National Global Imaginaries

"This research investigates a practical way to address clashes in stakeholder values and enhance outcomes in water allocation planning, in a case study of the water-stressed Lockyer catchment in Australia. A conflict assessment using photovoice interviews early in the process was used to identify divergent interests and values about sustainability, private and public benefit, and equity. A photovoice workshop as well as separate and joint meetings of government and irrigator groups using various consensus-building techniques fostered mutual respect, identified common ground, and contributed toward a negotiated package. This case study shows that techniques that clarify parties' values can reduce areas of divergence and refocus parties on topics for further negotiation in water planning. A consensus-building process need not be formalized in legislation; techniques can be tailored for the purpose and needs of the situation, and together with institutional change will contribute to more collaborative and deliberative planning processes."

"The paper reflects on the tension that the process of sensing a nation brings to the formation of a post-colony in Southeast Asia. The "aesthetic" in this context creates forms of sensibility of the "national," rendering it present in the world and endowing it with certain identity-effects. On the other hand, it also posits an exceptional singularity, at once discriminating against subjectivities that resist to be contained within the national project and achieving the distinction of autonomy. This process foregrounds moments of finitude, improvisation, and intimacy, aspects of the aesthetic that are central to the crafting of the national and its art."

Reviewing the 22 years that have elapsed since Gifford's 1989 report labelled Liverpool as racist, the authors focus on the fact that in a city which has had a British African Caribbean (BAC) community for over 400 years, there is minimum representation of that community in the city's workforce. The authors investigate two major forms of employment in the city, i.e. the teaching workforce and the city's Council workforce and one major route to employability, i.e. Higher Education Institutions in the city. They set out an evidenced argument which demonstrates the under-representation of the BAC community in two of the city's major areas of employment. The authors hypothesise that this under-representation is grounded in institutional and structural racism.

Significant tenure reforms have taken place over public forestlands in the past 20 years in Latin America. These reforms differ from previous tenure reforms with respect to their origins and goals. In forest tenure reform, rights have being granted through a diversity of tenure arrangements, mainly to those already living in forests and to collectives rather than individuals, and with the potentially contradictory goals of promoting local well-being while conserving forests. These reforms face several challenges for achieving their goals and have resulted in ambiguous outcomes. We argue that outcomes for people and forests could be improved if, besides the simple recognition of rights to forests, greater attention is placed on aligning broader policy incentives to support community and smallholders efforts to manage their forests. We discuss the characteristics of forest tenure reform based on five cases, representing different tenure arrangements, in four countries in Latin America.

This article explores the upgrade and perpetual innovation economy of digital gaming as it informs understandings and practices of the 'self'. Upgrade is situated in terms of digital gaming as a globalized techno-cultural industry. Drawing on accounts of governmentality and cultural work, research with digital games design students is drawn on to explore the overlapping twin logics of technological upgrade and work-on-the-self. The games industry-focused higher education context is examined as an environment for becoming a games designer and involving processes of upgrading the self. Having examined processes and practices of upgrading the self in terms of technological skills and personal development/enterprise, the article turns to some of the critical issues around anxiety, industry conventions and working practices.

This article draws on the insights/questions that emerged while putting together a set of stories for children published in a series named Different Tales. These stories, set in Dalit and other minority communities, problematize the normative grids through which we view 'childhood' as they depict the complex ways in which children negotiate and cope with the material conditions of their marginality, often drawing upon the resources and relationships within the community. What follows is a resistance to representing culture as a marker of essentialized difference.

What explains the appeal of sub-state nationalism in developed liberal democracies such as Belgium, Spain, the United Kingdom and Canada? This article suggests six main reasons: the power of the notion of self-determination; the institutionalization of national identity and nationalist politics in decentralized arrangements featuring autonomous government; the presence of powerful nationalist narratives; institutional and constitutional questions that are either unresolved or have been addressed by a shaky compromise, which means they remain on the political agenda; the involvement of nationalist movements in debates of public policy; and processes of continental integration that help nationalist movements make the case for increased autonomy and, in certain circumstances, independence.

This article analyses 'heritage' as a conceptual category among current and former residents affected by the proposed redevelopment of Protea Village, a neighbourhood in Cape Town razed during apartheid. Former residents, who were forcibly resettled in townships on the outskirts of the city on account of being coloured, won their land back through the Land Restitution Programme in 2006. Some 86 families were planning to return. Based on fieldwork conducted intermittently between 2005 and 2008, this article analyses three different idioms through which former and current residents made sense of the pending return of the community. While those who supported it hailed the proposed redevelopment as a chance to right the wrongs of the past, to reverse the spatial legacy of apartheid and to put the new democratic South Africa into practice, others feared declining property prices and the development of 'shanty towns' on their doorstep.

This paper addresses the question of character by thinking through how willfulness becomes a moral attribute, a way of making certain characters into problems. Reflecting on how an education in virtue became an education of the will, the paper explores how some characters become "willful parts" when they do not align their wills with the moral and general will. Drawing on readings of willfulness in novels by George Eliot, including Daniel Deronda, Mill on the Floss and Romola, the paper explores how feminist histories might involve the willful claiming of the attribite of willfulness. The paper suggests that when willfulness is reclaimed, it exceeds the very system of characterization, even when it appears to fulfill a set of expectations of what is behind an action.

The discipline of anthropology has been wracked with controversy since the 2007 establishment of a new program within the United States military, which officially employs anthropologists and other social scientists to collect "ethnographic intelligence" on local populations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The program, the Human Terrain System (HTS), was created to help U.S. military personnel better understand local cultural contexts. As part of this program, experts throughout the academy are being contacted by State Department officials to provide information on topics of interest to those in the Pentagon. The politicization of ethnographic fieldwork has posed a series of moral dilemmas for anthropologists, particularly feminist anthropologists who work with already vulnerable populations. This article proposes to examine the question of collaboration with reference to the HTS and recent debates raging among anthropologists about whether or not to cooperate with the U.S. government or any foreign government. Drawing on the author's own experiences conducting fieldwork among Slavic Muslims in Bulgaria, during which she was "invited" to share her findings with both the Bulgarian and American governments, the goal of the article is to openly discuss these dilemmas and offer some brief suggestions about how to navigate the murky waters of doing research in an increasingly fraught global context.

This essay contextualizes the Special Issue on Asian African Literatures by first discussing the terminology of "Asian" in the context of African identities. It then presents a brief genealogy of Asian African literary production in East and South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. While a number of scholars have increasingly paid attention to Asian writing in Africa since the 1960s, less is known about such literary activities in earlier decades. I present in this article some possible avenues for such research and highlight the theatrical and poetic engagements of Indians in those decades. The final part of the essay contextualizes the individual contributions to the volume and serves as a reading map for the volume.

Some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander individuals, organizations, and communities in Australia have embraced international human rights norms in their efforts to obtain redress for historical grievances and influence government policy and legal reform on contemporary social justice issues. This is unsurprising given the absence of formal national infrastructure for human rights recognition in Australia. While the use of international law and frameworks has brought notable gains, there have also been significant limitations on the relevance of international human rights law to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. These limitations are both a result of the local legal conditions in Australia as well as the form and nature of international law generally. A case study of the attempts during the 1990s and 2000s to apply the label of genocide to past government policies of removing and separating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and communities illustrates that there are considerable challenges and risks associated with campaign strategies based on the local mobilization of international human rights law.

Mayas living in the western highlands of Chiapas, Mexico are defining a new relationship with the national government. Rejecting paternalistic forms of development and military repression with which the nation in which they live have tried to eradicate their culture, Mayas are now asserting the right to autonomy within regions where they constitute a majority. I argue that the movement for autonomy based on collective norms of Mayan culture is most acute in areas that were the least incorporated in the 1910-1917 Mexican Revolution and have become important because of mineral, water, and genetic biodiversity that are attracting global investors. The strategies for practicing autonomy developed by indigenous municipalities and campesino organizations in distinct regional settings provide them with patterns for organizing themselves as distinct entities and for participating in national and global settings. Gender differences in all these settings influence the interpretation of autonomy as it is practiced in the communities that have declared themselves as autonomous. I shall compare these practices in regionally distinct settings of Chiapas in an attempt to demonstrate how this enters in to the formulation of an alternative model for pluricultural coexistence in the global ecumene.

Anime fan subtitling and online distribution offer rare insights into the relationship between fan creativity and industry conceptualizations of piracy. This article attempts to de-polarize this debate (wherein fans are presented as invaluable amateur producers or, alternatively, as overt pirates) in order to examine the roles played by these liminally situated fan producers in relation to the wider anime fan and industrial communities. These active fans are now represented as good or bad dependent on other groups' investments in their practices, and unpacking these conceptualizations provides a better view of how anime fandom may be indicative of larger changes in online fan community construction.

Implicated within the relationship between memory and identities at the local, national and international levels is the question of whether there is 'right to memory': the human right to have the otherness of the past acknowledged through the creation of symbolic and cultural acts, utterances and expressions. This article outlines the rationale for a right to memory and why the debate is of importance to memory and cultural studies. It outlines some of the relationships understood between memory and identity within memory studies, suggesting that a right to memory requires an understanding of the complex dynamics of memory and identities not only within, but internationally across, borders. It extends the concept of political cosmopolitanism to use as an analytical framework to enable an analysis of current international protocols, showing how they formulate the discursive relationship between identity and memory in four ways that involve a number of contradictions and unresolved tensions.

The life narratives of cô Nhựt, a former communist guerilla fighter and political prisoner during the American War in Vietnam, illuminate a dynamic politics of iteration and innovation at play within each act of remembering. Cô Nhựt lives in Ho Chi Minh City and is part of a women veteran's civic association called the Former Women Political Prisoner Performance Group. She is also a national and international advocate against the use of chemical warfare and a supporter of people living with Agent Orange-related disabilities in Vietnam. Historical and contemporary political contexts in Vietnam - such as decades of colonial rule, brutal wars and communist revolution and governance - dramatically affect the shape of official history and collective memory, including cô Nhựt's narratives.

"Without doubt since the 1990s inroads have been made in the development of international law in the sphere of sexual violence and armed conflict. Due to the progress made in international law itself and the tribunals of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, international law can now be seen to have an array of tools with which to combat and prosecute perpetrators of sexual violence. These tools include humanitarian law, the Genocide Convention, crimes against humanity, customary international law, in particular the rules of jus cogens and the Rome Statute. An analysis will be made in this article of the effectiveness of these tools and how they can be utilised in order to prevent the on-going onslaught on women's bodies. It will be seen that the gradual acknowledgement of rape and sexual violence as an international crime has the potential of empowering women and can give them the ability to use international law as a powerful tool to redress violence perpetrated against them in armed conflict. This article will then examine whether this potential is in fact a reality for women who have suffered sexual abuse in armed conflict or have the developments merely paid lip service to these crimes and not been as progressive as was first hoped."

"Segregated schools are a widely documented component of American history. Conversely, in Canada, provincially legislated segregation of Black Canadians has not been fully acknowledged. This historical amnesia raises numerous questions about the construction of Black experiences in both states. This interview examines Sylvia Hamilton's documentary The Little Black School House (2007), which explores the past as a means to contribute to the ongoing vitality of Black communities. Our discussion places this film within the historical context of legislated segregation in Canada and the United States, drawing attention to histories that have been largely absent within the dominant Canadian historical narrative."

"Recently, when preparing course materials for English graduate students on the practical skills and theoretical dimensions of teaching literature, I surveyed the literature on the "state of the field" of literary studies in English (and the entire concept of a liberal arts education), ranging from high-profile monographs to various commentaries in academic publications, including MLA Profession, College Composition and Communication, and Pedagogy. What I discovered was illuminating but somewhat appalling. It seems that the perennial (and perhaps self-perpetuating) perception (especially in MLA presidential addresses) is that-whether the commentator is coming from the right or left of the political spectrum-literary studies are in decline, that the public has little understanding or regard for the value of literary analysis or literature in general, and that scholars of literature are toiling in the service of something that is vaguely important but almost impossible to effectively define or articulate, even to ourselves. 1"

"The Bolivian constitution, debated in a Constituent Assembly in 2006 and 2007 called by the country's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, was adopted in a referendum in 2009. Among many other important provisions recognizing the country's majority indigenous population, it legitimizes the practice of indigenous community justice. Indigenous justice differs in important ways from the national justice system and from the international human rights regime but it expresses a legitimate assertion by the country's indigenous peoples of their cultural integrity."