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Unravelling Encounters: Ethics, Knowledge, and Resistance under Neoliberalism
Unravelling Encounters: Ethics, Knowledge, and Resistance under Neoliberalism
Unravelling Encounters: Ethics, Knowledge, and Resistance under Neoliberalism
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Unravelling Encounters: Ethics, Knowledge, and Resistance under Neoliberalism

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This multidisciplinary book brings together a series of critical engagements regarding the notion of ethical practice. As a whole, the book explores the question of how the current neo-liberal, socio-political moment and its relationship to the historical legacies of colonialism, white settlement, and racism inform and shape our practices, pedagogies, and understanding of encounters in diverse settings.

The contributors draw largely on the work of Sara Ahmed's Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, each chapter taking up a particular encounter and unravelling the elements that created that meeting in its specific time and space. Sites of encounters included in this volume range from the classroom to social work practice and from literary to media interactions, both within Canada and internationally. Paramount to the discussions is a consideration of how relations of power and legacies of oppression shape the self and others, and draw boundaries between bodies within an encounter.

From a social justice perspective, Unravelling Encounters exposes the political conditions that configure our meetings with one another and inquires into what it means to care, to respond, and to imagine oneself as an ethical subject.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 20, 2015
ISBN9781771120968
Unravelling Encounters: Ethics, Knowledge, and Resistance under Neoliberalism

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    Unravelling Encounters - Wilfrid Laurier University Press

    work.

    ONE

    Introduction

    Encounters with Difference in a Neoliberal Context

    CAITLIN JANZEN, DONNA JEFFERY, AND KRISTIN SMITH

    INTRODUCTION

    THIS COLLECTION STEMS from a workshop held at the University of Victoria, British Columbia in June 2012. In the span of time between organizing the workshop and writing this introduction, Canada has seen the seen the rise of at least three mass movements, each demanding some measure of liberation from the all-encompassing command of the market. At the outset of this project, those Canadians not participating in the Occupy protests taking place in various cities across the country were speculating upon the northward spread of the movement, while engaging in debates about the meaning of this diverse and seemingly leaderless fight against the gap between rich and poor. The workshop itself took place on the 123rd and 124th days of the Quebec student protest. Led by student unions, the protests opposed a tuition hike planned by the Quebec Liberal Party. Although diminishing in numbers by June, students continued to protest, even in the face of Bill 78, an emergency law passed on May 18, 2012, which restricts both the size and location of protest activities in the province of Quebec. Since the workshop, Canadians have seen the rise of the Idle No More movement, an Indigenous mass movement seek[ing] to assert Indigenous inherent rights to sovereignty and reinstitute traditional laws and Nation to Nation Treaties by protecting the lands and waters from corporate destruction (http://www.idlenomore.ca/story). Since its beginnings in organized teach-ins, Idle No More has generated widespread attention in the national media.

    A discussion of recent movements resisting market control of culture, knowledge, and natural resources, and the social inequities such control engenders, seems an appropriate introduction for a book that sets out to explore the question of how the current neoliberal socio-political moment, and its relationship to the historical legacies of colonialism, white settlement, and racism, inform and shape our practices, pedagogies, and understanding of encounters in diverse settings. The idea of encounter formed the platform from which contributors to this volume were asked to work through a problem or question that confronts them in their teaching or in their sites of practice. Authors were not asked to conform to any sort of prescriptive approach to the task that we set; rather they were invited to enter the idea of encounter at a place where their intellectual and empirical preoccupations led them. As a result, the invited scholars have developed a collection of papers concerned with the effects of neoliberal and (post)colonial power relations in a variety of sites and practices, including social welfare services, classrooms, community activism, research, and institutions.

    Many of us included in this book teach and practise in educational and social service fields. All of us are aware of the sometimes stark, sometimes insidious ways that the incursion of a neoliberal grammar into the ways in which we seek to re-imagine social justice and ethics is changing what it means to teach and work critically. The contributors in this collection take up the restructuring of social policy, reiterations of white supremacy, pedagogical challenges in the face of white settler resentments, and institutional reconfigurations that profoundly test our abilities to ask and answer the question: What is going on here? How do we understand these changes and imagine new ways to respond in this particular moment?

    ETHICAL ENCOUNTERS

    Resisting the Romance of Nostalgia

    THE VISION FOR THIS BOOK is to pull together a series of interdisciplinary papers in which critical conversations regarding the very notion of ethical practice are explored. For some, Sara Ahmed’s (2000) work on ethical encounters has been a collective starting point for this edited collection. We draw on Ahmed’s conceptualization of the encounter as a productive entry into an analysis of ethics in the classroom, in social activism, and in the helping professions. According to Ahmed, in the act of meeting, we try to read each other, to confirm or refute that which we think we know, to predict the direction and the outcome of meeting. However, encounters do not simply begin in the present or in conditions delinked from social, economic, or political contexts. Rather, each encounter reopens past encounters (2000, 8) and is historically and socially situated. The encounter, then, is an important counterpoint to colonial commonsense and contemporary neoliberal insistence on the undifferentiating rewards of individual ambition and responsible decision-making. Ahmed’s conceptualization of encounters incites us to interrogate the kinds of meetings taking place within the present social-economic and political moment and to inquire about the challenges and possibilities of ethical encounters in the neoliberal and postcolonial era. Like her, we argue that better ways of being in relation with others begin with a historicized accounting of how difference and otherness are produced and reproduced through a series of encounters with others. In such readings, ethics entail an interrogation of how we might respect the otherness of others, how we become a subject in these encounters, and how these encounters are situated within historical and contemporary power relations.

    Importantly, in the current neoliberal moment, any accounting of how difference and otherness is produced must include insights into how new governing technologies can be deployed to include as well as to exclude (Ong 2006). Conventional understandings of neoliberalism highlight how its technologies of governing mark out excludable subjects who are increasingly denied social and citizenship rights. However, it is our contention that neoliberal governing also works to mobilize selected populations as subjects of economic and social value. As Ong (2006) argues, such differential biopolitical investments in disparate subject populations privilege dominant races and ethnicities over others, males over females, and professional workers over working-class labourers. Observing how such processes produce naturalized ideas of racialized and gendered class differences over time, Ong insists upon the need to explore … the interplay among technologies of governing and of disciplining, of inclusion and exclusion, of giving value or denying value to human conduct (5).

    This book is an attempt to take pause in this particular neoliberal moment and unravel how we ended up in this particular place now, and how we might move forward. Place might be thought of here in the literal sense, as the ground upon which we stand, as well as the struggles that our standing represents—for example, a nation and its borders, which close it off to outsiders, or a nation as physically and figuratively built upon another’s land. Place also refers to the point in history we now occupy. In either formulation, place is both constituted and configured by the socio-political context that structures our lives and the lives of others.

    Each chapter in this book takes up a particular encounter and works through the elements that have created such meetings in a specific time and space. Paramount to our discussions is a consideration of how relations of power and legacies of oppression shape self and others and draw boundaries between bodies within an encounter. The authors in the book ask: Can we imagine an encounter with an/other that is non-violent in that it does not impinge on the integrity of the other’s claim to full humanity? Such ethical encounters (Ahmed 2000) would resist the allure of subjecting others to an objectifying, fetishistic gaze.

    A sense of ironic nostalgia is woven through many of the chapters in this book, a longing that requires an accompanying amnesia about the past. Chapters reveal the centrality of colonial nostalgia and claims to innocence as pasts are revisited and renegotiated in these present encounters. These encounters are inhabited by subjects who hasten to (re)secure their sense of self as fundamentally good and beyond reproach, in spite of evidence or feedback to the contrary. Sherene Razack (2000) asserts that the official Canadian stories of nation are fundamentally racial stories, which produce Canadians of European descent as entitled to the fruits of citizenship, and all others as external to the nation (183). The tenacity of these national myths is embedded in white Canadians’ sense of themselves as fair citizens, living in a good and tolerant nation. In her chapter included in this collection, Bains provides a cogent example of such storytelling at work. In her ethnography of nationalism, Bains analyses her interviews with Canadians teaching English in South Korea to reveal how narratives of Canada as a beacon of white progress are both bestowed upon and enacted by Canadians abroad. The symbolic currency of holding a Canadian passport, Bains argues, prevented those she interviewed from identifying as migrant workers (a racialized and distinctly non-Western identity), despite fitting the definition of migrant workers and despite the exploitation of their labour in deregulated global exchanges.

    Nationalist narrations often require a phenomenon, which Barnor Hesse (1997) refers to as white amnesia, or a sort of profound historical forgetfulness … [in our] attempt to wipe out and efface every trace of the colonial and imperial past (Hall 1978, cited in Hesse 1997, 91). The dominant group determines the narrative that holds sway, and selective amnesia is necessary to erase the historic violences that underpin the story. For example, in several chapters the Indigenous subject is omnipresent, even in their absence, as a subject that must be erased (Greensmith), (re)imagined (Jeffery), or contained (Schick) under the guise of necessity or sacrifice. A question emerges from these discussions: Can we encounter others in ways that are fully cognizant of how neoliberalism and (post)colonial relations shape both ourselves and the encounter’s possible outcomes?

    Greensmith’s chapter in this collection illustrates how seemingly benign statistics are used by AIDS service organizations to justify both the symbolic and material removal of Aboriginal presence from bathhouses in a large urban centre in Canada.¹ In another chapter, Schick addresses education, white settler identity, and the status quo of what is taught about Indigenous peoples and colonial histories in Canadian schools. In the face of Indigenous peoples’ success in what are typically seen as white settler domains (for example, higher education), Schick exposes the sense of threat and the affective aftermath of encounters between white people and narratives about Indigenous peoples. Her work manages to highlight histories of violence that reveal the rifts in the status quo narrative about the good white settler. Continuing the pedagogical theme, Jeffery unearths the encounter that occurs both in social work literature and in discourse on environmentalism wherein the key figure at the heart of green social work is frequently the imaginary Indian (Crosby 1991) and everything that iconic figure calls to mind. Here, the imaginary Indian fulfills Western desires for myths and traces of an ideal time and place.

    Ahmed’s (2000; 2004) reminder of the fundamentally emotional character of the sorts of encounters explored here is critical. As defined in The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, encounter as a verb can mean, to meet as an adversary; to engage in conflict with; to come upon face-to-face; to come upon or experience especially unexpectedly. As a noun, encounter is defined as a meeting between hostile factions or persons; a chance or accidental meeting. This language of surprise or chance, conflict and hostility, and, as we see in some of the chapters, nostalgia and desire, flags the deeply entrenched affective elements of each encounter. In each reading of the encounters depicted within the chapters here, authors explore the foundational nature of our complicity with, and resistance to, hierarchical and exclusionary relations of power.

    Kathleen Stewart’s (2007) book, Ordinary Affects, opens with the observation that terms like neoliberalism, globalization, and advanced capitalism—terms used to describe the current state of things in the United States (and other Western countries, we would add)—cannot begin to capture the situation in which we find ourselves. This is not to say that they are not real but rather that they miss the messiness of the everyday, the ordinary, that which she describes as the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies and emergences. They’re things that happen (2). They happen in sensations, expectations, encounters, and our habits of relating. They make us feel like something is happening. As Stewart points out, [t]heir significance lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible. The question they beg is not what they might mean in an order of representations, or whether they are good or bad in an overarching scheme of things, but where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating and attending to things are already somehow present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance (3). Stewart’s conceptualization of the ordinary and its affective power provides what we find to be a fruitful entryway into analyses of the tensions, intimacies, congruencies, and complicities of the historically and contextually laden encounters characterized in the chapters here. From the sense of something happening here, each author interrogates a particular site of encounter to expose the how of what is occurring and its implications. For example, Smith’s chapter on mourning over lost Canadian social welfare measures reveals how white, activist social workers make the transition into a neoliberal era by bringing along the dominant race, class, and gender social formations that historically sustained what Thobani (2007) calls the exaltation of white colonial subjectivity. Smith analyses such encounters with loss for the ways that they can mobilize an imaginary past in which Canadian social welfare was seen to provide everyone with a chance in life. Describing this as a liberal, white, romantic fantasy, Smith contrasts these benevolent visions of Canada with accounts provided by Indigenous social workers, newcomers to Canada, and the children of newcomers, who describe the effects of Canadian social welfare measures as encounters with violence, displacement, and social control.

    Importantly, the convergence of past and present in the meetings that take place throughout this book, while persistently shaping subjectivities and drawing us into the imaginaries of the other, happens in a context of neoliberal social and economic regulation. For our purposes, neoliberal governing refers to a continuum, which extends from government social and economic policies right through forms of self-regulation—in other words, technologies of the self (Lemke 2001).

    NEOLIBERALISM

    Its Logic and Discontinuities

    NEOLIBERALISM is conceptualized in different ways depending on one’s political and theoretical perspective. The most common critical analyses of neoliberalism view it as a coherent theory of political and economic policies and practices in which human well-being is believed to be advanced through heightened entrepreneurial freedoms, such as private property rights, individual liberties, and unfettered markets (Giroux 2004; Harvey 2007). These analyses describe a vast tidal wave of institutional reform and discursive adjustment (Harvey 2007, 23), whereby global powers, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) impose unpopular policies on unwilling national governments. In Canada, critics of neoliberalism decry a politically rightward shift from post–World War II Keynesian welfarism to the unregulated free trade between capitalist markets (Barlow and Clarke 2001/2002). All public and non-profit sectors are submitted to relentless economic rationality by which every policy and practice is measured against cost efficiencies and profitability. Such accounts describe a tsunami effect, whereby neoliberalism has overwhelmed the national economy and come to shape all of our encounters with one another. As Harvey (2007) observes, [neoliberalism] has become incorporated into the commonsense way we interpret, live in, and understand the world (23).

    Many of the chapters in this collection hone in precisely on various encounters with neoliberalism—understood broadly as taking place in institutional relations, professional practices, relationships of care, activism, and teaching—in order to render visible and thinkable the power relations produced through this particular political moment. At the same time, our authors push their analysis beyond the popular top-down framework for understanding neoliberalism as a coherent ideological framework to develop expanded conceptions in which additional elements of change are revealed. As a result, the analyses contained in this book answer important questions about the nature of rule and the sets of practices that enable neoliberal governance from a distance (Foucault 2008). Rather than a withdrawal of the state, conceptions of neoliberalism are understood as techniques of governmentality, leading less to the state losing powers of regulation and control and more to the restructuring of government techniques, shifting the regulatory role of the state onto responsible and rational individuals (Lemke 2001, 201). As Lemke (2001) explains, [h]ere, the economy is no longer one social domain among others with its own intrinsic rationality, laws and instruments. Instead, the area covered by the economy embraces the entirety of human action to the extent that this is characterized by the allocation of scant resources for competing goals (197). Working with these different conceptions, our book’s authors provide compelling insights about how to theorize knowledge, subjectivities, and resistance in relation to neoliberalism and consequently, how to build radical social change based on equity and social justice.

    Throughout these chapters, a basis of unity emerges around the idea that the historical moment we now collectively occupy is one thoroughly defined by market rationality (Harvey 2007). However, our theoretical journey does not end there. Turning attention to the ways in which neoliberalism constitutes the social aspects of our lives, our authors explore a multitude of ways that human action is reproduced as entrepreneurial and calculable action, but also how it is that institutional practices reward the enactment of this vision in ways that not only discipline conduct, but intimately shape subjectivities (Brown 2005). For example, Greensmith examines the mainstreaming of AIDS service organizations in Canada, and analyses how the white, gay subject remains racially unmarked, a move in which the continual assimilation of racialized and colonized subjects into the larger neoliberal and white settler colonial machinery remains naturalized. At another site, Mahrouse examines emerging forms of tourism, variously referred to as ethical, eco, volunteer, and charity, for the compelling travel alternatives they offer the Western subject with a social justice consciousness. Through her exploration of the experiences and meaning-making of such tourism, Mahrouse considers some of the ways in which racialized relations of power might be disrupted or reproduced through this type of socially responsible travel. Thus, both Greensmith and Mahrouse theorize how race factors into notions of citizenship, belonging and, indeed, our very notions of social justice-based practices, and how these are now differently constituted under neoliberalism.

    A key contribution by authors in this book involves highlighting the ways that neoliberal governance proves adept at suppressing dissent aimed at the market structure. These arguments are in line with what Peck and Tickell (2002, 390) call the morphing and adaptive potential that characterizes new forms of neoliberalism. Peck and Tickell observe that there is a deliberate stretching of the neoliberal policy repertoire to include new models of institution-building, such as the selective appropriation of progressive ideals associated with social justice, including community and partnership modes for public service delivery (390). An example in this volume is found in Dean’s analysis of recent trends in universities’ Community Engagement (CE) practices. In her chapter, Dean critically questions assumptions about The University and The Community that underpin the rhetoric found in CE. In doing so, she reveals both its reliance on colonial logic and also how that logic is veiled through subtle associations with neoliberalism. Dean believes CE to be potentially socially transformative because students can learn to encounter others without turning them into strangers. However, she fears that the turn to CE as a technology of governance through community serves, rather than challenges, the neoliberal transformation of the university, as well as cuts to social spending. Another example of neoliberalism’s appropriation of liberal progressiveness can be found in O’Connell’s exploration of apology technology in the form of Ontario’s Apology Act. She deconstructs the act of formal apology-making in an effort to shed light on how political figures regulate the manner in which restitution, reparation, and justice can be discussed. Through her concept of actuarial conduct, O’Connell shows how the apology elides the ways in which dominant power remains active in our legal, institutional, and national networks.

    An important theme generated by our authors is that new processes of neoliberalism effectively extend its reach through the management of its contradictions. Wendy Brown (2005) reflects on the challenges posed by these new arrangements and recalls observations made by critical social theorist Herbert Marcuse over a half century ago. Brown explains that Marcuse believed that the post–World War II appearance of a growing middle class meant that capitalism had successfully eliminated the revolutionary subject. No longer could the economic contradictions of capitalism fuel opposition to it; rather, resistance to capitalism would have to be generated from an alternative vision of how to be in the world. Brown elaborates: That is, the Left needed to tap the desires—not for wealth or goods but for beauty, love, mental and physical well-being, meaningful work, and peace—manifestly unmet within a capitalist order and to appeal to those desires as the basis for rejecting and replacing the order (57). Today, argues Brown, the problem diagnosed by Marcuse has expanded from capitalism to current forms of (neo)liberal democracy. Now, she says, oppositional consciousness cannot be generated from liberal democracy’s false promises and hypocrisies (57). In other words, the gap between liberal democratic ideals, such as equality, and the day-to-day lived realities of neoliberalism, has ceased to be exploitable; democratic ideals are no longer hollow, but rather they have been completely redefined under neoliberal terms, leaving democracy eviscerated. Brown concludes: Consequently, the Left cannot count on revealed deception, hypocrisies, interlocking directorates, featherbedding, or corruption to stir opposition to the existing regime. It cannot count on the expectation that moral principle undergirds political action or even on consistency as a value by which to judge state practices or aims (58). Brown’s observations are supported by Foucault’s (2007) insight that power does not only manifest in sovereign or disciplinary forms, and that the social rights implied under social democratic regimes are not simply defences against vulnerability and marginalization. Social rights can themselves become tactics of governing and domination. However, in contrast to Brown, we do not take these developments to be entirely new. Indeed, the misappropriation of social inclusion under the guise of democratic ideals as a technique of governing emerged long before the appearance of neoliberalism. As Eduardo Cadava (2006) explains, acts of removal, dispossession, extermination, and discrimination have been committed in the name of democracy and freedom for hundreds of years. Cadava draws on civil rights leader Frederick Douglass’s famous speech, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, to analyze how the United States of America, a nation that defines itself in relation to social democracy and human rights, can nevertheless produce millions of people, socially marked as black Americans—and, we would add, Indigenous peoples—who are not granted citizenship and who lack civil or human rights. In another context, Barnor Hesse (2004) has elaborated on how, at the end of the Second World War, the United Nations was founded on defending against a Eurocentric concept of racism that highlighted meanings associated with the policies of fascist regimes while avoiding anti-colonial critiques of Western imperialism. Hesse concludes that Western democracies only came to object to colonialism when Europe itself was the focus of Nazi colonialist procedures, and even then it seemed that the newly minted concept of human rights had no application to non-whites living in the colonies or in the racially segregated United States. What these critical race scholars have been able to convey is how a premature celebration of progress after World War II, in the areas of advancing social rights, risks obscuring the continuities of colonial and imperial power in others. Their examination of how seemingly progressively oriented projects can simultaneously advance the rights of dominant group members while subordinating the rights of others provides important lessons for those seeking to understand how neoliberalism, in addition to denying difference, can also co-opt notions of difference. It is these obscured dimensions of neoliberal governing and its effects on practices in different settings that our book explores. Key to these insights is an understanding of the various ways that the legacies of colonialism intersect with emerging technologies of governing.

    As editors of this volume, we take seriously the cautions offered by Cadava (2006) and Hesse (2004) that emerging forms of democracy under neoliberalism have much in common with prior forms of colonial rule. Much like radical activists working for change over several centuries, the ability to forge contemporary forms of resistance is accompanied by a daunting task in these neoliberal times: that of having to create another vision of being in the world, one that manages to outpace the masquerading versions of political legitimacy deployed by particular formations of liberal democratic governing. In this contemporary moment, our authors contribute to the building of these alternative visions to neoliberalism, in large part by exposing its phantasmal qualities; that is to say, neoliberalism is defined by its pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested (Brenner, Peck and Theodore 2010, 184) qualities.

    Brenner, Peck and Theodore (2010) argue that a critical interrogation of the modalities and pathways of neoliberal processes must take into account the problematic of variegation and how these processes are "simultaneously patterned, interconnected, locally specific, contested and unstable (184, emphasis in original). Our analytic contributions are in line with the conceptualization suggested by these scholars. Similar to their position, our book provides interrogations in which there is an emphasis on the cumulative effects of successive waves of neoliberalism upon an uneven institutional landscape. Our work here highlights how subjects are unevenly produced through the logic of neoliberalism to be self-managing, entrepreneurial, and autonomous. In other words, our authors reveal moments of discontinuities (Foucault 1991, 57) that can occur under neoliberal regimes. We argue that it is within these moments of discontinuity that potential ways to slow down or possibly even interrupt neoliberal processes can be found. As Clarke (2004) argues, dominant strategies do not occupy an empty landscape and they have to overcome resistance, refusals, and blockages: the ‘grit’ that prevents the imagined neo-liberal world system from functioning smoothly" (44). Clarke’s argument resonates with an important point, which resounds throughout the chapters in this book: that emerging forms of neoliberal governing are unruly and exist in a state of constant conflict and tension between techniques of governing. Some of these techniques assure compliance, such as those processes through which the self is produced and modified to ensure economic survival. Other techniques of governing reveal opportunities for a plurality of resistances that are at varying times possible, necessary [and] improbable (Foucault 1978, 96).

    The power of neoliberal governmentality is revealed in these chapters as having the ability to profoundly shape our subjectivities, our relationships, and our expectations of each other. As Brown (2005) explains, [n]eoliberalism is not simply a set of economic policies; it is not only about facilitating free trade, maximizing corporate profits, and challenging welfarism; rather, [it] carries a social analysis which, when deployed as a form of governmentality, reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject to education policy to practices of empire (Brown 2005, 39). By this, Brown means that neoliberal rationality does not operate from without, bearing down on autonomous subjects. Rather, the imperative to adopt the tenets of neoliberalism as one’s own is among the most pernicious aspects of the political agenda. In extending a market mentality to all aspects of human relations, neoliberalism shapes the good citizen as one who exercises fiscal restraint. As Lemke writes, the key feature of neoliberal rationality is the congruence it endeavors to achieve between a responsible and moral individual and an economic-rational individual (2001, 201).

    The pressure to do more with less, to encourage and operate with fiscal responsibility, is well established within the Canadian social service and education sectors. As many of us are academics within these fields, we are invested in how neoliberal political discourses shape our relationships with ourselves and with each other. Further, we are compelled to ask how these rationalities shape the type of work and the texture of care we provide to those with whom we work and live.

    All of the chapters in this book achieve our central aim: to expose the political conditions that have configured our meetings with one another at this particular neoliberal time, and to inquire into what it means to resist, to care, and to imagine oneself as an ethical subject.

    THE LIMITS OF CARE

    THE CHAPTERS IN THIS BOOK attend to how one feels (Janzen; Schick; Smith), should feel (Jeffery; O’Connell; Dean), or is made to feel (Bains; Greensmith) upon entering into an encounter. These feelings, as Sara Ahmed reminds us (2004; 2001), are neither private nor neutral sensations that originate within an individual. Instead, she posits that emotions define the contours of the multiple worlds that are inhabited by different subjects (Ahmed 2001, 10). Emotions, Ahmed explains, circulate between individuals, signs, and signifiers in what she calls affective economies: economies in which particular emotions stick to particular signs and bodies, forming the surfaces and skin not only of individuals but of collectivities, as well. Like other bodies, the bodies of the community or of the nation are boundary figures; they are bound with a material end and beginning, an inside and outside. The way we read, understand, and experience the movement of emotion between these seemingly bound figures, works to secure difference and the meaning associated with this difference. Ahmed (2001) writes, affective responses are readings that not only create the borders between selves and others, but also give others meaning and value in the very of apparent separation, a giving which temporarily fixes an other, through the movement engendered by the emotional response itself (13). The feelings associated with or projected onto figures within and through affective economies determine the limits of our hospitality and our willingness or ability to care for others.

    The authors in

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