J Auchter
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 21504 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | J Auchter |
| NOMBRES | J |
| APELLIDO | Auchter |
| FIRMA | AUCHTER J |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Tennessee at Chattanooga |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2686-5948 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 33 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 65 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2012 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Introducing IPS@20
As the journal International Political Sociology marks its twentieth anniversary, we explore what it now means to do international political sociology as a way of introducing the IPS@20 Special Issue. Drawing on our experience as an editorial team, we highlight how we have engaged with debates about what constitutes international political sociology in our editorial practice. In doing so, we offer a set of reflections on IPS and international pol…
Clothing as a proxy for human remains
Clothing is often narrated in a memorial context as ‘conceptually identical’ to human remains, but this is worthy of further interrogation. This article makes two interrelated arguments, focused on the Rwandan genocide. First, it suggests that clothing functions as a proxy for dead bodies in processes of identification and memorialisation, framed in terms of both evidentiary and emotional value in much the same way as human remains. This complex …
Transition and Trauma
This contribution seeks to think about how expertise and crisis are intertwined in the way atrocity is represented and studied. Specifically, it examines who the experts are relative to transitional justice, and then seeks to describe how this expertise is constructed in such a way as to reify particular understandings of justice that are connected to moments of crisis that can be “moved on from” with the right practical (legal, institutional, ps…
Bordering Vulnerability
How are migrants and refugees represented in media visual discourse in Quebec? This article explores the representation of migrants and refugees, particularly climate migrants, in Quebec media visual representations. Climate migrants, often perceived as “simple” migrants or as refugees due to a hitherto incomplete international legal definition, are faced with increasingly frequent, urgent, and irreversible displacements. Their vulnerability is e…
Visualizing War through Satellite Footage
Visualizing war is increasingly mediated through technology. Accompanying photographs from on the ground, media outlets often include satellite footage to offer context. Human rights organizations also rely on satellite imagery as a tool to confirm the veracity of images – as one example, Human Rights Watch used satellite footage to help confirm the authenticity of the Caesar images of Syrian torture victims. In the current context, where some cr…
Emotions and the Visual Representation of Human Suffering
This chapter discusses the connections between emotions and visual representation. It begins by examining how visual representation is often granted a privileged status as the way emotion is rendered accessible. This chapter offers a skeptical view of this notion that the visual is the only, or at least the key, way of accessing emotions, noting that this can reify particular types of representations, especially photographs. It suggests that, thr…
Terrorism as an aesthetic signifier
What are the legacies of the war on terror? This paper seeks to answer this question through an analysis of vernacular uses of terrorism discourse in political commentary on the Ukraine war. The paper describes how the set of tropes, ideas, and recurrent metaphors that constituted the historical backbone of narratives about terrorism before and after 9/11 is now being mobilised in the context of interstate conflict. Instead of rejecting such depl…
Missing pieces and body parts
While much attention is paid to what happens to dead bodies after political violence, disaster, or atrocity, less attention has been paid to body parts, despite the wide-ranging efforts, both material (often forensic) and discursive, to reconstitute or resuscitate the whole dead body. Materializing the whole body is often considered key to truth-telling mechanisms and for closure for family members of the missing and dead, thus the body part is o…
Transformations and transitions
Death is often considered the end of the story, and indeed the end of politics. The papers in this special issue demonstrate however that this is far from the case. They probe the transformations and transitions of the dead across varying cultural and social contexts, and time periods, and reckon with how human remains are repurposed, mobilized, represented, and integrated into larger narratives, including evidentiary, memorial, political, and em…
Thank You to Reviewers
Demystifying trauma in international relations theory
Recent work on trauma and memory in international relations has sought to emphasize the key role trauma plays in state and community formation, security policies, the mediatization of atrocities, and transitional and social justice. This article problematizes the doxology of trauma in this body of work: the assumptions about the traumatic that go without saying because they come without saying in the discipline. We counter, in particular, interna…
The Ocular Politics of Targeting
This article analyses the politics of seeing as a way to examine the elision of civilian casualty in the War on Terror. The author particularly focuses on the ambiguities and paradoxes at play in this discussion: the question of distance, the question of visibility and the role of the body. In doing so, she tells the story of how terrorism has emerged as a form of violence that centralizes bodies, focused on the figure of the innocent victim whos…
Forum
This forum takes up the question of how to do work in Historical International Relations (IR). Especially in the past decade, scholars have debated what modes of analysis are best suited to this sort of work and how Historical IR relates to the disciplines of History and International Relations. The contributors to this forum intervene in these debates and converge on three issues facing Historical IR—questions of methods, ontology, and disciplin…
Global Corpse Politics
Taboos have long been considered key examples of norms in global politics, with important strategic effects. Auchter focuses on how obscenity functions as a regulatory norm by focusing on dead body images. Obscenity matters precisely because it is applied inconsistently across multiple cases. Examining empirical cases including ISIS beheadings, the death of Muammar Qaddafi, Syrian torture victims, and the fake death images of Osama bin Laden, thi…
On the Spectrality of the Inter-state-eal/International
Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference 'Whither Marxism?' hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida's analyses provoked a la…
University faculty perceptions and utilization of popular culture in the classroom
This article discusses results of a survey on the utilization of and attitudes and beliefs towards the use of popular culture among faculty in higher education. A total of 212 faculty members from a mid-sized public regional university provided responses, with the majority indicating that they utilize popular culture in their classroom teaching with some frequency. Overall, the sample exhibited moderately high levels of confidence in their abilit…
Narrating Trauma
Relatar el trauma: Individuos, comunidades, narrativaRésuméRaconter le traumatisme : Individus, communautés, narration
Symposium Introduction
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818810989
Imag(in)ing the severed head
This paper examines how fear of ISIS beheadings comes to be taken for granted. It uses the framing of the Bilderverbot, the secularised image ban of biblical origin, to examine how beheadings are represented as unrepresentable, and how this paradox enters into normalcy. It demonstrates the relation between the image ban and the naturalisation of fear by telling the story of two beheadings: one of an Iraqi head and one of a Western one. The first …
Displaying dead bodies
The after-effects of mass atrocity - bodies and bones - struggle to be defined within memorial projects. This article seeks to examine the politics at play in displaying dead bodies to interrogate the role of materiality in efforts to memorialise and raise awareness about on-going violences. It focusses on the nexus between evidence, dignity, humanity and memory to explore bone display in Rwanda. It then takes up two artistic projects that play o…
The “Greatness” of the Great War
A wise philosopher once said that “wars do not make one great”. Yet the idea of war as a test of power remains a strong disciplinary norm within international relations. Disciplinary history is temporalized, with key eras defined as significant, as in the key division of the study of international politics into eras (the interwar period, the post‐Second World War international order, the post‐Cold War era), and wars demarcate these eras and act a…
On viewing
This paper assesses the politics of images of the dead body. Western cultural norms often dictate that dead bodies should not be viewable outside of the funerary industry, especially when they are graphic by virtue of a bloody and violent death. These cultural taboos tell us that dead bodies do not belong in the public sphere, and something extraordinary must be the case for them to be on display and rendered visible. However, rather than focus o…
The politics of decay
Forced male circumcision
Forced male circumcision has not yet been recognized as a specific gendered human rights abuse in international humanitarian law. This article takes the first step towards assessing these acts by considering them in the context of post-election violence in Kenya in 2007. This case allows for the exploration of how forced male circumcision was used in a context of political violence and militia-led—and often state-sanctioned—terror. The article th…
Playing war and genocide
This chapter focuses on gaming as a site of visual and political practice, where specific meanings are circulated about how violence should be viewed, perceived and engaged with. The chapter analyses the notion that raising awareness in the developed world among those with access to this sort of technology is the key to unlocking the solution to political violence and explore the type of humanitarian relationship this inculcates. The line of ques…
Gendering Terror
This article problematizes the deployment of the concept of agency in contemporary international relations scholarship. It examines the problems of relying on a foundationalist conception of agency as a tool to achieve meaningful political action by exploring the case of scholarship on the topic of women and terrorism. I argue that scholars on the topic of women and terrorism inscribe agency into women's subjectivities, that is, they place agency…
Paying Attention to Dead Bodies
What does taking dead bodies seriously tell us about the state of global security studies? Dead bodies play different roles in conventional, human, and critical security studies and thus thinking about them opens conversations among these different approaches. This paper pushes further to argue that scholars should think about the global dead as an analytical category. It demonstrates that doing so will allow us to rethink the measurement of war …
Imag(in)ing the severed head
This paper examines how fear of ISIS beheadings comes to be taken for granted. It uses the framing of the Bilderverbot, the secularised image ban of biblical origin, to examine how beheadings are represented as unrepresentable, and how this paradox enters into normalcy. It demonstrates the relation between the image ban and the naturalisation of fear by telling the story of two beheadings: one of an Iraqi head and one of a Western one. The first …
Border monuments
Immigrant deaths have increased in recent years due to changes in border enforcement practices, yet less attention has been paid to the memorialisation of undocumented immigrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border. This article explores the ordering mechanisms of statecraft through an examination of how the dead bodies of undocumented migrants pose a resistance to these mechanisms. I first lay out my conception of statecraft and the bordering …
Forum
This forum takes up the question of how to do work in Historical International Relations (IR). Especially in the past decade, scholars have debated what modes of analysis are best suited to this sort of work and how Historical IR relates to the disciplines of History and International Relations. The contributors to this forum intervene in these debates and converge on three issues facing Historical IR—questions of methods, ontology, and disciplin…
Demystifying trauma in international relations theory
Recent work on trauma and memory in international relations has sought to emphasize the key role trauma plays in state and community formation, security policies, the mediatization of atrocities, and transitional and social justice. This article problematizes the doxology of trauma in this body of work: the assumptions about the traumatic that go without saying because they come without saying in the discipline. We counter, in particular, interna…
Narrating Trauma
Relatar el trauma: Individuos, comunidades, narrativaRésuméRaconter le traumatisme : Individus, communautés, narration
On viewing
This paper assesses the politics of images of the dead body. Western cultural norms often dictate that dead bodies should not be viewable outside of the funerary industry, especially when they are graphic by virtue of a bloody and violent death. These cultural taboos tell us that dead bodies do not belong in the public sphere, and something extraordinary must be the case for them to be on display and rendered visible. However, rather than focus o…
Caution - graphic images
Hardly has one been able to engage with the recent spectacle created by ISIS beheadings and killings without encountering a warning of the graphic descriptions and images to follow in a written new
On the Spectrality of the Inter-state-eal/International
Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference 'Whither Marxism?' hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida's analyses provoked a la…
Symposium Introduction
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818810989
Displaying dead bodies
The after-effects of mass atrocity - bodies and bones - struggle to be defined within memorial projects. This article seeks to examine the politics at play in displaying dead bodies to interrogate the role of materiality in efforts to memorialise and raise awareness about on-going violences. It focusses on the nexus between evidence, dignity, humanity and memory to explore bone display in Rwanda. It then takes up two artistic projects that play o…
Forced male circumcision
Forced male circumcision has not yet been recognized as a specific gendered human rights abuse in international humanitarian law. This article takes the first step towards assessing these acts by considering them in the context of post-election violence in Kenya in 2007. This case allows for the exploration of how forced male circumcision was used in a context of political violence and militia-led—and often state-sanctioned—terror. The article th…
Reimagining the Burqa
Throughout the recent war in Afghanistan, the burqa has represented the oppression of the Taliban. It has acted as a site of intersection and contestation among discourses of beauty, freedom, women's rights, human rights and religion. This article explores the 2010 Afghan Parliamentary campaign of Farkhunda Zahra Naderi, who uses the symbol of the burqa rather than her own face on her campaign posters. Naderi's campaign represents a disruption of…
Reimagining the Burqa
Throughout the recent war in Afghanistan, the burqa has represented the oppression of the Taliban. It has acted as a site of intersection and contestation among discourses of beauty, freedom, women's rights, human rights and religion. This article explores the 2010 Afghan Parliamentary campaign of Farkhunda Zahra Naderi, who uses the symbol of the burqa rather than her own face on her campaign posters. Naderi's campaign represents a disruption of…
Gendering Terror
This article problematizes the deployment of the concept of agency in contemporary international relations scholarship. It examines the problems of relying on a foundationalist conception of agency as a tool to achieve meaningful political action by exploring the case of scholarship on the topic of women and terrorism. I argue that scholars on the topic of women and terrorism inscribe agency into women's subjectivities, that is, they place agency…
Border monuments
Immigrant deaths have increased in recent years due to changes in border enforcement practices, yet less attention has been paid to the memorialisation of undocumented immigrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border. This article explores the ordering mechanisms of statecraft through an examination of how the dead bodies of undocumented migrants pose a resistance to these mechanisms. I first lay out my conception of statecraft and the bordering …
The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations
International Relations has traditionally focused on conflict and war, but the effects of violence including dead bodies and memorialization practices have largely been considered beyond the purview of the field. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology to consider the politics of life and death, Auchter traces the story of how life and death and a clear division between the two is summoned in the project of statecraft. She argues that b…
GaddafisGhost
Qaddafi was widely lampooned in American popular culture before his death. This paper addresses this, together with representations after his death on Twitter and other social media sites, to explore the figure of the ‘dead dictator.’ It argues that the display of the gruesome body of a ‘dead dictator’ is enabled by the material and discursive construction of ‘dictators’ in contemporary narratives, which posit them as easily deposed with Western …
Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez. Unspeakable Violence
Playing war and genocide
This chapter focuses on gaming as a site of visual and political practice, where specific meanings are circulated about how violence should be viewed, perceived and engaged with. The chapter analyses the notion that raising awareness in the developed world among those with access to this sort of technology is the key to unlocking the solution to political violence and explore the type of humanitarian relationship this inculcates. The line of ques…
Paying Attention to Dead Bodies
What does taking dead bodies seriously tell us about the state of global security studies? Dead bodies play different roles in conventional, human, and critical security studies and thus thinking about them opens conversations among these different approaches. This paper pushes further to argue that scholars should think about the global dead as an analytical category. It demonstrates that doing so will allow us to rethink the measurement of war …
Caution - graphic images
Hardly has one been able to engage with the recent spectacle created by ISIS beheadings and killings without encountering a warning of the graphic descriptions and images to follow in a written new
The “Greatness” of the Great War
A wise philosopher once said that “wars do not make one great”. Yet the idea of war as a test of power remains a strong disciplinary norm within international relations. Disciplinary history is temporalized, with key eras defined as significant, as in the key division of the study of international politics into eras (the interwar period, the post‐Second World War international order, the post‐Cold War era), and wars demarcate these eras and act a…
On viewing
This paper assesses the politics of images of the dead body. Western cultural norms often dictate that dead bodies should not be viewable outside of the funerary industry, especially when they are graphic by virtue of a bloody and violent death. These cultural taboos tell us that dead bodies do not belong in the public sphere, and something extraordinary must be the case for them to be on display and rendered visible. However, rather than focus o…
The politics of decay
Forced male circumcision
Forced male circumcision has not yet been recognized as a specific gendered human rights abuse in international humanitarian law. This article takes the first step towards assessing these acts by considering them in the context of post-election violence in Kenya in 2007. This case allows for the exploration of how forced male circumcision was used in a context of political violence and militia-led—and often state-sanctioned—terror. The article th…
University faculty perceptions and utilization of popular culture in the classroom
This article discusses results of a survey on the utilization of and attitudes and beliefs towards the use of popular culture among faculty in higher education. A total of 212 faculty members from a mid-sized public regional university provided responses, with the majority indicating that they utilize popular culture in their classroom teaching with some frequency. Overall, the sample exhibited moderately high levels of confidence in their abilit…
Narrating Trauma
Relatar el trauma: Individuos, comunidades, narrativaRésuméRaconter le traumatisme : Individus, communautés, narration
Symposium Introduction
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818810989
Imag(in)ing the severed head
This paper examines how fear of ISIS beheadings comes to be taken for granted. It uses the framing of the Bilderverbot, the secularised image ban of biblical origin, to examine how beheadings are represented as unrepresentable, and how this paradox enters into normalcy. It demonstrates the relation between the image ban and the naturalisation of fear by telling the story of two beheadings: one of an Iraqi head and one of a Western one. The first …
Displaying dead bodies
The after-effects of mass atrocity - bodies and bones - struggle to be defined within memorial projects. This article seeks to examine the politics at play in displaying dead bodies to interrogate the role of materiality in efforts to memorialise and raise awareness about on-going violences. It focusses on the nexus between evidence, dignity, humanity and memory to explore bone display in Rwanda. It then takes up two artistic projects that play o…
On the Spectrality of the Inter-state-eal/International
Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference 'Whither Marxism?' hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida's analyses provoked a la…
Global Corpse Politics
Taboos have long been considered key examples of norms in global politics, with important strategic effects. Auchter focuses on how obscenity functions as a regulatory norm by focusing on dead body images. Obscenity matters precisely because it is applied inconsistently across multiple cases. Examining empirical cases including ISIS beheadings, the death of Muammar Qaddafi, Syrian torture victims, and the fake death images of Osama bin Laden, thi…
The Ocular Politics of Targeting
This article analyses the politics of seeing as a way to examine the elision of civilian casualty in the War on Terror. The author particularly focuses on the ambiguities and paradoxes at play in this discussion: the question of distance, the question of visibility and the role of the body. In doing so, she tells the story of how terrorism has emerged as a form of violence that centralizes bodies, focused on the figure of the innocent victim whos…
Forum
This forum takes up the question of how to do work in Historical International Relations (IR). Especially in the past decade, scholars have debated what modes of analysis are best suited to this sort of work and how Historical IR relates to the disciplines of History and International Relations. The contributors to this forum intervene in these debates and converge on three issues facing Historical IR—questions of methods, ontology, and disciplin…
Emotions and the Visual Representation of Human Suffering
This chapter discusses the connections between emotions and visual representation. It begins by examining how visual representation is often granted a privileged status as the way emotion is rendered accessible. This chapter offers a skeptical view of this notion that the visual is the only, or at least the key, way of accessing emotions, noting that this can reify particular types of representations, especially photographs. It suggests that, thr…
Terrorism as an aesthetic signifier
What are the legacies of the war on terror? This paper seeks to answer this question through an analysis of vernacular uses of terrorism discourse in political commentary on the Ukraine war. The paper describes how the set of tropes, ideas, and recurrent metaphors that constituted the historical backbone of narratives about terrorism before and after 9/11 is now being mobilised in the context of interstate conflict. Instead of rejecting such depl…
Missing pieces and body parts
While much attention is paid to what happens to dead bodies after political violence, disaster, or atrocity, less attention has been paid to body parts, despite the wide-ranging efforts, both material (often forensic) and discursive, to reconstitute or resuscitate the whole dead body. Materializing the whole body is often considered key to truth-telling mechanisms and for closure for family members of the missing and dead, thus the body part is o…
Political science (26 obras) · Law (21 obras) · Politics (21 obras) · Sociology (16 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Art (10 obras) · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration (10 obras) · Psychology (10 obras) · History (9 obras) · Aesthetics (6 obras)