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Bill Brydon

The Cholera Stigma and the Challenge of Interdisciplinary Epistemology: From Bengal to ... - 0 views

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    "For a century and a half cholera has been a stigmatizing disease. That the entire world was susceptible to it seemed merely to accentuate its association with Asia, and particularly with Bengal and its people. The recent epidemic in Haiti suggests that cholera still carries stigma. That stigma is the product of epistemic practices within an interdisciplinary and orientalist cholera science that took shape in the 1860s and 1870s, which have, without renewed scrutiny, prevailed largely uncontested until recent decades. Those practices involved an over-interpretation of the historical epidemiological work of John Macpherson by his colleague N. C. Macnamara. Recent research, recognizing the wide distribution and genetic instability of Vibrio cholerae, offers an alternative context for appreciating Macpherson's insights. This new program of interdisciplinary cholera research seems largely free of stigmatizing representations, but nor does it offer (or seek) a single and simple program of cholera prevention. The cholera case study invites reflection on the little-studied problem of epistemic accountability in interdisciplinary research, alerts us to questions of how disciplines are (and might be) made to cohere in policy-driven inquiries. The chief maxim is toward more explicit inclusion of the concept of multiple working hypotheses."
Bill Brydon

Emerging writing from four African countries: genres and Englishes, beyond the postcolo... - 1 views

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    "This article presents recent empirical research into emerging literature in English from four African countries. Employing ethnographic research methods to interrogate the current state of emerging writing in English from Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya, the research recognises the creative writing medium of 'short stories' to capture contemporary concerns of Africans living in the nations noted above. The short stories in this research project are newly sourced and are treated as data per se from which we are able to question the idea of emerging writing in English in these countries being 'beyond the postcolonial'. In essence, the article presents data which suggest a shift from the classic postcolonial text to new, contemporary texts highlighting fresh departures in theme, genre and use of Englishes. The article demonstrates how the emerging writing captures and represents a sense of the zeitgeist of Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya respectively. This article presents distinctive scholarly arguments for the use of interdisciplinary enquiry (ethnographic methods to interrogate the field of literary studies) as well as presenting substantial new empirical data to support the notion that writing in English from former postcolonial countries is less indicative of the classic postcolonial text."
Bill Brydon

Global South to the Rescue: Emerging Humanitarian Superpowers and Globalizing Rescue In... - 0 views

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    "The introductory essay offers a brief overview of current trends in critical globalization studies and international relations scholarship that shed light on three intersections: between imperialism and humanitarianism, between neoliberal globalization and "rescue industry" transnationalism, and between patterns of geopolitical hegemony and trajectories of peacekeeping internationalism. These research agendas have been generative and politically useful, but have tended to neglect the forms of humanitarian and peacekeeping agency emanating from the global south. In order to address this gap, this introduction lays out a new research agenda that combines interdisciplinary methods from global studies, gender and race studies, critical security studies, police and military sociology, Third World diplomatic history, and international relations. This introduction also theoretically situates the other contributions and case studies gathered here, providing a framework of analysis that groups them into three clusters: (I) Globalizing Peacekeeper Identities, (II) Assertive "Regional Internationalisms," and (III) Emergent Alternative Paradigms."
Bill Brydon

"Justice is on our side"? Animal's People, generic hybridity, and eco-crime - 0 views

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    "This essay examines how a recent fictionalisation of post-disaster life in Bhopal, Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People (2007), opens up perspectives on eco-crime, disaster, and systemic injustice on the level of genre. It begins by showing how the novel evokes private eye, noir, and spy genres in ways that present similarly hybrid forms of detective agency and legal subjectivity as a means of responding to the disaster's criminal dimensions. It then shows how this hybridity relates to the way Sinha plays off crime fiction's genealogical relationship with revenge tragedy both to disrupt the disaster's common real-world designation as 'tragedy' and to implicate readers in modes of active witnessing that probe legal-democratic failure. The essay concludes by discussing how these formal techniques shed light on the potential for interdisciplinary exchange between postcolonial ecocriticism and green criminology in relation to transnational crimes such as Bhopal."
Bill Brydon

Postcolonialism: interdisciplinary or interdiscursive? - Third World Quarterly - 0 views

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    This essay critically examines the nature and scope of postcolonial interdisciplinarity. Although postcolonial studies claims to operate on, and forge in, an interdisplinary approach, its intentions are largely interdiscursive. In spite of the vague and elusive claims evident in the catalogue of introductory texts on postcolonial theory, neither postcolonial theorists nor its exponents have adequately established the disciplinary bounds or their methodological fusion(s) specific to, and required for, interdisciplinarity. Drawing from the disciplinary foundations of literature, history and philosophy, this essay demonstrates that postcolonial theory has developed an implicit oppositional critique to eurocentrism. This oppositional critique, while discursive in intention and formulaic in application, is subsequently borrowed by a host of social science disciplines-anthropology, geography and development studies- as a proxy methodology that protects against the perils of eurocentric longings.
Bill Brydon

There is no 'universal' knowledge, intercultural collaboration is indispensable - Socia... - 0 views

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    Within some significant circles, where hegemonic representations of the idea of 'science' are produced, certain orientations of scientific research are carried out, and science and higher education policies are made and applied, references to the alleged existence of two kinds of knowledge, one of which would have 'universal' validity, and 'the other' (in fact the several others) would not, are frequent and do have crucial effects over our academic work. Although some outstanding authors within the very Western tradition have criticized from varied perspectives such universalist ambitions/assumptions, and although many colleagues have reached convergent conclusions from diverse kinds of practices and experiences, such hegemonic representations of the idea of science are still current. The acknowledgment of this situation calls for a deep debate. This article responds to such a purpose by attempting to integrate into the debate a reflection on the shortcomings of hegemonic academic knowledge to understand social processes profoundly marked by cultural differences, historical conflicts and inequalities, as well as significant perspectives formulated by some outstanding intellectuals who self-identify as indigenous, and the experiences of some indigenous intercultural universities from several Latin American countries.
Bill Brydon

The Comparatist - Translating Interdisciplinarity: Reading Martí Reading Whitman - 0 views

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    Walt Whitman never saw most of the myriad places he name-checks in "Salut au Monde," in fact never traveled beyond North America. 3 That minor technicality does not stop him from envisioning them-"seeing" them, as it were-through the lens of his own mystical, abstracted vision of an America at once generalized
Bill Brydon

New Left Review - Steven Lukes: The Gadfly - 0 views

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    "Ernest Gellner died in Prague, the city of his childhood, in 1995, leaving a colossal intellectual legacy: some twenty books, two of them posthumous; a mass of articles, scholarly or journalistic, many of them provocative and polemical; all displaying his distinctive, scintillating intelligence. Gellner's range across topics and disciplines was remarkable and yet his thought displays considerable unity. [1] Its foundations are most fully laid out in the second of the posthumous works, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma (1998). Reconstructed from manuscripts by his son David, this is a work of synthesis: the closest Gellner came to an intellectual autobiography. It brings together philosophy, anthropology, and an interpretation of the Central European context of his upbringing, by juxtaposing the ideas of his lifelong bête noire, Wittgenstein, with those of Malinowski, a figure whom Gellner greatly admired, and whose work helped inspire his own turn from philosophy to anthropology."
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