This article explores how hate crime reporting infrastructures in the United States have shaped the political classification of Jewishness over time. Drawing on scholarship in science and technology studies and infrastructure studies, the article approaches three legislative acts (the Immigration Act of 1924, the Selective Service Act of 1940, and the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990) as infrastructural events that stabilised classificatory relations and organised recognition across institutional systems. It introduces the concept of originary acts of infrastructure to describe moments in which provisional legal distinctions become embedded as durable conditions of legibility within reporting practices, data systems, and administrative routines. By foregrounding infrastructural rhythm as an analytic concept, the article demonstrates how infrastructures of classification shape the uneven production of recognition and absence within data collection regimes. The analysis clarifies how early infrastructural decisions continue to shape what can be named, counted, or rendered ambiguous in hate crime reporting long after their enactment, contributing to broader conversations about media, infrastructure, and the temporal politics of classification.
During the 2014-16 West African Ebola outbreak, a group of medical humanitarian NGO staff in an internal memo suggested they had been directed to prioritise their own safety, protection, and wellbeing over that - if not at the expense - of their West African patients (Mbow 2015; Farmer 2020; Balasegaram 2014; Sprecher 2017). In the memo, they called this systemic, self-protective care the 'institutionalised form of non-assistance to persons at risk of dying' (Gill 2016; Pallister-Wilkins 2016). In this paper, I argue that the institutionalised form of non-assistance they describe was not limited to clinical encounters or even to this organisation. Rather, it is embedded in the 'racial immuno-logics' of humanitarianism. In this paper, I highlight two cases where racial immuno-logics and 'institutionalisation of non-assistance' were most perceptible: medical evacuations; and health worker-specific Ebola treatment units. I address how racial inequalities in humanitarian mobility and the distribution of resources are rationalised as procedure and systematised via logistics. While affiliations with powerful organisations may attenuate risk of sickness and death from Ebola, they do little to unsettle or remediate inequitable, transnational distributions of care.
Scientific restoration efforts in the American West, which seek to amplify or initiate natural processes, are necessary to restore degraded habitat. However, the cultural, scientific, and capitalist systems rooted in colonial hierarchies, progress, and commodification that structure such interventions fail to account for an animate Earth. This essay explores how scientists' and restoration specialists' use what we term ecological infrastructures in beaver-based restoration efforts, including beaver relocation and beaver dam analogues (BDAs). Through this, we show the obstacles created by a lack of attunement to the ecological rhythms so essential to working with our non-human kin to restore watersheds.
Foucault's genealogy of race traces the racial to the normalising functions of the biopolitical state. Thus conceived, racism is deeply invested in the doctrinal practices of racial government, while little attention is paid to racism as a relational, interpersonal phenomenon. This essay considers Foucault's inattention to the relational character of racism by considering the contradiction between doctrinal and relational racisms. A theory of what I term racial grafting describes the overlay of doctrinal racism across the relational forms of ordinary, everyday racial resentment. Moreover, through a consideration of Frantz Fanon's phobogenic object and Foucault's race war, it is proposed that grafting occurs around the phobic production of dangerous objects. Dangerousness, which serves as both an ontological condition and a propensity for possible actions, describes a deeply ambivalent object that straddles racial being and racial doing, and as such serves as a pivotal point around which doctrinal and relation grafting occurs. This analysis concludes with a discussion of Foucault's treatment of the Social Defense criminological movement (for which the course Society Must Be Defended was named) wherein criminological dangerousness provides the framework for contemporary racism. Such a discussion demonstrates Foucault's relevance to contemporary critiques of racial civility in public life.
This essay examines real and fictional robots as co-constitutive representational objects whose imbrication makes the analysis of robot fictions especially important for robot design. It begins with an overview of the history of this entanglement, the design methodology it inspires, and the generative potential of highlighting the relationality and affordances of designed objects. The second part of the essay offers case studies that highlight the insights provided by 'reading robots' as representational objects. These case studies are catalysts for speculative thinking about the possibilities for a hermeneutic approach to robot design indebted to a feminist ethic of response-ability, which stresses more-than-human beings as fundamentally relational, responsive, entangled phenomena.
Adolescent suicidality remains a major public health concern in North America and is shaped by developmental, relational, and sociopolitical conditions. This conceptual article synthesises literature on Latinx immigrant and immigrant-origin youth to examine how suicidality has been interpreted in relation to cultural contradiction, constrained belonging, and limited future possibility. Using a critical interpretive synthesis approach, the article brings narrative identity theory, cultural psychology, and suicidology into conversation through four themes: (1) role disintegration and cultural conflict, (2) narrative foreclosure and identity incoherence, (3) emotional suppression and suicidal silence, and (4) existential isolation and disconnection from belonging. Together, these themes suggest that suicide-related vulnerability may be understood in relation to unstable role positioning, constrained self-authorship, inhibited disclosure, and threatened belonging. The Existential Network of Suicidal Identity (ENSI) is used as a heuristic lens to organise these patterns around belonging, meaning, and self-continuity. The synthesis highlights how discrimination, institutional exclusion, and legal precarity shape the conditions under which identity, disclosure, and future orientation become difficult to sustain.
This article examines 1969 as an important moment in the development of British clinical and social understandings of sex and gender. Specifically, I focus on two key events: the publication of The Intersexual Disorders by Dewhurst and Gordon and the First International Symposium on Gender Identity in London. The Intersexual Disorders (1969) framed variations of sex characteristics as biological issues, but ones with necessarily negative social and psychological consequences, influenced by US clinical practices associated with John Money. The symposium was an attempt to frame gender identity as separate from biological sex, while at the same time consolidating clinical authority over issues of gender. While the book was supposed to focus on intersex and the biological, gender and trans issues haunt the content. While the symposium was supposed to focus on gender identity, there was an almost constant slippage to discussion of the biological, and of intersex variations. Both the publication and the symposium represent boundary work between concepts of sex, gender and sexuality, but also between the biological, the psychological and the social. This effected both British and international clinical and social approaches to sex, gender and sexuality, including the healthcare protocols for intersex and transgender individuals.
While the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has responded to the plight of unauthorised Black African migrants in Niger as a humanitarian emergency, its mandate to facilitate the repatriation of these unauthorised migrants has raised the issue of coercion regarding its provision of humanitarian aid. IOM considers pregnant women migrants as vulnerable persons, and the maternal care they receive in the third trimester illustrates the ways that coercion and bodily control dictate migrant life in the IOM camp. Relying on over 12 months of ethnographic research, including interviews with migrants and IOM officials inside the IOM migrant camp in Agadez, this article highlights the inconsistencies of humanitarianism within the migration control apparatus. This article will be divided into three parts. Part I outlines how IOM utilises migrant women's vulnerabilities by enrolling these women in voluntary return programmes as a form of rescue. Part II explores the ways that pregnant migrants are susceptible to illness due to unhygienic conditions and how the camp itself produces iatrogenic effects. Part III focuses on how IOM's care of pregnant migrants may result in unwanted caesarean section procedures in the third trimester.
Scholars across many disciplines have turned their focus toward resilience, or the capacity to bounce back after a disruption. Resilience has been promised as a positive process for recovery from climate-related disasters. Less discussion has focused on the 'dark side' of resilience, or the capacity to bounce back to pre-disruption patterns that are destructive. This paper considers recent climate disasters and corresponding resilience efforts, tracing the infrastructure of recovery to ask how negative patterns of resilience may form. In particular, new applications of artificial intelligence may promise more efficient disaster recovery while perpetuating inequities. The paper engages a case study of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)'s use of AI to conduct disaster damage assessment as well as the pitfalls of AI in disaster recovery. AI has generative potential in resilience efforts, but can also reinforce resilience thinking that works against, rather than with, nature.
Rhetoric scholars interested in the ecological thought, object-oriented ontologies, and new materialisms have turned their attention from what rhetoric is to how rhetoric is - as both ambient and infrastructural. These theoretical moves prompt methodological questions: How do rhetoric scholars notice that which goes un(der)noticed? How do we tune our attunements from foreground to background? This article attempts an aesthetic and ambulant methodology that re/tunes and re/turns conceptual-corporeal-empirical methods to play with the background relations in which beings always already find themselves. More specifically, by practicing phenology, this article engages with infraordinary elemental rhythms - in/visible seasonal dis/appearances. The methodological trick may be thinking-feeling rhythmically, ma(r)king other temporalities - moving among chronos, kairos, pheno, and aion - to invent newly available paths of (infra)being.
The 'trans debates' have proliferated widely, and autism is frequently brought into these discussions. Autism researchers have begun to explore the perceived over-representation of autistic people within gender non-conforming populations. While discussions centred around autistic trans individuals are increasingly visible in 'gender critical' discourse - a discourse that is, at best, sceptical of transgender realities. This article consequently examines why being both autistic and trans has become a site of interest and/or scepticism. Engaging with some key medical literature produced at the intersection of autism and (trans)gender, its reproductions in mainstream media, and its use within gender critical discourse, this article argues that both scepticism and intrigue are actively produced through an uncritical adherence to the humanist logic of representationalism. Thus, rather than autism illuminating something about sex-gender, or autism 'causing' transgender identification, I argue these discussions highlight that representationalism is an epistemology that does not allow autistic people full recognition as (trans)gendered subjects. Karen Barad's conception of 'performative metaphysics' and 'the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agents' is proposed as an alternate onto-epistemological framework through which to make legible an agential autistic (trans)gender identity that is not produced by autism, but is co-constitutive with it.
This paper critically analyses Kim Scott's Taboo in reference to the Deleuzean notion of 'becoming minor'. The novel discusses Noongar characters dealing with historical trauma and land dispossession against the persistent impacts of forced assimilation, reflecting on their positioning as the 'other' in their ancestral land. Through the use of omniscient and communal storytelling, the tale subverts the settler colonial worldview and asserts Aboriginal sovereignty. This paper purports that the revival of the Noongar language together with cultural practices can be viewed as an act of deterritorialisation, reconstructing new forms and narratives to express Aboriginal knowledge, memory, and agency. The analysis of the novel as an act of 'becoming minor' demonstrates how Scott's novel can be read as a testament to new ways of Aboriginal sense of belonging and sovereignty within the field of Australian literature.
This article theorises seventeenth-century and contemporary still life by reading the genre through the twin lenses of biopolitics and new materialism. Combining visual analysis with critical theory (Agamben, Haraway, Wynter, Bennett), it traces how still life emerged alongside early-modern debates over sovereignty, materialism, and animacy, staging on the tabletop the sovereign decision that distinguishes human subjects from edible, collectible, or disposable 'bare life'. The essay shows that canvases from Cot & aacute;n and Collier to Yuskavage and Marshall function as portable laboratories in which fruits, animals, and racialized bodies both enforce and unravel political taxonomies. By foregrounding the vibrancy of ostensibly inert matter, still life anticipates new materialist claims about distributed agency, while its recurring aesthetics of exception visualise the perpetual suspension of law that undergirds modern governance. This interdisciplinary intervention positions still life-long dismissed as minor and mute-as a crucial archive for understanding how power scripts the life chances of humans and things alike.
This article proposes a conjunctural approach to thinking about the relation of the Humanities and GenAI. It argues that conversations about LLM technology cannot be separated from conversations about 'positionality' as both involve thinking deeply about textual filiation or the relationship of ownership and utterance. Such a conjunctural approach holds present GenAI's character as a social relation of production wholly reliant on the structures of racial capitalism and forecloses the tendency to resort to Human/machine binaries. Concentrating on the role of the mimetic in aligning discourses about race and technology, it takes the idea of plagiarism as the locus where these conversations generatively converge. The long tradition of thinking about plagiarism within post-colonial, Africana, and Black studies, it argues, complicates dominant discourse around the pedagogic uses of GenAI. This argument is pursued through a reading of Rebecca F. Kuang's bestselling novel, Yellowface (2024), which focuses on Kuang's distinctive treatment of the unreliable narrator. Kuang's revision of the conceptual figure of the unreliable narrator from a race critical perspective, it concludes, provides one important avenue for thinking a Humanities approach to GenAI that avoids the perils of the mimetic paradigm.
While men with breast cancer make up a relatively small percentage of breast cancer cases, their experiences of diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship are rarely discussed in part because the breast cancer movement in its pink ribbon discourse perpetuates narrow binary gender constructions which position femininity as central to breast cancer. In feminist scholarship, much has been said about women's breasts as sexualised, objectified, fetishised, and regulated within structures of heteropatriarchy. Just as women's breast cancer narratives reveal much about women's relationships to breasts and structures of gender, heteronormativity, race, and normate bodies, likewise men's breast cancer narratives and illness experiences do as well. Using queer feminist analysis and disability frameworks, I analyse men's survivor stories and representation posted on six advocacy organisations' websites. This paper adds to the analysis of heteromasculinity found in men's breast cancer experiences by focusing on the queer contexts of disability found in male breast cancer discourse. This paper seeks to disrupt the feminisation of breast cancer, and to argue that male breast cancer warrants attention not because it is a common experience but rather because it gives insight into understandings of gender, the body, and disability.
