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Green Magic: On Technologies of Enchantment at Apple's Corporate Headquarters Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2022-04-06 Christo Sims
Abstract Apple's corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley has become an object of public fascination for its technical marvels and green magnificence. However, architectural critics and urbanists have widely critiqued the campus for being socially retrograde and ecologically injurious. This essay queries this divergence in public responses to Apple's headquarters by examining how the campus has been
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Editors' Letter: A Critique of Pure Dumbfoundedness Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2022-04-06 Erica Robles-Anderson,Arjun Appadurai
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Black Mass; or, a Billion Plagues and More Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2022-04-06 Travis Alexander
Abstract This essay asks how we are to think the ethics of Black Lives Matter protest amid conditions of contagion in the summer of 2020. It argues that the multitude instantiated in these events didn't simply tolerate the biomedical damage that could result from such proximity, but that it stakes a claim for the ethical virtue of exposure and vulnerability. That these viral commonwealths apprehend
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Disclosure by Design: What Leaks Produce Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2022-04-06 Mihir Pandya
Abstract This essay revisits the saga of Cold War era stealth development programs—classified but curiously public efforts to build airplanes that eluded radar detection—to explore how leaks work and the work leaks do when designing complex technical systems. Stealth programs are aging examples of an increasingly visible phenomenon: disclosures about large, closely guarded design, manufacturing, and
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Post-grid Imaginaries: Electricity, Generators, and the Future of Energy Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2022-04-06 Joanne Randa Nucho
Abstract This essay describes an emerging “post-grid imaginary” that is informing visions of future collapse, growing scarcity, and deepening infrastructural fragmentation. By examining electrical grid failures in Lebanon and California, we can move beyond developmentalist assumptions about the supposedly different trajectories of the so-called Global North and South. The post-grid imaginary is at
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Currency under Value, Currency in Debt: A Conversation with Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Sarah Muir Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2022-04-06 Lily Chumley
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The Checkpoint State: Extortion, Discontents, and the Pursuit of Survival Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Daniel E. Agbiboa
Abstract This essay is about everyday encounters with the checkpoint state in a locus of enduring counterinsurgency. Specifically, the essay examines how road-transport workers in northeast Nigeria experience and negotiate the omnipresent threat of the checkpoint state in their workaday world. Further, the essay underscores the spatial practices and social imaginaries through which the checkpoint state
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The Front, the Frontier, Police Anarchy, and the Solidarity of the Shaken Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Allen Feldman
Abstract This essay opens the question of the political genesis of fractal topologies from monolithic fronts of power and privation. The political front can no longer be encapsulated as a continuous norm-provisioning ground. Emerging frontier zones of violence jettison anachronistic centralized fronts of law and procedure in their wake. The political frontier is exemplified by the current fusion of
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“ Your Life Is One-Hundred-Percent at Risk”: The Caravan of the Mutilated and the Internationalism of the Vulnerable Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Eric Vázquez
Abstract This essay examines the cultural politics of migrant caravans through video testimonies produced by Honduras’s Association of Returned Migrants with Disabilities (AMIREDIS). While the stated aim of the 2015 association-sponsored Caravan of the Mutilated involved raising transnational public awareness of the plight of Central American migrants, this essay argues that AMIREDIS’s testimonies
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“Hindustan Is a Dream”: Urdu Poetry and the Political Theology of Intimacy Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Anand Vivek Taneja
Abstract In a time of dominant Hindu nationalism and rising Islamophobia in India, Urdu poetry is the medium in which an alternative political theology finds popular articulation, questioning the “normative horizon” of the nation-state. The political theology being articulated through Urdu poetry is one that is concerned not with the state, but with the constitution of the self through a network of
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The Ends of Media Studies Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Nicole Starosielski
Abstract This article poses the question: what are the ends of media studies? It discusses a turn to “nature” and the elements that has pushed media studies beyond its traditional objects and subjects. While the conceptualization of environments and bodies as communicative substrates offers new avenues for media research, mediation has also been taken up in a wide range of disciplinary and intellectual
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Not Tracking: The Antipolitics of Contact-Tracing Applications Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Paula Kift
Abstract In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world turned to contact-tracing applications in an attempt to balance the reopening of the economy with keeping the virus at bay. But as this article demonstrates, contact-tracing applications not only fail to protect the most vulnerable among us; they also shift responsibility for failing to prepare public-health systems for a pandemic
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Counting the Uncountable: Revisiting Urban Majorities Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 AbdouMaliq Simone,Vyjayanthi Rao
Abstract Sustainable urban transformation increasingly relies upon technicities of computation and interoperability among variegated registers and domains. In contrast, the notion of an “urban majority,” first introduced by the authors nearly a decade ago, points to a different “mathematics” of combination. Here the ways in which different economic practices, demeanors, behavioral tactics, forms of
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Conjunctures: Who Counts, What Circulates, and the Politics of Children Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Arjun Appadurai,Michael Ralph,Vyjayanthi Rao,Erica Robles-Anderson
The preceding issue (January 2021) was completed in the spring of 2020 as a pandemic was disrupting every arena of social life. Even then, we aimed to see “the virus in the context of the planet” and not to succumb to “the temptation to see the planet solely through the lens of the virus.” (3) We've taken those words to heart. The present issue offers a somewhat dispersed set of articles about apps
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Playing through the Apocalypse: Preparing Children for Mass Disasters in Japan and Chile Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Chika Watanabe
Abstract There is a growing trend to prepare children for future disasters. A Japanese nonprofit organization has developed an event called Iza! Kaeru Caravan, which includes games that teach children and their families how to survive disasters, from earthquakes to floods. Many disaster experts and government officials from other countries have now implemented the Caravan in their own contexts. Based
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Childhood Memories of Circus Children Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Éléonore Rimbault
Abstract Before the 1990s, there were many child performers in India's circus companies. They joined the circus as trainees and received a salary for their performance. After their activity was problematized as child labor and made illegal, they progressively disappeared from circus companies. Drawing from ethnographic materials, this article reflects on the memories of former circus children who have
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Colonial Diffractions in Illiberal Times: Forecasts on the Future Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Ann Laura Stoler
Abstract This article identifies two radical shifts in how colonialism is politically positioned and temporally framed, shifts that alter what invocations of colonialism look like, what distinguishes the attention they garner, and thus what they are implicitly or explicitly called upon to do. For one, invocations of colonialism are now oriented less to “residual” damage than to deepening racial inequalities
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Sovereignty in a Minor Key Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Thomas Blom Hansen
Abstract Theories of sovereignty in the twentieth century are generally based on a teleological “out-of-Europe” narrative where the modern, centralized nation-state form gradually spread across the world to be the foundation of the international order. In this article, the author reflects on how the conceptualization of sovereignty may change if one begins a global account of modern sovereignty not
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The Cosmos and the Polis Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Arjun Appadurai,Erica Robles-Anderson
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Futures of Life and Futures of Reason Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Achille Mbembe
Abstract As the new century unfolds, humans are increasingly surrounded by multiple and expanding wave fronts of calculation. What remains of the human subject in an age when instrumental reason is carried out by and through information machines and technologies of calculation? Who will set the boundary that distinguishes between the calculable and the incalculable? In the double-edged conditions of
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The Museum, the Colony, and the Planet: Territories of the Imperial Imagination Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Arjun Appadurai
Abstract The primary argument of this essay is that the modern Western museum form is a critical site in which to understand the five centuries in which Europe dominated much of the rest of the world. In this imperial epoch, the world was shrunk to the museum and the museum was expanded to represent the colonized world, and nonhuman objects and human subjects were trafficked in connected ways. Now
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The Dotcom and the Digital Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-09-01 Henrietta L. Moore,Constance Smith
In Kenya, the terms dotcom and digital have become popular descriptors for particular periods of change, as well as for modes of being. The two terms’ usage extends beyond reference to the age of the Internet or to encounters with new technologies. Rather, the dotcom and the digital—in different ways and in different decades—enable Kenyans to imagine with and through time. Using extensive ethnographic
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Dark Ages and Bright Futures Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-09-01 Deepti Misri
This article examines the shape of time for those living in Indian-occupied Kashmir, focusing particularly on two calendars that became embroiled in a “calendar war” in Indian-occupied Kashmir in the year 2017. The first was the annual calendar of the Jammu and Kashmir Bank, which proudly featured twelve “talented youth[s]” of the state. The second was a “countercalendar” circulated online by the anonymously
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American Politics in the Era of Zombie Neoliberalism Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-09-01 Adam Kotsko
Adam Kotsko analyzes the current political conjuncture in the United States through the lens of political theology, which he understands as fundamentally a study of systems of legitimacy. From this perspective, the neoliberal order is not merely an economic or political order but also a theological one, centered on the axiomatic value of free choice and imbued with a faith in the market’s judgment
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Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind (1946; trans. 1953) Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Brooke Holmes
This article nominates Bruno Snell’s Discovery of the Mind (1946; trans. 1953) as an Undead Text on the basis of three criteria. The article examines first the persistence of a Snellian story about the Greeks as the ancestors of modern Europe within the discipline of classics, before considering the broader question of how Undead Texts interact with Undead (Grand) Narratives. It then considers Discovery
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Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Shamus Khan
The classic “Undead text” of sociology is Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. This article argues that what helps make Presentation Undead is that its key point is obvious. Yet this is only the case after someone shows that point to you. Undead texts are ones that live in us, because reading them awakens us to what we feel we have always seen and known, but did not quite know
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Undead Texts and the Disciplines That Love to Hate Them Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Lorraine Daston,Sharon Marcus
Undead Texts are books once assigned on every reading list, cited in countless books and articles, endlessly discussed and debated. Although the authors of these works wore their learning lightly, the Undead Texts were intellectually ambitious and formidably erudite, drawing on a range of references that defied boundaries among disciplines, genres, epochs, and languages. Those qualities made them vulnerable
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Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983) Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Manu Goswami
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is the single most cited English-language text in the human sciences. The article reconsiders its original argument, its astonishing multidisciplinary impact, and its more recent trajectory.
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Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (1942) Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Joel Isaac
Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (1942) is the most famous book you’ve never heard of. It has had a remarkable career: a big seller on the mass paperback market of the post–World War II decades; a key text in musicology, aesthetics, religious studies, and anthropology; a founding work of Langer’s decades-long attempt to reinvent philosophy. And yet, precisely because the book possessed such
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Wave Theory ~ Social Theory Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Stefan Helmreich
This article offers a history of the wave metaphor in social theory, examining how waves became rhetorical forms through which to think about the shape of social change. The wave analytic—“waves of democratization,” “waves of immigration,” “waves of resistance”—wavers between high theory and popular model, between objectivist sociological explanation and hand-waving sociobabble, between vanguardist
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The Narco Uncanny Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Shaylih Muehlmann
This article analyzes the unease created in northern Mexico by the prevalence of “narco-accusations,” which single out individuals suspected of being drug traffickers. The official discourse to justify the Mexican government’s unwillingness to investigate the majority of the 235,000 murders created by the “war on drugs” since 2006 is that the deaths consist of “narcos killing each other off.” However
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Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982) Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Stephen Best
Walter Ong published Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word in 1982, synthesizing his career-long concern with the impact of the shift from orality to literacy on various cultures. Scholars of African American literary and cultural studies were coming to redefine their field around the terms orality and literacy at around the same time that Ong published his book; but where Ong stressed
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Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966) Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Caitlin Zaloom
Mary Douglas’s masterpiece Purity and Danger holds a troubled place in the social sciences and humanities. Both classic and cast out, the book’s analysis cannot be ignored. In fact, Douglas’s thesis, “Dirt is matter out of place,” can help explain the fate of the very book that made it famous. Purity and Danger presents a probing cultural analysis. Douglas argued that social systems should be understood
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Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Lorraine Daston
Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is the bestselling and most-cited book ever published in the history and philosophy of science. Yet very few scholars in those fields would now endorse the book’s main claims, and many are critical of its central premise: namely, that major changes in different disciplines and diverse historical contexts conform to a single “structure.” Key Kuhnian
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Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949; trans. 1958) Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Laurie L. Patton
This article discusses the work of Mircea Eliade, especially Patterns in Comparative Religion, as an “Undead text.” Beginning with an analysis of Eliade’s work as it was understood in the 1980s, the author moves on to discuss the role of Patterns in the context of Eliade’s life throughout the twentieth century, including his wish to move away from his Romanian roots and far-right political associations
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Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949; trans. 1953) Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Sharon Marcus
Undead texts are works that help to found fields only to find themselves eventually rejected by specialists and embraced by novices. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is an exemplary Undead text: hailed as a classic when it was first published in 1949, dismissed by many scholars of gender and sexuality studies by the 1980s, yet still in print and still inspiring to undergraduates today. This article
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Between Europe and America Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Arvind Rajagopal
Werner Sollors is one of the first scholars of American literature to focus on African American literature before it was thought to constitute a canon in the academy. Unlike many other scholars who shared his focus, he completed his education in postwar Germany. The title of his doctoral dissertation on LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), completed at the Free University of Berlin in 1975, has a still-contemporary
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The Visual Side of Privacy: State-Incriminating, Coproduced Archives Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Maayan Amir
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt illustrates the “lesser of two evils” principle by relating the peculiar story of a state archive of photographs of women in swimwear. During the Nazi period, she writes, to receive a marriage license Czech women applying to marry German soldiers were required to furnish a photograph of themselves dressed in swimwear. Taking its cue from this historic example
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The Social Disappeared: Genealogy, Global Circulations, and (Possible) Uses of a Category for the Bad Life Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Gabriel Gatti
Building on conclusions drawn from research conducted in Latin America and Europe, this text develops an argument in two movements. In the first movement, it traces the genealogy of the international circulation of the categories disappeared and forced disappearance of persons and explores possible reasons that explain its current success, as these categories are used for thinking about, managing,
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Power, Privilege, and the (Extrajudicial) Punishment of Rape in Brazil Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 K. Drybread
When suspected rapists are detained in Brazil, they are frequently subject to brutal punishments: sodomy, torture, or summary execution. This article examines the competing logics of gender and justice that intersect in Brazilian prisons as authorities sometimes attempt to protect, and inmates almost always endeavor to punish, men who have been put behind bars in cases involving rape. Drawing on years
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Private Selves as Public Property: Black Women’s Self-Making in the Contemporary Moment Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Jenn M. Jackson
The American imperial project exploits race, class, gender, and sexual differences in the name of the state. But in what ways has the transformative nature of American imperialism intervened in the public and private lives of Black women? This essay asks, What impact has the American imperial project had on Black women’s self-making throughout the twentieth century? The author draws on the autobiographical
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Airpocalypse: Distributions of Life amidst Delhi’s Polluted Airs Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 D. Asher Ghertner
Extreme air pollution events have become a regular phenomenon in Delhi, triggering conjunctions of air pollution and death popularly referred to as airpocalypse. The city’s collective reckoning with bad air raises the question of how social justice is to be imagined when the source of death is diffuse and leaky. The Indian judiciary has taken up this question in earnest, dispersing the legal treatment
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Climate of Anxiety in the Sahel: Emigration in Xenophobic Times Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Jesse Ribot, Papa Faye, Matthew D. Turner
Many thanks to Niklas Damiris, Helen Epstein, Sara Fadabini, Alessandra Giannini, Loren Landau, Sara Vigil, Helga Wild, and Rea Zaimi, who provided critical insights, data, and sources for this article. We also would like to thank Ousmane Ndong, Sayba Soumano, Molly Teague, and Gabriella Bianchi for their research assistance and Ousmane Diouf Sané and Oumar Mamadou Dieng for helping to organize the
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The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Fragility Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Glenn Wharton
Author(s): Rubio, Fernando Dominguez; Wharton, Glenn | Abstract: Impermanence and fragility have become the defining conditions of the digital age. Technologies that were ubiquitous barely a decade ago, like floppy disks, now look like archaeological relics. It takes only a few years, if not months, before software environments are replaced by newer versions, often with limited backward compatibility
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Violence Work and the Police Order Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Madiha Tahir
In Fall 2011, an American marine — who was involved in the brutal 2004 assault on Fallujah, Iraq — excoriated the NYPD for getting rough with Occupy protesters in Times Square, New York City. Standing in his fatigues and occasionally pointing at the medals pinned to his chest, Sergeant Shamar Thomas chided the police repeatedly, “This is not a war zone!” He paced back and forth in front of a cluster
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James Baldwin and the Anti-Black Force of Law Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Jesse A. Goldberg
I think that one thing that remains constant for me is that the system — the prison industrial complex — isn’t broken. The system of mass criminalization we have isn’t the result of failure. Thinking in this way allows me to look at what’s going on right now in a cleareyed way. I understand that white supremacy is maintained and reproduced through the criminal punishment apparatus. —Mariame Kaba, “Towards
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Drones as “Atmospheric Policing” Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Caren Kaplan, Andrea Miller
In the space of less than twenty years, drones have become ubiquitous components of the security infrastructures that produce and police territories and borders of all kinds — from national dividing lines to the more scattered or almost imperceptible spatial relations that have come to characterize an era of globalized conflicts. Most often associated with the sensing and “signature strike” operations
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Bodycams and Gender Equity Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Kim Shayo Buchanan, Phillip Atiba Goff
The widespread adoption of bodyworn cameras by police departments across the country promises outcomes that appeal to a broad spectrum of stakeholders, ranging from Black Lives Matter and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Police Executive Research Forum. They hope that the presence of bodyworn cameras (“bodycams”) will improve the
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Elimination Politics Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Ilana Feldman
“We have the honour to congratulate His Majesty’s Empire for the decisive victory which His Forces has recently achieved.” So opened a May 1945 petition to the High Commissioner for Palestine from three Palestinians requesting clemency. They had, they said, been banished from their village of Beit Daras to Khan Yunis “for political doubts.” These political doubts almost certainly meant presumed participation
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Carceral Oversight Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Michelle C. Velasquez-Potts
In May 2014, lawyers from the Londonbased international nonpro t organization Reprieve led a motion on behalf of Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp prisoner Abu Wa’el (Jihad) Dhiab to produce thirtytwo videotapes of Dhiab being forcibly extracted from his cell and forcefed in a restraint chair. Dhiab’s lawyer described his forcefeedings as being administered so incorrectly that he vomited repeatedly and
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The Police Are the Punishment Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Didier Fassin
“It was not a desire for vengeance, but a desire for justice,” the lawyer told the court at a trial I attended a few months before I started my ethnographic research on urban policing in the banlieues of Paris.1 The defendants were seven police officers indicted for acts of violence that had occurred a year earlier. The photographs of the plaintiff, a man from Turkey, whose swollen and bruised face
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To Protect and Serve Themselves Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Stuart Schrader
“Who do you protect? Who do you serve?” You could hear this chant frequently at protests in recent years, directed at lines of grimfaced cops across the United States. Modifying a common police tagline, the chant raised the possibility that the aggressive police management of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter street protests was not simply about maintaining the peace but rather about a more
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The Exceptional Prison Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Samira Bueno, Graham Denyer Willis
We walk through an arched pergola draped with passionfruit vines. “Everything happens for a reason,” says Luis,1 the military police officer walking with the two of us. In the distance, gunfire crackles in occasional bursts from a training ground behind a grove of citrus trees. “He killed eight people . . . all while off duty.” Luis is speaking of someone who has turned his life around. He’s been rehabilitated
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The Politics of Nonracialism in South Africa Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2019-05-01 Ciraj Rassool
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State Sovereignty and the Politics of Indifference Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2019-05-01 Mayanthi L. Fernando
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Of Climate and Chilling Effects Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2019-05-01 Jessica R. Cattelino
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Tracing “Gay Liberation” through Postindependence Jamaica Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2019-05-01 Matthew Chin
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Interrogating the Histories and Futures of “Diversity” Public Culture (IF 1.442) Pub Date : 2019-05-01 Damani J. Partridge, Matthew Chin
On October 16 and 17, 2017, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, we brought together scholars from around the world to collectively investigate the concept, history, and administration of the global discourse and practice of “diversity.” In particular, we were interested in how the US Supreme Court decisions in Regents of University of California v. Bakke and Grutter v. Bollinger had ultimately