Through stories of young girls at play produced in a collective biography workshop we trace flows of desire and excesses of joy, and bring recent feminist work on positive affect into our analysis of girlhood becomings. Ringrose (2011, 2013) argues that the concept of the “affective assemblage“ brings together affect, embodiment, and relationality in powerful ways to enable a mapping of how desire moves through the social. She suggests that the affective capacities of assemblages can be “life affirming or life destroying“ (2011: 602). In this article we are interested in mapping flows of desire, moments of joy and possibility in moments of girlhood, and in the limitations and contingencies within these moments that shut down these possibilities. We suggest that the methodology of collective biography (Davies and Gannon 2006, 2009, 2013) offers potential for tracing the microparticulars of girlhood becomings.
"A Quick Sideways Look and Wild Grin"
Joyful Assemblages in Moments of Girlhood
Susanne Gannon, Kristina Gottschall, and Catherine Camden Pratt
What Makes a Megaproject?
A Review of Global Hydropower Assemblages
Grant M. Gutierrez, Sarah Kelly, Joshua J. Cousins, and Christopher Sneddon
This article reviews how global hydropower assemblages catalyze socioecological change in the world’s rivers. As a quintessential megaproject, massive dams and the hydropower they generate have long captivated the modernist development imaginary. Yet, despite growing recognition of the socio-ecological consequences of hydropower, it has recently assumed a central role in supporting renewable energy transitions. We highlight three trends in hydropower politics that characterize global hydropower assemblages: mega-dams as markers of nation-state development; river protection by territorial alliances and social movements opposed to hydropower; and transitions from spectacular, centralized hydropower installations to the propagation of small and large hydropower within climate mitigation schemes. We offer insights on how global hydropower assemblages force examination beyond traditional categories of “mega” through more holistic and grounded analyses of significance.
Lorenzo Cañás Bottos
Based on fieldwork undertaken in 2004–2005, I analyze how the Irish border has been constructed, represented, challenged, and imagined by both the state and borderlanders as a means to discuss processes of constructing sovereignty. I focus on the concept of “assemblage” to integrate and highlight the tensions and contradictions between different levels of analysis: the juridical, the academic representation of the border, and the memories and practices of borderlanders. I argue that sovereignty, rather than a claim to be taken at face value by states, is the emergent property of the combination of a variety of forces, forms, and practices involved in the making of borders, and that its very enactment also produces anti-sovereign effects.
Diana Espírito Santo
exactly by its relationship to its ‘exteriors’, and that lenience (or lenience-as-plasticity) is built into this process as a principle of assemblage and adaptation—it is, in the end, what makes the self-system continually move itself. A large part of the
Collecting the Asante
African Agency in a Pre-colonial Assemblage
Fiona Savage
In 1818 Thomas Edward Bowdich presented a small collection of artifacts to the British Museum that was assembled during the first diplomatic mission to Asante in 1817. Unfortunately, Bowdich did not disclose how he went about forming this collection but circumstantial evidence contained in his published account (1819) and archival records strongly suggest that a small number of these items, including seven examples of gold work, were given by the King of Asante to Bowdich for the British Museum. This article will present new research that calls into question the artistic, economic, and technological interpretations that have dominated the public display and reception of these items since their acquisition. By reexamining the social and political contexts within which these objects were collected and donated, an undeniable African agency is revealed that demonstrates that efforts were made to self-promote and represent.
Target Practice
The Algorithmics and Biopolitics of Race in Emerging Smart Border Practices and Technologies
Tamara Vukov
particular promises of a more rational, scientific, and “postracial” mode of border control. I go on to consider key theoretical approaches that help to inform my inquiry into race as a biopolitical assemblage as it is produced and remade through the smart
Marxist morphologies
A materialist critique of brute materialities, flat infrastructures, fuzzy property, and complexified cities
Michał Murawski
to be kept “flat”; that social things and processes never cohere into rigid “structures” but instead clump into transient and volatile “assemblages”; that causality is “emergent” (or nonlinear) rather than “effective” (or linear); and that the
Archaeology and Ethnographic Collections
Disentangling Provenance, Provenience, and Context in Vanuatu Assemblages
James L. Flexner
be “excavated” in order to understand their formation through time, as well as the histories and systemic contexts of the things that form the assemblage (e.g., Torrence and Clarke 2013 ). As with objects from an archaeological excavation
Gold Teeth, Indian Dresses, Chinese Lycra and ‘Russian’ Hair
Embodied Diplomacy and the Assemblages of Dress in Tajikistan
Diana Ibañez-Tirado
Tajikistan. In this article I examine how these types of instance concerning the assemblages of dress and bodies are important sites of diplomacy, or the processes to which I refer as ‘embodied diplomacy’. First, ‘embodied diplomacy’ refers to the
In The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2016
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 23–41
John Clarke
This article explores some concerns about the concept of neo-liberalism, suggesting that it has been stretched too far to be productive as a critical analytical tool. Neo-liberalism suffers from promiscuity (hanging out with various theoretical perspectives), omnipresence (treated as a universal or global phenomenon), and omnipotence (identified as the cause of a wide variety of social, political and economic changes). Alternative ways of treating neo-liberalism as more contingent and contested are considered. These emphasize its mobile and flexible character, stressing processes of contextual assemblage, articulation, and translation. The article concludes by wondering whether the concept of neo-liberalism is now so overused that it should be retired.