Seminar Series 2017/2018
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Semester One |
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Thursday 14 September, 1pm D418, Newman Building |
Pathological Integration: How East Europeans Use Racism to Become British
For the last decade, East Europeans have been quietly integrating into life in the UK. Part of this process entails learning to get along with their new neighbours, the diverse segments of the British population. But part of it also involves not getting along with certain neighbours. Integration isn’t confined to benevolent forms of everyday cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and conviviality; it can also include more pathological forms, like racism. Whilst integration is generally seen as desirable, the elements of acculturation it involves necessarily include the adoption of multiple practices and norms, including those deemed less desirable. The aim of this paper is to show how East Europeans in the UK have been acquiring specifically British competencies of racism. This doesn’t mean all East Europeans are racist or they always use racism; it does mean, however, that racism is one part of the integration equation. We focus on the racist and racialising practices of Poles, Hungarians, and Romanians in Bristol in the UK. These East Europeans are not simply deploying the variants of racism they learned and used in their countries of origin. Rather, they are learning to use new forms of racism that they have been acquiring since coming to Britain. (The paper is co-authored with Magda Mogilnicka). |
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Wednesday 20 September, 3pm D418, Newman Building |
Theorising Changes in Violence Is violence increasing or decreasing? The answer to this deceptively simple question depends on the concept and measurement of violence, which depend on how violence is situated within a theory of society. Taking issue with Zizek and Bourdieu, the paper argues for a concept of violence as a significant and distinctive institutional domain, separate from the economy, polity and civil society. Taking issue with Weber, it argues that the state never had a monopoly of legitimate violence in its territory, while violence against women and minorities went uncriminalised. The implications of this conceptualisation of violence for its measurement, challenge Pinker’s thesis that violence is declining. Rather, drawing on analysis of data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, the increase in violent crime, driven by domestic violence against women, is made visible. Bio |
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Thursday 28 September, 1pm D418, Newman Building |
Apology and Forgiveness in Restorative Justice
What are we restoring when we talk of restorative justice? Broken bonds between victim and offender? Offender and community? A sense of citizenship? What are the legal and sociological implications of incorporating this into a judicial process? This paper will explore these issues for adult offenders at the presentence stage. In particular I examine how symbolic reparative acts, such as the expression of apology and forgiveness, can contribute to a judicial process. Drawing on recent work on forgiveness and the law, I provide an empirical analysis of restorative justice processes in Australia and the UK, focusing on the micro-level dynamics of the apology-forgiveness exchange. |
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Thursday 12 October, 1pm D418, Newman Building |
Pierre Bourdieu: Theorist of the Iron Law of Social Reproduction?
Further considerations, with particular reference to Bourdieu's posthumously-published works: On the State (2014 [2012]), Sociologie Générale (2015) and Manet: A Symbolic Revolution (2017[2016]) |
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Thursday 19 October, 1pm O' Brien Science Centre North, Theatre B129 |
How 'Black Deficit' Entered the Academy |
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Thursday 16 November, 1pm D418, Newman Building |
Rituals of Exclusion? Identity, Ideology and Inequality in the Centenary Commemorative Speeches of the 1916 Rising
Looking at Irish nationalism and the 1916 Centenary Commemorations, this paper will shed light on the role that nationalism has in sculpting the parameters of these commemorative events. This study will focus on the role that rituals, nationalism and commemoration have in the (re)production of solidarity, nationalist identity and the legitimation of social organisations, social hierarchies, and social inequalities. Examining speeches dated throughout the Centenary Commemorative year sourced from key social and political actors in Ireland, this paper argues that these commemorative events hold more relevant information about Ireland in 2016, than Ireland in 1916. Adopting the methodology of critical-discourse analysis this paper strives to uncover the latent influences and subtle alterations of history adopted in this commemorative period. This paper attempts to unearth the significant role that elite representations of the Rising have in rewriting the past into a cleaner and more accessible narrative. A narrative which generates legitimacy for Ireland’s political elites through the construction of inconsistent ties with Ireland’s past. This paper exposes the politicization of Irish memory by the political elite in these commemorations, and details how Irish history has been distorted in the 2016 commemorations to specifically generate ties of legitimacy and allegiance between the contemporary political elite and the history, ideologies and philosophies of the 1916 participants. This paper suggests that the centenary commemorations of the 1916 Rising, speak more about the contemporary Irish social and political climate, than an accurate and objective reading of Ireland’s past. |
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Thursday 23 November, 1pm D418, Newman Building |
Can Human Rights Defeat Nationalism? The focus of this lecture is the way in which collective memory and memorialization processes are understood within the human rights centred ideology and how such understanding affects nationalism. The basic difference between human rights and nationalist understanding and promotion of memorialization processes is that human rights stand for world-wide inclusion of all people into one moral community, whereas nationalism presumes nationally bounded collectives. For the ideology of nationalism, historical memory is perceived in terms of continuity, provides legitimacy for sovereignty, however, human rights as the grand narrative in the world polity, has provided a new definition – that of coming to terms with (one specific version of) the past - by which collectives are supposed to remember, a phenomenon coined here as “memorialization isomorphism”. Memorialization isomorphism refers to the standardized set of norms, promoted through human rights infrastructures in the world polity, through which societies are supposed to deal with the legacies of mass human rights abuses. States, in particular weak and post-conflict states with troubled pasts, are expected to conform to the international human rights norms of facing their criminal past and becoming accountable for past massive human rights abuses. I ask here how successful memorialization isomorphism is in promoting universalist human rights values and whether memorialization isomorphism is capable of harvesting micro-solidarity in order to become an ideological cement that can overcome nationalism. Since the experience of micro-solidarity is not instinctive but rather a function of an interpretation of symbols and history, I argue that in contexts within which ethnic symbols and collective histories have played immediate roles in conflicts, and were further legitimized and embedded by peace agreements and human rights institutions, it is nationalist apparatus which has become the ultimate factor in the processes of recollecting micro-solidarity. In other words, I argue that at the world polity level, human rights have produced a norm of memorialization isomorphism that does not actually lead to the advancement of human rights values but is instead likely to further promote nationalist ideologies. Finally, I suggest we look at the current reappearance of nationalism world-wide partially as a result of a graduate and accumulative process of standardization of memory - from “duty to remember” as a moral instance onto policy-oriented “proper way to remember” and try to assess the impact such process has on the perception of the “self” and “other”. |
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Thursday 30 November, 1pm D418, Newman Building |
Difficult Encounters: Stops, Searches and Police Legitimacy |
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