A Koensler
Biographic Data
| ID | 44784 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Koensler |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Koensler |
| SIGNATURE | KOENSLER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen's University Belfast |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4786-0935 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Fieldwork as witnessing
This essay discusses poses of identities available for anthropologists in relation to increasingly salient issues of contemporary anthropological knowledge-making. Starting with a critical evaluation of the idea of the anthropologist as a witness by George Marcus (2005), we outline cornerstones in current debates on the positionality of the researcher, such as the implications of the end of meta-narratives, the call for epistemological openness, …
Surviving in an age of transparency
The concept of transparency is now an unescapable reference in public, professional, and private life. As transparency-making has recently transmuted from a progressive instrument to counter corruption into a new universal ideological formation, it is time to problematize the concept of transparency and its uses. In this article, I consider transparency not as a moral principle or static ideology but as a terrain of political struggle over its me…
Trying a sombrero
A Concise Look at Militant Ethnographies
What are the possibilities and limits of militant approaches to qualitative and ethnographic research? Recently, various combinations of activism and research have been at the centre of vivid debates. This article presents to an international audience an introduction to the arguments its authors have developed more extensively in a recent book published in Italian, Etnografie militanti: prospettive e dilemmi (Militant Ethnographies: Prospects and…
Prefigurative Politics in Practice
What and how we eat have once again become prominent in debates on the fight for global justice. Proponents of alterglobalism consider experiments with food sovereignty a prefigurative practice that anticipates broader ecocultural change. Critics, however, remain skeptical about its capacity to enhance social change. In social movement research, the practical implications of these prefigurative politics have rarely been investigated empirically. …
Antonio Gramsci, Waddah Charara and Walter Benjamin
Review article of Giovanni Pizza, L'antropologia di Gramsci: Corpo, natura, mutazione, Milano, Carocci, 2020, pp. 182; Fadi A. Bardawil, Revolution and disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the binds of emancipation, Durham, Duke University Press, 2020, pp. 280; Tilla Rudel, Walter Benjamin: L'angelo assassinato, traduzione di Lorenza Canepa, Milano, Excelsior 1881, 2007, pp. 182 [ed. orig. Walter Benjamin: L'ange assassiné, Mengès, Paris, 2006, pp. 2…
Affective Borderlands
In writing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the image of neo-Zionist settlers is taken often uncritically as an immediate expression of power, in representations by both settler movements and their opponents. Based on an ethnographic perspective that combines Herzfeld's attention to the "intimacies" with critical writing on the symbolization of reality, I shift attention to an intricate representation of "affective borderlands" to illuminate …
The right to certify? A grassroot response to standardization
Le recenti politiche della standardizzazione messe in atto in campo agroalimentare incidono in maniera profonda su come si definiscono agricoltori, su che cosa è considerato alimento “sicuro” e su come è gestito il paesaggio agrario. Spesso percepite dai soggetti in questione, come strati di complicazioni kafkiane, esse nascondono tuttavia interessi politici specifici. Il Peasant Activism Project indaga queste politiche della trasparenza, intese …
Reinventing Transparency Governance, Trust and Passion in Activism for Food Sovereignty in Italy
In an increasing number of realms in everyday life, informal personal relations of trust are being replaced by a constraining formalization of standardization and certification implemented in the name of transparency. Examining the repercussions of this process for small-scale farmers in Italy, this article offers an understanding of ordinary experiences with transparency and explores attempts to resist it. Based on ethnographic research with a n…
Flexible academic man
With the acceleration of the neoliberal management of academic institutions, the rules of evaluation change continuously in unpredicatable ways. In this contribution, we analyze the changes in evaluation criteria in two cases, one Italian and one in the UK. Despite the diversity of contexts, both are characterized by technologies of self designed to create a new human type: the 'flexible academic person
Acts of Solidarity
In academic and public discourse on the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, there still prevails a 'methodological nationalism' based on a separatist imagination overshadowing the existence and role of Israeli-Palestinian forms of communality and solidarity. This article analyses micro-political practices that cross existing frontiers, both within Israel and between the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel. Through recent conceptualizations of '…
Islamism and terror
What implies the conversion to fundamentalist Islam? What are the repercussions and implications of 'political Islam' in specific contexts? The relation between Islam, democracy and violence is often represented in a reductive or simplistic way. In order to contribute to a reasoned debate on these pressing questions, this essay covers some key dynamics stemming from long-term ethnographic observation regarding the conversion to neo Salafism among…
Studying frictions
In the Israeli Negev desert, home demolition of unauthorized Arab-Bedouin villages is a contested issue, enacting multiple and contradictory realities. The tents and shacks of el-Shams, for instance, have been demolished almost ten times in one year by the Israeli police, but each time they have been reconstructed with the help of human rights activists. Surprisingly and in contrast to nearly all circulating discourses, nobody ever lived in the d…
Insurgent Building
In the conflict betweenBedouin representatives and government authorities in the southernIsraeliNegev, the term 'insurgent building' refers to the construction of buildings erected in the full expectation that they will be demolished by theIsraeli police shortly thereafter. This article analyses how insurgent building is employed as a spatial practice by emerging political actors to claim contestedBedouin landownership. Importantly, insurgent bui…
Le conflit comme performance
Quand les insurrections et les émeutes sont analysées comme des pratiques discursives, qui forment, produisent et réifient des catégories de la réalité, les cadres des politiques normatives explosent laissant apparaître un espace contenant des ambiguïtés, des dysharmonies et des zones se chevauchant. Le plus souvent, dans la littérature habituelle consacrée aux émeutes et à la résistance populaire, le soulèvement populaire est considéré comme un …
Introduction
In this introduction to a Special Section, we outline three recent interrelated research tendencies with regard to how to understand the practices and politics of 'nature': 1) a major attention towards non-anthropocentric environmental ideologies; 2) more complex analyses of environmental movements; and finally, 3) attention to unconventional every-day practices of environmental justice. In all three tendencies, we argue, a renewed attention to s…
Frictions as opportunity
The question of how to advance justice for indigenous or marginalized ethnic groups leads to the heart of a polarized debate. We find a widely diffused 'right to culture' stance on one hand and a critical, constructivist one on the other. By taking up Tsing's metaphor of 'zones of friction', (2005) this article follows the way in which voices and imaginations about Bedouin culture and rights are produced in the conflict over a piece of land in th…
Political tourism in the Israeli‐Palestinian space (Respond to this article at http
With the violent clashes that took place in May 2010 during the attempt by the Free Gaza movement flotilla to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip, the remarkable strength of pro‐Palestinian networks became globally apparent. Drawing on an ethnography of political activism in the Israeli‐Palestinian space, we suggest that the striking visibility of these networks does not exclusively derive from the prominence of the Israeli‐Palestinian conflicts…
Practices of Reality
If knowledge is considered as incorporated in activities and events, a monolithic reality is no longer waiting to be uncovered, but multiple realities are coming into being through different sets of practices. In the Israeli negev desert, home demolition of unauthorized Arab-bedouin villages is a contested issue, enacting multiple and contradictory realities. The tents and shacks of el-Shams, for instance, have been demolished nearly ten times in…
Prefigurative Politics in Practice
What and how we eat have once again become prominent in debates on the fight for global justice. Proponents of alterglobalism consider experiments with food sovereignty a prefigurative practice that anticipates broader ecocultural change. Critics, however, remain skeptical about its capacity to enhance social change. In social movement research, the practical implications of these prefigurative politics have rarely been investigated empirically. …
Frictions as opportunity
The question of how to advance justice for indigenous or marginalized ethnic groups leads to the heart of a polarized debate. We find a widely diffused 'right to culture' stance on one hand and a critical, constructivist one on the other. By taking up Tsing's metaphor of 'zones of friction', (2005) this article follows the way in which voices and imaginations about Bedouin culture and rights are produced in the conflict over a piece of land in th…
Introduction
In this introduction to a Special Section, we outline three recent interrelated research tendencies with regard to how to understand the practices and politics of 'nature': 1) a major attention towards non-anthropocentric environmental ideologies; 2) more complex analyses of environmental movements; and finally, 3) attention to unconventional every-day practices of environmental justice. In all three tendencies, we argue, a renewed attention to s…
Surviving in an age of transparency
The concept of transparency is now an unescapable reference in public, professional, and private life. As transparency-making has recently transmuted from a progressive instrument to counter corruption into a new universal ideological formation, it is time to problematize the concept of transparency and its uses. In this article, I consider transparency not as a moral principle or static ideology but as a terrain of political struggle over its me…
Political tourism in the Israeli‐Palestinian space (Respond to this article at http
With the violent clashes that took place in May 2010 during the attempt by the Free Gaza movement flotilla to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip, the remarkable strength of pro‐Palestinian networks became globally apparent. Drawing on an ethnography of political activism in the Israeli‐Palestinian space, we suggest that the striking visibility of these networks does not exclusively derive from the prominence of the Israeli‐Palestinian conflicts…
Acts of Solidarity
In academic and public discourse on the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, there still prevails a 'methodological nationalism' based on a separatist imagination overshadowing the existence and role of Israeli-Palestinian forms of communality and solidarity. This article analyses micro-political practices that cross existing frontiers, both within Israel and between the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel. Through recent conceptualizations of '…
Insurgent Building
In the conflict betweenBedouin representatives and government authorities in the southernIsraeliNegev, the term 'insurgent building' refers to the construction of buildings erected in the full expectation that they will be demolished by theIsraeli police shortly thereafter. This article analyses how insurgent building is employed as a spatial practice by emerging political actors to claim contestedBedouin landownership. Importantly, insurgent bui…
Reinventing Transparency Governance, Trust and Passion in Activism for Food Sovereignty in Italy
In an increasing number of realms in everyday life, informal personal relations of trust are being replaced by a constraining formalization of standardization and certification implemented in the name of transparency. Examining the repercussions of this process for small-scale farmers in Italy, this article offers an understanding of ordinary experiences with transparency and explores attempts to resist it. Based on ethnographic research with a n…
Practices of Reality
If knowledge is considered as incorporated in activities and events, a monolithic reality is no longer waiting to be uncovered, but multiple realities are coming into being through different sets of practices. In the Israeli negev desert, home demolition of unauthorized Arab-bedouin villages is a contested issue, enacting multiple and contradictory realities. The tents and shacks of el-Shams, for instance, have been demolished nearly ten times in…
Practices of Reality
If knowledge is considered as incorporated in activities and events, a monolithic reality is no longer waiting to be uncovered, but multiple realities are coming into being through different sets of practices. In the Israeli negev desert, home demolition of unauthorized Arab-bedouin villages is a contested issue, enacting multiple and contradictory realities. The tents and shacks of el-Shams, for instance, have been demolished nearly ten times in…
Political tourism in the Israeli‐Palestinian space (Respond to this article at http
With the violent clashes that took place in May 2010 during the attempt by the Free Gaza movement flotilla to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip, the remarkable strength of pro‐Palestinian networks became globally apparent. Drawing on an ethnography of political activism in the Israeli‐Palestinian space, we suggest that the striking visibility of these networks does not exclusively derive from the prominence of the Israeli‐Palestinian conflicts…
Insurgent Building
In the conflict betweenBedouin representatives and government authorities in the southernIsraeliNegev, the term 'insurgent building' refers to the construction of buildings erected in the full expectation that they will be demolished by theIsraeli police shortly thereafter. This article analyses how insurgent building is employed as a spatial practice by emerging political actors to claim contestedBedouin landownership. Importantly, insurgent bui…
Le conflit comme performance
Quand les insurrections et les émeutes sont analysées comme des pratiques discursives, qui forment, produisent et réifient des catégories de la réalité, les cadres des politiques normatives explosent laissant apparaître un espace contenant des ambiguïtés, des dysharmonies et des zones se chevauchant. Le plus souvent, dans la littérature habituelle consacrée aux émeutes et à la résistance populaire, le soulèvement populaire est considéré comme un …
Introduction
In this introduction to a Special Section, we outline three recent interrelated research tendencies with regard to how to understand the practices and politics of 'nature': 1) a major attention towards non-anthropocentric environmental ideologies; 2) more complex analyses of environmental movements; and finally, 3) attention to unconventional every-day practices of environmental justice. In all three tendencies, we argue, a renewed attention to s…
Frictions as opportunity
The question of how to advance justice for indigenous or marginalized ethnic groups leads to the heart of a polarized debate. We find a widely diffused 'right to culture' stance on one hand and a critical, constructivist one on the other. By taking up Tsing's metaphor of 'zones of friction', (2005) this article follows the way in which voices and imaginations about Bedouin culture and rights are produced in the conflict over a piece of land in th…
Studying frictions
In the Israeli Negev desert, home demolition of unauthorized Arab-Bedouin villages is a contested issue, enacting multiple and contradictory realities. The tents and shacks of el-Shams, for instance, have been demolished almost ten times in one year by the Israeli police, but each time they have been reconstructed with the help of human rights activists. Surprisingly and in contrast to nearly all circulating discourses, nobody ever lived in the d…
Acts of Solidarity
In academic and public discourse on the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, there still prevails a 'methodological nationalism' based on a separatist imagination overshadowing the existence and role of Israeli-Palestinian forms of communality and solidarity. This article analyses micro-political practices that cross existing frontiers, both within Israel and between the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel. Through recent conceptualizations of '…
Islamism and terror
What implies the conversion to fundamentalist Islam? What are the repercussions and implications of 'political Islam' in specific contexts? The relation between Islam, democracy and violence is often represented in a reductive or simplistic way. In order to contribute to a reasoned debate on these pressing questions, this essay covers some key dynamics stemming from long-term ethnographic observation regarding the conversion to neo Salafism among…
Reinventing Transparency Governance, Trust and Passion in Activism for Food Sovereignty in Italy
In an increasing number of realms in everyday life, informal personal relations of trust are being replaced by a constraining formalization of standardization and certification implemented in the name of transparency. Examining the repercussions of this process for small-scale farmers in Italy, this article offers an understanding of ordinary experiences with transparency and explores attempts to resist it. Based on ethnographic research with a n…
Flexible academic man
With the acceleration of the neoliberal management of academic institutions, the rules of evaluation change continuously in unpredicatable ways. In this contribution, we analyze the changes in evaluation criteria in two cases, one Italian and one in the UK. Despite the diversity of contexts, both are characterized by technologies of self designed to create a new human type: the 'flexible academic person
The right to certify? A grassroot response to standardization
Le recenti politiche della standardizzazione messe in atto in campo agroalimentare incidono in maniera profonda su come si definiscono agricoltori, su che cosa è considerato alimento “sicuro” e su come è gestito il paesaggio agrario. Spesso percepite dai soggetti in questione, come strati di complicazioni kafkiane, esse nascondono tuttavia interessi politici specifici. Il Peasant Activism Project indaga queste politiche della trasparenza, intese …
Affective Borderlands
In writing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the image of neo-Zionist settlers is taken often uncritically as an immediate expression of power, in representations by both settler movements and their opponents. Based on an ethnographic perspective that combines Herzfeld's attention to the "intimacies" with critical writing on the symbolization of reality, I shift attention to an intricate representation of "affective borderlands" to illuminate …
A Concise Look at Militant Ethnographies
What are the possibilities and limits of militant approaches to qualitative and ethnographic research? Recently, various combinations of activism and research have been at the centre of vivid debates. This article presents to an international audience an introduction to the arguments its authors have developed more extensively in a recent book published in Italian, Etnografie militanti: prospettive e dilemmi (Militant Ethnographies: Prospects and…
Prefigurative Politics in Practice
What and how we eat have once again become prominent in debates on the fight for global justice. Proponents of alterglobalism consider experiments with food sovereignty a prefigurative practice that anticipates broader ecocultural change. Critics, however, remain skeptical about its capacity to enhance social change. In social movement research, the practical implications of these prefigurative politics have rarely been investigated empirically. …
Antonio Gramsci, Waddah Charara and Walter Benjamin
Review article of Giovanni Pizza, L'antropologia di Gramsci: Corpo, natura, mutazione, Milano, Carocci, 2020, pp. 182; Fadi A. Bardawil, Revolution and disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the binds of emancipation, Durham, Duke University Press, 2020, pp. 280; Tilla Rudel, Walter Benjamin: L'angelo assassinato, traduzione di Lorenza Canepa, Milano, Excelsior 1881, 2007, pp. 182 [ed. orig. Walter Benjamin: L'ange assassiné, Mengès, Paris, 2006, pp. 2…
Trying a sombrero
Fieldwork as witnessing
This essay discusses poses of identities available for anthropologists in relation to increasingly salient issues of contemporary anthropological knowledge-making. Starting with a critical evaluation of the idea of the anthropologist as a witness by George Marcus (2005), we outline cornerstones in current debates on the positionality of the researcher, such as the implications of the end of meta-narratives, the call for epistemological openness, …
Surviving in an age of transparency
The concept of transparency is now an unescapable reference in public, professional, and private life. As transparency-making has recently transmuted from a progressive instrument to counter corruption into a new universal ideological formation, it is time to problematize the concept of transparency and its uses. In this article, I consider transparency not as a moral principle or static ideology but as a terrain of political struggle over its me…
Political science (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Politics (13 works) · Ethnography (9 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works)