Oscar Davis
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 462220 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Oscar Davis |
| NOMBRES | Oscar |
| APELLIDO | Davis |
| FIRMA | DAVIS O |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Warwick |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2655-2789 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 40 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 20 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 40 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1960 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
The Entrepreneurship of Psychedelic Negativity
This article outlines a skeptical appraisal of Psymposia, a small but influential self-appointed psychedelics “watchdog” organization based in the United States of America, which played a significant role in blocking regulatory approval for MDMA as a treatment for PTSD in 2024. Contextualized close analysis of its “Power Trip” podcast series, which focused on sexual abuse in the psychedelic community, interventions by its members during the FDA h…
Jeremy F. Lane, Rancière’s Counter-Sociology
Becoming Lesbian
Forum Response
Voice
Three problems for the evolutionary debunking argument
In attempting to debunk moral realism through an appeal to evolutionary facts, debunkers face a series of problems, which we label the problems of scope, corrosiveness, and post‐hoc justification. To overcome these problems, debunkers must assume certain metaphysical or epistemological positions, or otherwise pre‐establish them. In doing so, they must assume or pre‐establish the very conclusion they seek in advancing the argument. This means that…
Hatred of Sex
Burry Holms, Gower, Wales, UK
This paper presents the results of work undertaken on the multi-period site of Burry Holms, Gower, South Wales by Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales. Burry Holms is a small tidal island that possesses a rich prehistoric and historical heritage. In 1998 the opportunity arose to excavate its important Mesolithic remains. The work generated rich new lithic and palaeoenvironmental data and a series of OSL and radiocarbon dates. A surprising disc…
Anthropotechnical Practising in the Foam-World
I begin by acknowledging the profusion of Peter Sloterdijk’s published work, the suggestion by Bruno Latour that it may be on the side of design, and Sloterdijk’s pugnacious aversion to professorial critique. I focus on what I consider to be the crucial and vexed relationship between the general immunology of the Spheres trilogy [1998–2004] and the general ascetology of You Must Change Your Life [2009]. I present an analytical reconstruction of S…
Mettray
This solid history of the Mettray boys’ reformatory, from its opening in 1840 to its closure in 1937, undertakes quite an extensive exploration of the rich archive of this significant institution, now housed in the Archives départementales d’Indre-et-Loire in Tours. Toth recognizes that Mettray was ‘a complex institutional hybrid’, in several senses: a private institution which worked closely alongside the state, a colonie agricole but one in whi…
Neoliberal Capitalism's Bureaucracies of 'governance
The account of bureaucracy under neoliberal capitalism which I present in this article under the innocuous heading it prefers to use to describe itself ('governance') draws together recent critical work by David Graeber, Wendy Brown, William Davies and Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, which it repositions in relation to Jacques Rancière's conception of the 'police order'. The key claims of the new critique of bureaucracy thus delineated are: (i…
Theorizing the advent of weaponized drones as techniques of domestic paramilitary policing
The killing of Micah Johnson by Dallas police using a teleguided exploding robot on 8 July 2016 is the first known example of the use of a killer drone by US law enforcement in the domestic arena. This repatriation of the drone, under conditions of racialized urban unrest designated as exceptional, was predicted by Didier Bigo and follows a familiar pattern whereby coercive security technologies are tested abroad before finding their way ‘home’ t…
Iron Age Hillfort Defences and the Tactics Of Sling Warfare, By Peter Robertson
"Iron Age Hillfort Defences and the Tactics Of Sling Warfare, By Peter Robertson." Archaeological Journal, 175(2), pp. 397–398
'Reading for Understanding Is Problematic'
'reading for understanding is problematic':Panagia's Rancière's Sentiments Oliver Davis (bio) Davide Panagia, Rancière's Sentiments. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 160 pp. $22.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-7022-2 (pbk); $84.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-7013-0 (hc); $22.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-7216-5 (ebook). Davide Panagia, Rancière's Sentiments. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 160pp. $22.95, ISBN 978–0–8223–7022–2 (pbk); $84.95, ISBN 978–0–8223–7013…
Managing (in)security in Paris in Mai ’68
This article reframes the extensive literature on the policing of protests in Paris in Mai ’68 around (i) the concept, borrowed from Critical Security Studies, of the management of (in)security and (ii) Peter Manning’s understanding of the dramaturgical function of policing. In the absence of direct archival evidence about how police felt during May, the article attempts a reconstruction – based on archival and secondary sources – of officers’ ex…
The anti-police of Mai ’68 fifty years on
Research on the police in Mai ’68 began in May 1968. Sociologist Evelyne Sullerot, who lived in the Quartier latin, distributed questionnaires about police conduct to other local residents the morn
Iron Age Burial in Wales
Until the latter part of the twentieth century, Iron Age burial in Britain was thought to be largely archaeologically invisible. However, over the last 40 years the recovery of large assemblages of human remains, often from pits and ditches rather than beneath monumental structures, has changed our understanding of Iron Age funerary practices. The problem, though, is that the majority of this material derives from core areas of study, particularl…
Danebury and the Heuneburg
The Iron Age in temperate Europe is characterized by the emergence of hillforts. While such sites can be highly variable, they also share many characteristics, implying cultural linkages across a wide geographical area. Yet, the interpretation of hillforts has increasingly seen significant divergence in theoretical approaches in different European countries. In particular, Iron Age studies in Britain have progressively distanced themselves from t…
Material legacies
Early Neolithic Enclosures in Wales
Causewayed enclosures have recently been at the forefront of debate within British and European Neolithic studies. In the British Isles as a whole, the vast majority of these monuments are located in southern England, but a few sites are now beginning to be discovered beyond this core region. The search in Wales had seen limited success, but in the 1990s a number of cropmark discoveries suggested the presence of such enclosures west of the River …
Police power and race riots. Urban unrest in Paris and New York
Police power and race riots. Urban unrest in Paris and New York." Modern & Contemporary France, 25(1), pp. 105–106
The last Communard. The story of an unexpected hero
The onomastic irony of Lejeune’s story is that it is ultimately a sad tale of simple senescence: he long outlived his comrades, becoming ‘a “relic” of a cause’ (168). A geriatrician’s office now ad
Filling the Gaps
Over the last 20 years interpretive approaches within Iron Age studies in Britain have moved from the national to the regional. This was an important development which challenged the notion that a unified, British, Iron Age ever existed. However, whilst this approach has allowed regional histories to be told in their own right, there has been far too much focus on ‘key’ areas such as Wessex and Yorkshire. Our knowledge of the ‘gaps’ in-between th…
Resiling From “Resilience”
This is a sketch for a critique of “resilience” and “resiliency” as keywords of neoliberal newspeak (officialese, langue de bois) under the innocuous banner of which all manner of business is now being transacted. I register the rapid extension of resilience discourse, note the socioeconomic context of its rise to prominence, and identify its implicit political assumptions and its social and subjective effects and side effects
Mettray revisited in Jean Genet’s Le Langage de la muraille
Genet was responding, with his own characteristically light-fingered form of autodidactic historical scholarship, to Michel Foucault's appropriation of Mettray in Surveiller et punir (1975). In my return to the archives of this model institution, I argue that Mettray was an exemplary exercise in liberal statecraft's mixture of coaxing and coercion; and that Demetz was an unrivalled master of 'the language of the wall'. This was a distinctly moder…
Theorizing the advent of weaponized drones as techniques of domestic paramilitary policing
The killing of Micah Johnson by Dallas police using a teleguided exploding robot on 8 July 2016 is the first known example of the use of a killer drone by US law enforcement in the domestic arena. This repatriation of the drone, under conditions of racialized urban unrest designated as exceptional, was predicted by Didier Bigo and follows a familiar pattern whereby coercive security technologies are tested abroad before finding their way ‘home’ t…
Danebury and the Heuneburg
The Iron Age in temperate Europe is characterized by the emergence of hillforts. While such sites can be highly variable, they also share many characteristics, implying cultural linkages across a wide geographical area. Yet, the interpretation of hillforts has increasingly seen significant divergence in theoretical approaches in different European countries. In particular, Iron Age studies in Britain have progressively distanced themselves from t…
Neoliberal Capitalism's Bureaucracies of 'governance
The account of bureaucracy under neoliberal capitalism which I present in this article under the innocuous heading it prefers to use to describe itself ('governance') draws together recent critical work by David Graeber, Wendy Brown, William Davies and Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, which it repositions in relation to Jacques Rancière's conception of the 'police order'. The key claims of the new critique of bureaucracy thus delineated are: (i…
Re-interpreting the Danebury Assemblage
Cunliffe's excavations at Danebury have revealed an Iron Age settlement in extraordinary detail. Its inhabitants have come to represent, in the popular literature at least, the idealised hillfort community of warriors, craftsmen, farmers, and their families in a hierarchically ordered settlement system. This model has been vigorously challenged, although largely from a theoretical perspective, and there has been little contextual re-analysis of t…
Voice
Anthropotechnical Practising in the Foam-World
I begin by acknowledging the profusion of Peter Sloterdijk’s published work, the suggestion by Bruno Latour that it may be on the side of design, and Sloterdijk’s pugnacious aversion to professorial critique. I focus on what I consider to be the crucial and vexed relationship between the general immunology of the Spheres trilogy [1998–2004] and the general ascetology of You Must Change Your Life [2009]. I present an analytical reconstruction of S…
Managing (in)security in Paris in Mai ’68
This article reframes the extensive literature on the policing of protests in Paris in Mai ’68 around (i) the concept, borrowed from Critical Security Studies, of the management of (in)security and (ii) Peter Manning’s understanding of the dramaturgical function of policing. In the absence of direct archival evidence about how police felt during May, the article attempts a reconstruction – based on archival and secondary sources – of officers’ ex…
The anti-police of Mai ’68 fifty years on
Research on the police in Mai ’68 began in May 1968. Sociologist Evelyne Sullerot, who lived in the Quartier latin, distributed questionnaires about police conduct to other local residents the morn
Iron Age Burial in Wales
Until the latter part of the twentieth century, Iron Age burial in Britain was thought to be largely archaeologically invisible. However, over the last 40 years the recovery of large assemblages of human remains, often from pits and ditches rather than beneath monumental structures, has changed our understanding of Iron Age funerary practices. The problem, though, is that the majority of this material derives from core areas of study, particularl…
From football stadium to Iron Age hillfort. Creating a taxonomy of Wessex hillfort communities
The variability of Wessex hillfort form, use and development has long been noted, but not satisfactorily explained. This paper seeks to explain this variability and suggests that each hillfort may have had its own distinctive history of use, dependent upon the nature of the hillfort community - the people who visited, inhabited and used the hillfort. This paper starts by using grid-group analysis to define identities that can be found among moder…
The Radical Pedagogies of François Bon and Jacques Rancière
This article interrogates contemporary writer François Bon's conception of the creative writing workshop in the light of work by political philosopher Jacques Rancière on intellectual emancipation. Bon's radical programme, based on over twenty years' experience as one of France's leading practitioners of the writing workshop, in Tous les mots sont adultes: méthode pour l'atelier d'écriture (revised edition, 2005), is examined alongside the critiq…
Growing old together
More on “the pastoral ministry”
The Author at Work in Genetic Criticism
Jean Genet
By David Houston Jones. (Glasgow Introductory Guides to French Literature, 50). University of Glasgow French And German Publications, 2004. 92 pp. Pb £4.50. This guide is an excellent introduction to a challenging work. Chapter One places the Journal in its historical context and offers a succinct discussion of the difficulties which Sartre's Saint Genet has caused, both to Genet and his readers. The assessment of Sartre's book, although less gru…
Genet
The Radical Pedagogies of François Bon and Jacques Rancière
This article interrogates contemporary writer François Bon's conception of the creative writing workshop in the light of work by political philosopher Jacques Rancière on intellectual emancipation. Bon's radical programme, based on over twenty years' experience as one of France's leading practitioners of the writing workshop, in Tous les mots sont adultes: méthode pour l'atelier d'écriture (revised edition, 2005), is examined alongside the critiq…
Where to Draw the Line
This article considers some of the ways that monuments and sites that receive statutory protection (Scheduled Ancient Monuments) are recorded in Wales and in particular examines some of the limitations of the current UK legislation designed to protect monuments and sites. It explores the concept of the type-site and considers the implications of using monument or site typologies to classify and characterise the past. The purpose of scheduling is …
Five questions for Jacques Rancière / Cinq questions à Jacques Rancière An interview with Oliver Davis
Oliver Davis : J’aimerais commencer par une question sur l’Universite, ou l’idee de l’Universite, et sur la place des etudes litteraires au sein de cette institution. Y a-t-il, selon vous, des comp
Didier Eribon, restive rationalist
This article suggests that Eribon’s autobiography is most engaging (as literature) and valuable (as social document) in those moments when the author loses his interpretative grip on the meaning of his own experience. Although a concerted attempt is made by Eribon to account for his problematic relationship to his working-class family background, in particular his father, in purely sociological terms, a restive textual indeterminacy at key junctu…
Re-interpreting the Danebury Assemblage
Cunliffe's excavations at Danebury have revealed an Iron Age settlement in extraordinary detail. Its inhabitants have come to represent, in the popular literature at least, the idealised hillfort community of warriors, craftsmen, farmers, and their families in a hierarchically ordered settlement system. This model has been vigorously challenged, although largely from a theoretical perspective, and there has been little contextual re-analysis of t…
Jacques Rancière and Contemporary Art
This is neither the place nor the time to say that the love affair between the contemporary art world and philosopher Jacques Rancière is over, even if signs of a certain decrystallization are beginning to appear. The philosopher seems coy, wary: “I get letters all the time from people who are organising biennales which, they say, have been conceived according to my principles, this being the reason I must come. Since I cannot go everywhere I am …
Jacques Rancière et l'art contemporain
une dcristallisation certaine
A special issue of Sexualities
To use the word ‘bareback’ to refer to condomless anal sex between men is to evoke the almost caricaturally US-American world of cowboys and rodeos to which the coinage of the term, in the mid-1990s, gestured salaciously (Rofes, 1998). This special issue offers new insight into bareback, as sexual practice and subcultural phenomenon, by investigating how it has been apprehended by queer theory and queer thinking within and across three national c…
Leading by example
This article advances a queer historiographical critique of Act Up-Paris’s operation against Guillaume Dustan and Erik Rémès, two writers of semi-autobiographical fiction closely associated with bareback in France at the turn of the 21st century. It calls into question the group’s strategy of personalization, its insistence on exemplarity of conduct and its reliance on a problematic if widely accepted view of the necessity of community governance…
From football stadium to Iron Age hillfort. Creating a taxonomy of Wessex hillfort communities
The variability of Wessex hillfort form, use and development has long been noted, but not satisfactorily explained. This paper seeks to explain this variability and suggests that each hillfort may have had its own distinctive history of use, dependent upon the nature of the hillfort community - the people who visited, inhabited and used the hillfort. This paper starts by using grid-group analysis to define identities that can be found among moder…
Resiling From “Resilience”
This is a sketch for a critique of “resilience” and “resiliency” as keywords of neoliberal newspeak (officialese, langue de bois) under the innocuous banner of which all manner of business is now being transacted. I register the rapid extension of resilience discourse, note the socioeconomic context of its rise to prominence, and identify its implicit political assumptions and its social and subjective effects and side effects
Mettray revisited in Jean Genet’s Le Langage de la muraille
Genet was responding, with his own characteristically light-fingered form of autodidactic historical scholarship, to Michel Foucault's appropriation of Mettray in Surveiller et punir (1975). In my return to the archives of this model institution, I argue that Mettray was an exemplary exercise in liberal statecraft's mixture of coaxing and coercion; and that Demetz was an unrivalled master of 'the language of the wall'. This was a distinctly moder…
Material legacies
Early Neolithic Enclosures in Wales
Causewayed enclosures have recently been at the forefront of debate within British and European Neolithic studies. In the British Isles as a whole, the vast majority of these monuments are located in southern England, but a few sites are now beginning to be discovered beyond this core region. The search in Wales had seen limited success, but in the 1990s a number of cropmark discoveries suggested the presence of such enclosures west of the River …
Police power and race riots. Urban unrest in Paris and New York
Police power and race riots. Urban unrest in Paris and New York." Modern & Contemporary France, 25(1), pp. 105–106
The last Communard. The story of an unexpected hero
The onomastic irony of Lejeune’s story is that it is ultimately a sad tale of simple senescence: he long outlived his comrades, becoming ‘a “relic” of a cause’ (168). A geriatrician’s office now ad
Filling the Gaps
Over the last 20 years interpretive approaches within Iron Age studies in Britain have moved from the national to the regional. This was an important development which challenged the notion that a unified, British, Iron Age ever existed. However, whilst this approach has allowed regional histories to be told in their own right, there has been far too much focus on ‘key’ areas such as Wessex and Yorkshire. Our knowledge of the ‘gaps’ in-between th…
Iron Age Hillfort Defences and the Tactics Of Sling Warfare, By Peter Robertson
"Iron Age Hillfort Defences and the Tactics Of Sling Warfare, By Peter Robertson." Archaeological Journal, 175(2), pp. 397–398
'Reading for Understanding Is Problematic'
'reading for understanding is problematic':Panagia's Rancière's Sentiments Oliver Davis (bio) Davide Panagia, Rancière's Sentiments. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 160 pp. $22.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-7022-2 (pbk); $84.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-7013-0 (hc); $22.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-7216-5 (ebook). Davide Panagia, Rancière's Sentiments. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 160pp. $22.95, ISBN 978–0–8223–7022–2 (pbk); $84.95, ISBN 978–0–8223–7013…
Managing (in)security in Paris in Mai ’68
This article reframes the extensive literature on the policing of protests in Paris in Mai ’68 around (i) the concept, borrowed from Critical Security Studies, of the management of (in)security and (ii) Peter Manning’s understanding of the dramaturgical function of policing. In the absence of direct archival evidence about how police felt during May, the article attempts a reconstruction – based on archival and secondary sources – of officers’ ex…
Sociology (19 obras) · History (13 obras) · Art (12 obras) · Political science (12 obras) · Law (11 obras) · Philosophy (10 obras) · Archaeology (9 obras) · Epistemology (9 obras) · History (9 obras) · Geography (8 obras)