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Migration scholars, and the universities and institutions who fund them, at times neglect to address the ways in which the traces of the imperial past, and references to the 'post' colonial serve to obfuscate and legitimize discriminatory practices in their work. The 'imperial eyes' of the academy set the terms and limitations on interactions, locations, and relationality in research, reducing the agency of migrants, producing stratified configurations in the positionality of both migrants and researchers and, subsequently, exacerbating dynamics of exclusion and extraction. As early-stage researchers, we see a critical need for an approach to migration studies which undermines the ongoing impact of colonialism and the normativity of institutionalized, hierarchical narratives that haunt academia. Our research builds on the work of scholars who write about the autonomy of migration, liberation theorists, and critical Indigenous perspectives, but our positions are also influenced by those on the 'frontlines' resisting various manifestations of violence and exclusion. In this article, using an interdisciplinary model, we propose the notion of collective self-inquiry to critically question and inquire into our own methods and approaches and provide a set of methodological tools that can be applied by other researchers within and outside of the university. These tools invite us to work collectively and look more critically at the b/ordering of movement(s) across former empires, thus helping us navigate towards the undercommons, a place where the liberatory potential of the academy can be realized.

This article examines Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016) in the context of recent feminist attempts to theorise the idea of a maternal subject. Happy Valley, a police series set in an economically disadvantaged community in West Yorkshire, has been seen as expanding the genre of British social realism, in its focus on strong Northern women, by giving it 'a female voice' (Gorton, 2016: 73). I argue that its challenge is more substantial. Both the tradition of British social realism on which the series draws, and the neoliberal narratives of the family which formed the discursive context of its production, I argue, are founded on a social imaginary in which the mother is seen as responsible for the production of the selves of others, but cannot herself be a subject. The series itself, however, places at its centre an active, articulate, mobile and angry maternal subject. In so doing, it radically contests both a tradition of British social realism rooted in male nostalgia and more recent neoliberal narratives of maternal guilt and lifestyle choice. It does this through a more fundamental contestation: of the wider cultural narratives about selfhood and the maternal that underpin both. Its reflective maternal subject, whose narrative journey involves acceptance of an irrecoverable loss, anger and guilt as a crucial aspect of subjectivity, and who embodies an ethics of relationality, is a figure impossible in conventional accounts of subject and nation. She can be understood, however, in terms of recent feminist theories of the maternal.

AbstractThis article brings the psychoanalysis of Bracha L. Ettinger to the question of mourning in the television series Transparent. As evident in the television series, and in everyday life, there is a troubling metonymy linking trans* lives with death. The appeal to death is often in stark contrast to the way trans* people experience their transitions as giving form to a new and invigorating commitment to life. Despite this, there can be something haunting and unspoken bothering familial relations post-transition. These cryptic experiences are well dramatized in Transparent. From a matrixial perspective, a transition always involves Others and rechoreographs intimate relations in conscious and nonconscious ways. Part of what happens post-transition is a non-cognized change in the matrixial web. Because so much of the matrixial is associated with metaphors of reproduction, life and death, it may be that the vocabulary of death (as metonymy of loss) is used to condense a vicissitude of unprocessed experiences in the matrixial. In other words, we lack ways to work through what has been changed in the relationality between intimate Others occasioned by a transition. The signifier "death" thus overwrites interpersonal familial relations. This article offers a way to understand and unpack the metonymic association using three key psychoanalytic concepts: the psychic crypt, the cryptic carriance, and the transcryptum. By bringing these concepts to the question of "mourning without loss" (van der Weele 2017) in Transparent, this article considers how transitions can enable a "working through" of unacknowledged familial trauma passed down between and within generations.

To what extent do dominant narratives and ontologies support the work of ecological care? While working in anti-extinction conservation requires paying careful attention to the realities of precarity and ambiguity, this is not necessarily reflected in our public narratives of such work. Instead, as in Jean Giono's 1953 short tale, The Man Who Planted Trees, many conservation narratives are pitched in heroic modes, framing conservation as work intended to secure or rescue an obvious 'good' in perpetuity. However, such individual heroism requires that one overlook the radical interdependence of life and the ambivalent and uncertain aspects of ecological care. In this paper, I think alongside the work of another tree planter— Wellington-based practicing Buddhist Errol Greaves—about the affordances and challenges of re-storying one's world in ways that make space for contingency and relationality. While Errol's aims of regenerating native forest on Te Ahumairangi Hill and—by so doing— providing habitat for the endangered kākā (Nestor meridionalis), are in accord with governmental anti-extinction conservation and regeneration goals in Aoteaora/New Zealand, his mode of storying his work contrasts with public framings of conservation through being supported by distinctly non-heroic and relational narratives. Rather than arguing for any inherently ecological aspects of Buddhist ontologies, this paper attends to the ecological affordances of specific practices and framings. Specifically, I argue that, in shifting from storying anti-extinction conservation as heroic rescue to the work of tending to life, ecological care may gain both greater responsiveness and sustainability in the face of environmental precarity.

In 2013, Erdum Gunduz's passive "standing man" performance in Istanbul spontaneously attracted thousands of participants, online followers and copyists in public acts of dissent. But exactly what form of new social relations, or more precisely, what kind of collective emancipatory political engagement did this facilitate? This paper examines the consequentialities of performative modes of "being public" through addressing the shift from "being singular" to "being plural" or, more pertinently, "being-in-common" (Nancy 2000). Reflecting on the historical activities of the Dutch Provo, which briefly enacted mayhem in public in the mid-1960s through a set of performative strategies, it considers a disparate set of situated but transitory "improvisational forms of public assembly" (Butler 2015, 22) from passive acts of togetherness to collective viral performative utterances (e.g., We are Charlie 2015; Oh Jeremy Corbyn! 2017). Informed by Lauren Berlant's (2016) troubling of the ambiguous and contingent nature of collective encounters of "becoming common," this paper acknowledges there is a preponderance of positivist political fantasizing associated with "being in proximity." That said, it concludes that public participative modes of performance that embrace spatial proxemics facilitate the development of alternative subjectivities through affective bodily encounters between strangers. These collective encounters of incipient "commoning" (Stavrides 2016) resonate with what Jeremy Gilbert refers to as the boundlessness, the "infinite relationality" (Gilbert 2014) of the human condition. While collective acts of political performativity may be fugitive in their convergent emancipatory politics, they engender a provisional unity toward being-in-common, a foundational ontological state to which individuals are already predisposed.

AbstractThis article links up the disastrous history of fossil fuels with the celebrated ecology of mangroves. Building on ethnographic and historical research in Puerto Rico and St. Croix, it outlines the often neglected but quite consequential place of crude oil in the Caribbean. Following the construction of what became the second largest refinery in the world, I describe how the imperial energy networks of the United States first came to the Caribbean. Troubling a popular origin story of the Caribbean, colonial and industry leaders voiced a robust critique of the plantation in order to justify the introduction of these enclave refineries. Imperial energy networks welcomed an unprecedented problem to the region: coastal oil spills. The scientific and legal response to these spills brought new attention to the vital relationality of mangroves. Rather perversely, the destruction of the mangroves in the Caribbean—in which crude oil played the leading role—opened mangroves up to new forms of knowledge and care. While many claim that fossil fuels helped cultivate a modern disregard for the natural world, I show how the negative ecologies of fossil fuels also instigated new scientific and political appreciations for the liveliness of the natural world. This story of oil in the Caribbean has implications for scholarly debates around the so-called Anthropocene. Against scholarship that looks at the coming disaster of crude oil as an epochal break in thought and politics, this paper instead describes the long history of acknowledging and managing the disastrous qualities of fossil fuels.

As its title, Family Sayings, suggests, it is through a body of sayings, stories, poems and songs, recalled by her mother, that the author Natalia Ginzburg tells the story of her family before, during and after WWII. Within the turmoil and chaos of the fascist regime and the war, there is a language, a lexicon, capable of establishing a comforting and familiar zone for the members of the family. Through repetitions of sayings and sketches, Natalia Ginzburg will present a work, partly oral and partly written, blurring the relationship between author/reader and storyteller/listener. In a time when consumerism is rampant in post-war Italy, when the family entity and unity is threatened by the individualistic and capitalistic model of prosperity and success, and when television is slowly annulling people's chances to communicate, Ginzburg establishes the writing of autobiography within immediacy, orality, and relationality, subverting the well-established notion of the genre as the story of an individual and his/her personality. Published in 1968, Family Sayings seems to appear in direct opposition with the revolutionary sentiments of the time. For Italian feminists a critique of any institution began with one of patriarchy, for Ginzburg with a reevaluation of the mother not as guardian of a nation, but as an individual with her own economy of authenticity. In a moment when entire student movements are demanding a deconstruction of institutional and family structures, Ginzburg claims maternal lineage as a transformative experience toward a social, political and literary restoration.

Based on the philosophy of Yunus—founder of the Grameen Bank model and Nobel Prize laureate—microfinance has been globally upheld as a neoliberal panacea for addressing poverty and income disparities. Despite these advances, microfinance—as a key policy tool for increasing well-being, social mobility, and capital markets in the underserved communities of the Global South—has not yet been evaluated for its effects in empowering women with disabilities. I draw from disability studies, feminist studies, and social work to examine the ethnographic phenomenon of disabled women who, despite dire poverty, take the unexpected strategic step of collectively refusing to accept microfinance loans. I argue that the individualizing, market-oriented logic of microfinance comports standards of compulsory able-bodiedness that are contradicted by disability as a reality that is experienced through relational kinship ties in rural India. This suggests that approaches to social work in microfinance and disability should attend to cultural aspects of power that manifest through beliefs about gender, ability, and kin-based relationality, beliefs which may sit uneasily with western cultural norms of autonomy, empowerment, and individual agency purported by neoliberal development programs. Finally, this article sheds light on the current development models and social work interventions in the public sphere, which tend to be ill-suited to redress the conditions of impairment that affect disabled women, and invites us to reimagine the domestic sphere as a domain of emergent dependencies and agentive possibilities.

Helen Verran uses the term 'relational empiricism' to describe situated empirical inquiry that is attentive to the relations that constitute its objects of study, including the investigator's own practices. Relational empiricism draws on and reconfigures Science and Technology Studies' traditional concerns with reflexivity and relationality, casting empirical inquiry as an important and non-innocent world-making practice. Through a reading of Verran's postcolonial projects in Nigeria and Australia, this article develops a concept of empirical and political 'accountability' to complement her relational empiricism. In Science and an African Logic, Verran provides accounts of the relations that materialize her empirical objects. These accounts work to decompose her original objects, generating new objects that are more promising for the specific postcolonial contexts of her work. The process of decomposition is part of remaining accountable for her research methods and accountable to the worlds she is working in and writing about. This is a practice of narrating relations and learning to tell better technoscientific stories. What counts as better, however, is not given, but is always contextual and at stake. In this way, Verran acts not as participant-observer, but as participant-storyteller, telling stories to facilitate epistemic flourishing within and as part of a historically located community of practice. The understanding of accountability that emerges from this discussion is designed as a contribution, both practical and evocative, to the theoretical toolkit of Science and Technology Studies scholars who are interested in thinking concretely about how we can be more accountable to the worlds we study.

According to Malaysia's former Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, local horror cinema is counterproductive to building a progressive society. While the genre is now at the peak of its popularity, it was banned throughout the 1990s and accused of tainting modernity with 'backwards' ways of thinking. Modernity's progress through erasure has already been conceptualized as a repression of various cultural contexts, religious practices, and pre-colonial epistemologies, yet its ontological implications are rarely investigated. Nonmodern ontologies, such as animism, are aesthetically, narratively, and theoretically embedded in a number of contemporary horrors, especially those created by independent or art-house directors, who see in the genre the possibility of discussing the ontological taboos of modernity, such as the personhood of the nonhuman. In contrast to an ethnographic approach to animism, I here read it as a method of disruption: a negation of the idea that cinema is the quintessential modern medium. Animism, as a practice of relational personhood (Bird-David, 1999) renegotiates ontological boundaries modernity claimed to have set in stone: between self and other, nature and culture, humans and nonhumans, belief and practice, religion and play. By taking animism as a theoretical framework rather than a cultural trace, I highlight various points of intersection between James Lee's gory slasher horror Histeria (2008) and this nonmodern ontology, positing it as a template for animistic slasher horror, where humans and nonhumans connect and disconnect on the axis of personhood, and the transition from relationality to individuality is depicted as a threat.

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier at. ; End of life care in England has recently been framed by two very different discourses. One (connected to advance care planning) promotes personal choice, the other promotes compassionate care; both are prominent in professional, policy and media settings. The article outlines the history of who promoted each discourse from 2008 to early 2015, when, why and how and this was done. Each discourse is then critically analysed from a standpoint that takes account of bodily decline, structural constraints, and human relationality. We focus on the biggest group of those nearing the end of their life, namely frail very old people suffering multiple conditions. In their care within contemporary healthcare organisations, choice becomes a tick box and compassion a commodity. Informed choice, whether at the end of life or in advance of it, does not guarantee the death the person wants, especially for those dying of conditions other than cancer and in the absence of universally available skilled and compassionate care. Enabling healthcare staff to provide compassionate, relational care, however, implies reversing the philosophical, political and financial direction of healthcare in the UK and most other Anglophone countries. ; Erica Borgstrom would like to thank the funders of her PhD, which inspired much of the thinking in this article. The PhD research was funded by the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care East of England at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust.

This article examines influential recent arguments in science studies which stress the interactive and mutually transformative nature of human-animal relations in scientific research, as part of a broader ontological proposal for science as material engagement with the world, rather than epistemic detachment from it. Such arguments are examined in the light of ethnography and interviews with field biologists who work with meerkats under conditions of habituation. Where philosophers of science stress the mutually modifying aspect of scientific interspecies relationality, these researchers present habituation as a way to study meerkats 'in the wild', and to access their putatively natural, undisturbed, behaviour. Building on this contrast, I will argue that the logic of scientific habituation remains difficult to grasp as long as we think of it exclusively in terms of human-animal relations. The seeming 'paradox' of habituation – the idea that it transforms precisely that which it aims to hold stable, namely the 'wildness' of animals – is an artefact of a frame of analysis which takes animals to be the object of the science of animal behaviour. Habituation ceases to look paradoxical, however, if we remain faithful to these researchers' own interests, for whom the scientific object does not coincide with the animal as a whole, but is rather only a selected subset of its behaviour. In conclusion I suggest that this account of habituation sheds a new light on the articulations and disjunctions between diverse practices and commitments in social anthropology, philosophy and biological science.

In post‐Fordist economies, the nature of laboring activities can no longer be subsumed under a Taylorized model of labor, and the service sector now constitutes a larger share of the market. For Maurizio Lazzarato, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and other theorists in the post‐Marxist tradition, labor has changed from a commodity‐producing activity to one that does not produce a material object. For these authors, this new type of labor is immaterial labor and entails communicative acts as well as added worker agency. This paper reflects on this new paradigm of labor by examining the paid practices of care defined as the activities performed by individuals who have a mandate to help another adult accomplish the tasks of self‐care. Because care workers take care of other bodies, care labor exemplifies an embodied practice. I make use of the corporeality of care to put forward the notion of thin and thick embodiment in order to examine critically the meaning of immaterial labor and to support my claim that immaterial labor, as conceptualized by Hardt and Negri, erases both the materiality and relationality of care labor. Furthermore, typifying care labor as immaterial only serves to maintain its marginalized status.Care Assistant. Required to work within a private residential center to assist nursing staff. Experience desirable, qualifications an advantage, but caring and understanding more important than either. Must have good English to understand instructions and be co‐operative to work in a friendly team environment (Toynbee 2007, 220).

Recently a range of relational approaches have established themselves in many arenas of geographical thought. Insights have been drawn in from poststructural philosophy and social theory to decentre the human subject and consider agency in a more distributed way. Within such work, amongst references to networks, rhizomes, assemblages, and the like, the term 'ecology' has at times been employed to refer to such relationalty. However, the implications of its use and the specific value of the term in thinking about relationality have not yet been fully considered. Therefore, this paper articulates an 'ecological approach' to the study of the embodied practices. The significance of such an approach is expressed in terms of its ability to pay attention to the co-constitutive relatedness of practices and the social—cultural—material environments in which they take place. This is articulated in the paper in three main ways: (1) by drawing attention to the sheer complexity and singularity of relatedness; (2) by reflecting on connections with, and the status of, human and nonhuman entities in the playing out of practices; and (3) by considering the structuring of affective relations and the context in which practices take place. This is illustrated in the paper in relation to the practice of street performance and the intertwining both of the more concrete 'material' aspects of the street space (architecture, benches, people), and of its less concrete, but still materially significant, aspects (meteorological-atmospheres, felt-ambiences, not physically present regulative formations), with the performer in the playing out of this practice.

This article takes a genealogical approach to the problem of affective communication that we find coalescing around the phenomenon of 'affective transfer' identified in experiences such as voice-hearing, telepathy and hypnotic suggestion. These experiences breach the boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, and material and immaterial, and make visible some of the central issues that are important in re-thinking affect, relationality and embodiment. The article will attempt to re-engage the problematic of subjectivity by asking what a turn to affect entails within such technologies of listening and attention. This is particularly important when such turning or opening to affect engenders a conversation with traumatic memories, albeit a conversation that does not occur primarily in a verbal register. The key focus will be on the marginalized status of telepathic modalities of affective transfer throughout the histories of the development of the psychological sciences. The article uses this as a platform to consider the connections between what is occluded or excluded from the psychological sciences, and what is being silenced within work on affect taking form across the humanities. Taking us back to the practice of telepathy in the 19th century and the problem of hypnotic suggestion in the mid 20th century (the Macy Conferences), the article discloses how both function as carriers of what is being overlooked and silenced in the engagement by many affect scholars with the knowledge-practices of the psychological and neurosciences.