Martha Claeys, University of Antwerp
In Swedish, there is a word for the shame we feel when we choose air travel over more ecological options. The Swedes call it ‘flygskam.’ They also coined the words ‘tågskryt’ (train pride) en ‘smygflyga’ (flying in secret). The question whether we should feel ashamed when making unecological choices is not restricted to Swedish media. But does this shame actually contribute to the greening of society?
By Kate Pahl
In the previous post Mathew Flinders identified the ways in which collaborative research touches the emotions of academics and places different kinds of demands on them. In our joint article with Milton Brown, Paul Ward and Zanib Rasool (available here) we identified the emotional work of collaboration and the ways in which it touched us personally. Here I reflect on my own academic journey and explore how it helped to work both inside and outside academia.
Continue readingEmotions seem increasingly to mark political movements and discourse. Anger, fear and sadness have, to varying degrees, been implicated in the outcome of the Brexit referendum and the rise of Trump, on the one hand, and the persistence of Black Lives Matter and the impact of the Me Too movement, on the other. A philosophical tradition that stretches from Plato to Martha Nussbaum has urged us to keep negative emotions like anger and jealousy out of politics, and to instead nurture positive ones, like love and compassion. Yet, that must be confounding to minorities, the poor and other marginalized groups, whose political claims frequently originate in negative emotions and take the form of emotional expressions. Indeed, their marginalization and attendant suffering has been exacerbated by processes, such as medicalization, which prompt individuals to think of their anger, fear and other painful emotions as personal problems to be dealt with in the medical or some other ostensibly apolitical sphere. But not everyone believes negative emotions must be kept out of politics. Some feminists have long defended the political value of anger. And, more recently, such thinkers as Judith Butler and Deborah Gould have highlighted the politically empowering and constructive role that other negative emotions can play as well. Moreover, a series of methodological discussions on the importance of affect have brought the role of emotions in research into sharp focus. But whether these newer perspectives can survive the popular trend of blaming our contemporary political problems on passions like anger and fear remains to be seen.
This Editor’s Choice contains three pieces on the place of emotions in politics and means of harnessing those emotions methodologically and politically from the first two issues of volume 10. First, from 10:1 Graham Crow outlines a number of complications in advancing methods grounded in affect, in his ‘Collaborative research and the emotions of overstatement: four cautionary tales but no funeral’. Matt Flinders provides a substantive reply to Crow in ‘Collaborative Research and the Emotions of Overstatement’, arguing that the emotional implications of collaboration with non-academic partners and the value of that work needs much more fully to be understood and, often, appreciated. Finally, from 10:2-3, Karen Adkins‘ ‘“We will march side by side and demand a bigger table’: Anger as dignity claim’ deploys recent feminist perspectives on anger in politics to explain why Martha Nussbaum gets anger wrong. In the process, Adkins explores a range of practical issues, from mansplaining to rape victim impact statements, which will be of interest to a wide range of academic audiences.
Matthew Flinders @politicalspike
The simple fact is that deep, embedded, collaborative research whereby researchers work hand-in-hand with community participants in order to reveal new perspectives and to curate new forms of knowledge is inevitably risky, messy and to some extent even defiant.
Continue readingEditor’s choice
In May 2019, tensions between Iran and the United States dramatically escalated following the imposition of US sanctions. Across the Persian Gulf a number of tankers were attacked, whilst others were seized, including a British oil tanker detained for “violating international maritime rules”. Amidst this escalation of tensions, international news outlets carried stories suggesting that Iran told its proxies to prepare for war. Referring to Iran’s long-standing relationships with groups across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Palestine, these stories played on the idea of a complex web of often – although not exclusively – sectarian networks that cut across sovereign borders and help Tehran to achieve its geopolitical aims. Yet the reality of relations between Iran and local groups is far more complex, determined by a range of factors. This Editor’s Choice focuses on issue 9:4: Transnational religious networks and the geopolitics of the Muslim World, which is our annual Richardson Institute special issue.
In ‘Transnational identity claims, roles and strategic foreign policy narratives in the Middle East’, Edward Wastnidge explores how identity claims are inherent in the transnational appeal of these two regional powers. Focusing on Yemen, Vincent Durac’s ‘The Limits of the Sectarian Narrative in Yemen’ starts by critically contextualising the notion of sectarianism in relation to politics and conflict in the Middle East. Simon Fuchs’ ‘Faded Networks: The Overestimated Saudi Legacy of anti-Shi‘I Sectarianism in Pakistan’ seeks to debunk some of the arguments surrounding the extent and depth of the Saudi influence on anti-Shi’i sectarian discourses in Pakistan.
-Dr Matthew Johnson
