University of Kent Open Access Journals
Not a member yet
879 research outputs found
Sort by
Of Neo-Constitutionalisms, Lefts and (De)Colonial Struggles: Thoughts from the Andes in Conversation with Breny Mendoza
Get PDFPower and Normality in Paratransit – Individual Autonomy in Welfare State Law
Get PDFThis article focuses on power structures that define and conceptualize individuals with disabilities and their claims for transport services in Swedish welfare state law. In the Nordic countries people often expect the government to be both an important ally and a necessary tool for egalitarian emancipation. In many respects the Nordic welfare states are success stories where collective efforts have created a more egalitarian and economically prosperous society. Relative equality and emancipation are never static factors, however; every system creates new challenges and new injustices which add to the old. This article uses the right of people with disabilities to move about in society with the help of special transport services as an empirical example. The right to decide when and where to go where you want to go highlights immediate and important aspects of power relations. In the context of Swedish welfare state law this also creates an opportunity to show how law in the welfare state operates and how law constructs both people and their needs to fit into preconceived patterns of normality and citizenship in the Swedish welfare state. The terms redistribution and recognition are used to illustrate different aspects of social justice. Misrecognition can be understood as a status in society where cultural patterns systematically subordinate people, a situation experienced by many persons with disabilities. At the core of recognition lies parity of participation on equal terms with everybody else. The conclusion of the article is that the law on special transport services is quite capable of reaffirming social justice viewed as redistribution. However, when social justice is viewed as recognition people’s lack of power over daily life decisions makes the law quite oppressive
Are Research Data a 'Common' Resource?
Get PDFThis article explores the implicit philosophical framework that underpins, and provides the moral and political justification for, the move towards treating data as a so-called common resource. It begins by tracing the emergence of the idea of viewing data as an open access common resource. It then outlines the regulatory, policy and legislative mechanisms that have been instituted to encourage and ensure that researchers comply with data sharing requirements, and that are institutionalising new ownership regimes away from research data being treated de facto as private property towards it becoming public property. It also spells out the case being made for treating data as a public good, including scientific, moral, economic and political arguments. The article then moves on to suggest that positioning data as a common resource is dependent on a Cartesian and representational understanding of data, their production, and their use in the making of knowledge, drawing in particular on the work of Karen Barad. Barad’s critique of classical Cartesian and Newtonian metaphysical assumptions helps to reveal the positionality of the assumed universalism of treating research data as a given and a priori common resource. The final section of the article considers what treating data as a common resource and public good, and the exclusion of the labour and relations of data producers that it depends on, does ontologically, epistemologically, morally and politically. In particular, it suggests that emerging regulatory, policy, legislative and discursive practices reinforce, institutionalise and legitimise power differentials and inequalities precisely along the lines that feminist scholars have been contesting for over four decades
Illusions of Post-Feminism, Ghosts of Gender and the Discourses of Law
Get PDFThis article seeks to consider evidence of post-feminist and "post-equality" gender narratives contained in the discourses of law in the UK and European contexts. Analysis of perennial ghosts of gender in the areas of gender-neutrality in policy, legislative regulation of sexual crimes, and the adjudication of gendered issues by judges will be undertaken in order to renew and reinstate the focus of the legal feminist project and advocate for continued scrutiny in these three practical areas
Persons and Property
No full textThis is an audio recording of an Open Lecture given by Professor Margaret Davies at the University of Kent on 18 January 2012
Immaterial labour and alternative valorisation processes in Italian feminist debates: (re)exploring the ‘commons’ of re-production.
Get PDFThis article takes its cue from Desai’s critique of the new communists of the commons, particularly her claim that their project is built upon a series of misunderstandings about the dynamics of capital accumulation, the production of value in post-Fordism and the concept of the ‘commons’ itself. Focusing on earlier explorations by Italian feminists of the dynamic interaction between labour and value, the contribution this article makes to the commons debate is three-fold: first, it argues that the most interesting insights emerging from immaterial/cognitive/affective labour theories on which Italian post-workerists rely to put forward a renewed understanding of the commons derive from this feminist body of work. Secondly it shows how, despite being relied upon, the radical potential of this work has been limited by positing a qualitative shift to post-Fordist production that pays little attention to the important connections between labour and value that make up our common world. Finally, the article focuses exactly on this potential, that is, the challenge to capitalist value through the instantiation of other processes of valorisation, in light of the current attack on social reproduction
The New Communists of the Commons: 21st Century Proudhonists
Get PDFIf Proudhonism in the 19th century was, as Marx argued, a petty bourgeois ideology, this paper argues that the new communism of the commons propounded by Badiou, Hardt and Negri and Žižek is a 21st century avatar of it. It speaks not for what Poulantzas called the ‘traditional petty bourgeoisie’, as Proudhon did, but for the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ of ‘non-productive wage-earners’, which has also lately styled itself the ‘creative class.’ A failure to comprehend the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and a general antipathy to any general organization of labour in society, and thus to any serious politics, are common to both. In addition, the paper shows that the protection of the cultural commons, the core of the project, is but a programme aiming for the continued reproduction of the creative class within capitalism. It is also prey to a series of misunderstandings - of the concept of the commons itself, of contemporary capitalism whose dynamics forms the backdrop of their project and key economic and political ideas of Marx whose authority they seek to attach to their project. This is a pre-print of an article published in the journal International Critical Thought (c) 2011 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The article is available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21598282.2011.58416
Access Repository Dashboard
Do you manage University of Kent Open Access Journals? Access insider analytics, issue reports and manage access to outputs from your repository in the CORE Repository Dashboard!