Paper short abstract:

This paper illustrates local resistance against (post-)colonial authority over African political systems, secularized modernity, and the rationalities of market capitalism. It introduces the concept of political cosmology as a tool for analyzing non-secular ideas of legitimacy.

Paper long abstract:

How do post-colonial societies re-negotiate globalized narratives of the authority of expert knowledge and its legitimization in specific settings? This paper aims at illustrating complex - and often uncomfortable - local discourses concerning resistance against (post-)colonial authority over African political systems, the end of secularized modernity, and challenges against the rationalities of market capitalism. Drawing on research data from Malawi, the case material provided will outline grassroots processes that redefine contemporary Malawian society according to explicitly non-modernist ideas about sociopolitical authority and its legitimacy. In the long aftermath following the end of the secularization hypothesis associated with a globally universalized modernity, the functional differentiation between the political and the religious (or other) spheres in society appears increasingly artificial and ideological in character. In response to this assessment, the present paper offers the concept of political cosmology in order to address the deep interrelatedness between these two allegedly distinct social realms. It therefore aims at complementing the somewhat essentializing focus on political economies that pre-defines economic considerations as the heart of political institutions and processes across global settings. In a post-rational environment of resurging religious nationalism, anti-globalization movements, and a 'post-factual' society, factors of ideology, cosmology, and (civil) religion need to be reconceptualised as crucial forces within the political sphere - on local, national, and transnational levels.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the alternative modes of power and the legitimization of expertise of the relief pain in obstetric. How does the standardization of epidural anesthesia in obstetric brings to reconsider the boundaries between what belongs to « nature » and what comes out?

Paper long abstract:

What does the pain of childbirth mean to you? Would you wish to feel the pain? Your mental health might be clinically suspected if you answered 1) « pleasure », 2) « yes! ». Between dangerousness, "culturally patterned", biological determinism and empowerment of women, the relief of labor pain is today a question a priori set by the development of anesthesia techniques. Drug treatment of pain during childbirth, circumscribed around epidural anesthesia, became widespread, to the rank of dominant health standard in developed countries. For its social and subjective implications, childbirth and its pain are still located in a medical and social paradigm in which are confronted the categorization of this pain. For some medical professions, this archaic pain is to be treated. For some feminists, it comes to treating the appropriation of women's bodies by epidural by abolishing the massive use of this technique (Duden, 1993). If no one wants to suffer during childbirth, how do alternative practices to pharmacological technical produce a bunch of « tacit knowledge » that come to question the scientific basis on acquired understanding of pain relief of women during childbirth? This comparative research is based on seventy-five semi-directed interviews (with health professionals and users) and non-participant observations conducted in the public hospitals and in birth houses in Quebec and France. This paper aims to examine the circumvention strategies of dominant standards to understand how is structured an intuitive and clinical knowledge field from the body of women in the development of medical scientific knowledge (Scheper-Hughes and Lock, 1987).

Paper short abstract:

Can forms of care interrupt biopolitics? How are forms of expertise asserted in economies of care? I examine non biomedical forms of care that women in Vanuatu seek out during pregnancy and situate them in forms of power and authority both biopolitical and otherwise.

Paper long abstract:

Can forms of care interrupt biopolitics? How are forms of expertise asserted in economies of care? The medicalization of pregnancy has been a central concern for critiquing the expansion of biomedical and biopolitical power over women's bodies. Despite attempts to foster medical institutions- by ni-Vanuatu and a variety of practitioners and administrators- the infrastructures to support those medical modernities were always inadequate. This paper examines non biomedical forms of care that women in Vanuatu seek out and participate in during pregnancy and situates them in forms of power and authority both biopolitical and otherwise. While the lack of infrastructure means that birth is at least partially medicalized and pregnancy is not in Vanuatu, this paper argues in addition that the forms of knowledge and practice that constitute pregnancy care can both be shaped by and subvert biopolitics. Contextualized against a colonial and missionary past, where medicine was explicitly used to gain authority, this paper examines the significance of ni-Vanuatu women's health knowledge as part of an economy of care and the assertion of alternate authority.

Paper short abstract:

Examining the contest over what counts as evidence, this paper will discuss how the dismissal of personal narratives as only being anecdotal becomes a form of structural violence that contributes to the further traumatization of those experiencing psychological distress.

Paper long abstract:

"The plural of anecdote is not evidence" - these words were spoken in early 2016 during testimony given before the Standing Committee on Public Safety & Security discussing contested knowledge in regards to the use of medical marijuana to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. The statement was made in refutation of the personal stories of veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces that medical marijuana was having a positive impact in managing the symptoms of their psychological distress. This phrase has since been uttered in response to other attempts to have the subjective experience of the individual included in so-called evidence-based decision-making, including at the level of arbitrating disability claims being made by veterans to Veterans Affairs Canada. This statement had the effect of telling veterans that their subjective experiences were not as valid as the supposedly objective nature of epidemiological studies, and that medical professionals have more authority to speak to the lived reality of psychological distress, something that creates and reinforces distrust between veterans and clinicians or bureaucrats. This paper argues that the dismissal of narratives as being only anecdotal, and therefore not worthy of the same level of consideration as other forms of evidence, is an act of violence towards those who would contest decisions that have direct impacts on their lives, and that even the perception that this is the position taken by the medical professionals and bureaucrats who influence policy-making is in itself traumatizing, particularly in the form of moral injury referred to as "sanctuary trauma".

Paper short abstract:

Taking an extended sit-in protest in Cairo, Egypt as a case study, this paper explores the negotiation of authority in debates over the event, showing how Sudanese protesters’ claims on the basis of global norms were refuted by the assertion of humanitarian institutional expertise.

Paper long abstract:

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees is known globally for its advocacy on behalf of refugees. In Egypt, however, UNHCR's Cairo office has been the site of ongoing protests by the people it is mandated to help. In the largest of these, several thousand Sudanese protesters staged a three-month-long 2005 sit-in in front of UNHCR-Cairo. This paper explores the conflicting claims of authority negotiated through the landmark event. Recent research has explored ways in which humanitarian governance may function as a form of repressive authoritarianism over silenced refugees. Empirical study of refugee protest complicates this discourse by interrogating the grounds on which both refugees and humanitarian agencies claim authority. In this paper, I apply Ecker-Ehrhardt's 'authority talk' method to analyse the protest's debates as political communication through which relationships of power may be traced. I show how, while protesters claimed legitimacy on the basis of international norms and rights, UNHCR-Cairo steered attention away from the protesters' systemic critiques and towards bureaucratic processes over which the office could claim expertise. By asserting authority over the protesters' legal classifications, I argue, the office undermined protesters' claims and shifted responsibility onto the Egyptian government - and ultimately disassociated itself from authority over the protesters. In investigating these contestations, the paper explains why UNHCR's advocacy role may be questioned by refugees themselves, and contributes an at once local and international study to the discussion of shifting hierarchies of contemporary knowledge and power.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I show how conflicting claims of authoritative knowledge by Kyrgyz imams can be analysed as grounded in the clash of global and local practices and flows of materials.

Paper long abstract:

In the past 25 years of Kyrgyzstan's independence, a growing number of people have been increasingly practicing Islam based on a specific notion of religious knowledge (ilim) implying the strict adherence to the holy scriptures and the practical and moral guidelines - a process that, along with other developments such as the construction of numerous mosques, has been termed "Islamization". Within this process, imams take on an important role, especially within rural settings: besides mosques, madrasas and lay preachers (davatchy), a new generation of imams is emerging who - for instance - have institutional training in Egypt, Turkey or Russia, have acquired knowledge travelling the Indian subcontinent, who attract (international) funds for mosque constructions via their (trans-)regional networks and who can testify their knowledge with official certifications. These imams achieve authority vis-à-vis an elderly generation of imams, in turn grounding their knowledge in their genealogies, their ancestors' traditions and their claim of "knowing the secrets of Islam".

In their respective narratives, each group of imams lays claim to authority by essentializing their knowledge as "true path" ("tuura jol") of ilim, an essential truth that exists beyond and independent of material reality. Conversely, I analyse ilim as knowledge primarily grounded in practices and (global) flows of materials. That is, while ilim of the elderly imams is constituted by flows of knowledge between past and present emphasizing the connection to local traditions, the new generation of imams embody ilim as flows of people, money, information, books etc. across the globe.

Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the global discussion on basic income grants as a requirement to (re-)allocate resources and achieve justice. Based on the Namibian income grant project it explores the impact of moving experts and information flows on local negotiations over moral and political authority.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the global discussion on basic income grants which are conceived of as an indispensable requirement for the achievement of social justice. Given the fact that growing wealth is accumulated in fewer and fewer hands on a global scale, the quest for (re-)allocating resources in favor of the poor and underprivileged has become a major issue and contentious point to many platforms ranging from international organizations to institutions of civil society. Scientists from different disciplines move around the world to present their research findings on the feasibility of basic income projects and information has been spread via global communication channels - but when it comes to the local implementation of policies, it all boils down to the question of power and authority.

Based on the results of the recently finalized Namibian unconditional income grant project the paper focuses on the socio-cultural dynamics in the use and allocation of resources. In a highly competitive arena of moral and political authority, the heated public debates revealed that "social justice" is a contested concept and "authority" might be claimed by many stakeholders in the process.