Fuyuki Kurasawa
Biographic Data
| ID | 295064 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fuyuki Kurasawa |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fuyuki |
| FAMILY NAME | Kurasawa |
| SIGNATURE | KURASAWA F |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0387-5227 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 125 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Evidentiary activism in the digital age: On the rise of feminist struggles against gender-based online violence
Gender-based online violence (GBOV) involves digitally-mediated and -enabled forms of harassment and abuse targeting women, and thus represents a major challenge to feminist movements globally. In this paper, we argue that civil society-based feminist organizations from various parts of the world have responded to this challenge by centring evidence of GBOV in order to develop key though hitherto under-examined epistemic, cultural, and socio-poli…
Jews, Western sociology's intimate others
This article argues that Goldberg's Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought fills an important gap: Jews are not only 'good to think' (Lévi-Strauss) but also essential for Western social theorists to critically interpret modernity and ambivalence towards it. In the article's first part, devoted to the book's epistemological and methodological underpinnings, I raise the following points: the book's disciplinary focus prevents it from enga…
On humanitarian virality: Kony 2012 , or, the rise and fall of a pictorial artifact in the digital age
This article adopts a socio-visual constructivist approach to explain how the Kony 2012 video became a site of intense symbolic struggle regarding how to represent humanity in the digital age and, in the process, one of the most viral and intensely contested cultural artifacts of the last few years. The first section demonstrates that the video employs the visual conventions of personification and rescue, which form part of an iconographic repert…
An Invitation to Critical Sociology
Interrogating the Social
The long shadow of history: The paradoxes of iconographic reiteration in anti-slavery advocacy
The sentimentalist paradox: On the normative and visual foundations of humanitarianism
This paper examines how Western humanitarianism has attempted to work through its simultaneous commitment to individualized moral universalism and ambivalence about substantive global egalitarianism via what is identified as humanitarian sentimentalism, namely an ensemble of narrative and visual mechanisms designed to cultivate charitable moral sentiments among Euro-American publics toward victims of humanitarian crises in the global South. After…
L'humanitaire, manifestation du cosmopolitisme
Cet article explore les sources et conséquences d'une tension constitutive du discours humanitaire, soit celle entre la reconnaissance d'un égalitarisme socioculturel (qui ressort d'un cosmopolisme critique) et l'attachement à un universalisme moral individuel axé sur la personne souffrante (qui provient d'un libéralisme humaniste). Nous commençons par analyser les origines ethnocentriques du projet humanitaire, qui rendait l'appel à la charité e…
A Message in a Bottle: Bearing Witness as a Mode of Transnational Practice
In response to distant suffering, global civil society is being consumed by a generalized witnessing fever that converts public spaces into veritable machines for the production of testimonial discourses and evidence. However, bearing witness itself has tended to be treated as an exercise in truth-telling, a juridical outcome, a psychic phenomenon or a moral prescription. By contrast, this article conceives of bearing witness as a transnational m…
Global Justice as Ethico-Political Labor and the Enactment of Critical Cosmopolitanism
This essay links global justice to a materialist theorization of an alternative globalization in order to decenter the formalist current predominating in contemporary human rights discourses. It does so through the concept of the work of global justice: namely, the ethico-political labor and forms of social action that are constitutive of transnational struggles for emancipation. Using this framework, the essay proposes a way out of the human rig…
Americanity and the Prospects of a Hemispheric Social Imaginary
This paper employs the concept of americanity, as outlined in French-language writings over the past few decades, as a point of entry to outline the theoretical foundations of a transcultural hemispheric social imaginary in the Americas. The paper begins with a brief intellectual history of americanity's usage in francophone Québécois scholarship, after which it turns to a consideration of how the term can assist an interculturally based reading …
The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices
Human rights have been generally understood as juridical products, organizational outcomes or abstract principles that are realized through formal means such as passing laws, creating institutions or formulating ideals. In this book, Fuyuki Kurasawa argues that we must reverse this 'top-down' focus by examining how groups and persons struggling against global injustices construct and enact human rights through five transnational forms of ethico-p…
The State of Intellectual Play: A Generational Manifesto for Neoliberal Times
This paper constitutes a manifesto for Generation-X academics, in the form of eight diagnostical and prescriptive theses. It is written in response to shifting conditions at two levels: externally, the hegemony of neoliberalism in the socio-political environment within which North American universities operate, which has spawned the dogma of inter-institutional competitiveness and educational vocationalism; and internally, a generational changing…
The Ties to Bind: Techno-science, Ethics and Democracy
The paper seeks to address the lag between, on the one hand, existing ethical and socio-political frameworks and, on the other hand, developments in the realm of techno-science. I argue that the growing power of science and technology has been fed by, and has itself fed, the confrontation of instrumentalism and autonomy defining the modern condition. Conversely, the project of self-management of techno-science by citizens needs to proceed by bind…
The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity
Kurasawa (sociology, York U., Toronto) suggests what he calls the ethnological imagination as one of the possible routes out of the impasse created by the apparent exhaustion or inadequacy of Western social theory to deal with cross-cultural thinking, which becomes ever more urgent in light of increasing cultural pluralism and difference in the glo
Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight
Alexander and the Cultural Refounding of American Sociology
This paper considers and evaluates Jeffrey Alexander's strong program in cultural sociology, which represents an exercise in paradigm formation and an ambitious attempt to refound American sociology along interpretive lines. Cultural sociology is assessed according to four axes, namely its social constructivist epistemology, culturalizing methodology, analytical realism, and internal and external positioning. In addition to discussing the accompl…
A Cosmopolitanism from Below: Alternative Globalization and the Creation of a Solidarity without Bounds
This paper aims to demonstrate that cosmopolitanism should be understood as a transnational mode of practice, whereby actors construct bonds of mutual commitment and reciprocity across borders through public discourse and sociopolitical struggle. This practice oriented perspective allows us to question three of the main assumptions imbedded within most frameworks theorizing global solidarity, namely cultural homogenization, political fragmentatio…
Primitiveness and the flight from modernity: Sociology and the avant-garde in inter-war France
This paper examines the links between the French school of sociology and anthropology and the surrealist avant-garde in inter-war Paris by unearthing their common reliance on a cross-cultural critique of European modernity. Accordingly, the paper focuses on how both currents – and notably the Collège de sociologie – used representations of a mythical ‘primitive’ condition to produce an outside of modern society and an alternative socio-cultural u…
Which Barbarians at the Gates? From the Culture Wars to Market Orthodoxy in the North American Academy
Dans cet article, l'auteur soutient que les liens entre les deux orientations principales qui caractérisent le monde universitaire nord‐américain au cours de la dernière décennie (soit les guerres culturelles et la « marchandisation ») doivent etre analysées de manière plus explicite qu'elles ne Font été jusqu'à présent. Plutôt que de fournir une description empirique détaillée de ces développements, nous pro‐posons une critique d'inspiration thé…
A requiem for the `primitive
This article argues that the implications of the recent eclipse of the construct of the `primitive' for the practice of the human sciences have not been adequately pondered. It asks, therefore, why and how the myth of primitiveness has been sustained by the human sciences, and what purposes it has served for the modern West's self-understanding. To attempt to answer such a query, the article pursues two principal lines of inquiry. In order to app…
The Ethnological Counter-Current in Sociology
As it enters the 21st century, sociology seemingly faces an exhaustion of theoretical and substantive approaches to deal with the pressing matter of cross-cultural research. This article suggests that one possible route out of the impasse lies in the rediscovery of an ethnological counter-current within sociology, a way of thinking that juxtaposes modern Western societies to other sociocultural contexts in order to better understand the full rang…
At the Crossroads of the Radical: The Challenges of Castoriadis's Thought
CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS'S death on 26 December 1997 silenced one of the most consistently original and critical voices of the postwar era in Europe. Despite his considerable reputation on the Continent, as well as the efforts of some interpreters,1 Castoriadis's writings remain relatively unknown in the English-speaking world when compared to those of other scions of the contemporary Parisian scene.2 In many ways, his peripheral status reveals more…
The Exotic Effect: Foucault and the Question of Cultural Alterity
This paper examines the relationship between Foucault's general concerns and his neglected work on non-Western societies. It does so by examining two related questions. Firstly, what role does exoticism play in his theoretical imaginary? Secondly, how does his work on Japan, Iran and the non-Western world contribute to a different understanding of his thinking? As such, four general themes will be followed in order to underline the interplay of c…
The Adventures of the Structure
A Cosmopolitanism from Below: Alternative Globalization and the Creation of a Solidarity without Bounds
This paper aims to demonstrate that cosmopolitanism should be understood as a transnational mode of practice, whereby actors construct bonds of mutual commitment and reciprocity across borders through public discourse and sociopolitical struggle. This practice oriented perspective allows us to question three of the main assumptions imbedded within most frameworks theorizing global solidarity, namely cultural homogenization, political fragmentatio…
A Message in a Bottle: Bearing Witness as a Mode of Transnational Practice
In response to distant suffering, global civil society is being consumed by a generalized witnessing fever that converts public spaces into veritable machines for the production of testimonial discourses and evidence. However, bearing witness itself has tended to be treated as an exercise in truth-telling, a juridical outcome, a psychic phenomenon or a moral prescription. By contrast, this article conceives of bearing witness as a transnational m…
Alexander and the Cultural Refounding of American Sociology
This paper considers and evaluates Jeffrey Alexander's strong program in cultural sociology, which represents an exercise in paradigm formation and an ambitious attempt to refound American sociology along interpretive lines. Cultural sociology is assessed according to four axes, namely its social constructivist epistemology, culturalizing methodology, analytical realism, and internal and external positioning. In addition to discussing the accompl…
The sentimentalist paradox: On the normative and visual foundations of humanitarianism
This paper examines how Western humanitarianism has attempted to work through its simultaneous commitment to individualized moral universalism and ambivalence about substantive global egalitarianism via what is identified as humanitarian sentimentalism, namely an ensemble of narrative and visual mechanisms designed to cultivate charitable moral sentiments among Euro-American publics toward victims of humanitarian crises in the global South. After…
Primitiveness and the flight from modernity: Sociology and the avant-garde in inter-war France
This paper examines the links between the French school of sociology and anthropology and the surrealist avant-garde in inter-war Paris by unearthing their common reliance on a cross-cultural critique of European modernity. Accordingly, the paper focuses on how both currents – and notably the Collège de sociologie – used representations of a mythical ‘primitive’ condition to produce an outside of modern society and an alternative socio-cultural u…
The long shadow of history: The paradoxes of iconographic reiteration in anti-slavery advocacy
Global Justice as Ethico-Political Labor and the Enactment of Critical Cosmopolitanism
This essay links global justice to a materialist theorization of an alternative globalization in order to decenter the formalist current predominating in contemporary human rights discourses. It does so through the concept of the work of global justice: namely, the ethico-political labor and forms of social action that are constitutive of transnational struggles for emancipation. Using this framework, the essay proposes a way out of the human rig…
L'humanitaire, manifestation du cosmopolitisme
Cet article explore les sources et conséquences d'une tension constitutive du discours humanitaire, soit celle entre la reconnaissance d'un égalitarisme socioculturel (qui ressort d'un cosmopolisme critique) et l'attachement à un universalisme moral individuel axé sur la personne souffrante (qui provient d'un libéralisme humaniste). Nous commençons par analyser les origines ethnocentriques du projet humanitaire, qui rendait l'appel à la charité e…
Which Barbarians at the Gates? From the Culture Wars to Market Orthodoxy in the North American Academy
Dans cet article, l'auteur soutient que les liens entre les deux orientations principales qui caractérisent le monde universitaire nord‐américain au cours de la dernière décennie (soit les guerres culturelles et la « marchandisation ») doivent etre analysées de manière plus explicite qu'elles ne Font été jusqu'à présent. Plutôt que de fournir une description empirique détaillée de ces développements, nous pro‐posons une critique d'inspiration thé…
The State of Intellectual Play: A Generational Manifesto for Neoliberal Times
This paper constitutes a manifesto for Generation-X academics, in the form of eight diagnostical and prescriptive theses. It is written in response to shifting conditions at two levels: externally, the hegemony of neoliberalism in the socio-political environment within which North American universities operate, which has spawned the dogma of inter-institutional competitiveness and educational vocationalism; and internally, a generational changing…
A requiem for the `primitive
This article argues that the implications of the recent eclipse of the construct of the `primitive' for the practice of the human sciences have not been adequately pondered. It asks, therefore, why and how the myth of primitiveness has been sustained by the human sciences, and what purposes it has served for the modern West's self-understanding. To attempt to answer such a query, the article pursues two principal lines of inquiry. In order to app…
The Ethnological Counter-Current in Sociology
As it enters the 21st century, sociology seemingly faces an exhaustion of theoretical and substantive approaches to deal with the pressing matter of cross-cultural research. This article suggests that one possible route out of the impasse lies in the rediscovery of an ethnological counter-current within sociology, a way of thinking that juxtaposes modern Western societies to other sociocultural contexts in order to better understand the full rang…
At the Crossroads of the Radical: The Challenges of Castoriadis's Thought
CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS'S death on 26 December 1997 silenced one of the most consistently original and critical voices of the postwar era in Europe. Despite his considerable reputation on the Continent, as well as the efforts of some interpreters,1 Castoriadis's writings remain relatively unknown in the English-speaking world when compared to those of other scions of the contemporary Parisian scene.2 In many ways, his peripheral status reveals more…
The Exotic Effect: Foucault and the Question of Cultural Alterity
This paper examines the relationship between Foucault's general concerns and his neglected work on non-Western societies. It does so by examining two related questions. Firstly, what role does exoticism play in his theoretical imaginary? Secondly, how does his work on Japan, Iran and the non-Western world contribute to a different understanding of his thinking? As such, four general themes will be followed in order to underline the interplay of c…
The Adventures of the Structure
The Exotic Effect: Foucault and the Question of Cultural Alterity
This paper examines the relationship between Foucault's general concerns and his neglected work on non-Western societies. It does so by examining two related questions. Firstly, what role does exoticism play in his theoretical imaginary? Secondly, how does his work on Japan, Iran and the non-Western world contribute to a different understanding of his thinking? As such, four general themes will be followed in order to underline the interplay of c…
The Ethnological Counter-Current in Sociology
As it enters the 21st century, sociology seemingly faces an exhaustion of theoretical and substantive approaches to deal with the pressing matter of cross-cultural research. This article suggests that one possible route out of the impasse lies in the rediscovery of an ethnological counter-current within sociology, a way of thinking that juxtaposes modern Western societies to other sociocultural contexts in order to better understand the full rang…
At the Crossroads of the Radical: The Challenges of Castoriadis's Thought
CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS'S death on 26 December 1997 silenced one of the most consistently original and critical voices of the postwar era in Europe. Despite his considerable reputation on the Continent, as well as the efforts of some interpreters,1 Castoriadis's writings remain relatively unknown in the English-speaking world when compared to those of other scions of the contemporary Parisian scene.2 In many ways, his peripheral status reveals more…
Which Barbarians at the Gates? From the Culture Wars to Market Orthodoxy in the North American Academy
Dans cet article, l'auteur soutient que les liens entre les deux orientations principales qui caractérisent le monde universitaire nord‐américain au cours de la dernière décennie (soit les guerres culturelles et la « marchandisation ») doivent etre analysées de manière plus explicite qu'elles ne Font été jusqu'à présent. Plutôt que de fournir une description empirique détaillée de ces développements, nous pro‐posons une critique d'inspiration thé…
A requiem for the `primitive
This article argues that the implications of the recent eclipse of the construct of the `primitive' for the practice of the human sciences have not been adequately pondered. It asks, therefore, why and how the myth of primitiveness has been sustained by the human sciences, and what purposes it has served for the modern West's self-understanding. To attempt to answer such a query, the article pursues two principal lines of inquiry. In order to app…
Primitiveness and the flight from modernity: Sociology and the avant-garde in inter-war France
This paper examines the links between the French school of sociology and anthropology and the surrealist avant-garde in inter-war Paris by unearthing their common reliance on a cross-cultural critique of European modernity. Accordingly, the paper focuses on how both currents – and notably the Collège de sociologie – used representations of a mythical ‘primitive’ condition to produce an outside of modern society and an alternative socio-cultural u…
The Ties to Bind: Techno-science, Ethics and Democracy
The paper seeks to address the lag between, on the one hand, existing ethical and socio-political frameworks and, on the other hand, developments in the realm of techno-science. I argue that the growing power of science and technology has been fed by, and has itself fed, the confrontation of instrumentalism and autonomy defining the modern condition. Conversely, the project of self-management of techno-science by citizens needs to proceed by bind…
The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity
Kurasawa (sociology, York U., Toronto) suggests what he calls the ethnological imagination as one of the possible routes out of the impasse created by the apparent exhaustion or inadequacy of Western social theory to deal with cross-cultural thinking, which becomes ever more urgent in light of increasing cultural pluralism and difference in the glo
Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight
Alexander and the Cultural Refounding of American Sociology
This paper considers and evaluates Jeffrey Alexander's strong program in cultural sociology, which represents an exercise in paradigm formation and an ambitious attempt to refound American sociology along interpretive lines. Cultural sociology is assessed according to four axes, namely its social constructivist epistemology, culturalizing methodology, analytical realism, and internal and external positioning. In addition to discussing the accompl…
A Cosmopolitanism from Below: Alternative Globalization and the Creation of a Solidarity without Bounds
This paper aims to demonstrate that cosmopolitanism should be understood as a transnational mode of practice, whereby actors construct bonds of mutual commitment and reciprocity across borders through public discourse and sociopolitical struggle. This practice oriented perspective allows us to question three of the main assumptions imbedded within most frameworks theorizing global solidarity, namely cultural homogenization, political fragmentatio…
The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices
Human rights have been generally understood as juridical products, organizational outcomes or abstract principles that are realized through formal means such as passing laws, creating institutions or formulating ideals. In this book, Fuyuki Kurasawa argues that we must reverse this 'top-down' focus by examining how groups and persons struggling against global injustices construct and enact human rights through five transnational forms of ethico-p…
The State of Intellectual Play: A Generational Manifesto for Neoliberal Times
This paper constitutes a manifesto for Generation-X academics, in the form of eight diagnostical and prescriptive theses. It is written in response to shifting conditions at two levels: externally, the hegemony of neoliberalism in the socio-political environment within which North American universities operate, which has spawned the dogma of inter-institutional competitiveness and educational vocationalism; and internally, a generational changing…
Global Justice as Ethico-Political Labor and the Enactment of Critical Cosmopolitanism
This essay links global justice to a materialist theorization of an alternative globalization in order to decenter the formalist current predominating in contemporary human rights discourses. It does so through the concept of the work of global justice: namely, the ethico-political labor and forms of social action that are constitutive of transnational struggles for emancipation. Using this framework, the essay proposes a way out of the human rig…
Americanity and the Prospects of a Hemispheric Social Imaginary
This paper employs the concept of americanity, as outlined in French-language writings over the past few decades, as a point of entry to outline the theoretical foundations of a transcultural hemispheric social imaginary in the Americas. The paper begins with a brief intellectual history of americanity's usage in francophone Québécois scholarship, after which it turns to a consideration of how the term can assist an interculturally based reading …
A Message in a Bottle: Bearing Witness as a Mode of Transnational Practice
In response to distant suffering, global civil society is being consumed by a generalized witnessing fever that converts public spaces into veritable machines for the production of testimonial discourses and evidence. However, bearing witness itself has tended to be treated as an exercise in truth-telling, a juridical outcome, a psychic phenomenon or a moral prescription. By contrast, this article conceives of bearing witness as a transnational m…
L'humanitaire, manifestation du cosmopolitisme
Cet article explore les sources et conséquences d'une tension constitutive du discours humanitaire, soit celle entre la reconnaissance d'un égalitarisme socioculturel (qui ressort d'un cosmopolisme critique) et l'attachement à un universalisme moral individuel axé sur la personne souffrante (qui provient d'un libéralisme humaniste). Nous commençons par analyser les origines ethnocentriques du projet humanitaire, qui rendait l'appel à la charité e…
The sentimentalist paradox: On the normative and visual foundations of humanitarianism
This paper examines how Western humanitarianism has attempted to work through its simultaneous commitment to individualized moral universalism and ambivalence about substantive global egalitarianism via what is identified as humanitarian sentimentalism, namely an ensemble of narrative and visual mechanisms designed to cultivate charitable moral sentiments among Euro-American publics toward victims of humanitarian crises in the global South. After…
The long shadow of history: The paradoxes of iconographic reiteration in anti-slavery advocacy
An Invitation to Critical Sociology
Interrogating the Social
On humanitarian virality: Kony 2012 , or, the rise and fall of a pictorial artifact in the digital age
This article adopts a socio-visual constructivist approach to explain how the Kony 2012 video became a site of intense symbolic struggle regarding how to represent humanity in the digital age and, in the process, one of the most viral and intensely contested cultural artifacts of the last few years. The first section demonstrates that the video employs the visual conventions of personification and rescue, which form part of an iconographic repert…
Jews, Western sociology's intimate others
This article argues that Goldberg's Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought fills an important gap: Jews are not only 'good to think' (Lévi-Strauss) but also essential for Western social theorists to critically interpret modernity and ambivalence towards it. In the article's first part, devoted to the book's epistemological and methodological underpinnings, I raise the following points: the book's disciplinary focus prevents it from enga…
Evidentiary activism in the digital age: On the rise of feminist struggles against gender-based online violence
Gender-based online violence (GBOV) involves digitally-mediated and -enabled forms of harassment and abuse targeting women, and thus represents a major challenge to feminist movements globally. In this paper, we argue that civil society-based feminist organizations from various parts of the world have responded to this challenge by centring evidence of GBOV in order to develop key though hitherto under-examined epistemic, cultural, and socio-poli…
Sociology (23 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Social science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Law (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works)