Papers by Bradley Dunseith
Anthropologica, 2020
Both gun rights advocates and right-to-die activists shape their moral selves through time in rel... more Both gun rights advocates and right-to-die activists shape their moral selves through time in relation to a demand of personal autonomy. Practising autonomy – having a sense of control over one’s own life and death – becomes the principle of the good for both gun advocates and right-to-die activists. Though the ethical aims of both groups could not be more different, both movements produce a similar kind of subject. Whether through guns or end-of-life technologies, the person who has control over death has control over life, resulting in a subject actively working in and through time. However, while right-to-die activists take their own lives into their sovereign hands, gun owners engage with an ethics of time to prove their capacity in deciding who may live and who must die.
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Book Reviews by Bradley Dunseith
The question is not only: What are practices of science today? The question is: How do we become ... more The question is not only: What are practices of science today? The question is: How do we become capable of naming anthropological problems of the sciences today? Vocationally, what work on ourselves as anthropologists might we need to do in order to be capable of carrying out this activity? (Stavrianakis, Bennett, Fearnley, 11) 1. I have a distinct memory of my first graduate presentation: a visceral sense of anxiety felt acutely from my stomach to neck. A fear that I'd be unable to articulate what I'd been thinking; that my thoughts weren't even worth articulation in the first place. Learning to engage with the texts (to read, speak about, and think with) was an experience that was part panic, part excitement. They led me to inhabit a space where I constantly questioned and reflected on how I understood myself, my capabilities, and my limitations. That research methods seminar was organized around many of the same texts (https://www.academia.edu/15386387/Research_Methodology_in_Anthropology_Syllabus) as Science, Reason, Modernity: Readings for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, and we (at the time, three students starting graduate school and their professor) traced one possible variation on the " genealogical line " and " pedagogical legacy " (p. 33) to which this reader is extended as an invitation. The spirit of that invitation is, in our understanding, not to a canon that would replace any number of others, but to a set of equipment. We take this book forum as an opportunity to reflect on Science, Reason, Modernity through our experiences, exploring how these texts served as our tools, and to what end. [1] (#_ftn1) 2. I remember my initial surprise, in the seminar as in this reader, at the relative lack of texts disciplined into anthropology. Learning to become a " subject of truth under the conditions of modernity " requires as much unlearning as it does thinking about new concepts and ways of conduct. The works in the twentieth-century human sciences collected in Science, Reason, Modernity have brought, in the words of Paul Rabinow, to whom the reader is dedicated as the editors' teacher (and directly or indirectly ours), " philosophical learning, diagnostic rigor, and a practice of inquiry that operates in proximity to concrete situations into a productive relationship " (p. 250). That is, the reader's texts demonstrate a mode of inquiry that is identifiably anthropological in Rabinow's sense, and share key characteristics of the anthropology he has come to conceptualize and practice. Of course, as Rabinow notes in a different section of Anthropos Today, " it is worth forcefully repeating that there are a multitude of other practices anthropologists might pursue " (emphasis in the original, 2003, 85).
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Thesis Chapters by Bradley Dunseith
Gun rights activists in the United States have been incredibly successful in opposing state regul... more Gun rights activists in the United States have been incredibly successful in opposing state regulation and restrictions on firearms. Activists argue that violence in the U.S. will subside not through firearm restrictions but by allowing “good” people to continue to buy, possess, and carry guns who will then be able to stop “bad” people from committing violence. Based on participant observation with a grass-roots, gun rights organization in the state of Georgia, this thesis critically examines what it means to be a “good” gun owner. I argue that gun owners cultivate themselves ethically by learning new skills which disproportionately prioritize anonymous human attacks as the most concerning threat to one’s physical and social integrity. I further show the implications of such a worldview as being enacted in gun owners’ everyday lives.
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Papers by Bradley Dunseith
Book Reviews by Bradley Dunseith
Thesis Chapters by Bradley Dunseith