83 research outputs found

    Following Fatigue, Feeling Fatigue: A Reflexive Ethnography of Emotion

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    This article takes the emotion of fatigue both as its analytical object as well as a methodological tool to engage in a reflexive ethnography, to question the categorical borders of researcher, researched and the field, in the politicised context of migration studies. I do so by drawing on ethnographic material collected during my fieldwork between Athens, Hamburg and Copenhagen in 2019–2020. This article’s theoretical and conceptual framing is informed by feminist scholarship on emotions, as well as decolonial scholarship in migration studies. By bringing these theoretical threads into the conversation, I study the different qualities of fatigue, amongst others the collective; how fatigue circulates in and through the ethnographic field; and how it shapes relations between refugees, humanitarian aid workers, activists and researchers such as me. Following fatigue across and through its many different instances in this reflexive ethnography of emotions lays bare the uneven emotional geographies that exist and are (re-)produced in the encounters between actors in Europe’s migration control field

    Nearly Perfect: Notes on the Failures of Salvage Linguistics

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    This dissertation examines the salvage era of American linguistics (c.19101940) and its focus on the extraction of knowledges and cultural artifacts from Indigenous groups whose civilizations were believed in peril. Through close readings of historical archives and published materials, I imbricate the history of these scientific collection practices through the interpretive frames of Science & Technology Studies (STS), deconstructive criticism, and postcolonial theory. I centre the project on the career of linguist-anthropologist Edward Sapir, seizing upon his belief that linguistics was more nearly perfect than other human sciencesthat linguistic methods were more akin to those of the natural sciences or formal mathematics. I employ Sapir as the chief focalizer of my work to map the changing topography of the language sciences in North America over these pivotal decades of disciplinary formation. Failure, here, offers a heuristic device to interrogate the linear logics of science and success which buttress that desire for perfection. Both conceptually and historically, the dialectics of failure and success throw into relief the vicissitudes of fieldwork, the uncertainty of patronage relationships, and the untenable promise of salvage that characterized these years. Through this approach, I present linguistics instead as a kairotic sciencefrom the Greek kairos, suggesting opportunitynot perfect, but situated vividly in the world, bound by space, identity, and time. I examine how linguists conducted their collection work through the extension of a scientific network (Chapter 1), their construction of a scientific identity to the gradual exclusion of amateurs and the reduction of informant contributions (Chapter 2), and the development of an experimental system within the temporalities of fieldwork (Chapter 3). My dissertation hence invites a critical intervention within the history linguistics to re-encounter the sciences disregarded past and re-think its shared responsibility toward Indigenous communities in the present

    A modal theorem-preserving translation of a class of three-valued logics of incomplete information

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    International audienceThere are several three-valued logical systems that form a scattered landscape, even if all reasonable connectives in three-valued logics can be derived from a few of them. Most papers on this subject neglect the issue of the relevance of such logics in relation with the intended meaning of the third truth-value. Here, we focus on the case where the third truth-value means unknown, as suggested by Kleene. Under such an understanding, we show that any truth-qualified formula in a large range of three-valued logics can be translated into KD as a modal formula of depth 1, with modalities in front of literals only, while preserving all tautologies and inference rules of the original three-valued logic. This simple information logic is a two-tiered classical propositional logic with simple semantics in terms of epistemic states understood as subsets of classical interpretations. We study in particular the translations of Kleene, Gödel, ᴌukasiewicz and Nelson logics. We show that Priest’s logic of paradox, closely connected to Kleene’s, can also be translated into our modal setting, simply by exchanging the modalities possible and necessary. Our work enables the precise expressive power of three-valued logics to be laid bare for the purpose of uncertainty management

    Migration Infrastructures at the Edge: (Re)making Arrival Infrastructures in Hamburg

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    This paper examines the (re)making of two distinct but related migrant arrival infrastructures in Hamburg: the Lampedusa in Hamburg tent (hereafter referred to as the ‘Lampedusa tent’), which existed from 2013 to 2020, and the Refugee Info Point, which existed for six months in 2022. Both infrastructures were built by and for migrants as an access point to the city of Hamburg. This paper is based on fieldwork conducted in Hamburg between 2017 and 2022. Building on existing research on arrival infrastructures as gateways to the city, I elucidate how arrival infrastructures at the edge function as sites of transformation and contestation where migrants in Hamburg claim rights to the city. My material speaks to the mutability, adaptability, vanishing, and (re)emergence of arrival infrastructures in Hamburg’s urban spaces over several years

    Jane Austen's free indirect style : a linguistic ethnography

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    This study assesses the relationship between the diffusion of free indirect discourse and the decline of the British epistolary novel in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Studying the works of a single stylist, Jane Austen, and her engagement with the mobility of the letter genre at the turn of the century, it synthesizes literary-historical, linguistic, and narratological perspectives on discourse representation in order to evaluate claims that Austen was the “pioneer” of this free indirect style, and to comment on how her simultaneous shift in genre from the first-person epistolary mode to third-person classical realism informs that style’s development.Arts, Faculty ofEnglish, Department ofGraduat

    Following Fatigue, Feeling Fatigue: A Reflexive Ethnography of Emotion

    No full text
    This article takes the emotion of fatigue both as its analytical object as well as a methodological tool to engage in a reflexive ethnography, to question the categorical borders of researcher, researched and the field, in the politicised context of migration studies. I do so by drawing on ethnographic material collected during my fieldwork between Athens, Hamburg and Copenhagen in 2019–2020. This article’s theoretical and conceptual framing is informed by feminist scholarship on emotions, as well as decolonial scholarship in migration studies. By bringing these theoretical threads into the conversation, I study the different qualities of fatigue, amongst others the collective; how fatigue circulates in and through the ethnographic field; and how it shapes relations between refugees, humanitarian aid workers, activists and researchers such as me. Following fatigue across and through its many different instances in this reflexive ethnography of emotions lays bare the uneven emotional geographies that exist and are (re-)produced in the encounters between actors in Europe’s migration control field.</jats:p
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