Eva Haifa Giraud
Biographic Data
| ID | 298618 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eva Haifa Giraud |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eva Haifa |
| FAMILY NAME | Giraud |
| SIGNATURE | GIRAUD E H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Keele University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0845-9804 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 159 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Reassembling the banal; Pausing before inventing anew
In Fashionable Nonsense (1998), Sokal and Bricmont describe Latour's work as ‘either true but banal, or else surprising but manifestly false’ (92). Using this characterisation of Latour as ‘banal’ as a springboard, this short commentary responds to Blok and Jensen's proposal to reinvent actor-network theory (ANT) by interrogating the stakes and risks of their account of his critics as ‘uninteresting’. Rather than dismissing critique of Latour as …
Learning from online hate speech and digital racism: From automated to diffractive methods in social media analysis
There has been a dramatic surge in uses of big data analytics and automated methods to detect and remove hate speech from social media, with these methods deployed both by platforms themselves and within academic research. At the same time, recent social scientific scholarship has accused social media data analytics of decontextualizing complex sociological issues and reducing them to linguistic problems that can be straightforwardly mapped and r…
Mediating lifestyle movements: The Ethical Ecologies of Digital Veganisms
This article sets out a framework, 'ethical ecologies,' for researching and conceptualizing the role of media in lifestyle movements. Understanding lifestyle movements is important due to their growing prominence as a site of ethical and political agency, and media are integral in materializing this agency. The framework I develop to research these movements combines three bodies of work: media ecological scholarship (which emphasizes relations b…
Hypocrite!’ Affective and argumentative engagement on Twitter, following the Christchurch terrorist attack
This article intervenes in debates about whether public-facing social media enable the rapid spread of hate speech, or whether these platforms can offer valuable opportunities to contest it. Advancing scholarship on ‘networked counter-publics’ and research emphasising the affective dimensions of digital media, we identify three different modes of counter-public contestation that coalesced on Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch …
Digital Archives as Resisting Displacement
Amid wider concern about the emergence of vast data archives that document and instrumentalize everyday user activities for the purpose of marketing, research, and governance, this article turns to a series of creative and activist initiatives that preserve heterodox internet histories. Though a focus on three case studies—artistic engagements with GeoCities, traces left by Indymedia in contemporary activism, and emerging ethical frameworks for r…
Unfamiliar Archives
This article documents the roundtable “Unfamiliar Archives,” which took place as part of a two-day event to mark twenty years of Cultural Politics. Drawing from a range of “archives in the making” related to activists, artists, social theorists, and digital media practices, the participants reflect on the political, ethical, and epistemological provocations offered by their specific archival encounters. In particular, the participants reflect on …
Tracing Media Solidarities With Muslims: Contesting Islamophobia on Twitter
Solidarity has been cited as a necessary prerequisite for transformational structural change and therefore contains revolutionary potential (Featherstone, 2012). This paper examines the role and evolution of mediated solidarities, which have become increasingly central to an analysis of social movements with the advent of participatory technologies, by drawing on data from a project on anti-Islamophobic counter-narratives. Online platforms have t…
Expedient, Affective, and Sustained Solidarities? Mediated Contestations of Islamophobia in the Case of Brexit, the Christchurch Terror Attack, and the Covid-19 Pandemic
This article advances research on mediated solidarity, by analyzing the contestation of Islamophobia on the social media platform Twitter, in the context of Brexit, the Christchurch terror attack, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a unique longitudinal dataset, gathered over a 5-year period, we elucidate how evolving relations between platforms and trigger events can enable solidarity networks to shift dominant narratives. Taking each event i…
Animal Studies
In this year’s overview of animal studies scholarship, I examine how authors strike a difficult balancing act between making critical interventions while preserving complexity, in relation to three (overlapping) topics that have long been central to the field: domestication, consumption, and extinction. The essay begins by engaging with three texts that interrogate the dynamics of domestication, especially in relation to animal rescue: Chris Pear…
Ethical Complexities and Interdisciplinary Pathways for Animal Studies
Estranged companions: Bed bugs, biologies, and affective histories
In recent decades, bed bugs have swept across wealthy industrialized nations. After near extirpation in North America and Northern Europe, the return of these insects has led to a significant level of public anxiety and cultural notoriety. Here, we undertake an analysis of human-bed bug relations in order to both better understand this contemporary resurgence and critically examine the concept of "companion species." We argue for conceiving of be…
Animal Studies
This overview of animal studies scholarship from 2020 covers a diverse range of sites – from escaped primates in IKEA carparks to boar hunting in colonial India – and disciplinary contexts, drawing together research from philosophy, literary theory, the environmental humanities, animal geographies, imperial history, and ecofeminism. What unites these texts is their engagement with one of the most significant themes in animal studies: the politics…
Priorities for social science and humanities research on the challenges of moving beyond animal-based food systems
Increasingly high-profile research is being undertaken into the socio-environmental challenges associated with the over-production and consumption of food from animals. Transforming food systems to mitigate climate change and hidden hunger, ensure food security and good health all point to reducing animal-based foods as a key lever. Moving beyond animal-based food systems is a societal grand challenge requiring coordinated international research …
After the “Age of Wreckers and Exterminators
This essay delineates the material and conceptual limitations of two prominent ways of figuring the relationship between humans and harmful beings: narratives of eradication and entanglement. Ecological concern about the legacies of twentieth-century attempts to eradicate life deemed dangerous to humans (such as the damage fostered by DDT and the overuse of antibiotics), coupled with declines in the efficacy of some major medical and chemical tec…
What Comes after Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion
By foregrounding the ways that human existence is bound together with the lives of other entities, contemporary cultural theorists have sought to move beyond an anthropocentric worldview. Yet as Eva Haifa Giraud contends in What Comes after Entanglement?, for all their conceptual power in implicating humans in ecologically damaging practices, these theories can undermine scope for political action. Drawing inspiration from activist projects betwe…
Tactical interventions in online hate speech: The case of #stopIslam
This article sets out findings from a project focused on #stopIslam, a hashtag that gained prominence following the Brussels terror attack of 2016. We initially outline a big data analysis which shows how counter-narratives – criticizing #stopIslam – momentarily subverted negative news reporting of Muslims. The rest of the article details qualitative findings that complicate this initial positive picture. We set out key tactics engaged in by righ…
Book Forum
Post-truths, Common Worlds, and Critical Politics
The emergence of so-called post-truth politics has seen popular calls to return to the “facts,” accompanied by frequent attacks on gender studies, postcolonial theory, and science and technology studies, all of which have been portrayed as somehow responsible for destabilizing truth. This article intervenes in debates arising in response to these developments, with a focus on a promising “third path” proposed by Bruno Latour. In a proposal framed…
What Comes after Entanglement: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion
Contesting #StopIslam: The Dynamics of a Counter-narrative Against Right-wing Populism
This paper sets out quantitative findings from a research project examining the dynamics of online counter-narratives against hate speech, focusing on #StopIslam, a hashtag that spread racialized hate speech and disinformation directed towards Islam and Muslims and which trended on Twitter after the March 2016 terror attacks in Brussels. We elucidate the dynamics of the counter-narrative through contrasting it with the affordances of the original…
The planetary is political
Right-Wing Populism and Mediated Activism: Creative Responses and Counter-Narratives Special Collection
This is an introduction to the Open Library of Humanities Special Collection ‘Right-Wing Populism and Mediated Activism: Creative Responses and Counter-Narratives’. It provides an overview of key issues and debates in discussions of social media activism, specifically in relation to populism, and the corresponding rise in hate speech. It provides a summary of the contributing articles which demonstrate the digital practices of the far right and t…
Abundance in the Anthropocene
Numerous attempts have been made to understand the Anthropocene in relation to overwhelming species and habitat loss. However, amidst these losses ecological niches have emerged and been taken as signs of resilience and hope: from mushrooms that flourish in damaged forests to urban wildlife in brownfield sites. This article offers an alternative conception of abundance, which addresses the sociological and conceptual challenges posed when abundan…
A Feminist Menagerie
This paper appraises the role of critical-feminist figurations within the environmental humanities, focusing on the capacity of figures to produce situated environmental knowledges and pose site-specific ethical obligations. We turn to four environments-the home, the skies, the seas and the microscopic-to examine the work that various figures do in these contexts. We elucidate how diverse figures-ranging from companion animals to birds, undersea …
Social Media Abyss: Critical Internet Cultures and the Force of Negation
(Dis)entangling Barad: Materialisms and ethics
In the wake of the widespread uptake of and debate surrounding the work of Karen Barad, this article revisits her core conceptual contributions. We offer descriptions, elaborations, problematizations and provocations for those intrigued by or invested in this body of work. We examine Barad's use of quantum physics, which underpins her conception of the material world. We discuss the political strengths of this position but also note tensions asso…
Care, Laboratory Beagles and Affective Utopia
A caring approach to knowledge production has been portrayed as epistemologically radical, ethically vital and as fostering continuous responsibility between researchers and research-subjects. This article examines these arguments through focusing on the ambivalent role of care within the first large-scale experimental beagle colony, a self-professed 'beagle utopia' at the University of California, Davis (1951-86). We argue that care was at the c…
Abundance in the Anthropocene
Numerous attempts have been made to understand the Anthropocene in relation to overwhelming species and habitat loss. However, amidst these losses ecological niches have emerged and been taken as signs of resilience and hope: from mushrooms that flourish in damaged forests to urban wildlife in brownfield sites. This article offers an alternative conception of abundance, which addresses the sociological and conceptual challenges posed when abundan…
Tactical interventions in online hate speech: The case of #stopIslam
This article sets out findings from a project focused on #stopIslam, a hashtag that gained prominence following the Brussels terror attack of 2016. We initially outline a big data analysis which shows how counter-narratives – criticizing #stopIslam – momentarily subverted negative news reporting of Muslims. The rest of the article details qualitative findings that complicate this initial positive picture. We set out key tactics engaged in by righ…
A Feminist Menagerie
This paper appraises the role of critical-feminist figurations within the environmental humanities, focusing on the capacity of figures to produce situated environmental knowledges and pose site-specific ethical obligations. We turn to four environments-the home, the skies, the seas and the microscopic-to examine the work that various figures do in these contexts. We elucidate how diverse figures-ranging from companion animals to birds, undersea …
Estranged companions: Bed bugs, biologies, and affective histories
In recent decades, bed bugs have swept across wealthy industrialized nations. After near extirpation in North America and Northern Europe, the return of these insects has led to a significant level of public anxiety and cultural notoriety. Here, we undertake an analysis of human-bed bug relations in order to both better understand this contemporary resurgence and critically examine the concept of "companion species." We argue for conceiving of be…
Veganism as Affirmative Biopolitics: Moving Towards a Posthumanist Ethics
This article addresses tensions within the emerging field of animal studies, which have arisen in the process of trying to craft an ethics that is not grounded in humanist rights-frameworks, by--firstly--mapping how these debates are manifested and--secondly--positing Cary Wolfe’s concept of "affirmative biopolitics" as means of overcoming these conceptual rifts. Building on work that attributes these tensions to the influence of posthumanism (We…
After the “Age of Wreckers and Exterminators
This essay delineates the material and conceptual limitations of two prominent ways of figuring the relationship between humans and harmful beings: narratives of eradication and entanglement. Ecological concern about the legacies of twentieth-century attempts to eradicate life deemed dangerous to humans (such as the damage fostered by DDT and the overuse of antibiotics), coupled with declines in the efficacy of some major medical and chemical tec…
Beasts of Burden: Productive Tensions between Haraway and Radical Animal Rights Activism
Coming from a critical animal studies perspective, this essay develops an urgent challenge to what Zipporah Weisberg describes as the ‘largely depoliticized approach within animal studies’ (2009: 5), with a focus on the work of Donna Haraway. Drawing on grassroots activist literature and practice, the essay analyses some productive tensions between animal rights perspectives and the work of Haraway, which centre on their different strategies for …
Hypocrite!’ Affective and argumentative engagement on Twitter, following the Christchurch terrorist attack
This article intervenes in debates about whether public-facing social media enable the rapid spread of hate speech, or whether these platforms can offer valuable opportunities to contest it. Advancing scholarship on ‘networked counter-publics’ and research emphasising the affective dimensions of digital media, we identify three different modes of counter-public contestation that coalesced on Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch …
Right-Wing Populism and Mediated Activism: Creative Responses and Counter-Narratives Special Collection
This is an introduction to the Open Library of Humanities Special Collection ‘Right-Wing Populism and Mediated Activism: Creative Responses and Counter-Narratives’. It provides an overview of key issues and debates in discussions of social media activism, specifically in relation to populism, and the corresponding rise in hate speech. It provides a summary of the contributing articles which demonstrate the digital practices of the far right and t…
Digital Archives as Resisting Displacement
Amid wider concern about the emergence of vast data archives that document and instrumentalize everyday user activities for the purpose of marketing, research, and governance, this article turns to a series of creative and activist initiatives that preserve heterodox internet histories. Though a focus on three case studies—artistic engagements with GeoCities, traces left by Indymedia in contemporary activism, and emerging ethical frameworks for r…
Unfamiliar Archives
This article documents the roundtable “Unfamiliar Archives,” which took place as part of a two-day event to mark twenty years of Cultural Politics. Drawing from a range of “archives in the making” related to activists, artists, social theorists, and digital media practices, the participants reflect on the political, ethical, and epistemological provocations offered by their specific archival encounters. In particular, the participants reflect on …
Expedient, Affective, and Sustained Solidarities? Mediated Contestations of Islamophobia in the Case of Brexit, the Christchurch Terror Attack, and the Covid-19 Pandemic
This article advances research on mediated solidarity, by analyzing the contestation of Islamophobia on the social media platform Twitter, in the context of Brexit, the Christchurch terror attack, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a unique longitudinal dataset, gathered over a 5-year period, we elucidate how evolving relations between platforms and trigger events can enable solidarity networks to shift dominant narratives. Taking each event i…
Post-truths, Common Worlds, and Critical Politics
The emergence of so-called post-truth politics has seen popular calls to return to the “facts,” accompanied by frequent attacks on gender studies, postcolonial theory, and science and technology studies, all of which have been portrayed as somehow responsible for destabilizing truth. This article intervenes in debates arising in response to these developments, with a focus on a promising “third path” proposed by Bruno Latour. In a proposal framed…
The planetary is political
Charisma and the clinic
Beasts of Burden: Productive Tensions between Haraway and Radical Animal Rights Activism
Coming from a critical animal studies perspective, this essay develops an urgent challenge to what Zipporah Weisberg describes as the ‘largely depoliticized approach within animal studies’ (2009: 5), with a focus on the work of Donna Haraway. Drawing on grassroots activist literature and practice, the essay analyses some productive tensions between animal rights perspectives and the work of Haraway, which centre on their different strategies for …
Veganism as Affirmative Biopolitics: Moving Towards a Posthumanist Ethics
This article addresses tensions within the emerging field of animal studies, which have arisen in the process of trying to craft an ethics that is not grounded in humanist rights-frameworks, by--firstly--mapping how these debates are manifested and--secondly--positing Cary Wolfe’s concept of "affirmative biopolitics" as means of overcoming these conceptual rifts. Building on work that attributes these tensions to the influence of posthumanism (We…
Practice as theory
This chapter focuses on two food-activism movements, the transnational Food Not Bombs network and UK-based Nottingham Vegan Campaigns, to examine how activists' navigation of tensions between theory and practice can inform a critical animal geography. It suggests that engaging with activists – and particularly participating in projects where complex political issues are articulated in practice – provides valuable insights about how to politicize …
Subjectivity 2.0: Digital technologies, participatory media and communicative capitalism
Charisma and the clinic
Care, Laboratory Beagles and Affective Utopia
A caring approach to knowledge production has been portrayed as epistemologically radical, ethically vital and as fostering continuous responsibility between researchers and research-subjects. This article examines these arguments through focusing on the ambivalent role of care within the first large-scale experimental beagle colony, a self-professed 'beagle utopia' at the University of California, Davis (1951-86). We argue that care was at the c…
Social Media Abyss: Critical Internet Cultures and the Force of Negation
(Dis)entangling Barad: Materialisms and ethics
In the wake of the widespread uptake of and debate surrounding the work of Karen Barad, this article revisits her core conceptual contributions. We offer descriptions, elaborations, problematizations and provocations for those intrigued by or invested in this body of work. We examine Barad's use of quantum physics, which underpins her conception of the material world. We discuss the political strengths of this position but also note tensions asso…
A Feminist Menagerie
This paper appraises the role of critical-feminist figurations within the environmental humanities, focusing on the capacity of figures to produce situated environmental knowledges and pose site-specific ethical obligations. We turn to four environments-the home, the skies, the seas and the microscopic-to examine the work that various figures do in these contexts. We elucidate how diverse figures-ranging from companion animals to birds, undersea …
What Comes after Entanglement: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion
Contesting #StopIslam: The Dynamics of a Counter-narrative Against Right-wing Populism
This paper sets out quantitative findings from a research project examining the dynamics of online counter-narratives against hate speech, focusing on #StopIslam, a hashtag that spread racialized hate speech and disinformation directed towards Islam and Muslims and which trended on Twitter after the March 2016 terror attacks in Brussels. We elucidate the dynamics of the counter-narrative through contrasting it with the affordances of the original…
The planetary is political
Right-Wing Populism and Mediated Activism: Creative Responses and Counter-Narratives Special Collection
This is an introduction to the Open Library of Humanities Special Collection ‘Right-Wing Populism and Mediated Activism: Creative Responses and Counter-Narratives’. It provides an overview of key issues and debates in discussions of social media activism, specifically in relation to populism, and the corresponding rise in hate speech. It provides a summary of the contributing articles which demonstrate the digital practices of the far right and t…
Abundance in the Anthropocene
Numerous attempts have been made to understand the Anthropocene in relation to overwhelming species and habitat loss. However, amidst these losses ecological niches have emerged and been taken as signs of resilience and hope: from mushrooms that flourish in damaged forests to urban wildlife in brownfield sites. This article offers an alternative conception of abundance, which addresses the sociological and conceptual challenges posed when abundan…
What Comes after Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion
By foregrounding the ways that human existence is bound together with the lives of other entities, contemporary cultural theorists have sought to move beyond an anthropocentric worldview. Yet as Eva Haifa Giraud contends in What Comes after Entanglement?, for all their conceptual power in implicating humans in ecologically damaging practices, these theories can undermine scope for political action. Drawing inspiration from activist projects betwe…
Tactical interventions in online hate speech: The case of #stopIslam
This article sets out findings from a project focused on #stopIslam, a hashtag that gained prominence following the Brussels terror attack of 2016. We initially outline a big data analysis which shows how counter-narratives – criticizing #stopIslam – momentarily subverted negative news reporting of Muslims. The rest of the article details qualitative findings that complicate this initial positive picture. We set out key tactics engaged in by righ…
Book Forum
Post-truths, Common Worlds, and Critical Politics
The emergence of so-called post-truth politics has seen popular calls to return to the “facts,” accompanied by frequent attacks on gender studies, postcolonial theory, and science and technology studies, all of which have been portrayed as somehow responsible for destabilizing truth. This article intervenes in debates arising in response to these developments, with a focus on a promising “third path” proposed by Bruno Latour. In a proposal framed…
Animal Studies
This overview of animal studies scholarship from 2020 covers a diverse range of sites – from escaped primates in IKEA carparks to boar hunting in colonial India – and disciplinary contexts, drawing together research from philosophy, literary theory, the environmental humanities, animal geographies, imperial history, and ecofeminism. What unites these texts is their engagement with one of the most significant themes in animal studies: the politics…
Priorities for social science and humanities research on the challenges of moving beyond animal-based food systems
Increasingly high-profile research is being undertaken into the socio-environmental challenges associated with the over-production and consumption of food from animals. Transforming food systems to mitigate climate change and hidden hunger, ensure food security and good health all point to reducing animal-based foods as a key lever. Moving beyond animal-based food systems is a societal grand challenge requiring coordinated international research …
After the “Age of Wreckers and Exterminators
This essay delineates the material and conceptual limitations of two prominent ways of figuring the relationship between humans and harmful beings: narratives of eradication and entanglement. Ecological concern about the legacies of twentieth-century attempts to eradicate life deemed dangerous to humans (such as the damage fostered by DDT and the overuse of antibiotics), coupled with declines in the efficacy of some major medical and chemical tec…
Animal Studies
In this year’s overview of animal studies scholarship, I examine how authors strike a difficult balancing act between making critical interventions while preserving complexity, in relation to three (overlapping) topics that have long been central to the field: domestication, consumption, and extinction. The essay begins by engaging with three texts that interrogate the dynamics of domestication, especially in relation to animal rescue: Chris Pear…
Ethical Complexities and Interdisciplinary Pathways for Animal Studies
Estranged companions: Bed bugs, biologies, and affective histories
In recent decades, bed bugs have swept across wealthy industrialized nations. After near extirpation in North America and Northern Europe, the return of these insects has led to a significant level of public anxiety and cultural notoriety. Here, we undertake an analysis of human-bed bug relations in order to both better understand this contemporary resurgence and critically examine the concept of "companion species." We argue for conceiving of be…
Tracing Media Solidarities With Muslims: Contesting Islamophobia on Twitter
Solidarity has been cited as a necessary prerequisite for transformational structural change and therefore contains revolutionary potential (Featherstone, 2012). This paper examines the role and evolution of mediated solidarities, which have become increasingly central to an analysis of social movements with the advent of participatory technologies, by drawing on data from a project on anti-Islamophobic counter-narratives. Online platforms have t…
Sociology (24 works) · Political science (20 works) · Politics (14 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Environmental ethics (12 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works)