Claire Blencowe
Claire Blencowe is Associate Professor of Sociology. She joined Warwick in 2011 after spending a year lecturing social theory at Newcastle University, and completing her studies at the University of Bristol where her PhD on Foucault, race and biopolitical modernity was supervised by Thomas Osborne. She grew up in Cornwall on the edge of the Atlantic, which increasingly seeps its way into her research.
Research Statement
My work is driven by curiosity about the ways that power relations are embedded and transformed through practices of knowledge, systems of thought and structures of experience or ‘aesthetic regimes’. This underlies my creative and hopeful work towards developing participatory action research and collaborative theory-work as forms of disruptive and egalitarian democratic practice. It also underlies my critical explorations of political discourse, science, and religious thought, as sites through which the intersecting power structures of racism, coloniality, class-oppression and heteropatriarchy are reproduced. My current work in both respects centres on the relationship between religion and colonialism.
On the one hand, I explore the ways that coloniality and destructive civilisational discourses are produced in social theory, and political movements, through a kind of secularist policing of ‘proper’ knowledge. I have argued for the celebration of practices that validate and engage with the often embodied and spiritual knowledges of marginalised peoples that disrupt hierachies of 'proper' knowledge, disenchant secularism, and challenge racism. I have written about this in relation to ecological attunement, decolonial social theory, and problematics of hopeLink opens in a new window in the 21st century. These concerns inform my ongoing participatory action research with Redes de Mare, UFRJ & Cardiff University on embodied practices, knowledge and community amongst women who survive state-racism and its cascading violences in a favela complex in Rio de Janeiro.
On the other hand, I am exploring the role of past and present religious practice as a site through which colonial, imperialist, and extractivist economies are created and lived. My current book project – Spirits of Extraction: Evangelical Chrisitanity, Mining & the Metaphysics of Race – explores the history of 18th and 19th century Evangelical Revival Movements and their complex relationship to the power and political economy of the British Empire. I explore how Methodist theology and affective investments contributed to carving out civilisational or 'cultural' racism, its role in establishing British control of mines around the world as well as settler colonial sovereignty. This builds on my previously published work on biopolitical structures of experience, biopolitical authorityLink opens in a new window, and on migrant child detention as ‘family debilitationLink opens in a new window’. But the questions have pushed me beyond the constraints of biopolitical theory to engage more deeply with the complex intersections of religion, coloniality and the earth itself, moving towards planetary materialism and geopolitics.
Research Statement
My work is driven by curiosity about the ways that power relations are embedded and transformed through practices of knowledge, systems of thought and structures of experience or ‘aesthetic regimes’. This underlies my creative and hopeful work towards developing participatory action research and collaborative theory-work as forms of disruptive and egalitarian democratic practice. It also underlies my critical explorations of political discourse, science, and religious thought, as sites through which the intersecting power structures of racism, coloniality, class-oppression and heteropatriarchy are reproduced. My current work in both respects centres on the relationship between religion and colonialism.
On the one hand, I explore the ways that coloniality and destructive civilisational discourses are produced in social theory, and political movements, through a kind of secularist policing of ‘proper’ knowledge. I have argued for the celebration of practices that validate and engage with the often embodied and spiritual knowledges of marginalised peoples that disrupt hierachies of 'proper' knowledge, disenchant secularism, and challenge racism. I have written about this in relation to ecological attunement, decolonial social theory, and problematics of hopeLink opens in a new window in the 21st century. These concerns inform my ongoing participatory action research with Redes de Mare, UFRJ & Cardiff University on embodied practices, knowledge and community amongst women who survive state-racism and its cascading violences in a favela complex in Rio de Janeiro.
On the other hand, I am exploring the role of past and present religious practice as a site through which colonial, imperialist, and extractivist economies are created and lived. My current book project – Spirits of Extraction: Evangelical Chrisitanity, Mining & the Metaphysics of Race – explores the history of 18th and 19th century Evangelical Revival Movements and their complex relationship to the power and political economy of the British Empire. I explore how Methodist theology and affective investments contributed to carving out civilisational or 'cultural' racism, its role in establishing British control of mines around the world as well as settler colonial sovereignty. This builds on my previously published work on biopolitical structures of experience, biopolitical authorityLink opens in a new window, and on migrant child detention as ‘family debilitationLink opens in a new window’. But the questions have pushed me beyond the constraints of biopolitical theory to engage more deeply with the complex intersections of religion, coloniality and the earth itself, moving towards planetary materialism and geopolitics.
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Contents
Introduction: Problems of hope
Cranes, Luke Carter
On finding hope beyond progress, Leila Dawney
Xanadu, Miles Link
Hope without a future in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Patrick Bresnihan
Eagles, Luke Carter
Seeking, Claire Blencowe
Hope in a minor key, Naomi Millner
Hopefully indebted, Sam Kirwan
Starlings, Luke Carter
Rhythms of hope, Julian Brigstocke
Networked hope, Aécio Amaral
The Psychonaut’s journey: Race, closure, and hope, Tehseen Noorani
Epilogue
Further Reading
The first problem that the essays address is that ‘Participatory Democracy Needs Authority’. The authors of essays in this section affirm the value of democracy, paying particular attention to how it needs to be cultivated through structures of authority. Those who have authority and those who grant it are connected by bonds of trust that allow us to hold people and actions to account. Democracy’s dependence upon authority constitutes a problem, creating challenges and dilemmas, because trust takes time and emotional labour to build and often seems to be a scarce resource. Moreover, we have to deal with the fact that there are always power relations and inequalities at play – however participatory our practice or democratic our intentions.
The second problem that we take up is that ‘Participatory Democracy is a Craft’. Rather than understanding democracy in terms of electoral politics, and participation in terms of handbooks and manuals brimming with the latest techniques and models, the contributors attend to the subtleties of effective participation, whether in civil society activity, processes of collaborative learning or in ‘ordinary’ life. Enhancing democracy through better forms of participation requires particular ethical and embodied sensibilities and commitments, which can only be developed through practical experience, and which need to be nurtured through slow apprenticeship. Democracy is craftwork more than it is a set of institutions, textbook techniques or processes. However, as the authors of this section suggest, it is a difficult, costly and embodied challenge to learn the skills and ethos of such craft.
The final problem is that ‘Participatory Democracy is a Struggle Against Privatization’. Many advocates of participatory democracy are more or less explicitly committed to resisting ‘privatization’ both in the sense of commodification and market dominance, and in the sense of individualisation of life and experience – seeing both as opposed to equality and dignity. But many proponents of neo-liberal marketization and individualised freedom also promote myriad forms of ‘participation’. Further, as is evident in theatre box offices, ‘participation sells’. This raises awkward questions and uncomfortable challenges for proponents of participation – a challenge that the authors of this section try to address, in part, by reframing participation in terms of acting in, and creating, alternative visions of what we share in common.
We hope that this collection of essays helps in opening up conversations around participation. Such conversation is crucial, not simply for specialist communities of practitioners or academics, but for everyone who is interested in democracy and dignity today. ‘Participation’ has become nigh on ubiquitous as an ambition, description and buzzword throughout social life, from marketing strategies and economic development, through government reform and alternative politics, to education and the arts. We might even say that participation is the form, the mode of organisation, that defines our present moment. Participation is our condition, our imperative and our problem.
Papers
本文开啓一个寻找反法西斯主义美学的探险——一个从我们逐渐加剧的种族主义、反移民、反穆斯林毒害的政治基础的绝望中诞生的旅程。本文质问生态调和是否能够用以反抗此般资本主义巫术和野蛮的未开化状态。本文运用科学女性主义哲学、新物质主义和生态女性主义,并质问这些索引,生态调和能够为组成反法西斯、反资本主义的政治主体性,抑或打破“别无选择”的现实信条之任务提供什麽?对上述问题的回答中,是有关我们可能称为神学形体的若干概念——通向质问价值的价值的神学任务之形体,以及鼓起灵性的政治工作。本文聚焦与考史坦格共同思考的企图,转向此般三种人物形体:妖妇、女巫,以及盖亚的侵入。本文质问这些形体如何成功或失败地诉诸可能解除我们的绝望的大众政治。
Este artículo se embarca en aventuras por la búsqueda de la estética antifascista – una excursión producto del desespero por el cada vez más grave envenenamiento racista, anti-inmigrante y anti-musulmán de nuestro terreno político. El artículo pregunta si la afinación ecológica puede proveer remedio contra a tal hechicería y barbarismo capitalista. Se apoya en la filosofía feminista de la ciencia, el nuevo materialismo y el ecofeminismo. ¿Qué puede ofrecer, se les pregunta a estas guías, la afinación ecológica a la tarea de componer subjetividad política antifascista y anticapitalista, o para devastar el principio de realidad de la “no alternativa”? Entre las respuestas a esa pregunta hay ciertas ideas que podríamos denominar figuraciones teológicas – figuras que se abren sobre la tarea teológica de cuestionar el valor de los valores, y la tarea política de soliviantar el espíritu. Centrándose en un intento de pensar con Stengers, el artículo vuelve sobre tres de esas figuras: la encantadora, la bruja y la intrusión de Gaia. Se pregunta cómo podrían estas figuras triunfar y fallar hablando a una política popular que pudiese levantar nuestro desespero.
science. With the term ‘alternative objectivity’, we point to collectivisations of experience that are different to biomedical science but are nonetheless forms of objectivity. Taking
inspiration from feminist theory, science studies and sociology of culture, we argue that participatory mental health organisations generate their own forms of objectivity
through novel modes of collectivising experience. Through two case studies, the Hearing Voices Movement and Stepping Out Theatre Company, we demonstrate how successful
participatory organisations can be seen as ‘engines of alternative objectivity’ rather than as the subjective other to objective, biomedical science. The Hearing Voices Movement
cultivates an ‘activist science’ that generates an alternative objective knowledge through a commitment to experimentation, controlling, testing, recording and sharing experience.
Stepping Out distinguishes itself from drama therapy by cultivating an alternative objective culture through its embrace of high production values, material culture, aesthetic standards
and critical review processes. A crucial aspect of participatory practice is overcoming alienation, enabling people to get outside of themselves, encounter material worlds and
join forces with others.
Contents
Introduction: Problems of hope
Cranes, Luke Carter
On finding hope beyond progress, Leila Dawney
Xanadu, Miles Link
Hope without a future in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Patrick Bresnihan
Eagles, Luke Carter
Seeking, Claire Blencowe
Hope in a minor key, Naomi Millner
Hopefully indebted, Sam Kirwan
Starlings, Luke Carter
Rhythms of hope, Julian Brigstocke
Networked hope, Aécio Amaral
The Psychonaut’s journey: Race, closure, and hope, Tehseen Noorani
Epilogue
Further Reading
The first problem that the essays address is that ‘Participatory Democracy Needs Authority’. The authors of essays in this section affirm the value of democracy, paying particular attention to how it needs to be cultivated through structures of authority. Those who have authority and those who grant it are connected by bonds of trust that allow us to hold people and actions to account. Democracy’s dependence upon authority constitutes a problem, creating challenges and dilemmas, because trust takes time and emotional labour to build and often seems to be a scarce resource. Moreover, we have to deal with the fact that there are always power relations and inequalities at play – however participatory our practice or democratic our intentions.
The second problem that we take up is that ‘Participatory Democracy is a Craft’. Rather than understanding democracy in terms of electoral politics, and participation in terms of handbooks and manuals brimming with the latest techniques and models, the contributors attend to the subtleties of effective participation, whether in civil society activity, processes of collaborative learning or in ‘ordinary’ life. Enhancing democracy through better forms of participation requires particular ethical and embodied sensibilities and commitments, which can only be developed through practical experience, and which need to be nurtured through slow apprenticeship. Democracy is craftwork more than it is a set of institutions, textbook techniques or processes. However, as the authors of this section suggest, it is a difficult, costly and embodied challenge to learn the skills and ethos of such craft.
The final problem is that ‘Participatory Democracy is a Struggle Against Privatization’. Many advocates of participatory democracy are more or less explicitly committed to resisting ‘privatization’ both in the sense of commodification and market dominance, and in the sense of individualisation of life and experience – seeing both as opposed to equality and dignity. But many proponents of neo-liberal marketization and individualised freedom also promote myriad forms of ‘participation’. Further, as is evident in theatre box offices, ‘participation sells’. This raises awkward questions and uncomfortable challenges for proponents of participation – a challenge that the authors of this section try to address, in part, by reframing participation in terms of acting in, and creating, alternative visions of what we share in common.
We hope that this collection of essays helps in opening up conversations around participation. Such conversation is crucial, not simply for specialist communities of practitioners or academics, but for everyone who is interested in democracy and dignity today. ‘Participation’ has become nigh on ubiquitous as an ambition, description and buzzword throughout social life, from marketing strategies and economic development, through government reform and alternative politics, to education and the arts. We might even say that participation is the form, the mode of organisation, that defines our present moment. Participation is our condition, our imperative and our problem.
本文开啓一个寻找反法西斯主义美学的探险——一个从我们逐渐加剧的种族主义、反移民、反穆斯林毒害的政治基础的绝望中诞生的旅程。本文质问生态调和是否能够用以反抗此般资本主义巫术和野蛮的未开化状态。本文运用科学女性主义哲学、新物质主义和生态女性主义,并质问这些索引,生态调和能够为组成反法西斯、反资本主义的政治主体性,抑或打破“别无选择”的现实信条之任务提供什麽?对上述问题的回答中,是有关我们可能称为神学形体的若干概念——通向质问价值的价值的神学任务之形体,以及鼓起灵性的政治工作。本文聚焦与考史坦格共同思考的企图,转向此般三种人物形体:妖妇、女巫,以及盖亚的侵入。本文质问这些形体如何成功或失败地诉诸可能解除我们的绝望的大众政治。
Este artículo se embarca en aventuras por la búsqueda de la estética antifascista – una excursión producto del desespero por el cada vez más grave envenenamiento racista, anti-inmigrante y anti-musulmán de nuestro terreno político. El artículo pregunta si la afinación ecológica puede proveer remedio contra a tal hechicería y barbarismo capitalista. Se apoya en la filosofía feminista de la ciencia, el nuevo materialismo y el ecofeminismo. ¿Qué puede ofrecer, se les pregunta a estas guías, la afinación ecológica a la tarea de componer subjetividad política antifascista y anticapitalista, o para devastar el principio de realidad de la “no alternativa”? Entre las respuestas a esa pregunta hay ciertas ideas que podríamos denominar figuraciones teológicas – figuras que se abren sobre la tarea teológica de cuestionar el valor de los valores, y la tarea política de soliviantar el espíritu. Centrándose en un intento de pensar con Stengers, el artículo vuelve sobre tres de esas figuras: la encantadora, la bruja y la intrusión de Gaia. Se pregunta cómo podrían estas figuras triunfar y fallar hablando a una política popular que pudiese levantar nuestro desespero.
science. With the term ‘alternative objectivity’, we point to collectivisations of experience that are different to biomedical science but are nonetheless forms of objectivity. Taking
inspiration from feminist theory, science studies and sociology of culture, we argue that participatory mental health organisations generate their own forms of objectivity
through novel modes of collectivising experience. Through two case studies, the Hearing Voices Movement and Stepping Out Theatre Company, we demonstrate how successful
participatory organisations can be seen as ‘engines of alternative objectivity’ rather than as the subjective other to objective, biomedical science. The Hearing Voices Movement
cultivates an ‘activist science’ that generates an alternative objective knowledge through a commitment to experimentation, controlling, testing, recording and sharing experience.
Stepping Out distinguishes itself from drama therapy by cultivating an alternative objective culture through its embrace of high production values, material culture, aesthetic standards
and critical review processes. A crucial aspect of participatory practice is overcoming alienation, enabling people to get outside of themselves, encounter material worlds and
join forces with others.