Jenny Edkins
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 642923 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Jenny Edkins |
| NOMBRES | Jenny |
| APELLIDO | Edkins |
| FIRMA | EDKINS J |
| AFILIACIONES | Aberystwyth University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1477-0607 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 44 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 296 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 37 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 11 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1996 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Memory Politics After Disaster
This article critically approaches disaster ‘recovery’ in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic through the notion of embodied trauma. We explore concepts of embodiment and trauma and ask how embodied traumatic memory differs, particularly in relation to a staggered global event such as the Covid-19 pandemic where trauma was embodied in raced, classed and gendered waves and experiences and outcomes were deeply unequal. In contrast to the mostly techn…
When This Is Over
The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound and persistent impact – a tragic loss of life, changes to established patterns of life and social inequalities laid bare. It brought out the good in many and the worst in others, and raised questions around what is truly important in our lives. In this book, academics, activists and artists come together to remember, and to reflect on, the pandemic. What lessons should we learn? How can things be different whe…
When This Is Over
When This Is Over
Supposed to know
Open AccessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Edkins Jenny 2022Supposed to knowNotes Rec.76721–722http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2021.0022SectionOpen AccessResearch articlesSupposed to know Jenny Edkins Jenny Edkins http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1477-0607 University of Manchester [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search …
Poetry, the political moment, and the poet as witness
In this autoethnographic reflection on my experiments with poetry as form and its value as method, I propose that poetry is perhaps well suited to address and be faithful to the political moment: the moment when the taken for granted no longer holds. Poetry seems able to escape the linearity often found in narrative writing and to replace any search for certainty with openness or ambiguity. As method it can reveal what may be hidden. Looking at b…
Tales of Entanglement
Entanglement, and the way people and worlds ‘emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating’, becomes nowhere more apparent perhaps than when we tell stories. In telling stories we invoke a reader, a listener, an audience, even if sometimes that audience is within what we call our selves. But stories do more. They draw out the complex and ambiguous mutual constitution of selves with others, of present with past, of person with place…
Global Politics
After Grenfell
Change and the politics of certainty
Despite the imperative for change in a world of persistent inequality, racism, oppression and violence, difficulties arise once we try to bring about a transformation. As scholars, students and activists, we may want to change the world, but we are not separate, looking in, but rather part of the world ourselves. The book demonstrates that we are not in control: with all our academic rigour, we cannot know with certainty why the world is the way …
Global Politics
Routledge Handbook of Critical International Relations
Global Politics
Why do we obey
Max Weber was one of the founders of sociology. His most famous work is perhaps The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, written in 1905–1906, where he links the growth of capitalism to the Calvinist view that whether one is damned or saved can be seen from one’s works: profit and material possessions are signs of God’s grace. Once capitalism had taken root and material goods had ‘gained an increasing and finally inexorable power’ over …
Disobeying Marx, Disobeying Derrida-Hopes & Risks
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 Politics
Missing Migrants and the Politics of Naming
The essay asks what naming a body does, politically. It begins by examining practices of memory when people are missing after wars, terrorist attacks, or disappearances: when we have names without bodies. It then turns to cases of migrant bodies: bodies displaced from their established location, without documentation or recognition by governments. When those who are already missing in this way meet their deaths, they become unidentified decedents…
Face Politics
The face is central to contemporary politics. In Deleuze and Guattari's work on faciality we find an assertion that the face is a particular politics, and dismantling the face is also a politics. This book explores the politics of such diverse issues as images and faces in photographs and portraits; expressive faces; psychology and neuroscience; face recognition; face blindness; facial injury, disfigurement and face transplants through questions …
International Politics and Performance
Global politics
Still face, moving face
The article examines two sets of photographs of the face: first, a set of images by Suzanne Opton of soldiers returned from tours of duty in Iraq/Afghanistan and second, Robert Lyons’ portraits of Rwandans. In conclusion, it looks briefly at Alfredo Jaar’s The Eyes of Gutete Emerita. It explores what pictures of the face can do. Responses to Opton’s images from passers-by who saw them mounted on huge billboards, as well as the photographer’s acco…
Politics and Personhood
The faces of the missing are held aloft on placards in demonstrations or posted on walls in the aftermath of disappearances. They appear massed on the pages of newspapers and in the displays of genocide museums. Often nothing more than family snapshots given a public place, such images can be compelling. Although photographs of atrocity and war have frequently been discussed, little attention has been paid to these other images: images that do no…
Novel writing in international relations
Prompted by Elizabeth Dauphinee's The Politics of Exile, the article explores the political potential of novel ways of writing in international relations. It begins by examining attempts to distinguish between narrative writing and academic writing, fiction and non-fiction, and to give an account of what narrative might be and how it might work. It argues that although distinctions between narrative writing and academic writing cannot hold, there…
Dismantling the Face
The face is central to contemporary politics: it is photographed, pinned down, stored, documented, and presented as proof of identity in passports and ID cards. Automatic face recognition and face-processing systems are key to biopolitical control. However, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the face is a particular politics, and dismantling the face is also a politics. This paper explores what it might mean to dismantle the face, and what politics …
Poststructuralism & International Relations
Politics, Subjectivity and Depoliticization Decentering the Subject Foucault's Docile Bodies Derrida and the Force of Law The Lacanian Subject Ideology and Reality in Zizek The Political and Repoliticization.
Through the Wire
This article seeks to explore the question, most starkly posed by Giorgio Agamben, of whether sovereign power can be challenged. By deploying readings of Agamben and Foucault that complement and illuminate each other, we propose that although sovereign power remains globally predominant, it is best considered not as a form of power relation but as a relation of violence. By exploring sovereign power in this way, we argue, alongside Agamben, that …
Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp
Like Coleridge's ancient mariner who fixes us with his glittering eye and forces us to hear his tale of horror, survivors of the Nazi concentration camps are plagued by demons.2 In the face of the inexpressible horror of the camps, they have a compulsion to bear witness. They have to offer atonement for their survival. To their audience, they are both frightful and compelling. Like the ancient mariner, survivors seize the attention of their unwil…
Novel writing in international relations
Prompted by Elizabeth Dauphinee's The Politics of Exile, the article explores the political potential of novel ways of writing in international relations. It begins by examining attempts to distinguish between narrative writing and academic writing, fiction and non-fiction, and to give an account of what narrative might be and how it might work. It argues that although distinctions between narrative writing and academic writing cannot hold, there…
Forget Trauma? Responses to September 11
Traumatic events demand a response that recognizes their impact rather than one that moves rapidly to forgetting the trauma or incorporating it into existing narratives. This article explores four reactions to the events of September 11: securitization, criminalization, aestheticization and politicization. Securitization represents the rapid reinstatement of state power and sovereign control in the face of a traumatic challenge to the state's mon…
Legality with a Vengeance
Humanitarianism, humanity, human
(2003). Humanitarianism, humanity, human. Journal of Human Rights: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 253-258
Tales of Entanglement
Entanglement, and the way people and worlds ‘emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating’, becomes nowhere more apparent perhaps than when we tell stories. In telling stories we invoke a reader, a listener, an audience, even if sometimes that audience is within what we call our selves. But stories do more. They draw out the complex and ambiguous mutual constitution of selves with others, of present with past, of person with place…
Politics and Personhood
The faces of the missing are held aloft on placards in demonstrations or posted on walls in the aftermath of disappearances. They appear massed on the pages of newspapers and in the displays of genocide museums. Often nothing more than family snapshots given a public place, such images can be compelling. Although photographs of atrocity and war have frequently been discussed, little attention has been paid to these other images: images that do no…
Security, cosmology, Copenhagen1
Analysts of international security employ notions of the subject or object of security that draw on a Newtonian cosmology. This view of the world, which treats objects as independent of observation and existing before they interact, arose alongside the changes in forms of political community that led to the modern sovereign state. Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen' examines competing narratives of a meeting in Copenhagen in 1941 between nuclear ph…
Exposed Singularity
In his photographs of children in displaced persons’ camps, Salgado takes each subject seriously. His images dis‐place us through their dignity and presence. We are no longer spectators but engaged: each gaze demands a response and produces the self as exposed. Pictures of prisoners from Tuol Sleng in Cambodia take the same form: a single figure facing the camera. Here, however, we are caught in an additional and irresolvable aporia: we are faced…
Missing Migrants and the Politics of Naming
The essay asks what naming a body does, politically. It begins by examining practices of memory when people are missing after wars, terrorist attacks, or disappearances: when we have names without bodies. It then turns to cases of migrant bodies: bodies displaced from their established location, without documentation or recognition by governments. When those who are already missing in this way meet their deaths, they become unidentified decedents…
Generalising the international
Ironically, since 11 September 2001, world politics seems to have taken a turn towards certainty. This article is an intervention that demonstrates how the illusion of the sovereign state in an insecure and anarchic international system is sustained and how it might be challenged. It does so through a Derridean analysis of Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society . The article examines how International Relations (IR) thinking works; it teases out th…
Mass Starvations and the Limitations of Famine Theorising
Dismantling the Face
The face is central to contemporary politics: it is photographed, pinned down, stored, documented, and presented as proof of identity in passports and ID cards. Automatic face recognition and face-processing systems are key to biopolitical control. However, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the face is a particular politics, and dismantling the face is also a politics. This paper explores what it might mean to dismantle the face, and what politics …
Biopolitics, communication and global governance
In the aftermath of the 7th July 2005 bombings in London, communication with those searching desperately for relatives and friends was one-way or non-existent. The authorities dealing with the processes of the identification of the bodies of those killed or the treatment of those injured adopted procedures and protocols derived from emergency or disaster planning that were framed in terms of an instrumentalisation or objectification of persons. T…
Ground Zero
This essay traces practices of tourism and memory at Ground Zero in New York in 2001 in an attempt to understand the perceived significance of what had happened and what it was that had been seen as traumatic. It describes the endless circling of the site, and the need for people to see for themselves. It argues that what happened included not just the impact of the planes but the collapse of the twin towers and the wound to the cityscape that fo…
The Local, the Global and the Troubling
This chapter explores what is left out when we examine Northern Ireland as a problem with causes to which there might be solutions. It argues that constituting it this way, as ‘the troubles’, already contributes to the perpetuation of what it is trying to resolve. Such a form of analysis is problematic in other situations, and the chapter will examine the literature on famines as an example of how this happens. If the search for causes and soluti…
Poetry, the political moment, and the poet as witness
In this autoethnographic reflection on my experiments with poetry as form and its value as method, I propose that poetry is perhaps well suited to address and be faithful to the political moment: the moment when the taken for granted no longer holds. Poetry seems able to escape the linearity often found in narrative writing and to replace any search for certainty with openness or ambiguity. As method it can reveal what may be hidden. Looking at b…
Disobeying Marx, Disobeying Derrida-Hopes & Risks
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…
Forum
In the current situation of the so-called 'war on terror' the question of political activism in the face of an oppressive hegemony becomes acutely important. The role of academics and intellectuals in this context is the particular focus of this forum. Questions of agency, subjectivity and activism more broadly are raised, but the specific location of the international relations scholar needs to be considered too. Are scholars inevitably already …
Ethics and Practices of Engagement
Legality with a Vengeance
Poststructuralism and International Relations
Offering a sophisticated introduction to the major poststructuralist thinkers, this book shows how Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and i ek expose the depoliticization found in conventional international relations theory. Edkins argues that, contrary to the opinions of their detractors, the poststructuralists are concerned with the big questions of international politics: it is precisely their work that analyzes the political and explains the processe…
Sovereignty and Subjectivity
This analysis of notions of subject and identity in international relations goes beyond discussions of identity politics to argue that sovereignty and subjectivity implicate each other, together constituting the political.
Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp
Like Coleridge's ancient mariner who fixes us with his glittering eye and forces us to hear his tale of horror, survivors of the Nazi concentration camps are plagued by demons.2 In the face of the inexpressible horror of the camps, they have a compulsion to bear witness. They have to offer atonement for their survival. To their audience, they are both frightful and compelling. Like the ancient mariner, survivors seize the attention of their unwil…
Mass Starvations and the Limitations of Famine Theorising
Forget Trauma? Responses to September 11
Traumatic events demand a response that recognizes their impact rather than one that moves rapidly to forgetting the trauma or incorporating it into existing narratives. This article explores four reactions to the events of September 11: securitization, criminalization, aestheticization and politicization. Securitization represents the rapid reinstatement of state power and sovereign control in the face of a traumatic challenge to the state's mon…
Trauma and the Memory of Politics
In this interesting study, Jenny Edkins explores how we remember traumatic events such as wars, famines, genocides and terrorism, and questions the assumed role of commemorations as simply reinforcing state and nationhood. Taking examples from the World Wars, Vietnam, the Holocaust, Kosovo and September 11th, Edkins offers a thorough discussion of practices of memory such as memorials, museums, remembrance ceremonies, the diagnosis of post-trauma…
Humanitarianism, humanity, human
(2003). Humanitarianism, humanity, human. Journal of Human Rights: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 253-258
Security, cosmology, Copenhagen1
Analysts of international security employ notions of the subject or object of security that draw on a Newtonian cosmology. This view of the world, which treats objects as independent of observation and existing before they interact, arose alongside the changes in forms of political community that led to the modern sovereign state. Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen' examines competing narratives of a meeting in Copenhagen in 1941 between nuclear ph…
Ground Zero
This essay traces practices of tourism and memory at Ground Zero in New York in 2001 in an attempt to understand the perceived significance of what had happened and what it was that had been seen as traumatic. It describes the endless circling of the site, and the need for people to see for themselves. It argues that what happened included not just the impact of the planes but the collapse of the twin towers and the wound to the cityscape that fo…
Through the Wire
This article seeks to explore the question, most starkly posed by Giorgio Agamben, of whether sovereign power can be challenged. By deploying readings of Agamben and Foucault that complement and illuminate each other, we propose that although sovereign power remains globally predominant, it is best considered not as a form of power relation but as a relation of violence. By exploring sovereign power in this way, we argue, alongside Agamben, that …
Panel Participants
Generalising the international
Ironically, since 11 September 2001, world politics seems to have taken a turn towards certainty. This article is an intervention that demonstrates how the illusion of the sovereign state in an insecure and anarchic international system is sustained and how it might be challenged. It does so through a Derridean analysis of Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society . The article examines how International Relations (IR) thinking works; it teases out th…
Forum
In the current situation of the so-called 'war on terror' the question of political activism in the face of an oppressive hegemony becomes acutely important. The role of academics and intellectuals in this context is the particular focus of this forum. Questions of agency, subjectivity and activism more broadly are raised, but the specific location of the international relations scholar needs to be considered too. Are scholars inevitably already …
Ethics and Practices of Engagement
Exposed Singularity
In his photographs of children in displaced persons’ camps, Salgado takes each subject seriously. His images dis‐place us through their dignity and presence. We are no longer spectators but engaged: each gaze demands a response and produces the self as exposed. Pictures of prisoners from Tuol Sleng in Cambodia take the same form: a single figure facing the camera. Here, however, we are caught in an additional and irresolvable aporia: we are faced…
Remembering Relationality
Memories of traumatic events can be seen, to borrow Toni Morrison’s phrase, as a ‘thread thrown’ between the dead and those who survive: to hold the dead in our arms is an impossible gesture of solidarity and compassion in the face of ‘the wit of eternity’.2 What is being remembered, or perhaps more accurately re-constituted, is relationality, that radical interconnectedness that has been so shockingly betrayed in and through the violence of trau…
The Local, the Global and the Troubling
This chapter explores what is left out when we examine Northern Ireland as a problem with causes to which there might be solutions. It argues that constituting it this way, as ‘the troubles’, already contributes to the perpetuation of what it is trying to resolve. Such a form of analysis is problematic in other situations, and the chapter will examine the literature on famines as an example of how this happens. If the search for causes and soluti…
Biopolitics, communication and global governance
In the aftermath of the 7th July 2005 bombings in London, communication with those searching desperately for relatives and friends was one-way or non-existent. The authorities dealing with the processes of the identification of the bodies of those killed or the treatment of those injured adopted procedures and protocols derived from emergency or disaster planning that were framed in terms of an instrumentalisation or objectification of persons. T…
Critical Theorists and International Relations
Covering a broad range of approaches within critical theory including Marxism and post-Marxism, hermeneutics, feminism, queer theory, deconstruction and psychoanalysis, this book provides students with an introduction to 32 key critical theorists whose work has been influential in the field of international relations.
Missing
Stories of missing persons offer profound insights into the tension between how political systems see us and how we see each other. The search for people who go missing as a result of war, political violence, genocide, or natural disaster reveals how forms of governance that objectify the person are challenged. Contemporary political systems treat persons instrumentally, as objects to be administered rather than as singular beings: the apparatus …
Sovereign Lives
Sovereign Lives
For International Relations scholars, discussions of globalization inevitably turn to questions of sovereignty. How much control does a country have over its borders, people and economy? Where does that authority come from? Sovereign Lives explores these changes through reading of humanitarian intervention, human rights discourses, securitization, refugees, the fragmentation of identities and the practices of development.
International Politics and Performance
Global politics
Political science (33 obras) · Law (29 obras) · Sociology (27 obras) · Politics (24 obras) · Philosophy (18 obras) · Epistemology (15 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras) · Computer Science (10 obras) · International Relations (9 obras)