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- Convenors:
-
Alexander Koensler
(University of Perugia)
Christine Hämmerling (University of Göttingen)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Knowledge Production
- Sessions:
- Thursday 24 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
The ideal of overcoming formal structures calls for ethnographic and theoretical reflection. We ask: Under which conditions can the "no rules"-ideal unfold its emancipatory potential? Why should rules be avoided? And which hidden power structures can ethnography unearth behind this ideal?
Long Abstract:
The ideal of creating a society that does not follow a certain set of rules, inspires many social movements and forms of activism. In this panel, we invite contributions that offer ethnographic insights and theoretical reflections related to the ideal of overcoming the necessity of rules and formal structures. Papers might deal with an array of forms of mobilization and activism in past and present, spanning from classical anarchism, over community movements to online activism or voluntary work.
Our aim is to situate these cases within the context of two interrelated theoretical perspectives:
First, in critical neoliberal thought, appeals for freedom and individual responsibility can create new forms of social control, especially if combined with uncertainty and flexibility. A decision against formal structures may strengthen less obvious hierarchies, it may foster social structures with hidden norms, feeling rules and power struggles.
Second, the turn from an ideal of absolute autonomy towards contingent practices of becoming in postanarchist theory, opens new possibilities for political practice as well as for the understanding of contradictions and limits of the ideal of non-rules.
Both perspectives invite critical engagements with ethnographic case studies and narrative analyses that situate practices of non-rules between constraints and emancipatory spaces: Under which conditions can the "no rules"-ideal unfold its emancipatory potential? Why should rules be avoided? How then are decisions made and members chosen? Which hidden power structures can ethnography unearth behind the ideal of non-rules?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 24 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Rehabilitation from drug addiction often involves reflection on the addict's life story, which is usually portrayed as entangled with substance abuse. What happens when the script is flipped, and the addict tries to bend the rules of rehabilitation and reappropriate their life story?
Paper long abstract:
In the widespread representation of addiction as a moral failing, one of the tasks of the addict in rehabilitation is to re-evaluate their life, to pinpoint the how and the why of substance abuse, and what to change of themselves to «become a better person», a prerequisite for sobriety. But the sometimes-unspoken, sometimes-explicit rules of rehabilitation assign the responsibility of addiction to the addict: if drug use is a choice, and if such choice is the defining factor of addiction, then other factors are incidental.
However, the push towards reflexivity leaves the door oper for subjects to reappropriate their life narrative and re-shape the meaning of rehabilitation. Drawing both from my research in and my recent work with local public health services in Tuscany (Italy), this paper aims to explore how addicts negotiate their life stories throughout the rehabilitation process. My interest is twofold. On one hand, how these subjects navigate institutional spaces and define themselves in accordance with – or in opposition to – hegemonic narratives on addiction. On the other, how the focus on personal responsibility in spaces such as self-help groups is articulated in the different narratives subjects construct on themselves. If rehabilitation, as Jarrett Zigon (2011) suggests, is a process of re-creating one’s subjectivity, then the struggle for the control of one’s life story is also the struggle for the possibility of determining the roots – and trajectories of growth – of this new subjectivity.
Paper short abstract:
This project reformulates the translation of a work by my father, Radio Free Europe commentator and journalist Zoltan Thury to include various hidden layers of emancipatory potential: my perspectives, a 1974 film about him, and historical sources on his role in the 1956 Hungarian revolution.
Paper long abstract:
I am currently working on a project centered on translating a 1956 work by my father, Zoltan Thury. Autobiographical and political in turns, The Refugee's Guide describes his life after fleeing Hungary in 1947, touching on the journalism compelling his departure from newly-Communist Hungary, and on his putative role in encouraging the 1956 Revolution as a commentator for Radio Free Europe. My project involves reformulating the structure of the translation to incorporate: my own memories and perspectives, a film made in 1974 about him, and historical sources about his role in the revolution. I began with a feeling of resistance: I did not appear in a book describing the essence of my father, and yet I had been THERE. How could that be? However, as I continued, I began to see my goal not as following the rules for a “faithful translation” but for a more encompassing fidelity to the revolution my father supported. The need to resist his voice developed into a transformation that incorporates various layers in addition to the original material in the form of what Leon Anderson calls multithreading or "meta-discursive commentary" in the tradition of Susan Griffin. I have now translated about 20 pages and fitted that with various perspectives that were formerly hidden but have the potential to better represent the power structures inherent in the work, as a brief excerpt of this material will show in the course of the presentation.
Paper short abstract:
With the help of ethnographic approaches, my paper examines the prostitution-ID as an identity document that triggers conflict potential in the everyday (work) life of sex workers in Hamburg, Germany, a town which advertises it’s urban spaces „Reeperbahn“ as „the most sinful mile of the world“. This paper is interested in state surveillance, crime and subjectification practices and identity-creating processes and therefore creates knowledge about social orders and normative frames for the individual doing of everyday life.
Paper long abstract:
My paper examines the prostitution-ID in Germany which was initiated in 2017 by the national Prostitute-Protection-Act (ProstSchG). After mandatory registration and a health check-up, sex workers receive an identification document that they must carry with them while working. At this point there are are tensions between state surveillance, crime and subjectification practices and processes of identity formation which are materialized in the ID and can be seen in the everyday lives of sex workers.
The document evokes feelings (including uncertainty, fear, shame) and specific affective affordances, for example when guests pretend to be governement employees to read the ID and thereby put the sex workers under pressure. At this point, it offers further criminal opportunities through the rule-breaking in a profession that is already threatened by blackmailing. Further the document does not guarantee anonymity and discloses nicknames. As it becomes clear, the ID is conflicted on many levels.
I would like to approach this research subject with the help of theoretical perspectives from the Material Cultural Studies and the New Materialism and ethnographic research with sex workers in Hamburg for my Bachelor-Thesis in 2018 and 2019. Both sex workers and social workers ascribe different meanings (from german scholars often called "Dingbedeutsamkeit") to the document and they position it differently in their everyday experiences and practices:
Which empowerment and action potentials are inscribed and materialized? How does it create practices and institutions? Which historical-grown orders of knowledge and discursive frames does it refer to?
With (recent) perspectives of the Actor-Network-Theory and the New Materialism the identity document could be assigned its own capacities for action (agency). I will present a cultural anthropological research design in the context of my contribution.
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyzes Swedish Humanities scholars’ strategies towards the demands of ‘internationalization’. Through analysis of 30 in depth-interviews we discuss how internationalization is explained as overcoming formal structures of academic capitalism or breaking with Humanities’ old traditions.
Paper long abstract:
The aim with this paper is to analyze how 30 Swedish Humanities scholars depicted their different ways of responding to the growing expectations of becoming more ‘internationalized’. Internationalization has been articulated in official government reports and in research policy bills as closely connected to innovation, economic growth and development, and regarded as a way to ascertain Sweden’s success on the international area. English as a working language, physical mobility, international networking in projects, publishing in English etc. are regarded as almost an obligation and the Humanities are expected to implement internationalization in much the same way as medicine, technology and science. In our ethnographic study, 30 in depth-interviews were subject to cultural analysis in order to problematize how scholars from the disciplines of history, Romance languages and philosophy at Swedish universities responded to the demands of internationalization. Some regarded their reluctance to use English as a resistance against the formal rules imposed by funding bodies and authorities (and thus as a resistance to “system” or academic capitalism). For others, embracing the demands of internationalization challenged the more nationally bound traditions of the Humanities and thus had an emancipatory potential. The language scholars criticized the domination of English and claimed that “internationalization” should be just as much about other languages. Some historians claimed that writing books or publishing in Swedish is of great scientific importance while other historians, as well as many philosophers, claimed that networking and publishing in English could successfully challenge the old rules of nationally bound traditions of the Humanities.