla Gqola, Sharlene Khan, June Jordan, bell hooks amongst others. The intellectual diversity of these feminist contributions connects with reference to a feminist project that is rooted in (re)imaginings of love and self that are simultaneously personal yet also political. In the end, the project of Black liberation must address itself to the place of love in healing. The article explores what some of these features of love liberation could entail.

Emili Du Châtelet – on Matter

This paper draws on Emily du Châtelet, an early 18th Century philosopher’s life and work to reflect on posthuman feminist theory’s redefinition of the historical feminist project away from emancipatory, dialectical epistemologies in relation to science. In her 1740 published book, Institution de Physics (Foundations of Physics), du Châtelet, in an enlightenment fashion turns to empiricism in an attempt to explain the physical world and specifically bodily agency. It is empiricism that leads her to critic both the Cartesians as well as the Newtonians disembodied account of force. Turning to Leibniz’s metaphysics, du Châtelet critiques Newton’s theory of bodies and gravity and in its place suggests a vital, agential approach to matter. Having an insight into her intellectual world at the dawn of enlightenment renders the lacuna of our scientific paradigm to account for bodies as a nonlogical one and affirms technoscience/ posthuman feminist transformative project.

Gender-Related Violence: What Can a Concept Do?

This paper explains the logic for using the concept of gender-related violence (GRV) as a broad category that problematises homophobia, transphobia and the policing of gender norms and the gender binary, as well as gender-based violence—understood as primarily violence against women and girls (VAWG). It then evaluates the utility of this concept and its capacity to introduce theoretical refinement to the study of gendered violence, by reviewing its reception within a large international feminist project on gendered violence in the lives of children and young people. The aim of this study was to improve knowledge and understanding of forms of violence and discrimination among practitioners who have everyday contact with general populations of children and young people. It sought to improve their ability to identify and challenge sexist, sexualising, homophobic or transphobic language or behaviour, and their knowledge of how and when to refer children and young people to appropriate support. The paper reports my view of the contribution that the concept of gender-related violence made in each of the four project sites: Ireland, Italy, Spain and the UK. The findings are mixed: in Spain and the UK the concept seemed helpful, but in Italy and Ireland it was initially expected to be helpful but, in practice, a conceptualisation closer to gender-based violence plus homophobia was employed. It is tentatively concluded that where LGBTQIA+ rights were well-established as well as the problematisation of VAWG, this framework was successful, but that it was less successful in more heteronormative sites where homophobia was less problematised. It is suggested that, as a concept, GRV can make a valuable intervention in sites like the former.

Siting Islamic feminism: The Indonesian Congress of Women Islamic Scholars and the challenge of challenging patriarchal authority

ABSTRACTThis article takes the first ever Indonesian Congress of Women Islamic Scholars (Kongres Ulama Perempuan Indonesia, KUPI), and its methodology for formulating religious opinions, as an entry point for analysing the challenge of challenging male, male-centred, and patriarchal authority in Islam. Although a recent initiative, KUPI must be understood in the context of a long and often contentious history of Indonesian secular activists and Islamic scholars (men and women) sounding each other out and seeking common ground in their efforts to reinterpret religious sources and develop new ideas about the position of women in society. Studying the event ethnographically as a site of public communication and exchange – of religious knowledge, views, and experiences – , and contextualizing it in the history of Indonesian Islamic practices and institutions, we argue that the main significance of KUPI lies in the way in which it expands the global Islamic feminist project from a scholarly and intellectual movement into a locally resonant and potentially impactful social movement.