Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) Bodies Research Programme

Transcription

1 Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) Bodies Research Programme Workshop for project organisers May, 2010 Hilton Hotel, Milton Keynes Project organisers: Claudia Aradau (Open University) Trafficking trauma: victims and citizens. This project examines the surplus of migration and the idea of trauma. The project analyses how the dichotomy between trauma and more visible injuries to the body, and the surface/depth metaphor at work, is played out and contested by NGOs and victims. It explores an example of whether and how bodies are regarded as speaking a truth. Trafficked, tortured bodies are bodies in pain, suffering bodies. But for the assessment of the state, pain and suffering are not enough how can we know they are genuine victims? With Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) a new field of expertise was created, in which psychiatrists and victims re-assess how the body/mind distinction is worked out. This has given rise to claims to traumatic citizenship in which trauma is a modality for access to citizenship rights. The diagnostic of trauma becomes a means to gain a visa. Trauma becomes a mediator between state and citizen. Claims on the grounds of trauma may have the effect of equalising access to citizenship, but also blur the understanding of the qualifications for citizenship. Trauma, not healed, becomes an elusive truth. PTSD as a field of expertise is supposed to do the work of classification, but this is at the expense of obscuring and confusing the body-assurface/mind-as-depth dichotomy. This example raises important questions about the meaning of subjectivity, body and mind. Laura Brace (Leicester) The politics of slavery. I am particularly interested in the ways in which embodiment affects self-ownership and the layers of belonging to market and civil societies. I see this research programme as unique and valuable in its commitment to overcoming the mind-body dichotomy and to thinking though what it means for the body to enter politics. I would be particularly interested in working within the research programme to develop my work on slavery, and to think about how the mind / body distinction maps onto the subject / object binary in discussions of what it means to be a slave, or a 'living tool'. Why is the idea that some people are reducible to their bodies, and others are not, such a potent myth? What is it about slavery and its connections with bodies, 1

2 violence and sheer hard work that takes it outside politics? I have recently been trying to construct a 'politics of slavery', and this programme offers an invaluable opportunity to develop this project by focusing both on the body and on the de-politicisation of slavery. Terrell Carver (Bristol) 'Non-binary conceptions of sex, gender and sexuality'. This project derives from an ESRC application for a research professorship which I would like to pursue in the context of your programme I can say that I would be delighted to be included and that it builds on my work and will help to get collaborative partners. I'm interested in how creeping non-binarism in sex, gender and sexuality plays out in policy, legislation and pressure group thinking. I had users lined up in the Human Genetics Agency, Stonewall and Liberty. Diana Coole (Birkbeck) Too Many Bodies? Reopening the World Population Question The project is `Too Many Bodies? Reopening the World Population Question', so it's obviously related to bodies. It is based on a Leverhulme application. In the full proposal I've sketched out summaries of eleven constituent studies examining different dimensions of the question. Needless to say, I'd be delighted to pursue one or more of these studies under the aegis of your research programme. Ros Hague (Nottingham) Nature, women and autonomy: exclusion from the political. An area of research I am pursuing looks at connections between people s attitudes to nature, their attitudes to women and their ideas about autonomy. I m interested in the connections found in 19 th century political thought between the body and nature and the tendency towards the exclusion of both from the realm of the political. The project would seek to uncover the ways in which the self that evolved from this period of political thought was one constructed as separate from both nature and the body with both of these being devalued. Some work I have done on the thought of J S Mill, using some of the work of Christine Di Stefano, has traced a sense of fear of certain bodies and of nature. For Mill it is the very connection he makes between the two which is at the heart of his anxiety the human body (especially a woman s body) represents nature and nature is a threat to the autonomous individual. More recent work I have undertaken has uncovered a range of views on nature in Mill s thought with nature s beauty being valued but only as an object of contemplation. But fear of nature s destructive forces appears to dominate Mill s thought on nature. Part of the proposed project would trace further connections between these views of nature held by Mill and his attitude to women but it would also seek to make similar connections between nature and women s bodies in other thinkers. The end result would then be a clearer understanding of the self that emerged from 19 th century political thought. The self that appears to emerge from Mill s thought is one who conceptualises the world away from nature and with little embodiment but it could be that the bodymind can be found in other areas of 19 th century political thought. Wendy Hollway (Open University) Becoming a mother: embodiment and intersubjectivity I am very enthusiastic about what you are proposing and most impressed by how you have formulated the issues. The proposal in itself constitutes an intervention. Your approach sits very well with my interests and emphasis on embodiment and intersubjectivity. I have not done all I want to do with my 'becoming a mother' data on this conceptual issue but it is part 2

3 of my current ESRC Fellowship to do some more along these lines. The Fellowship has one year and four months to run. But then I shall be retiring, so am not taken on any potential commitments for after April If within these parameters I can support the initiative, I would be happy to do so. (The other consideration is that I work from home almost all the time, so am useless when it comes to attending meetings.) Kim Hutchings (LSE) The phenomenology of political violence The proposed research programme would provide a useful counterpart to my ongoing collaborative research on the phenomenology of political violence. There are several themes that overlap with my own concerns about the neglect of political violence as a practice in canonic political theory, and the need to re-think political and ethical theory in the light of taking the body and bodily violation seriously. I would hope, in particular, that the programme would work as a hub that enabled dialogue between a range of scholars working in related fields on questions concerning the body in politics. Jef Huysmans (Open University) The political significance of the movement of bodies. My specific interest is in understanding the political significance of the movement of bodies in numbers i.e. a political reading of the sheer materiality of bodies moving irrespective of claims that are made in relation to it. This comes out of our work in ENACT WP3, concerned with mobility within the EU, citizenship and migration. Your research programme would be an ideal place to start thinking about a possible genealogy and/or theorization of this more systematically. I hope the research programme will offer some anchoring point to think the notion of materiality by means of reflecting on political notions of the body in relation to politics. Jane McCarthy (Open University) Bodies and Families and relationships. There are useful overlaps and synergies between the Bodies programme and the Families and Relationships (FaR) programme. Clearly some of the specific issues that you identify under (2) will overlap in interesting ways with FaR, particularly rape, abortion, assisted death, domestic violence, the gendered pay gap, care practices. And perhaps death more generally falls within the concerns of insecurity and bodies. In terms of your section (3), the issues of the intersubjective bodymind citizen is very interesting to me personally, along with the politics of belonging and meaning (which presumably has to include families and relationships fairly centrally?), and then the discussion about the appropriate notion of self is also a continuing concern for me. I can certainly see scope for mutual synergies between your proposed programme and FaR, and I m very happy to be generally supportive towards your proposal, [and it could lead to] conversations and discussions that might not otherwise occur. Vicki Squire (Open University) The body as a primary site for political struggles around the irregular movements of asylum seekers and migrants. My long-standing interest is in the politics of asylum and migration, and this programme allows for an approach that reads bodies as integral to the workings of exclusionary discursive formations without assuming them to be passive or dominated objects that governed without resistance or contestation. In particular, this framework will be useful for my work because it offers an alternative to liberal and humanistic approaches that either write out the body or 3

4 include the body only in abstract terms. This will allow for the exploration of an issue that has emerged from the existing work that I have carried out on migration and that I have not yet examined in detail. Specifically, it will allow for a distinctly political rethinking of the irregular movements and interactions of bodies, while problematising both an abstract liberal emphasis on autonomous individuals as well as an abstract humanistic emphasis on the need to protect life. Working with an analytics of the bodymind shows the limits of each of these approaches, while opening up the space for a contextualised analysis of the political struggles that emerge through the interactions of bodies that move in irregular ways. Rather than interpreting irregular movement in terms of the depoliticising reduction of individuals to bare life as many recent analyses have done, an analytics of the bodymind will allow for an analysis of the various politicisations that emerge in the irregular interactions of moving bodies. Such an approach will also allow for a re-thinking of borders and irregularity, in order to consider both how borders move across bodies as well as how irregularity is produced and re-appropriated through the movement of bodies. It is in relation to this interest in the interactions that emerge through the irregular movement of bodies that I would like to express an interest in developing a new research project as part of the Body in Politics programme. Specifically, I would like to develop a project that explores the different ways in which the body emerges as a primary site for political struggles around irregularity. There are various cases that emerge of interest here that will develop out of a political analysis of the irregular movements and interactions of bodies. For instance, many humanitarian workers or volunteers literally put their body to work as part of a political struggle against statist and governmental productions of irregularity. This embodied humanitarianism could be said to engender interactions that challenge a liberal or paternalistic humanitarianism that strives to protect life in the abstract, instead producing irregular solidarities between diverse bodyminds. Another example might be where tourists put their bodies to work in helping others arriving at the shores of Europe. What happens when we take these experiential processes of irregular interaction seriously? This programme will be an ideal location for a consideration of these questions, and I am looking forward to participating as an active member of the programme. Rachel Thomson (Open University) and Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck) Embodiment and the politics of the maternal This project explores the ordinary extraordinariness of the pregnant body. The spectacular bodies of pregnant celebrities highlighted in the media indicate the move from the previous confinement convention to the contemporary wearing of the bump. The project analyses case histories of lived bodies, and sees the body as historically situated. The body can be seen as a non-verbal text that speaks or doesn t. We are planning to collaborate through an engagement with the data that we have collected as part of Rachel s ESRC-funded Making of Modern Motherhoods (MAMSIE) study. In a way this would be secondary analysis of Rachel s own data, but working with someone with a very different theoretical repertoire (Lisa s work brings together philosophy and psychoanalysis). Our idea is to work together with case study material in order to explore some key issues, one of which might well be embodiment and the politics of the maternal. In theory this might be a project for which we could pursue some postdoc input, but more than anything it would be about buying ourselves out to work on the initiative. It would of course be wonderful to link our work to a wider group of colleagues. We would also be feeding into the MAMSIE collective, which itself might be a useful/ interesting connection for this bid. Margie Wetherell (Open University) One of the most exciting recent intellectual trends is the subjectivising of some of the most unlikely domains and disciplines of the social sciences. There are now new ways of thinking about and studying the body, affective trajectories, relationality and the psychosocial and 4

5 these are beginning to have concrete impacts on research and methodological practices with profound implications, too, for activism. This new CCIG initiative focused on the body/mind and the political is very promising and goes to the heart of this new work. The proposed outputs and interdisciplinary collaborations are intriguing and the anticipated monograph is particularly welcome. For CCIG this and related strand and programme initiatives (e.g. Intimacies, Affect) represent a much needed re-working of the identities theme. This proposed programme will strengthen the emerging critical mass in the Faculty around work on affect and the psychosocial. It is going to be interesting to see but I strongly suspect that if in the past OU social sciences were known for their distinctive work on critical constructionism, in the future they will be known for theorising affect and the psychosocial. I look forward to seeing how this unfolds and hope that my own work will find some synergies with this initiative. Kath Woodward (Open University) Boxing: addressing agency within the framework of theories of embodiment. [The programme] would I think fit in well with what I do. My 2009 book Embodied Sporting Practices demonstrates how regulatory bodies in sport constitute and are constituted by material sporting body practices, which would fit in well with your proposal. I can suggest something coming out of this that I'd like to do next. One of the major theoretical problems that arises is the problem of addressing agency within the framework of theories of embodiment. Whilst phenomenological accounts go a long way towards eliminating the mind body split and providing adequate explanations of some of the body practices in sport, its emphases are often too individualistic, although I am attracted to de Beauvoir's conceptualisation of bodies as situations which locates bodies on the margins and enables an analysis of the processes through which embodied practices and selves are lived. I would like to revisit boxing, about which I have written quite extensively, as a particularly corporeal sport that prioritises bodies in its practices and exclusions (especially gendered) and explore some of the possibilities of developing Deleuzian notions of assemblage that could be compatible with phenomenological theories. I'd like to stick to sport for what I do next and have another project planned with women's cricket (another source of extreme exclusion!). Helen Yanacopulos (Open University) De-emnification : The re-humanising of the other in post-conflict peacebuilding. I can definitely see connections to my work. The area of intersection is with a proposal I am in the process of writing which is on 'de-emnification' - which is the re-humanising of the 'other' in post conflict peacebuilding. I'm going to be (hopefully) looking into how it is necessary to emnify (extreme othering to enable to kill your neighbours in civil wars) and how peacebuilding requires the re-humanisation. One illustration of this (and unfortunately there are many) was on Rwandan Hutu Power Radio in 1994, where the phrase 'We must kill the Tutsi Cockroaches' was frequently used. The negation of the Tutsi human form made genocide possible. I would love to be part of the project, and somehow link it to the 'Enemies' project that I'm hopefully going to be doing. 5