Posocco
Biographic Data
| ID | 58165 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Posocco |
| FAMILY NAME | Posocco |
| SIGNATURE | POSOCCO |
| AFFILIATIONS | Birkbeck, University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2075-1480 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 65 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality
The tense but enduring engagement between anthropology and gender and sexuality studies has had profound effects upon anthropological theory and practice. Bringing together contributions from an international team of authors, this Handbook shows that anthropological work has taken inspiration from feminist and LGBTQI movements to create a transformative body of research. It provides an accessible, state-of-the-art overview of the anthropology of …
Counterfeit
The article draws on our respective work on the transnational adoption files that ordered the movement of children from Guatemala to Europe in the latter part of the 20th century and up until 2007, to consider strategies to detect and figure the irregularities that underpinned these transnational adoption flows. We intersect approaches to deciphering the files drawn from anthropological research conducted in Guatemala, and in Europe in the contex…
Harvesting Life, Mining Death
Transnational adoption and surrogacy make explicit the relations between war, structural violence and crisis, and global shifts in the organization and governance of reproduction. This article focuses on the interrelatedness of vitality and death, and the nexus between biopolitics and necropolitics, through an analysis of adoption and surrogacy. It reinscribes the transnational circulation and exchange of persons, substance and bodily capacities …
Sepur Zarco, Guatemala
Drawing on long‐term anthropological research in Guatemala, the article examines the case of sexual and labor slavery in armed conflict known as ‘Sepur Zarco’. Focusing on the scene of selected court hearings related to events that took place in a military base near the village of Sepur Zarco, Izabal, between 1982 and 1986, the analysis focuses on ‘bodying forth’ (Das 2007), as a process of witnessing, materialization and subjectification that em…
Forensic Apophenia
This article draws on intersecting debates on archives, infrastructures and knowledge in anthropology to analyse a ‘bioinformational turn’ in forensic science. Focussing on transformations in forensic science provision in England and Wales apparent in the history of a forensic archive, the article frames frictions between ways of making knowledge across scientific cultures, law enforcement, and a legal system that aims to create facts and certain…
Psychosocial research in Covid-19 times
COVID-19 emerged in the public consciousness in March 2020. While the framings and responses to the emergence of this virus have been very diverse globally, the pandemic has had a profound impact on sociality and relationality. It has brought into relief and exacerbated long-standing inequalities, vulnerabilities and exclusions, raised new questions about how social protection might be figured and how to respond to emergent immunitarian logics an…
Archives, promises, values
This article analyses the role of infrastructures in the 'bioinformational turn' in forensic science and examines processes through which evidence is constituted, validated or challenged in and through domains of expertise that engage different techniques, data, objects and knowledges through infrastructural arrangements. While the digitisation of the infrastructures that underpin forensic service delivery promised connectivity, prosperity and we…
Field-defying Political Anthropologies
I. Definition What is political anthropology for you? How do you understand both anthropology and politics (or the political): what is politics (or the political) and what does anthropology mean to you? The relation between anthropology and the domain of the political is very important to me in the sense that it orients and organises my understanding of anthropological research. It informs my research and writing endeavours in several registers i…
Decolonial Trajectories
In this special issue of Interventions, we consider the transnational articulations of the expansive site of decolonial studies. The disparate as well as interconnecting lines of reflection, traversing geopolitical and disciplinary borders, instructively allude to the trajectories of decolonial theorization. It is within these interstitial transnational sites that the Decolonizing Sexualities Network (DSN) emerged in the last decade by suturing q…
Against Extraction in Guatemala
In this essay, we develop a speculative analysis of the agential modalities connected to the extractive industries that dominate the present history of Guatemala. We focus on appropriation, extraction and the destruction of places of refuge for humans and non-humans, as well as on the strategies and responses that emerge for thinking and doing “in the ruins” in seemingly apocalyptic conditions. We mobilize technoscience, multispecies thinking and…
Introduction
This special issue addresses vital epistemological, methodological, ethical and political issues at the intersections of queer theory and anthropology as they speak to the study of sexual and gender diversity in the contemporary world. The special issue centres on explorations of anthropology’s queer sensibilities, that is, experimental thinking in ethnographically informed investigations of gender and sexual difference, and related connections, …
A commitment to difference
Esther Newton (b. 1940) is an influential American anthropologist, whose pioneering work on drag queens and gay and lesbian communities has contributed to the emergence of gay and lesbian anthropology, and gradually also queer anthropology, as a recognized sub-field within socio-cultural anthropology. Newton undertook her graduate work at the University of Chicago under the tutelage of Professor David Schneider. Newton is currently Professor of W…
Bordering, exclusions and necropolitics
Purpose Contemporary governmentality combines biopolitical and necropolitical logics to establish social, political and physical borders that classify and stratify populations using symbolic and material marks as, for example, nationality, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, social class and/or disability. The social sciences have been prolific in the analysis of alterities and, in turn, implicated in the epistemologies and knowledge practices th…
Life, death, ethnography
Purpose What difference, if any, does it make to appeal to the ordinary and the everyday, the situated and always-already-in-relation, the emergent and the quasi-event (Povinelli, 2011), as simultaneously sites, objects and frames? The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Through a focus on epistemological and methodological reflection, this paper asks: what is the relation between the biopolitical and necropolitical te…
Violence and Affective States in Contemporary Latin America
This special issue brings together scholars interested in the analysis of the social, cultural and affective dimensions of violence. The contributions explore the connections between situated experiences of violence and shifting affective states, relations, sensations and contingencies in contemporary Latin America. The articles consider how violence might constitute a nexus for the production of subjectivities and forms of identification, relati…
Substance, sign, and trace
In Kinship, Law and the Unexpected, Marilyn Strathern (2005, Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives are Always a Surprise, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) shows how, through analogies, Euro-American knowledge practices turn offspring into property, information into knowledge, and relations into relations. This article takes this Strathernian insight as a point of departure for a consideration of the analytical possibilities - and the i…
Queer Necropolitics
Obligation, Social Projects and Queer Politics
Murderous Inclusions
Expedientes
The article provides an examination of how adoption files, or expedientes, have “fissured” the legality of transnational adoption processes in Guatemala. By focusing on declarations and disclaimers as an entry point to explore controversies over adoption files, the article argues that files point to the “prior” histories of adoption that are intimately connected to local histories of violence in the country. Through the analysis of the politics i…
Ethnography and Incommensurability in the Aftermath of Insurgency
Does ethnography in some way enact and perform what it names? If one foregrounds this performative dimension, what exactly does ethnography in the aftermath of insurgency do? The article explores these questions as they emerge in the context of ethnography in the aftermath of insurgency ( insurgencia) in Guatemala, and in relation to debates in social and cultural theory. It is argued that ethnography activates-and is responsive to-performative m…
Globalising failures
Zoning
This article considers debates concerning the contribution of anthropology to an understanding of vernacular and marginal forms of cosmopolitanism in relation to the environmental cosmopolitics of zoning practices in and around the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), Petén, Guatemala. Zoning practices realize political and economic restructuring, integration, and fragmentation through conditionality and exceptionalism. The rationale for zoning of MBR t…
Female Masculinity
Female masculinity refers to a range of masculine‐inflected identities and identifications. Debates over the status and meaning of female masculinity and the bodies and selves to whom the terms may be ascribed emerge in the context of analyses of sex, gender, and sexuality
Murderous Inclusions
Expedientes
The article provides an examination of how adoption files, or expedientes, have “fissured” the legality of transnational adoption processes in Guatemala. By focusing on declarations and disclaimers as an entry point to explore controversies over adoption files, the article argues that files point to the “prior” histories of adoption that are intimately connected to local histories of violence in the country. Through the analysis of the politics i…
Bordering, exclusions and necropolitics
Purpose Contemporary governmentality combines biopolitical and necropolitical logics to establish social, political and physical borders that classify and stratify populations using symbolic and material marks as, for example, nationality, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, social class and/or disability. The social sciences have been prolific in the analysis of alterities and, in turn, implicated in the epistemologies and knowledge practices th…
Globalising failures
Substance, sign, and trace
In Kinship, Law and the Unexpected, Marilyn Strathern (2005, Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives are Always a Surprise, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) shows how, through analogies, Euro-American knowledge practices turn offspring into property, information into knowledge, and relations into relations. This article takes this Strathernian insight as a point of departure for a consideration of the analytical possibilities - and the i…
Obligation, Social Projects and Queer Politics
Life, death, ethnography
Purpose What difference, if any, does it make to appeal to the ordinary and the everyday, the situated and always-already-in-relation, the emergent and the quasi-event (Povinelli, 2011), as simultaneously sites, objects and frames? The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Through a focus on epistemological and methodological reflection, this paper asks: what is the relation between the biopolitical and necropolitical te…
Violence and Affective States in Contemporary Latin America
This special issue brings together scholars interested in the analysis of the social, cultural and affective dimensions of violence. The contributions explore the connections between situated experiences of violence and shifting affective states, relations, sensations and contingencies in contemporary Latin America. The articles consider how violence might constitute a nexus for the production of subjectivities and forms of identification, relati…
Archives, promises, values
This article analyses the role of infrastructures in the 'bioinformational turn' in forensic science and examines processes through which evidence is constituted, validated or challenged in and through domains of expertise that engage different techniques, data, objects and knowledges through infrastructural arrangements. While the digitisation of the infrastructures that underpin forensic service delivery promised connectivity, prosperity and we…
Ethnography and Incommensurability in the Aftermath of Insurgency
Does ethnography in some way enact and perform what it names? If one foregrounds this performative dimension, what exactly does ethnography in the aftermath of insurgency do? The article explores these questions as they emerge in the context of ethnography in the aftermath of insurgency ( insurgencia) in Guatemala, and in relation to debates in social and cultural theory. It is argued that ethnography activates-and is responsive to-performative m…
Female Masculinity
Female masculinity refers to a range of masculine‐inflected identities and identifications. Debates over the status and meaning of female masculinity and the bodies and selves to whom the terms may be ascribed emerge in the context of analyses of sex, gender, and sexuality
Zoning
This article considers debates concerning the contribution of anthropology to an understanding of vernacular and marginal forms of cosmopolitanism in relation to the environmental cosmopolitics of zoning practices in and around the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), Petén, Guatemala. Zoning practices realize political and economic restructuring, integration, and fragmentation through conditionality and exceptionalism. The rationale for zoning of MBR t…
Globalising failures
Expedientes
The article provides an examination of how adoption files, or expedientes, have “fissured” the legality of transnational adoption processes in Guatemala. By focusing on declarations and disclaimers as an entry point to explore controversies over adoption files, the article argues that files point to the “prior” histories of adoption that are intimately connected to local histories of violence in the country. Through the analysis of the politics i…
Ethnography and Incommensurability in the Aftermath of Insurgency
Does ethnography in some way enact and perform what it names? If one foregrounds this performative dimension, what exactly does ethnography in the aftermath of insurgency do? The article explores these questions as they emerge in the context of ethnography in the aftermath of insurgency ( insurgencia) in Guatemala, and in relation to debates in social and cultural theory. It is argued that ethnography activates-and is responsive to-performative m…
Obligation, Social Projects and Queer Politics
Murderous Inclusions
Queer Necropolitics
Substance, sign, and trace
In Kinship, Law and the Unexpected, Marilyn Strathern (2005, Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives are Always a Surprise, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) shows how, through analogies, Euro-American knowledge practices turn offspring into property, information into knowledge, and relations into relations. This article takes this Strathernian insight as a point of departure for a consideration of the analytical possibilities - and the i…
Violence and Affective States in Contemporary Latin America
This special issue brings together scholars interested in the analysis of the social, cultural and affective dimensions of violence. The contributions explore the connections between situated experiences of violence and shifting affective states, relations, sensations and contingencies in contemporary Latin America. The articles consider how violence might constitute a nexus for the production of subjectivities and forms of identification, relati…
A commitment to difference
Esther Newton (b. 1940) is an influential American anthropologist, whose pioneering work on drag queens and gay and lesbian communities has contributed to the emergence of gay and lesbian anthropology, and gradually also queer anthropology, as a recognized sub-field within socio-cultural anthropology. Newton undertook her graduate work at the University of Chicago under the tutelage of Professor David Schneider. Newton is currently Professor of W…
Bordering, exclusions and necropolitics
Purpose Contemporary governmentality combines biopolitical and necropolitical logics to establish social, political and physical borders that classify and stratify populations using symbolic and material marks as, for example, nationality, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, social class and/or disability. The social sciences have been prolific in the analysis of alterities and, in turn, implicated in the epistemologies and knowledge practices th…
Life, death, ethnography
Purpose What difference, if any, does it make to appeal to the ordinary and the everyday, the situated and always-already-in-relation, the emergent and the quasi-event (Povinelli, 2011), as simultaneously sites, objects and frames? The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Through a focus on epistemological and methodological reflection, this paper asks: what is the relation between the biopolitical and necropolitical te…
Introduction
This special issue addresses vital epistemological, methodological, ethical and political issues at the intersections of queer theory and anthropology as they speak to the study of sexual and gender diversity in the contemporary world. The special issue centres on explorations of anthropology’s queer sensibilities, that is, experimental thinking in ethnographically informed investigations of gender and sexual difference, and related connections, …
Field-defying Political Anthropologies
I. Definition What is political anthropology for you? How do you understand both anthropology and politics (or the political): what is politics (or the political) and what does anthropology mean to you? The relation between anthropology and the domain of the political is very important to me in the sense that it orients and organises my understanding of anthropological research. It informs my research and writing endeavours in several registers i…
Decolonial Trajectories
In this special issue of Interventions, we consider the transnational articulations of the expansive site of decolonial studies. The disparate as well as interconnecting lines of reflection, traversing geopolitical and disciplinary borders, instructively allude to the trajectories of decolonial theorization. It is within these interstitial transnational sites that the Decolonizing Sexualities Network (DSN) emerged in the last decade by suturing q…
Against Extraction in Guatemala
In this essay, we develop a speculative analysis of the agential modalities connected to the extractive industries that dominate the present history of Guatemala. We focus on appropriation, extraction and the destruction of places of refuge for humans and non-humans, as well as on the strategies and responses that emerge for thinking and doing “in the ruins” in seemingly apocalyptic conditions. We mobilize technoscience, multispecies thinking and…
Psychosocial research in Covid-19 times
COVID-19 emerged in the public consciousness in March 2020. While the framings and responses to the emergence of this virus have been very diverse globally, the pandemic has had a profound impact on sociality and relationality. It has brought into relief and exacerbated long-standing inequalities, vulnerabilities and exclusions, raised new questions about how social protection might be figured and how to respond to emergent immunitarian logics an…
Archives, promises, values
This article analyses the role of infrastructures in the 'bioinformational turn' in forensic science and examines processes through which evidence is constituted, validated or challenged in and through domains of expertise that engage different techniques, data, objects and knowledges through infrastructural arrangements. While the digitisation of the infrastructures that underpin forensic service delivery promised connectivity, prosperity and we…
Harvesting Life, Mining Death
Transnational adoption and surrogacy make explicit the relations between war, structural violence and crisis, and global shifts in the organization and governance of reproduction. This article focuses on the interrelatedness of vitality and death, and the nexus between biopolitics and necropolitics, through an analysis of adoption and surrogacy. It reinscribes the transnational circulation and exchange of persons, substance and bodily capacities …
Sepur Zarco, Guatemala
Drawing on long‐term anthropological research in Guatemala, the article examines the case of sexual and labor slavery in armed conflict known as ‘Sepur Zarco’. Focusing on the scene of selected court hearings related to events that took place in a military base near the village of Sepur Zarco, Izabal, between 1982 and 1986, the analysis focuses on ‘bodying forth’ (Das 2007), as a process of witnessing, materialization and subjectification that em…
Forensic Apophenia
This article draws on intersecting debates on archives, infrastructures and knowledge in anthropology to analyse a ‘bioinformational turn’ in forensic science. Focussing on transformations in forensic science provision in England and Wales apparent in the history of a forensic archive, the article frames frictions between ways of making knowledge across scientific cultures, law enforcement, and a legal system that aims to create facts and certain…
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality
The tense but enduring engagement between anthropology and gender and sexuality studies has had profound effects upon anthropological theory and practice. Bringing together contributions from an international team of authors, this Handbook shows that anthropological work has taken inspiration from feminist and LGBTQI movements to create a transformative body of research. It provides an accessible, state-of-the-art overview of the anthropology of …
Counterfeit
The article draws on our respective work on the transnational adoption files that ordered the movement of children from Guatemala to Europe in the latter part of the 20th century and up until 2007, to consider strategies to detect and figure the irregularities that underpinned these transnational adoption flows. We intersect approaches to deciphering the files drawn from anthropological research conducted in Guatemala, and in Europe in the contex…
Sociology (20 works) · Law (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Anthropology (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Sex work and related issues (7 works) · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues (6 works)