The arts of refusal: tragic unreconciliation,pariah humour,and haunting laughter

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates Hannah Arendt’s writings on tragic unreconciliation and pariah humour as offering creative strategies for confronting the deadening of emotion that enables people to become reconciled to what they should refuse or resist. She offers a distinctive contribution to debates on reconciliation and justice, I suggest, by articulating a tragic approach to unreconciliation. Yet Arendt recognised that tragic accounts of violence can reinforce denial and resignation. In writings on the ‘hidden tradition’ of the ‘Jew as pariah,’ Arendt suggests that humour can be an important response to tragic accounts of political violence and a strategy for awakening an emotional response in those who cannot perceive tragedies to which they have become reconciled. As arts of refusal, tragic unreconciliation and pariah humour invoke and subvert the tragic imagination to reveal possibilities for solidarity, responsibility, and transformation that challenge problematic forms of reconciliation – reconciliation to one’s role as a participant in, or bystander to abuse, reconciliation as self-abnegating assimilation, and reconciliation as compromise, scapegoating, or denial.     

‘Without Education You Can Never Become President’: Teenage Pregnancy and Pseudo-empowerment in Post-Ebola Sierra Leone

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the emergence of ‘teenage pregnancy’ as a new policy focus in post-Ebola Sierra Leone and explores how Sierra Leoneans interpret the problem of ‘teenage pregnancy’. I argue that the new policy focus is not indicative of changing or new problems. Rather, ‘teenage pregnancy’ has created opportunities for donors and the Government of Sierra Leone to continue cooperation in gender politics. At the same time, Sierra Leoneans are clearly concerned about ‘teenage pregnancy’, and many agree with sensitization campaigns that responsibilize young women and girls while downplaying structural factors that render them vulnerable to arrangements involving transactional sex.     

The most plausible pro-coercion view: requiring informed agreement while penalizing non-participation in research

In ‘(Why) should we require consent to research?’ Alan Wertheimer probes whether it is legitimate for the government to ‘coerce’ people into participating in biomedical research, including interventional biomedical research. In debating the rules that ought to govern participation in interventional biomedical research, we should distinguish two separate moral claims. First, interventional research should proceed only when the subject has given her informed agreement. Second, it is legitimate for the state to set a requirement that people participate in interventional biomedical research, and to penalize or punish those who refuse to participate. The most plausible ‘pro-coercion’ view accepts both of these claims. Though I stop short of endorsing this view, it captures important ‘pro-coercion’ and ‘anti-coercion’ intuitions.     

Women's right to work: The interplay of state,market and women's agency

This article addresses questions central to the conception of women's citizenship: Do women have the same right to wage work as men have? That is, do women have the same access to and chances to keep jobs as men? Is women's right to employment perceived as an individual right, disconnected from men's traditional prerogative to hold jobs as breadwinners? Women's right to work is conceptualized as a complex structural and ideological construct, shaped by the interplay of the labour market, welfare state and women's agency. The empirical analysis takes one of the Scandinavian welfare states, Norway, as its main case. The study concludes that women's individual right to work was significantly strengthened from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s.     

Élites in Omsk

A French sociologist provides a detailed analysis of the politics, economics, and political elite of Omsk oblast' in Western Siberia. Analysis covers oil politics, reactions to the August 1998 financial crisis, relations with Moscow, the role of entrepreneurs in politics, and the communist and nationalist oppositions. Focus is on the role of the governor and his relations with diverse political forces. The article also examines the gap between formal institutions and actual social and political practices.