Abstract: In Europe, the public discourse on migration opposes narratives of endangered national identities and sovereignties to utilitarian arguments that migrants can restore fiscal balance and demographic dynamism. The notion of hospitality as the foundational basis for granting protection is, however, absent from the debate. In Germany, the initial spirit of organized popular solidarity with refugees and asylum seekers that came in during summer and fall 2015 were soon disillusioned by the unpreparedness of the bureaucracy in processing all asylum claims. As a result of the massive streams of migrants in the recent years, resentment towards migrants, while still marginal in Germany, has become more outspoken. The state’s duty to provide protection to refugees and asylum seekers has become fraught with political considerations that serve bureaucratic interests. Consequently, the provision of protection paradoxically developed into inhospitable practices that disenfranchises migrants and hinders the provision of protection to incoming displaced populations. This article proposes a re-discovery of hospitality by integrating the analyses of Derrida and Hallie. It argues for a politicization of hospitality that can achieved by enabling migrants themselves to enter discourse and fill it with their subjective outlook on their own mobility. Hospitality, as a discursive act that relates the host and the guest on a basis of equality, demarginalizes migrants in the reception country as they are invited into the public space to express their own voices on the migratory processes that they experienced.

Abstract: In this paper, I perform close readings of several of the narratives included in the This American Life podcast in order to rethink sovereignty outside of the framework of the state as it is lived and practiced in everyday circumstances. Drawing on Bonnie Honig’s reformulation of sovereignty as a modality of power that is not possessed by a singular authority but instead embodied in the collective activity of a people, I use these narratives to assist in theorizing a politics that seeks not emancipation but rather the enactment of futures that are more egalitarian. Such a politics is best conceived a struggle against forms of violence enacted at specific sites rather than as expressions of unified forms of domination. To undertake this analysis, I begin by briefly outlining Honig’s line of inquiry, after which I turn to the specific narratives documented by This American Life, reading them not merely as the chronicles of life in Englewood but as theoretically fecund exemplars of collective and individual sovereignty. Finally, I conclude by exploring what the reading of such narratives as instances of sovereignty can reveal for us regarding politics more generally. Conceiving of the characters in these narratives as sovereign actors seeking to survive rather than as either helpless sufferers (those who experience violence) or criminals (those who act violently) helps to illuminate the complex political dynamics that sustain poverty and produce violence in locales such as Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood.

Abstract: As tensions based on race, gender and class continue, I believe it is imperative for scholars reexamine Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought. Collins uses an intersectional approach to describe the unique oppression which women of color in the United States face. Although the book was published over a decade ago, I believe it can aid one in understanding current oppression women of color still face today. Furthermore, Black Feminist Thought can help to facilitate meaningful dialogue around topics of racism and sexism which are happening across the country. As women continue to be at the forefront of activism against the current division and oppression in the United States, Black Feminist Thought will aid in establishing an inclusive and educated movement.

Abstract: In Martin Heidegger’s concept of care, he explains the process of becoming as an intersubjective relation that extends beyond mere spatial proximity of one being to an other. Through this common and basic experience of care, anxiety is an ontological revealing of self, perpetually leaving behind remnants of prior self-constitution(s). It is through anxiety that being is lifted out of the average everydayness of our human condition. Anxiety, then for Heidegger, is critical, as it confronts nothingness on route to an authentic existence where being finds grounding in Being. We find in the work of Hannah Arendt, therefore, a conceptual continuation of Heidegger’s conception of anxiety through her understanding of courage. For Heidegger, anxiety suggests transcendence as a possibility whereas for Arendt courage via action is transcending. By reading Heidegger’s concept of anxiety through an Arendtian lens we can therefore arrive at a political project shaped by both theory and practice.

Abstract: In an era of exponentially increasing globalization, the experience of time has changed. Tasks that once took days or weeks, now take hours or seconds. This shrinking of time, or the speeding up of activities and processes that transpire within it, has also had profound effects on the experience of space, bringing personal and cultural identities into increasingly closer proximity. As a result, the public sphere has become a contested site in which a multiplicity of heterogenous identities vie for legitimacy and acknowledgment. In such an environment, the concept of identity has taken on a new and heightened significance. Citizens of the contemporary global village risk irreconcilable conflict by privileging rigid conceptions of identity based upon an understanding of time that privileges being over becoming; an understanding that excludes the reality of change, difference, and alterity. Although Jane Bennett’s The Enchantment of Modern Life and Matthew Scherer’s Beyond Church and State: Democracy, Secularism, and Conversion are addressing fundamentally different problems, they nevertheless agree on the ethical and political significance of the plasticity of identity, as well as the possibility and nature of change. This convergence is not entirely surprising, given the web of influences in which Bennett and Scherer are implicated; a web wherein Gilles Deleuze is influenced by Henri Bergson and Bennett and Scherer by both Bergson and Deleuze. In this paper, I argue that both Bennett and Scherer, drawing upon the writings of Deleuze and Bergson respectively, acknowledge two kinds of time: a closed, circular time that solidifies habits—what I will call the time of being—and an open, spiral time which allows for the possibility of change and the production of new habits, the time of becoming. Not only do both Scherer and Bennett acknowledge these different understandings of time, but they also stress the necessity of cultivating an appreciation of the fundamental reality of becoming, and the role that such a cultivation can play in navigating an increasingly heterogeneous political landscape.

Abstract: Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Lacan: In Spite of Everything. Verso Books, 2014. Paperback. £12.09 ISBN: 9-781-78168162-6