Why is dignity in the Charter of the United Nations?
It could be that without Virginia Gildersleeve, no one would be talking about it today.
Author Archives: C Jayasinghe
Ghosts of the field: rendering and retaining meaning
There are two sets of ghosts that we experience when visiting and engaging with field sites.
The murder of Malcolm X: forty-nine years ago today
Forty-nine years ago today, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, gunmen opened fire on the African-American activist Malcolm X, killing him almost instantly.
Human rights postdoc announcement
The Berkeley Human Rights Program has announced a postdoctoral fellowship for the 2014-15 academic year.
DEMOCRACY, GIVE OR TAKE?
In 2007, the King of Bhutan “gave” democracy to his people. Using this story as a point of departure, this article interrogates the complicated humanitarian notion of democracy as a gift in thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Claude Lefort, and Jacques Rancière. After bringing out the paradoxes in the King of Bhutan’s abdication, DeGooyer speculates to what degree a protest against the Bhutanese state might model a new formulation of democracy, one that cannot be reduced to a consensualist scheme of sovereign sacrifice. While DeGooyer concludes that we cannot fully abandon an economy of rights as “giving and taking,” a new discussion of the rhetorical structure of rights emerges. Continue reading →
Projected memory: reflections on one year’s work at a memorial museum in Germany, and an initiative that aims to remind us how we remembered
A project that enables us to put words back into the void that trauma leaves behind.
