Positionality

This article examines the positionality of local stakeholders in the production of knowledge through fieldwork in qualitative research in Northern Uganda. While scholarly literature has evolved on the positionality and experiences of researchers from the Global North in (post)conflict environments, little is known about the positionality and experiences of local stakeholders in the production of knowledge. This article is based on interviews and focus groups with research assistants and respondents in Northern Uganda. Using a phenomenological approach, this article analyzes the positionality and experiences of these research associates and respondents during fieldwork. Three themes emerged from these interviews and are explored in this article: power, fatigue, and safety. This article emphasizes that researchers need to be reflexive in their practices and highlights the need to reexamine how researchers are trained in qualitative methods before going into the field. This article is further critical of the behavior of researchers and how research agendas impact local stakeholders during and after fieldwork.

In this course, students will be introduced to the sustainable development goals (SDGs), the concept of development and different discourses around them. Two key concepts, advocated by decolonial and feminist scholar-activists, for the study of local communities and their sustainable development; namely, the concepts of “delinking” and “positionality” will also be presented and discussed. The premise of this course is to show how these concepts provide us with non-normative and post-disciplinary perspectives for knowledge production on local development. In addition, these concepts are argued to also be important for sustainable development (Mignolo, 2016), especially in relation to the many attempts worldwide for the reconstitution of local ways of seeing, sensing and becoming in the world.

This paper addresses the thorny issue of complicity with wrongdoing under conditions of systemic political violence, such as authoritarianism, totalitarianism or military occupation. The challenge of dealing with collaborators – those who colluded with the apparatus of repression or who benefitted from its existence – is central to subsequent processes of justice and memory-making. This paper proposes several arguments. Firstly, it claims we need to think about complicity and resistance not dichotomically, but as a continuum of locations individuals can occupy. Secondly, these locations are influenced by the agents’ positionality within the social world, each agent being situated at the intersection of several axes of distinction: class, gender, racialisation, and religion, among others. Thirdly, to understand complicity we also need to draw a connection between individual’s experience of time and their actions: temporality is experienced from within a social position, through the interplay between memory, imagination and hope. Positionality thus affects one’s memories and self-understanding, the scope of one’s imagination, as well as the type and intensity of one’s hopes. Therefore, individuals’ capacity to build on the past to imagine a future, to invest emotionally in the future and act accordingly are interrelated aspects of their experience, which will influence how they navigate the muddy waters of systemic wrongdoing, more or less complicitly. To give concreteness to these three theoretical arguments, the paper discusses several forms of complicity with violence during the Vichy Regime in France.

This paper contributes to the growing literature on methods and techniques for conducting qualitative research in economic geography, as well as to recent feminist debates on the impact that relationships of power between researchers and their informants have on the rigor of the findings of qualitative research. Drawing upon my own experiences whilst conducting interviews with managers and workers in information processing companies in Jamaica, I will examine the ways that inter-cultural perceptions, interactions and representations influenced the fieldwork process, and their ultimate eect on my interpretation and writing of the final text. This paper includes that because of the dynamic way in which identities and their attendant power relations are created and transformed during business interviews, uncertainty will necessarily remain a residual in the evaluation and interpretation of information received. It argues that recognizing and naming these uncertainties is an important s...

Questions in Qualitative Social Justice Research in Multicultural Contexts take readers on an accessible and inspiring journey to critically self-reflect on current or future research practices to encourage and facilitate greater equity, inclusion, and social justice in qualitative research.

In a diverse world, "doing" qualitative research needs unpacking and developing awareness of interconnected perspectives and challenges. However, as researchers, there is not always a chance to fully prepare or self-reflect on the processes and experiences. This book raises awareness of key multidimensional aspects of social justice, such as power, privilege, trust, insider-outsiderness, ethics, arts-based, co-produced, and decolonial research. The authors connect theory and conceptual constructs with practical in-field realities, guiding researchers through the dynamic, evolving steps to give voice to and promote social justice practices in research.

This foundational book can be used as a jumping-off point to engage and critically self-reflect about research moving us towards decolonizing research practice, creating more inclusive, equitable, and socially just research. It will be suitable for upper-level and postgraduate students and all researchers interested in qualitative methods in education and the social and behavioral sciences.

The Death of Kings by Colette F Keen, is a new verbatim theatre work that relives the early 80s during the HIV/AIDS crisis. Drawing on both laughter and tears the play focuses on the experiences of gay men and the response to the epidemic by the gay community, the toll of being surrounded by constant death, stories of survival and the nobility of the individuals facing the devastation of their community. Built on interviews that took place between January and December 2012, the show tells the stories of a varied group of gay men. The Death of Kings is a moving, lively and honest display of how a community came together to face tragedy with hope, grace, courage.

This article presents a new positional perspective for the analysis of dia-spora mobilization in international relations (IR), seeking to shift debates beyond realist, liberalist, and constructivist thinking, and speaking to a cluster of sociopositional theories in IR. It provides a conceptual discussion and empirical illustrations of diaspora positionality—the power diaspora activists derive from their sociospatial positions in particular contexts—and its utility to account for different mobilization trajectories. Positionality as a sociospatial concept offers opportunities to analyze diaspora politics beyond statist paradigms, dominated by analyses of triadic relationships between diasporas, host states (immigration states), and home states (sending states). Diasporas have links to many contexts beyond host states and original home states. Such linkages structure their relationships globally. If diaspora entrepreneurs perceive themselves as deriving strong powers to achieve homeland-oriented goals from a particular sociospatial context, they are more likely to pursue claims through institutional politics and moderate means. If they perceive themselves as deriving weak powers from a context, they are more likely to engage with activist networks and pursue claims in transgressive ways. The conceptual discussion engages aspects of diaspora positionality in juxtaposition with other spatial concepts such as geographical proxim-ity/distance and position in a social network. The empirical discussion brings patterns of mobilization trajectories from the Armenian diaspora mobilization for genocide recognition and the Palestinian diaspora mobilization for statehood, informed by a rich multisited fieldwork. Acknowledgments: I would like to express gratitude to the European Research Council for its sponsorship of the research conducted for this article with grant 284198. I also would like to thank colleagues who gave helpful feedback of earlier drafts or during my presentations at the International Studies Association, Warwick University,

In this paper I explore questions related to the epistemological and ontological differences existing between Euro-Western and Indigenous ways of knowing. Revealing myself to the reader through positioning, I explore the possibility of reaching an ethical middle ground, while occupying an unearned position of privilege. In doing so, I discuss the personal process of decolonization and its location within my research. Drawing on the works of Indigenous scholars, I discuss the potential for a neutral, ethical, space-bridging worldview. In conclusion, I highlight details about how meaningful knowledge creation can aid a non-Aboriginal researcher engaged in an Aboriginal research paradigm.

Like the development industry, development pedagogy and practice have begun to take into account the role of emotions and the deeper, affective and embodied experiences of understanding and doing development. In her groundbreaking piece 'Emotional geographies of development', Sarah Wright illustrates how emotions not only create development subjects and associated subjectivities, but also provide a powerful entry point for resistance that may ultimately lead to transformative social change. Post-colonial and feminist scholars have long emphasised the role of emotions such as anger, fear, shame, joy and hope in discursive construction of the 'Other' and the persistence of false binaries that obscure layers of struggle, exclusion and disen-franchisement. In this paper, we (students and educators) reflect on the role of emotions and affective engagements with development, drawing upon classroom discussions as well as reading and reflection logs of those studying for a Master in International Development (MID) at the University of Western Australia. We explore how explicit efforts to be attentive to our own emotions while digesting and deliberating material for this unit allow us to better grasp our own positionality while revisiting our personal entanglements with the 'Other'-the quintessential development subject. Making space for 'more-than-rational' aspects of development enables scholars and educators to experiment with affective options for interdisciplinary teaching in a distinctly more personal way than students may expect from a postgraduate degree in international development.

During the past two decades, a new immigrants’ rights movement in the U.S. has emerged, constructing a counterpublic that challenges hegemonic immigration discourses, policies, and practices. We show how a counterpublic is constructed in practice, using as a case study the Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride (IWFR), an event in 2003 that helped further the momentum of immigrant rights activism. We examine how immigrant activists and their allies came together and worked to construct, articulate, and enact a shared political identity that we refer to as an identity-in-alliance. Space-time and emotions were crucial in the development of this identity as ‘Freedom Riders,’ as well as a sense of solidarity. We reflect on the vulnerabilities within the counterpublic and challenges it faced when inserting its discourses on immigration, race, and citizenship into the hegemonic public sphere. Taking the insights gained from these practices, we extend Nancy Fraser’s concept of the counterpublic by demonstrating the centrality of space-time and emotions to its theorization.

Heidegger’s Gestell (Enframing/Positionality) and the Three Syntheses of the Unconscious of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the example of Chess

-- Abstract: Enframing/Positionality as the essence of Technology in relation to the three syntheses of the Unconscious in Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and Guattari

-- Key Words:  Deleuze, Heidegger, Fundamental Ontology, Continental Philosophy

This unique companion is a much-needed guide for those who are embarking on field research in conflict-affected countries. In a break with academic tradition, the chapters are mainly written in the first person and contain personal accounts of the ethical and practical challenges of fieldwork. In the book, over thirty scholars reflect on the complexity of dealing with human subjects in conflict-affected contexts. This indispensable book provides insider knowledge and gives confidence to researchers - both those at the very start of their careers or during their studies, and experienced researchers who want to consider positionality, responsibility and the moral obligation of the researcher in new ways. Essential reading for students and scholars embarking upon fieldwork in International Relations, Politics, Sociology, Political Geography and Anthropology.

In recent years, there has been increased interest in, and work towards,
decolonising the curriculum in higher education institutions in the UK. There are various initiatives to review university syllabuses and identify alternative literature. However, there is an increasing risk of turning ‘decolonisation’ into a buzz term tied to a trend. We fear that decolonisation within academia is becoming an empty term, diluted and depoliticised, allowing for superficial representations that fail to address racial, political and socio-economic intersectionalities. In this article, we examine several initiatives to decolonise the curriculum with a focus on the field of education as a discipline and medium. Based on our analysis, we engage with three main themes: conceptualisation, positionality and conduct. The article concludes that decolonisation cannot happen in a vacuum, or as an
aim disconnected from the rest of the structure of the university, which leads to diluting a wider movement and turns into a box-ticking exercise. We argue that there needs to be a deconstruction of asymmetrical power relationships within academic spaces to allow for meaningful decolonisation in practice. This requires a real political will, a change in the structure, and in the hearts and minds of those in decision-making positions, and a shift in the practices of knowledge production.

Intersectionality is celebrated in education research for its capacity to illuminate how identities like race, gender, class, and ability interact and shape individual experiences, social practices, institutions, and ideologies. However, although widely invoked among educational researchers, intersectionality is rarely unpacked or theorized. It is treated as a simple, settled concept despite the fact that, outside education research, it has become in the early 21st century one of the most hotly debated concepts in social science research. Education researchers should therefore clarify and, where appropriate, complicate their uses of intersectionality. One important issue requiring clarification concerns the question: “Who is intersectional?” While some critical social scientists represent intersectionality as a theory of multiple marginalization, others frame it as a theory of multiple identities. Either choice entails theoretical and practical trade-offs. When researchers approach intersectionality as a theory of multiple marginalization, they contribute to seeking redress for multiply marginalized subjects’ experiences of violence and erasure, yet this approach risks representing multiply marginalized communities as damaged, homogenous, and without agency, while leaving the processes maintaining dominance uninterrogated. When scholars approach intersectionality as a theory of multiple identities, meanwhile, they may supply a fuller account of the processes by which advantage and disadvantage co-constitute one another, but they risk recentering Whiteness, deflecting conversations about racism, and marginalizing women of color in the name of inclusivity. A review of over 60 empirical and conceptual papers in educational research shows that such trade-offs are not often made visible in our field. Education researchers should therefore clarify their orientations to intersectionality: They should name the approach(es) they favor, make arguments for why such approaches are appropriate to a particular project, and respond thoughtfully to potential limitations.

What does it mean to engage in Deaf Studies and who gets to define the field? What would a truly deaf-led Deaf Studies research program look like? What are the research practices of deaf scholars in Deaf Studies, and how do they relate to deaf research participants and communities? What innovations do deaf scholars deem necessary in the field of Deaf Studies? In Innovation in Deaf Studies: The Role of Deaf Scholars, volume editors Annelies Kusters, Maartje De Meulder, and Dai O'Brien and their contributing authors tackle these questions and more. Spurred by a gradual increase in the number of Deaf Studies scholars who are deaf, and by new theoretical trends in Deaf Studies, this book creates an important space for contributions from deaf researchers, to see what happens when they enter into the conversation. Innovation in Deaf Studies expertly foregrounds deaf ontologies (defined as "deaf ways of being") and how the experience of being deaf is central not only to deaf research participants' own ontologies, but also to the positionality and framework of the study as a whole. Further, this book demonstrates that the research and methodology built around those ontologies offer suggestions for new ways for the discipline to meet the challenges of the present, which includes productive and ongoing collaboration with hearing researchers. Providing fascinating perspective and insight, Kusters, De Meulder, O'Brien, and their contributors all focus on the underdeveloped strands within Deaf Studies, particularly on areas around deaf people's communities, ideologies, literature, religion, language practices, and political aspirations.

“Reflective practice is the process of exploring a pattern of action, making adjustments during the action, or thinking about past action. In an elemental sense, most of us preform some form of reflective practice virtually every day. To the extent that reflective practice incorporates theory and experience, even the most mundane of activities engages aspects of experiential learning and nascent theory.”

This course is designed to introduce students to the theories, skills and approaches to conflict resolution focused around reflective practice. Reflective practice involves developing critical awareness, and subsequently using such a lens to explore the patterns of action that make up our lives. We aim to first observe and acknowledge our social, emotional, mental, political and interpersonal patterns, and based on these observations, make adjustments to our present to positively affect the future while learning from the past. Through an exploration of a variety of literatures we will develop theory, awareness and practical familiarity with such approaches and seek to locate places for their incorporation into our work.

This course is designed to be integrative, combining theories of conflict and applications of reflective practice approaches. We will focus on engaging in three core areas:
1.) Conflict resolution practices and theories necessary for understanding, mapping, intervening and transforming conflicts.
2.) Reflective practices necessary for understanding positionality, subjectivity, knowledge construction and experience.
3.) The collaborative development of practice through the shared experience of knowledge building, critical engagement and guided reflection

Documentary Theatre, and its more recent iteration, Verbatim Theatre, has been a vital theatre form in the West since the early 20th Century, notable for its preoccupation with socio-political issues and its reliance on the actual words of those who witnessed or participated in a particular event or phenomenon. This thesis examines what puts the ‘art’ into Documentary and Verbatim Theatre, while considering its relationship with and roots in journalism. By exploring the influences on practitioners and how these impact their work, the question asked is: What position does the writer take in terms of placing themselves in the text and how does this influence the work? To inform this, it is asked: Is the writer speaking for or with the story-owners. Related questions include: To what extent does the writer have an outsider/insider positionality; what is the intersectionality of the writer with the subject; and what role does empathy play in the creation of such work? This critical reflection provides practitioners, participants, and the audience of Documentary and Verbatim Theatre with new ways of engaging with this arts practice.
To establish the form’s development from journalism to art, the historical influence of journalism is explored. Ethnographic methodology is also employed to analyse the subject positions and working methodologies of two of the great practitioners of this form, Anna Deavere Smith and Moisés Kaufman. Auto-ethnographic techniques are also utilised, drawing from the experience of working as personal assistant to Smith and participating in Kaufman’s professional training in Moment Work.
The practice component of the dissertation is the full-length Documentary Verbatim Theatre script, The Death of Kings (Keen, 2016). This work has been created as an example of a writer speaking with the story-owners and positioning themselves in the audience. The play focuses on the experiences of self-identified white gay men in Sydney, Australia and the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic by the gay community.

The result of this research is to offer an analytical framework for mapping out the influences on the writers of Documentary or Verbatim Theatre, demonstrating how they create an artistic element not found in documentary and journalism practice. By understanding how Documentary and Verbatim Theatre go beyond journalism, we are given the opportunity to better appreciate and more deeply query the nature of the truth being presented and the art inflecting and underpinning the stories told by the creators of these works.

Research on public service interpreting employs a number of methods to examine a range of variables, from specific linguistic and paralinguistic variables to spatial positioning, agency, and ethics. These methods, however, require explicit recognition of the researcher’s positionality in order to ensure appropriate data analysis and interpretation of results. This article examines the unique aspects of the interpreting studies research that requires reflection when conducting work in this area. Two specific types of bias, namely social desirability bias and the Hawthorne effect, are discussed in detail to illustrate the type of reflective practice required to ensure valid, reliable, and credible results. The article concludes with a brief reflection on how positionality may be a starting point for discussion surrounding the agency of the researcher.

In this introductory chapter, the editors critically map the field of Deaf Studies. Central in this discussion is an exploration of themes that have been investigated in the field and a critical examination of the theoretical frameworks and concepts that have been used including the deaf culture concept and the d/D writing convention. The editors then flag up current theoretical trends in the field and consider how the field can be strengthened. Subsequently, they discuss the hegemony of hearing scholars in Deaf Studies, and collaboration between deaf and hearing scholars. They explore experiences of deaf researchers within research contexts and within academia, followed by a discussion of ethical research practice. Having thus established the theoretical and socio-political context of the current state of the field of Deaf Studies, the editors introduce the main themes of the current volume and explicate the unifying threads that run through the following chapters.

Innovations in Deaf Studies: Critically Mapping the Field. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316878605_Innovations_in_Deaf_Studies_Critically_Mapping_the_Field [accessed May 12, 2017].

In order to illustrate what is at stake in the definition and in the development of a complex epistemology of transformative learning, this chapter introduces the paradigm of complexity and explores six challenges that appear particularly illustrative with regards to the advance of research and practices related to transformative learning

In this chapter, I focus on two discrete but interrelated intellectual projects: Southern theory and decolonial options. With a focus on race-aware and anti-racist critiques of Southern theories, I argue that assertions of the need to focus more centrally on Southern theory are not equivalent with assertions of the need to end, unequivocally, the coloniality of knowledge. Some of the critical and celebrated scholarship critiquing the (on-going) hegemony of Eurocentric theory and knowing—broadly, theories from the South—has failed to systematically engage with the racialisation of actors within the university and racial inequality in knowledge making. In such paradigms, southern theories are importantly recognised as valuable for shifting the gaze at the same time that there remains a certain blindness to the colonial racial hierarchies that create and sustain the invisibilization(s) and destructions of them. Situated in the context of coloniality, such projects risk reiterating the global knowledge hierarchy. I sketch an alternative approach for knowing across and between North(s)-South(s) and South(s)-South(s). This approach is a feminist decolonial orientation founded on an open assessment of racial and geographical inequalities within the university along with a critical feminist attention to the politics of the mundane in the academy (authorship, citation, language, promotion and impromptu encounters in classrooms and corridors).

At this time of revived activism on the African continent, a number of contemporary artists based in Africa are producing works that assert the need for further and more radical forms of change in society and in the art world. While the largely northern-driven world of contemporary art displays a fetishistic fascination with what it calls “African art,” often this art discourse is disconnected from art production and art reception on the African continent, as the written discourse largely remains the assumed domain of the “north”. As such, a problematic geography of reason is created in which those in the “south” are viewed as creators of raw materials (in this case artworks) that are theorized by scholars in the “north.” Focusing on a politics of knowing, this article argues that in order to achieve significantly deeper decolonial shifts in the field of the visual and performing arts of Africa, scholarly writers on the continent need to play a greater role in challenging epistemic dependencies and shifting the center of gravity of the global academy.

This paper considers the positionality and reflexivity of non- Romani, ally-identified researchers vis-à-vis insider/outsider research by critically examining – or queer(y)ing – non-Romani researcher identity and the privilege that goes with it. On a theoretical level this can be facilitated by, for example, queer theoretical concepts and the concept of critical whiteness. Critical whiteness is “queer” by virtue of being counter/non/ anti-normative in relation to whiteness as a social norm (white- normativity). In practical terms, employing queer, feminist, and critical whiteness methodologies means that reflective and reflexive researchers conducting research “with,” “for,” and “on” Roma do not “have to be” Romani in order to participate in knowledge production on Romani communities. Nonetheless, it implicates their ability to critically examine their own privilege and challenge it accordingly, that is, not only academically but also politically and socially.

This article explores the recent expansion of narrative approaches in International Relations (IR) and the conceptual and political possibilities it brings about. Instead of suggesting a set of criteria through which we should evaluate narrative texts, we investigate what they are already doing in IR scholarship. We show that the space narrative writing delineates through the encounter between text and reader/reading potentiates critique and engages complexity in ways that are often not available in other forms of IR scholarship. Concretely, we examine themes around openness, contradiction, ambiguity, fracture, surprise, and the ungovernable aspects of social and scholarly life.

The Baloch are one of the best documented ethnic communities in the modern Islamic world.
But the information comes from non-Baloch, who saw them as a tribal population, with their own
history and culture, separate from the people around them. This conventional approach masks the
continuities in their history, from their raiding of urban populations over a thousand years ago to
their current national opposition movements in Iran and Pakistan and their recent association with
international terrorism. But if studied in a larger context, both historical and geographical, the
available information illustrates the continuities, through qualitative changes, from the earliest
available sources down to the present. Enlarging the context in this way has an additional advantage:
it enhances our understanding of other world-historical processes that are currently playing out
under globalization.
An important variable in this history is locality, the cultural evaluation of location, and
translocality, the way locality changes as the social context becomes more complex—variables that
have received little attention from either historians or ethnographers. Locality is determined mainly
by investment and the social interests resulting from investment. Where there was sufficient soil
and water to support investment in irrigation engineering and agricultural development, small
communities settled and grew into cities. As the cities grew, they developed trade networks, which
further increased their investment potential. The Baloch, like other ‘tribal’ peoples in the arid zone of
the northern hemisphere, formed from people who did not find a place in this urban social dynamic.
They are people without investment, who remained historically independent of the cities, but were
always there to replenish the cities demographically in times of economic growth, and to take in their
economic refugees in times of decline. This history of demographic interdependence, between the
cities which could increase their productivity by means of investment and the tribal people who
could not, generated a culturally distinctive sense of locality throughout the arid zone, which was
different from the temperate and subtropical zones to the north and south.
More recently, as translocality has accelerated with the increasing social complexity of
globalization, the people without investment have been forced into political and economic
dependence on the cities, but the new city-based nation-state governments responsible for them
have so far largely continued to leave them without investment. In the new political framework of
the information age the tribes rebel. Similar developments are evident among tribal populations in
other parts of the modern Islamic world, and make interesting comparison with similar populations
elsewhere.

In this article, I draw on the experiences of Iraqi diasporas in the UK and Sweden after the 2003 US‐led intervention to demonstrate how ethno‐sectarianism in Iraq has affected their political transnationalism. Using the concepts of intersectionality and positionality, I show how the reconfiguration of the social positions of individuals and groups in the diaspora affects their types of political engagement and the spaces in which political mobilization takes place. In the case of the Iraqi diaspora, I show how, among other things, the social categories of ethnicity, religion and gender create positions of both subordination and privilege, which inhibit, reshape and empower the political actions of diasporas in both the homeland and host country. In societies divided along ethnic, religious or tribal lines, the social positions of individuals and groups relative to the dominant ethnic/religious political parties and the nationalist ideology they promote determine the nature of their diasporic mobilization.

The article unpacks the issues of bias and partisanship—and the risk of being accused of these—which confront social scientists who study socio-political conflict. Drawing on the author's experience when conducting research on the conflict between animal liberation activists and their state and corporate adversaries in Britain (1999–2014), the article argues for a relational research approach—focusing on the interaction between contending parties, rather than study stakeholders singly—as a way to overcome challenges of taking sides when studying socio-political conflict. The debate generated by Howard Becker's classic essay ''Whose side are we on?'' (1967), now 50 years old, is used throughout the article as a point of reference for addressing the issues involved. The argument is made for constant reflexivity during research on radical social movements, and for ''temporary bias'' during qualitative fieldwork.

Drawing from scholarship in feminist political geography that embraces discomfort and unease as generative features of social encounter along with the literature on decolonial ethics for research, Murrey argues that further concrete work is necessary to deconstruct the artificial barriers between ‘the field’/home-site and that this project remains particularly acute for research ‘on Africa’ given its position in a global colonial system. To these ends, Murrey makes three interconnected arguments: (a) ‘women researching in Africa’ are responsible for challenging masculinist and colonial epistemologies. (b) This would mean, among others, moving beyond guilt and compassion to an explicit political consciousness of decolonization. (c) Such a consciousness is centered upon attention to the functions of race, particularly global whiteness and anti-blackness, for research in Africa.

This short reflection—a provocation of sorts—considers the complex relationships between early modern studies and postmodern theory. For the most part, these realms are divided but, every so often, are hesitantly united in powerful ways. I seek to understand the following: can postmodern methods of inquiry be used productively in the study of premodern subject matters, specifically in sex and gender histories on the deviant sodomitical body in art, architecture, law, and politics. These questions open up the longstanding debate between anachronism and efficacy in the applications of 20th and 21st century methods, primarily through the invocation of positionality as an investigative system for queer-identifying folks studying earlier queer histories—yet another (lexical) debate on anachronisms: how did "sodomitical histories" of the Renaissance become "homosexual ones," and when can they become "queer?" Without definitive answers, I muse.

This book offers in-depth insight into the lives of queer Roma, thus providing rich evidence of the heterogeneity of Roma. The lived experiences of queer Roma, which are very diverse regionally and otherwise, pose a fundamental challenge to one-dimensional, negative misrepresentations of Roma as homophobic and antithetical to European and Western modernity. The book platforms Romani agency and voices in an original and novel way. This enables the reader to feel the individuals behind the data, which detail stories of rejection by Romani families and communities, and non-Romani communities; and unfamiliar, groundbreaking stories of acceptance by Romani families and communities. Combining intersectionality with queer theory innovatively and applying it to Romani Studies, the author supports her arguments with data illustrating how the identities of queer Roma are shaped by antigypsyism and its intersections with homophobia and transphobia. Thanks to its theoretical and empirical content, and its location within a book series on LGBTIQ lives that appeals to an international audience, this authoritative book will appeal to a wide range of readers. It will a be useful resource for libraries, community and social service workers, third-sector Romani and LGBTIQ organisations, activists and policymakers; an invaluable source of information for scholars, teachers and students of bigger modules in undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate courses in a cross section of academic disciplines and subject areas.

This working paper presents a first analysis of irrigation practices and irrigation development interventions in a village located in the central Karakorum, northern Pakistan. The social arrangements that for centuries sustained farmer-managed irrigation systems are seen to have, due to a range of factors, come under increased pressure in recent decades. Yet in the high altitude mountain valleys of the Karakorum, irrigation systems continue to be managed effectively, for without irrigation life in such desert landscapes would be untenable. This research seeks to understand how it is that farming communities continue to sustain their irrigation systems. It focuses on irrigation practices, water rights systems, and irrigation projects and the socio-political context within which they are situated. Field research, using ethnographic and participatory methods, was conducted in spring 2013 in the upper Shigar valley, Skardu district, Gilgit-Baltistan.
The village is shown to have a historically constructed, distinct materiality, embedded in broader sets of historically constituted social relations while simultaneously regulating and mediating contemporary social relations. This is illustrated by a discussion surrounding irrigation practices and related water rights systems, drawing on the work of Coward (1986, 1990) and Schmidt (2000, 2004, 2008). Local politics involves village-based actors, government agencies and local politicians, a non-government organisation which channels European funds into the region, and religious leaders, all of whom exert different forms of territorial power (essentially, control over resources). Cox’s (1998) notion of ‘spaces of dependence, spaces of engagement’ is shown to be a useful conceptual tool for understanding how water users strive to secure the conditions for their continued existence, e.g. by drawing value (capital) towards the irrigation channels within their village. Thus a group of water-users may strive to secure their farmland’s water supply, while a village-based political leader is concerned with his reputation as well as his village’s water supply. Spaces of dependence relate to an actor’s positionality, and the spaces constructed connect differentially positioned and endowed actors via networks of association that span geographically and politically delineated nested jurisdictions.

Evan Thompson geeft in zijn boek Mind in Life een weergave van zijn visie op bewustzijn. In zijn visie op bewustzijn brengt hij ideeën uit de biologie, de fenomenologie en de cognitiewetenschappen samen. Thompson laat met zijn enactive approach Descartes’ mind-body probleem in rook opgaan. Daarna introduceert hij het body-body probleem. Enculturatie en sensual emapthy zijn voor Thompson belangrijke begrippen die verklaren hoe in het domein van interactie, die plaatsvindt tussen de binnen- en buitenwereld van de mens, het bewustzijn zich vormt. Mijn vraagstelling is: “Biedt Thompsons beschrijving van bewustzijn en semi-oplossing wel een volledig beeld van de menselijke ervaring?” Plessners excentrische positionaliteit speelt een belangrijke rol bij de beantwoording van deze vraag. Thompson heeft namelijk (nog) geen verklaring voor de ervaring van het eigen lichaam, de kenmerken en de gedachten vanuit het derde-persoonsperspectief. Plessner wel, zijn excentrische positionaliteit biedt een waardevolle aanvulling op Thompsons theorie.
Kernwoorden: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Edith Stein, bewustzijn, Plessner, excentrische positionaliteit, derde-persoonsperspectief.