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Desire is bound up with structural inequalities and normative violence. Even when it seeks to resist them, it keeps risking to reproduce hierarchies. While taking seriously the power analysis of desire, Engel, Govrin, and Holzhey have organized the lecture series 'Desire's Multiplicity and Serendipity' in order to explore the potentials and limits of desire as a transformative force. They propose to draw on theories asserting desire's multiplicity and to face desire's paradoxes by calling on serendipity, allowing for fortunate errans. Starting the conversation with their different understandings of serendipity and the politics of desire in psychic, social, and structural registers, they wish to engage in a discussion with the public: What are the potentials of happenstance and erring when trying to leave the dis/comfort zone of identity and normative forms of intimacy and sexuality? How can one find openings for queer reconceptualizations of desire? Antke Engel is an independent scholar working in the fields of queer, feminist and poststructuralist theory, political philosophy, and cultural politics. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy at Potsdam University in 2001, and since 2006 she is director of the Institute for Queer Theory (Berlin) Jule Jakob Govrin is a Ph.D candidate in philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and a research assistant of the Institute for Queer Theory, Berlin. In her Ph.D. project she is focusing on the epistemological entanglements of desire and economy. Her research interests include political and social philosophy, theories of desire, sexuality studies, poststructuralist philosophies. Christoph Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin. He received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics (1993) and another one in German literature with a dissertation on the critical potential of paradoxical pleasures in aesthetics (2001). ; desire Conserves desire Transgresses desire: On the Paradoxical Politics of Desire , roundtable, ICI Berlin, 4 February 2015 ...

Configuring Desire was a presentation by Mo Throp to the BreadMatters III Forum, in West Cork, Ireland, as part of the Bread Matters series. BreadMatters is a platform for exchange and collaboration, a medium for bringing together professionals from various disciplines, communities and cultural backgrounds to question and debate across a range of disciplines, focusing on contemporary issues such as migration and emigration; the construction of identity; power, globalization and equality; historical legacy; ritual and symbolism in contemporary life; connectedness and communion. BreadMatters thus explores the social, cultural, historical, philosophical, political, and theological issues around bread.

International audience ; This article is an attempt to rethink the interconnectedness between discourse and subjective agency and to highlight methodological approaches to studies of gendering processes as a central part of it. The notions of desire, subjectification and biography are understood as mediated by narratives and metaphors, as a movement between the individual and her contexts. The transformative methodological project suggests conceptual retoolings as new analytic approaches to empirical analysis of the kind that aims to provide complex understanding of subjectification processes in lived life. The empirical field brought into the article as a means of explication deals with university cultures, and more specifically with a case of an assistant professor caught in conflicts between official academic discourses and more subtle political and gendered discourses. The author takes the concepts of desire trajectories, discursive authority, multifaceted discursive realities and past experiences (biography) into an analysis of the enacting forces involved in the processes of exclusion that finally ejects the protagonist in the empirical case from the university field.

This article uses my own experience navigating the law review placement process to reflect on the dynamics that shape intellectual life at American law schools. My recent work focuses on the legal relationship between unmarried lovers who conceive. At its heart, it is about the law's role in shaping the precursor to pregnancy—heterosexual sex. When I began researching this topic what I was most curious about was how law and culture might conspire to foster connections that are more loving and less violent, more authentic and less alienated. Pursuing this topic—which would entail exploring big existential questions to which I still don't have clear answers—seemed risky before tenure. Part I recounts the turn I took instead: a proposal for incentivizing and rewarding "preglimony" through tax reform. Currently, ex-spouses get a deduction when they pay alimony. In my last article before tenure, I argued that the same treatment should extend to men who support their pregnant lovers. Part II turns back the clock and revisits the lead I would have followed had I not been focused on producing a law review article within the conventional mold. This "road not traveled" explores a category of sex at the margins of mainstream definitions of what counts as "law": sex that is consensual but not mutually desired, "sex against desire." Why describe the thread I abandoned here? Why include so much detail about a category of sex at the margins of what generally counts as "law" in a paper about authenticity in legal scholarship? Because the personal is political. Because like intimate partners who agree to sex they don't truly desire, professors who adhere to conventions that don't serve their deepest relationship with truth engage in a compromise that ultimately hurts not only them. It hurts students by breeding cynicism and depression. It hurts the practice of law by producing foot soldiers instead of visionary stewards. Ultimately, our compromise hurts all of society. Part III concludes with my vision of what a more authentic ethos might bring to faculty and students, to the profession, and to the world we help shape.

This paper considers the operations of affective technology within contemporary technocapitalism through affect theory. It is argued that affective technologies enter into power arrangements with political and corporate interests, altering an acting bodies' affect — in the Spinozan definition, the "capacity to affect and be affected" — within social and political life. Affective computation uses machine learning techniques to 'capture' and quantify affective intensities in data form, automating a normalizing logic of division and categorization that classifies bodies, emotions, and objects. Affective technologies invoke what Luciana Parisi called "automated decisionism," where machine learning processes digitize incomputable states in order to impose a self-rationalizing logic structure that regulates a user-subject's actions (Parisi, "Reprogramming Decisionism"). Affective technologies exert biopolitical control over users through quantified logics of division and devaluation. It is suggested thataffect might simultaneously operate as an analytic lens to speculate on whether collective affectivity and political agency might be reclaimed through using these technologies. The following concludes with an engagement with Deleuze and Guattari's "assemblages of desire" to suggest that affective technologies might produce other micropolitical arrangements that increase user agency as social and political subjects.

International audience ; This article presents qualitative research conducted in an Israeli ova `extraction' clinic in Romania. Following on from a piece written by Jyotsna Gupta and published in this journal in February 2006, this article asks what kinds of feminist alliances can or should be made in the arena of reproductive technologies. In conversation with Gupta, the author asks whether `an ethic of universal human dignity' is possible or desirable. This article looks to the voices of Romanian egg sellers themselves as a source of theoretical and political direction for transnational feminists who try to think about responses to reproductive technologies.

International audience ; In recent decades, questions of impunity have become key contemporary topics and major policy challenges on issues of political participation and legitimacy, both in postconflict situations and in liberal democracies. The fight against impunity has taken on a cataclysmic role in rights-driven movements, marking what Karen Engle (2015) identifies as a "turn to criminal law" and a response to issues ranging from economic injustices, to environmental devastation, and even to contexts of genocide. However, this reframing of political and legal action is accompanied by significant challenges. Among the most substantial issues are the reality that not all actors can be brought to court; that advocates often face the absence of a competent legal arena, including trained, recognized, and credible representation; and, not least, the lack of the necessary laws or political will to exercise judgment over powerful entities like governments or corporate organizations.

International audience ; In recent decades, questions of impunity have become key contemporary topics and major policy challenges on issues of political participation and legitimacy, both in postconflict situations and in liberal democracies. The fight against impunity has taken on a cataclysmic role in rights-driven movements, marking what Karen Engle (2015) identifies as a "turn to criminal law" and a response to issues ranging from economic injustices, to environmental devastation, and even to contexts of genocide. However, this reframing of political and legal action is accompanied by significant challenges. Among the most substantial issues are the reality that not all actors can be brought to court; that advocates often face the absence of a competent legal arena, including trained, recognized, and credible representation; and, not least, the lack of the necessary laws or political will to exercise judgment over powerful entities like governments or corporate organizations.

This paper explores the historical background to a proposed study of political disputes over the value of large-scale tourism development in Baja California Sur. The paper starts with a review of anthropological discussions of value — focusing on the work of Kluckhohn, Graeber, Elyachar and Appadurai. The aim is to use an anthropological approach to value to place current conflicts over land and resources arising from recent developments within a historical perspective. The paper then investigates how actors in different time periods have contributed to collective and often contradictory constructions of the area as a place of subsistence, adventure, possibilities, salvation, investment, leisure and conflict. It is not a report on the contemporary situation, but rather it examines some of the key moments and events that have in the past created, reshaped, and defined Baja California Sur as a place of value, meaning, and importance. These episodes start with the Spanish contact period and focus primarily on the southern portion of the peninsula. [Value, tourism, development, Baja California Sur, Mexico]

This paper inquires into assumptions on sexuality and kinship in religious and theological interventions in the debates around same-sex marriage and assisted reproduction. I am especially concerned about how a steadfast investment in "the natural" and "the normal" haunts these debates. Not only does the Roman Catholic Church object to same-sex relations, but the supporters of same-sex marriage often equally rely on the sexual and erotic privilege of the monogamous couple, which serves as the basis for "normal" family life. This "normality" is completed by the fulfillment of the desire to raise children, a creation of the model modern family that increasingly, for both heterosexuals and homosexuals, includes assisted reproductive technologies. In both discussions, how the family is defined focuses on the body and on its legal, medical, and scientific status. The aim of this paper is to ask in what ways the horizons of intelligibility and practices of recognition structure who and what we can become.

This volume, the result of ongoing collaborations between Australian and French anthropologists, historians and linguists, explores encounters between Pacific peoples and foreigners during the longue durée of European exploration, colonisation and settlement from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century. It deploys the concept of 'encounter' rather than the more common idea of 'first contact' for several reasons. Encounters with Europeans occurred in the context of extensive prior encounters and exchanges between Pacific peoples, manifest in the distribution of languages and objects and in patterns of human settlement and movement. The concept of encounter highlights the mutuality in such meetings of bodies and minds, whereby preconceptions from both sides were brought into confrontation, dialogue, mutual influence and ultimately mutual transformation. It stresses not so much prior visions of 'strangers' or 'others' but the contingencies in events of encounter and how senses other than vision were crucial in shaping reciprocal appraisals. But a stress on mutual meanings and interdependent agencies in such cross-cultural encounters should not occlude the tumultuous misunderstandings, political contests and extreme violence which also characterised Indigenous-European interactions over this period.

In this paper we use Elizabeth Grosz's notion of becomings to argue that Lisa Cholodenko's film, High Art, offers visual representations of desiring bodies that challenge heteronormativity and identity-based politics. We illustrate how the film turns in on itself and brings to the forefront questions about spectatorship, pleasure, and desire, thereby commenting on how the politics of visual representation are always fraught with contradictions and complexities. Ultimately, we argue that the self-referentiality of High Art draws spectators into spaces where the 'positive' pleasure of easily consuming cinematic images is thrown into relief.

This paper articulates our desire for new humanisms in a contemporary cultural, economic and global context that has been described as posthuman. As researchers committed to modes of radical, critical, politicised and inclusive education, we are mindful of the significance of social theory and its relationship with articulations of social justice. Whilst sympathetic to the potentiality of posthuman thought we grapple with the imperative to embrace new humanisms that historicise and recognise global inequalities that concurrently exist in relation to a myriad of human categories including class, age, geopolitical location, gender, sexuality, race and disability. We focus in on the latter two categories and draw on ideas from postcolonial and critical disability studies. Our argument considers the problem of humanism (as a product of colonial Western imaginaries), the critical responses offered by posthuman thinking and then seeks to rearticulate forms of new humanism that are responsive to the posthuman condition and, crucially, the political interventions of Postcolonial and Critical Disability Scholars. We then outline six new humanist projects that could productively feed into the work of the Journal of Disability Studies in Education.

In this paper, I will argue that the subject of human desire, and specifically erotic desire, can best be explored with a multi-disciplinary approach in the Humanities, from the standpoints of philosophy and psychotherapy, among others. Using desire as the example, I will then propose a model of cross disciplinary understanding of subjects, which might be used in many other areas of human concern. The tripartite model I propose, including elements of psychology, politics and philosophy, will, I hope, be of use to both theorists and practitioners in various fields. I also intend that the specific treatment here of erotic desire, using this model, will be of immediate interest to both philosophers and psychotherapists. The motivation behind this paper is a keen enthusiasm for what might be characterized as a European Continental, as opposed to Anglo-American, tradition of 'blurring the disciplinary boundaries'– in particular between philosophy and psychotherapy. I am an academic philosopher, and a practicing psychotherapist.

Civic Spaces and Desire presents an original and critical appraisal of civic spaces for a novel theoretical intersection of architecture and human geography. The authors address civic spaces that embody a strong moral code, such as a remembrance park or a casino, in various places in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, Australia and Asia. The consecutive chapters of the book present these chosen spaces as the interconnection between the everyday and the ideological. By doing so the book reimagines the socio-political effects of the countercultural assemblages and ontologies of difference that these spaces produce, represent and foster, as presented through outcasts and nomads of various kinds and forms. The book reflects on different interpretations of the key texts from primarily post-linguistic theoreticians, such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jacques Derrida. It will benefit students and academics in architecture, geography, philosophy and urban studies and planning, who seek to understand the politics of space, place and civility. By deconstructing normative ideological constructs, the book uses the concept of desire to explore the tensions between expectations of civic spaces and the disappointment and wonder of their immanent existence.