Amy Swiffen
Biographic Data
| ID | 201352 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Amy Swiffen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Amy |
| FAMILY NAME | Swiffen |
| SIGNATURE | SWIFFEN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Concordia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8953-2131 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 18 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Divine Violence Reconsidered
Indigenous Peoples and the Future of Federalism
From European Roots to Settler Soil
This article examines the applicability of Michel Foucault’s biopolitical theory within the Canadian settler colonial context. Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, which describes the shift from sovereign power to the regulation of life and populations, is grounded in European historical contexts. In contrast, the Canadian settler colonial experience diverges significantly, necessitating a re-examination of biopolitics. The article argues that in C…
Pandémies et paradigmes de gouvernance
La pandémie de COVID-19 représente-t-elle véritablement un moment charnière pour la gouvernance contemporaine? Cette question suscite de multiples réponses de même qu’une grande variété de débats et de perspectives. D’un côté se trouvent ceux qui soutiennent ardemment que cette pandémie constitue un événement historique des plus rares, aux répercussions profondes, notamment dans le domaine du droit et de la gouvernance. En revanche, d’autres prét…
Pandemics and Paradigms of Governance
Is the COVID-19 pandemic truly a pivotal moment in contemporary governance? This question has sparked multifaceted responses and spurred diverse debates and perspectives. On one side of the spectrum, there are those who ardently argue that this pandemic represents an exceedingly rare and profoundly impactful historical juncture, specifically within the domain of law and governance. In contrast, a counterpoint in this debate contends that the pand…
Right Wing Extremism as Terrorism and the Law’s Relation to Violence
Collective Religious Freedom as Associational Action
Religious freedom is protected by section 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Historically, the right has been understood in individual terms, though the courts have acknowledged a collective dimension to religion as expressed in a community of believers. Yet, the precise meaning of collective religious freedom has not been fully fleshed out. The current case law only encompasses a limited range of forms of collective religious e…
Pornocratic Fantasy and the Contractarian Conception of Sexual Exchange
Mastery Over the Time of the Other
Introduction
New Resistance to Hate Crime Legislation and the Concept of Law
This article addresses the implications of a new resistance to hate crime legislation that has yet to be addressed in the mainstream legal debate in Canada or the United States. It comes mainly from groups in the US that represent lgbtq communities who are poor and/or of color. These communities are particularly vulnerable to victimization by hate crime yet the groups have repeatedly opposed the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity…
The End(s) of History
The essays featured in this special issue stem from two workshops that took place in Montreal at Concordia University in 2011 and in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia in 2012. By entitling the workshops “The End(s) of History: Questioning the Stakes of Historical Reason,” we adopted a “big picture” thematic that we hoped would appeal to a diverse set of scholars working across sub-disciplines in law, the social sciences, and the hum…
Derrida Contra Agamben
This essay is concerned with criticisms of Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical theory of sovereignty that are developed by Jacques Derrida in his final seminar titled The Beast and the Sovereign (2009). The implicit interlocutor for much of the seminar is theories of biopolitics. However, when these theories are addressed explicitly, it is through the work of Agamben. The article proceeds first with a brief account of the main issues that preoccupy De…
Pleasure and Political Subjectivity
Freud's interest in sexual fetishism – an interest that spanned his entire career – lay in the way that fetishistic pleasure does not result from repressing a forbidden desire, but rather in displacing desire from a forbidden object onto an object available for use. In this way, fetishism recognizes the 'law of the father' but manages to evade an effect of its force. Our argument here is that the fetishistic relationship to law that Freud describ…
Law without a Lawgiver
This paper defines a ‘crisis of sovereignty’ in relation to the status of legal authority without the nationstate as an ultimate referent. Based on an analysis of a debate between two influential strands of legal theory known as legal positivism and natural law, it suggests one current form of response is a renewal in natural law theory, which de-emphasises theological concepts in favour of the idea of the common good of a political community. Th…
Politics of Law and the Lacanian Real
From Hegemony to Biopolitics
The call for papers for the 2007 Canadian Association of Cultural Studies (CACS) conference asked participants to consider, among other things, “What might be urgent for cultural studies to face, i
Blood and desire
In this article, we use narratives of cultural identity among U.S. parents of children adopted from China to conceptually explore the ideas that underwrite socially intelligible kinship. Although these narratives address the cultural heritage of the child, we find that they also perform a kind of social labor. The ways adoptive parents respond to the "culture question" (their children's birth heritage) also speak to family identity in relation to…
Research and Moral Law
This paper explores the ethics of social science research by taking the Canadian context as a case study of the increasing formalization of ethics review procedures in North America. Based on a biomedical model of harm prevention, all university research involving humans in Canada, regardless of discipline, must pass through an ethics board review. I read the official ethics policy document governing review procedures for human research in Canada…
Blood and desire
In this article, we use narratives of cultural identity among U.S. parents of children adopted from China to conceptually explore the ideas that underwrite socially intelligible kinship. Although these narratives address the cultural heritage of the child, we find that they also perform a kind of social labor. The ways adoptive parents respond to the "culture question" (their children's birth heritage) also speak to family identity in relation to…
New Resistance to Hate Crime Legislation and the Concept of Law
This article addresses the implications of a new resistance to hate crime legislation that has yet to be addressed in the mainstream legal debate in Canada or the United States. It comes mainly from groups in the US that represent lgbtq communities who are poor and/or of color. These communities are particularly vulnerable to victimization by hate crime yet the groups have repeatedly opposed the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity…
Research and Moral Law
This paper explores the ethics of social science research by taking the Canadian context as a case study of the increasing formalization of ethics review procedures in North America. Based on a biomedical model of harm prevention, all university research involving humans in Canada, regardless of discipline, must pass through an ethics board review. I read the official ethics policy document governing review procedures for human research in Canada…
Derrida Contra Agamben
This essay is concerned with criticisms of Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical theory of sovereignty that are developed by Jacques Derrida in his final seminar titled The Beast and the Sovereign (2009). The implicit interlocutor for much of the seminar is theories of biopolitics. However, when these theories are addressed explicitly, it is through the work of Agamben. The article proceeds first with a brief account of the main issues that preoccupy De…
The End(s) of History
The essays featured in this special issue stem from two workshops that took place in Montreal at Concordia University in 2011 and in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia in 2012. By entitling the workshops “The End(s) of History: Questioning the Stakes of Historical Reason,” we adopted a “big picture” thematic that we hoped would appeal to a diverse set of scholars working across sub-disciplines in law, the social sciences, and the hum…
From Hegemony to Biopolitics
The call for papers for the 2007 Canadian Association of Cultural Studies (CACS) conference asked participants to consider, among other things, “What might be urgent for cultural studies to face, i
Research and Moral Law
This paper explores the ethics of social science research by taking the Canadian context as a case study of the increasing formalization of ethics review procedures in North America. Based on a biomedical model of harm prevention, all university research involving humans in Canada, regardless of discipline, must pass through an ethics board review. I read the official ethics policy document governing review procedures for human research in Canada…
From Hegemony to Biopolitics
The call for papers for the 2007 Canadian Association of Cultural Studies (CACS) conference asked participants to consider, among other things, “What might be urgent for cultural studies to face, i
Blood and desire
In this article, we use narratives of cultural identity among U.S. parents of children adopted from China to conceptually explore the ideas that underwrite socially intelligible kinship. Although these narratives address the cultural heritage of the child, we find that they also perform a kind of social labor. The ways adoptive parents respond to the "culture question" (their children's birth heritage) also speak to family identity in relation to…
Law without a Lawgiver
This paper defines a ‘crisis of sovereignty’ in relation to the status of legal authority without the nationstate as an ultimate referent. Based on an analysis of a debate between two influential strands of legal theory known as legal positivism and natural law, it suggests one current form of response is a renewal in natural law theory, which de-emphasises theological concepts in favour of the idea of the common good of a political community. Th…
Politics of Law and the Lacanian Real
Pleasure and Political Subjectivity
Freud's interest in sexual fetishism – an interest that spanned his entire career – lay in the way that fetishistic pleasure does not result from repressing a forbidden desire, but rather in displacing desire from a forbidden object onto an object available for use. In this way, fetishism recognizes the 'law of the father' but manages to evade an effect of its force. Our argument here is that the fetishistic relationship to law that Freud describ…
Derrida Contra Agamben
This essay is concerned with criticisms of Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical theory of sovereignty that are developed by Jacques Derrida in his final seminar titled The Beast and the Sovereign (2009). The implicit interlocutor for much of the seminar is theories of biopolitics. However, when these theories are addressed explicitly, it is through the work of Agamben. The article proceeds first with a brief account of the main issues that preoccupy De…
The End(s) of History
The essays featured in this special issue stem from two workshops that took place in Montreal at Concordia University in 2011 and in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia in 2012. By entitling the workshops “The End(s) of History: Questioning the Stakes of Historical Reason,” we adopted a “big picture” thematic that we hoped would appeal to a diverse set of scholars working across sub-disciplines in law, the social sciences, and the hum…
New Resistance to Hate Crime Legislation and the Concept of Law
This article addresses the implications of a new resistance to hate crime legislation that has yet to be addressed in the mainstream legal debate in Canada or the United States. It comes mainly from groups in the US that represent lgbtq communities who are poor and/or of color. These communities are particularly vulnerable to victimization by hate crime yet the groups have repeatedly opposed the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity…
Mastery Over the Time of the Other
Introduction
Pornocratic Fantasy and the Contractarian Conception of Sexual Exchange
Right Wing Extremism as Terrorism and the Law’s Relation to Violence
Collective Religious Freedom as Associational Action
Religious freedom is protected by section 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Historically, the right has been understood in individual terms, though the courts have acknowledged a collective dimension to religion as expressed in a community of believers. Yet, the precise meaning of collective religious freedom has not been fully fleshed out. The current case law only encompasses a limited range of forms of collective religious e…
Pandémies et paradigmes de gouvernance
La pandémie de COVID-19 représente-t-elle véritablement un moment charnière pour la gouvernance contemporaine? Cette question suscite de multiples réponses de même qu’une grande variété de débats et de perspectives. D’un côté se trouvent ceux qui soutiennent ardemment que cette pandémie constitue un événement historique des plus rares, aux répercussions profondes, notamment dans le domaine du droit et de la gouvernance. En revanche, d’autres prét…
Pandemics and Paradigms of Governance
Is the COVID-19 pandemic truly a pivotal moment in contemporary governance? This question has sparked multifaceted responses and spurred diverse debates and perspectives. On one side of the spectrum, there are those who ardently argue that this pandemic represents an exceedingly rare and profoundly impactful historical juncture, specifically within the domain of law and governance. In contrast, a counterpoint in this debate contends that the pand…
Indigenous Peoples and the Future of Federalism
From European Roots to Settler Soil
This article examines the applicability of Michel Foucault’s biopolitical theory within the Canadian settler colonial context. Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, which describes the shift from sovereign power to the regulation of life and populations, is grounded in European historical contexts. In contrast, the Canadian settler colonial experience diverges significantly, necessitating a re-examination of biopolitics. The article argues that in C…
Divine Violence Reconsidered
Political science (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (11 works) · Criminology (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (4 works)