1,721,016 research outputs found
Apostasy and asylum in the United Kingdom
No full textThis thesis, which is based on 13 months of multi-sited research, explores the trajectories of atheist, humanist, and other non-religious asylum seekers and refugees as they navigate the United Kingdom’s asylum field. I examine the ways in which this hitherto neglected category of asylees experience key aspects of the asylum application process, including credibility assessments, discretion tests, and knowledge or ‘belief’ tests. While all categories of claimants are liable to be subjected to such assessments and tests, non-religious refugees stand out as a particularly striking category in part because institutional actors such as immigration officers and judges routinely fail to understand or comprehend them. As a result, it is not uncommon for such claimants to receive initial refusal decisions that are based on reasoning that is so expressive of an absence of knowledge that the official refusal letters themselves can play a key part in appeals that generally end with non-religious asylum seekers gaining refugee status. On the basis of the decisive role played by ignorance and non-knowledge in decision-making at the Home Office, I argue that the United Kingdom’s asylum field must be understood as partly ‘agnotological’ in nature: this field not only operates in the absence of knowledge, it is also inimical to the relevance of accurate knowledge due to related institutional conditions. This analytical approach represents a significant departure from anthropological and other social scientific work that has heavily emphasised the role of knowledge and epistemic logics in the practice of asylum screening.
This thesis is also about two non-religious organisations that have become highly active in providing social and legal support to this category of claimants: Humanists UK and the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB). A majority of non-religious refugees in the United Kingdom are former Muslims, which has brought the two organisations into a tense relationship as they espouse opposed discursive framings of non-religious refugees—framings that inform their public advocacy work. In part due to the fact that the asylum application process often takes years to complete, non-religious refugees have—since at least 2017—become members of both organisations. I argue that this has led to new organisational and dispositional shifts in these two organisations and the wider movements that they purport to speak for: humanists and ex-Muslim atheists. I describe these shifts as the ‘apostate turn,’ a conceptualisation that advances a growing but nascent focus on the positive or distinctive content of non-religious formations, while also foregrounding contestations within them
Becoming middle class: kinship, personhood, and social mobility in the central Philippines
Full text linkThis thesis is an intimate portrait of kinship, personhood, and social mobility in the
central Philippines. Through the story of a sibling set that came of age after the
Second World War, their kin, and neighbours, it explores why and how upward
mobility was aspired for, its consequences, and the ways in which such an
achievement are recalled and narrated. The chapters examine the manifold and, at
times, contradictory emotions that surrounded journeys of social mobility, whilst
historicising the very selves and relations within which such narratives and emotions
become embedded.
Central to this account is siblingship, as viewed from later life, and in relation
to filiation, the pursuit of personal autonomy through gendered educational and
professional fields, and marriage and family formation. Although expectations of
solidarity and life-long, and even transgenerational, support saturated ties of
siblingship, conflicts between siblings were also deemed unsurprising, especially in
adulthood, after marriage, and most especially, after the death of their parents.
Whilst solidarity amongst siblings was seen as fundamental to achieving
middle-classness, the pursuit of upward mobility in some cases heightened the
potential for hierarchy, inequality, gendered differences, and enmity implied by
siblingship, whilst mitigating and reversing it in others. Upward mobility had
implications too for the succeeding generation, as conflicts and unequal life chances
were passed on by parents to their children, sibling set sizes became smaller, and
cousins became geographically distant from one another.
Rooted in the anthropology of Southeast Asia and the Philippines, this thesis
speaks to broader concerns about how kinship and personhood unfold and are
transformed over time, how persons and their relations reflect, absorb, and refract
broader societal shifts, and how seemingly ordinary, intimate, and private aspects of
life have wider reverberations
There is no god, Summer:A critical evaluation of Rick and Morty’s approach to atheism and nihilism
Full text linkAn Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange: Interactions, Transactions and Ethics in Asia and Beyond
Full text linkDialogues, encounters and interactions through which particular ways of knowing, understanding and thinking about the world are forged lie at the centre of anthropology. Such ‘intellectual exchange’ is also central to anthropologists’ own professional practice: from their interactions with research participants and modes of pedagogy to their engagements with each other and scholars from adjacent disciplines. This collection of essays explores how such processes might best be studied cross-culturally. Foregrounding the diverse interactions, ethical reasoning, and intellectual lives of people from across the continent of Asia, the volume develops an anthropology of intellectual exchange itself
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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