Jewish joke telling in Muttersprache Mameloschn: performing queer intervention on the German stage

This essay explores the central role of Jewish joke telling in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s play Muttersprache Mameloschn (first performed in 2012). Subversively revealing the problematic of essentializing cultural, national, and even sexual identity, Jewish joke telling figures as a performance of social and political resistance and disidentification in this play. Engaging with Jack Halberstam’s queer epistemology of failure and José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of queer disidentification, I propose that the act of Jewish joke telling by a young lesbian plays out as a new queer project of intervention in this play that confronts both antisemitism and culturally positioned sexual hegemony.     

Swampwalls: dark matter and the lumpen army of art

Dominant notions of contemporary art are being overturned not by some radical avant-garde theory or movement, but instead by an “uprising” from within the confines of the “art factory,” as well as by newly embodied instances of informal everyday creativity that high culture has long overlooked. Theorists Negt and Kluge might have described this insurrection as the partial unblocking of a counter-public or proletarian sphere: a realm of fragmented identities and working class fantasy generated in response to the alienating conditions of capitalism. A more specific cultural interpretation suggests this mutiny from within and assault from below is the irrepressible brightening of “creative dark matter:” that marginalized and systematically underdeveloped aggregate of creative productivity, which nonetheless reproduces the material and symbolic economy of high culture. The results are explosive, or at least potentially so as this long, pent-up shadow archive spills out into the once forbidden dwelling place of mainstream law and order and high cultural privilege. Meanwhile, a new wave of socially engaged art is thriving on the margins of the art world. Like an enormous production warehouse this “post-public” creativity is developing sustainable farming, reenacting historical labor demonstrations, providing public services lost to decades of deregulatory economic policy, and initiating local bartering systems and environmental cleanups. Its vitality is something Joseph Beuys could have only dream about. And not surprisingly even this “autonomous” and “Interventionist” art is selectively becoming part of the mainstream culture industry through what Gilles Deleuze describes as an “apparatus of capture.” Nevertheless, one result of this new confrontation reveals this vibrant imaginary “from below” is pushing artistic production, pushing also discourse, pedagogy and cultural institutions into radically re-thinking definitions and possibilities not only involving the possibilities of contemporary avant-garde art practices, but also about the very nature of creativity, democracy, and political agency more broadly.     

Gendered discourses of facilitation in a probation learning environment: challenging the heteronormative ideal

This article focuses on the cognitive behavioural rehabilitation programmes run by the probation service in the UK. Drawing on Judith Butler's assertion that both sex and gender are discursively produced and Becky Francis' notion of gender monoglossia and heteroglossia, the article seeks to analyse and problematise the gendered discourses of facilitation that were mobilised by policy-makers and practitioners in this setting. The dominant institutional model of heteronormative facilitation promoted the ideal of each programme being delivered by one female and one male facilitator in order to provide a gender ‘balance’. But underpinning this ideal lay the binarised and essentialist notion that ‘masculinity’ arose naturally from the male body and ‘femininity’ from the female body. Female facilitators were positioned as bringing a calming and non-threatening atmosphere to the group and as naturally possessing skills of ‘empathy’ and ‘warmth’. Male facilitators were highly valued by managers, but were also under pressure to perform masculinity in very specific ways that were linked to notions of intellectual, rational, ‘middle-class’ masculinity. Through an analysis of interviews with probation practitioners and session observations, the article highlights that despite these dominant institutional constructions, a variety of complex and contradictory performances of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ were mobilised in this environment.     

Shifting linkages in ethnic mobilization: the case of RMDSZ and the Hungarians in Transylvania

The Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (RMDSZ) has been the most stable actor in the Romanian party system over the past two decades. However, in this article, we argue that beyond this apparent stability, the linkages between RMDSZ and its voters have undergone a gradual, yet significant shift. The ethnic block voting of Transylvanian Hungarians was closely connected to the concept of a self-standing and parallel “Minority Society,” and to the practices of institution building that the minority elites engaged in in the early 1990s. However, since its first participation in the Romanian government in 1996, RMDSZ has gradually departed from this strategy, a phenomenon that was also closely connected to a process of elite change within the organization. The present RMDSZ leadership puts less and less emphasis on policy programs that could reinforce the institutional system of the minority; consequently, it is unable (and unwilling) to organizationally integrate the community activists of the minority society who previously had played a key role in the process of (electoral) mobilization. At the rhetorical level, RMDSZ did not abandon the goal of building a parallel Hungarian minority society, but in its linkages to the Hungarian electorate, clientelistic exchanges have become predominant.     

China’s ‘New Silk Roads’: sub-national regions and networks of global political economy

This paper argues that the Chinese government’s ‘belt and road’ initiative – the Silk Roads vision of land and maritime logistics and communications networks connecting Asia, Europe and Africa – has its roots in sub-national ideas and practices, and that it reflects their elevation to the national level more than the creation of substantially new policy content. Further, the spatial paradigms inherent in the Silk Roads vision reveal the reproduction of capitalist developmental ideas expressed particularly in the form of networks, which themselves have become a feature of contemporary global political economy. In other words, the Silk Roads vision is more of a ‘spatial fix’ than a geopolitical manoeuvre.     

Humanism in the autobiographies of Edward Said and Nelson Mandela: memory as action

This paper discusses the concept of memory as a form of humanist activism in the autobiographies of Nelson Mandela and Edward Said. Mandela and Said were chosen because they dedicated their lives to the cause of freedom in South Africa and Palestine. Their engagement with the political causes of their countries turned into a concern with worldwide struggles for human rights and racial equality. While Mandela emerged as a vital force against apartheid in South Africa, Said was a well-known and influential Palestinian critic and intellectual whose writings tackle the Palestinian struggle for justice within the worldwide experience of imperialism and its binary oppositions of white/black, male/female, superior/inferior. I argue that these autobiographies bear witness to the plight of Black South Africans and Palestinians as both a shared memory resistant to erasure and a call for justice. Mandela and Said used their personal memories and life stories to construct a public reading of the meanings of the events that shaped them. Here I focus on the concept of humanist and political activity in the two autobiographies.     

The Young-Girl in Theory

This essay situates Tiqqun's Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl within a long history of leftist art and theory that uses the figure of the girl to respond to, reflect on, and even to attempt to subvert the various subjective crises of late capitalism. At the same time, and reading Tiqqun against the grain, it asks whether the Young-Girl might be of any use for thinking through the new questions about subjectivity and representation that neoliberalism has presented for feminism.     

警察临战:和谐目标下的危机管理

加强公共危机管理是构建和谐社会的重要内容。警察临战是公共危机管理的重要组成部分,它为公共危机管理决策提供服务,为公共危机管理提供资源保障,它是公共危机管理的重要手段。危机管理是警察临战学的理论基础。     

社区警察人际交往的PAC理论及其训练模式

据警务专家统计分析,一名社区警察在工作中大部分的时间和精力是在同社区公众接触,为公众提供各类服务,而只有较少的时间才是面对真正的犯罪嫌疑人。如果社区警察不注重交往技能和心理调控训练,势必会影响警民关系,给社区警务工作带来不便。PAC理论为我们提供交往技能训练提供了理论依据,可以为我们对警察人际交往训练提供理论指导。     

周礼是怎样形成的

周礼是在继承殷礼的基础上,在周初政治、经济以及文化条件制约之下,在平衡各种政治势力的权力和利益的基础上诞生.采用韦伯的立场、观点和方法进行相关分析.