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Through interdisciplinary research, key Gandhian concepts are revisited by tracing their genealogies in multiple histories of world contact and by foregrounding their relevance to contemporary struggles to regain the?humane? in the midst of global conflict.

This paper takes up Avtar Brah's (1999) invitation to write back to the issues she raises in her mapping of the production of gendered, classed and racialised subjectivities in west London. It addresses two topics that, together, illuminate racialised and gendered interpellation and psychosocial processes. The paper is divided into two main sections. The first draws on empirical research on the transition to motherhood conducted in east London to consider one mother's experience of giving birth in the local maternity hospital. The maternity ward constituted a site where racialised difference became salient, leading her to construct her maternal identity by asserting her difference from Bangladeshi mothers and so self-racialising, as well as 'othering' Bangladeshi mothers. The paper analyses the ways in which her biography may help to explain why her experience of the maternity hospital interpellates her into racialised positioning. The second section focuses on media responses to the riots in various English cities in August 2011. It examines the ways in which some media punditry racialised the riots and inclusion in the British postcolonial nation. The paper analyses three sets of commentaries and illuminates the ways in which they racialise the debate in essentialising ways, reproducing themes that were identified in the 1980s as 'new racism' and apportioning blame for the riots to 'black gangster culture'. While these media pronouncements focus on racialisation, they are intersectional in implicitly also invoking gender and social class. The paper argues that the understanding of the mother's self-racialisation is deepened by a consideration of the racialised discourses that can be evoked (and are contested) in periods of social unrest. The paper thus draws on part of the methodology of 'The Scent of Memory' in layering media readings and biographical narratives to analyse the contemporary psychosocial space of racialisation.

Our paper contributes to studies of stigma and dirty work by asking 'how can workers and clients of dirty work manage stigma together?' With the purpose of appreciating the worker/client relational dynamics in an organisation characterised by stigma, we conducted an ethnography in a wound healing clinic where clinicians do the dirty work of caring for patients with socially stigmatising wounds. To guide and subsequently interpret our ethnographic observations, we developed an original theoretical framework informed both by realist social theory and by extant studies of how people cope with dirty work through techniques of refocusing, reformulating and recalibrating stigma. Our findings point at three types of patient-clinician relationships: of familiality, scripted compliance and obstruction. For each type of relationship, we trace the conditions of possibility (theorised as a relational configuration) and the plausible effects (theorised as relational goods and evils) on patients' and clinicians' capacity to cope with stigma together. Overall, we find that the types of relations threaded by workers and clients over time can be a powerful resource (or obstacle) for managing stigma together. Our paper points to future avenues for research on the materiality of social relations and on the significance of the broader sociological context in which specific relationships are threaded between relational subjects.

Rice reviews 'Solidarity and Suffering: Toward a Politics of Relationality' by Douglas Sturm.

AbstractWeber's ideal-type bureaucracy demands impersonalism premised on assumptions regarding egalitarianism and polity scale, explaining why it is able to excel with large-scale population policymaking. Transport, national infrastructure, taxation, and defense are classic success examples of what is called the actions of government that are done "to" and "for" the polity. However, government fails in important areas of action done "with" citizens and communities, such as health, education, and justice, which do not fit one-size-fits-all approaches. Calls to personalize policy delivery chafe at Weberian bureaucracy and inevitably will do so until form change is recognized as necessary. One way forward may be found in Indigenous worldviews and clan governance concepts of relationality. This article uses William Ouchi\'s organizational form arguments that privilege clans alongside markets and hierarchies, as well as illustrative examples of Indigenous public service leadership, to propose a new conceptual approach—complementary bureaucracy—to demonstrate clan approaches that provide rich practical and theoretical opportunities to engage in bureaucratic personalism. Taking the best of impersonalism and relationality helps meet modern societal needs, building off the wisdom of governance practices that have served this planet's oldest enduring civilizations.

In this essay, I argue for a theoretico-practical accountability to difference and belonging in feminist philosophy and theory that requires attentiveness to disability as an important vector of power, normativity, and oppression. My insistence on accountability echoes the many appeals to confront and take account of one's own ableist, white supremacist, cisgendered forms of privilege (while simultaneously working to dismantle more systemic forms of privilege) that disabled feminists, feminists of color, and transgender feminists have made.[i] Following Eli Clare and Aimee Carrillo Rowe, I consider how an ongoing accountability to intersectionality and embodiment in a politics of relation can avoid the exclusionary logics at work in feminist philosophical and theoretical invocations of "gender, race, and class," or "gender, race, and sexuality" that consistently ignore disability, among other identifications, as constitutive productions of structural power. An embodied and intersectional feminist refiguring of subjectivity that attends to race, class, age, disability, cis/gender, and sexuality, among other axes of difference, should be recognized as an important requirement of accountability for feminist philosophers and theorists, especially feminist philosophers and theorists who are privileged along one or more of these axes of power.[i] Aurora Levins Morales (1998), frames this accountability as "the willingness to examine and dismantle our own privilege and take full responsibility for remaking the world so that neither we nor anyone else can hold it again" (94). Keywords: belonging; relationality; feminism; disability; queer; transgender

From SAGE Publishing via Jisc Publications Router ; History: received 2019-12, accepted 2020-10, epub 2021-01-12 ; Publication status: Published ; Funder: Economic and Social Research Council; FundRef: https://doi.org/10.13039/501100000269; Grant(s): ES/I004890/1 ; Storytelling is a fundamental part of human interaction; it is also deeply social and political in nature. In this article, I explore reproductive storytelling as a phenomenon of sociological consequence. I do so in the context of donor conception, which used to be managed through secrecy but where children are now perceived 'to have the right' to know about their genetic origins. I draw on original qualitative data with families of donor conceived children, and bringing my data into conversation with social script theory and the concept of relationality, I investigate the disjuncture between the value now placed on openness and storytelling, and the absence of an existing social script by which to do so. I show the nuanced ways in which this absence plays out on relational playing-fields, within multidimensional, intergenerational relationships. I suggest that in order to understand sociologically the significance and process of reproductive storytelling, it is vital to keep both the role of social scripts, and embedded relationality, firmly in view.

By analysing the relevant case law, this article argues that the promise must be understood as a more-than-human practice rather than merely a human affair of exchanging commitments to make agreements. Promise is always rolled into, and complicated by, the heterogenous networks formed up by humans and nonhumans in the world. Within the broader scope of this special issue – to build dialogues between comparative law and legal geography – this article, by analysing the legality and spatiality of promise, unpacks spatio-legal tangles, which are dynamic, contextual, and territorial, producing knowledge about law and society. It assesses three cases of promise in different spatio-legal settings: first, a piece of legislation about seismic risk management in Türkiye; second, a judicial decision regarding land use rezoning in Hong Kong; and, third, some disputes over property rental arrangement during the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong. These cases are analysed through three interrelated aspects of making sense of the social world: relationality, materiality, and performativity. Different material objects, which can help relate and unrelate actants, are embedded in the performance of the law's territory. The identification of these three components begins with the provocative vision shared by the scholarship of both comparative law and legal geography that aims to understand how the world is ordered, as well as with the awareness of comparison and spatiality. When using these three notions, the theoretical framing is not only limited to the analysis of the promise, but it can also be extended to make sense of other aspects of law and society.