Geographies of authority Brigstocke, Julian; Bresnihan, Patrick; Dawney, Leila ...
Progress in human geography,
12/2021, Letnik:
45, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We propose a geography that pluralizes the sites, practices and politics of authority. We defend an approach that tracks less perceptible forms of authority emerging through everyday micropolitics ...and experimental practices. In contrast to dominant definitions of authority as institutionalized legitimate power, we define authority as a relation of guidance emerging from recognition of inequalities in access to truth, experience or objectivity. Analysing four intersecting areas of authority (algorithmic, experiential, expert and participatory authority), we propose analyses grounded in political aesthetics that trace authority’s affective force, and its role in disclosing and contesting the common.
This article offers a creative disjunctive feminist analysis of affective rhythms within a complexly bordered complex of favelas in Rio de Janeiro. It explores the gendered atmospheric constitution ...of authority in the favela’s violent border spaces, arguing that authority is partly embodied through a channelling of attention. Attention is conceptualised as involving not just conscious intentions, perceptions and emotions, but also non-conscious rhythms of autonomous affective self-regulation. The article is structured through a tripartite disjunctive form that expresses the bordering of city, body and experience. Drawing on qualitative interview data, quantitative electrodermal activity physiological data and creative writing, the article dwells with the materiality of words and the forms of affects to express material and physiological aspects of emotion and affect in journeys around the internal border-spaces of the city. Adapting the modernist tradition of ‘stream of consciousness’ writing, we style a ‘stream of attention’ form of writing that expresses multiple modes of embodied, conscious and preconscious attention.
Engines of alternative objectivity Blencowe, Claire; Brigstocke, Julian; Noorani, Tehseen
Health (London, England : 1997),
05/2018, Letnik:
22, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Through two case studies, the Hearing Voices Movement and Stepping Out Theatre Company, we demonstrate how successful participatory organisations can be seen as ‘engines of alternative objectivity’ ...rather than as the subjective other to objective, biomedical science. With the term ‘alternative objectivity’, we point to collectivisations of experience that are different to biomedical science but are nonetheless forms of objectivity. Taking inspiration from feminist theory, science studies and sociology of culture, we argue that participatory mental health organisations generate their own forms of objectivity through novel modes of collectivising experience. The Hearing Voices Movement cultivates an ‘activist science’ that generates an alternative objective knowledge through a commitment to experimentation, controlling, testing, recording and sharing experience. Stepping Out distinguishes itself from drama therapy by cultivating an alternative objective culture through its embrace of high production values, material culture, aesthetic standards. A crucial aspect of participatory practice is overcoming alienation, enabling people to get outside of themselves, encounter material worlds and join forces with others.
This short reflection on forty years of the UK's History and Philosophy of Geography group reflects on the poetics of geographical knowledge. Whilst histories of geography have diverged from ...philosophies of geography over recent years, the intervention proposes that a useful avenue of enquiry for future work is to develop fuller historical and philosophical accounts of the forms and poetics of geographical writing. This includes: philosophical reflection on form and space; historical studies of the varying forms, styles, and poetics of geographical knowledge; and active experiments with formal aspects of writing. Through a short reflection on the ethics of Jean-Marie Guyau (a sociologist whose naturalist and vitalist ethics had an important influence on anarchist geographers) the paper proposes an approach to the authority of geographical texts that is animated by an anomic ethos that is: genetic; affirmative; and generous.
•Proposes an agenda for future histories and philosophies of geography based on experimental genealogical analyses of form and aesthetics.•Explores the different forms of authority co-constructed through the forms, styles and genres of geographical writing.•Argues that a productive space of intersection between history and philosophy of geography can be found in a revitalised genealogical study of the forms and aesthetics of geographical writing.•Draws on Jean-Marie Guyau's vitalist ethics to argue for a genealogical approach to ethics of history and philosophy of geography.
How is it possible to resist with authority? This article explores the role of humour and laughter in contesting authoritative knowledge and discourse. Bringing Michel Foucault's account of ...'parrhesia', or courageous truth-telling, into conversation with geographies of humour, laughter, and authority, the paper explores affective, non-representational modes of truth telling in early anarchist spatial culture. Focusing on an anarchist cabaret in 1890s Paris which humorously parodied the forced labour camps to which anarchists had been deported after the 1871 Paris Commune, as well as on the grotesque laughter of an executed anarchist's severed head, the paper develops a new theorisation of how satire, parody, irony and the grotesque were deployed in militant truth-telling to articulate a new aesthetics of revolutionary authority.
This speculative genealogy of trends in the written forms of geographical scholarship, 2020–2043, explores the dramatic transformations in the discipline that came with a ‘neo-formalist’ turn towards ...critical reflection on and experiment with the formal aspects of geographical writing, including structure, genre, voice, and style. At the start of the 2020s, the forms, genres, and styles of academic geographical writing in Anglophone research journals were still rather homogeneous in form. Experiments with form were mostly restricted to sub-disciplinary silos. Following a series of important scholarly interventions, the discipline started to reflect more earnestly on the different kinds of authority that are claimed through the use of particular written forms and authorial personas. Whereas in the early decades of the 21st century, authorial personas were mostly confident, self-assured, decisive, and expressing a ‘mastery’ of concepts, the turn towards greater critical analysis of geography's written forms led to a proliferation of authorial personas, often rejecting personas associated with ‘mastery’ and instead exploring hesitation, anxiety, indecision, passivity, improvisation, unreliability, plurality, failure, humour, and self-deprecation, as ways of claiming different, more egalitarian forms of epistemic authority. This genealogy concludes that despite the problem of eclecticism, this turn towards greater methodological reflection on geography's written forms has greatly enriched the discipline from the mid-2020s until today.
Authority is one of the most problematic and ambiguous concepts in social and educational theory. Authority is a relation that is based on disparities of knowledge, expertise or experience. Drawing ...on teaching observations and interviews with undergraduate students and lecturers about their experiences of large-group teaching, I argue that in contrast to lecturers' focus on professional authority and expertise, many students respond most strongly to experiential forms of authority in lectures. In other words, there is a disparity between students' and educators' conceptions of pedagogic authority. Through a discussion of a teaching intervention aiming to playfully experiment with authority relations in the lecture theatre, the paper contributes to a conceptualization of an emancipatory and experimental politics of educational authority, one where students are challenged, not only to think independently, but to see their own existence - the grounds for their actions - as an important intellectual problem to engage with. This requires moving beyond the dominant Weberian ideal types of educational authority (traditional, rational-legal, charismatic, and charismatic-intellectual) towards a fuller understanding of experiential forms of authority.
Sand is a key material foundation of modern cities. In Hong Kong, a city founded in British mercantile imperialism, the extraction of sand needed for construction and reclamation projects has always ...been tied up with violent dispossession. Experimenting with the forms and poetics of postcolonial and new materialist critical theory, and thinking with sand's distinctive materialities and forms of drift, this paper develops a speculative critique of Hong Kong's sandy infrastructure. Hong Kong's colonial and post-colonial authority is legitimized by a continual process of surfacing and resurfacing, claiming and reclaiming. By evoking the process of saltation, one of sand's distinctive mechanisms of movement, the paper uncovers utopian potential in sand's unsettled qualities, searching for a new ethics of ground-down grounds.
In The Use of Pleasure, Michel Foucault suggests that it is possible to read Walter Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire as a contribution to a genealogy of ethics. This article experiments with reading ...Benjamin in this way. It shows that a distinctive analysis of each of the four elements of Foucauldian ethics (ethical substance, mode of subjectivation, ethical practice and telos) can be found in Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire and the Paris arcades. Specifically, the article makes the case for reading Benjamin in terms of his valuable contribution to understandings of the role played by art in modern forms of ‘parrhesia’, or courageous truth-telling. However, whereas Foucault’s notion of ‘arts of living’ focuses on challenging actual relations of power, Benjamin’s focuses on activating potential forms of power. In this way, Benjamin’s ethical framework tests the limits of Foucault’s conceptualization of the government of self and others.
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