Month: January 2020

[Article] Max Papadantonakis – Black Athenians: Making and Resisting Racialized Symbolic Boundaries in the Greek Street Market

Posted on January 24, 2020 by - Articles, Recent Publications

Max Papadantonakis (PhD Candidate)

Published an article titled “Black Athenians: Making and Resisting Racialized Symbolic Boundaries in the Greek Street Market.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (December 7, 2019).

Abstract

In this article, I show how groups and individuals maintain racialized symbolic boundaries at the micro-level of personal interactions. Using data collected during an ethnographic study in Athens, Greece, where I worked as a fruit vendor in a street market, I detail how local Greek vendors and immigrant workers use language, gesture, olfaction, along with their interpretations of faith and sexuality to reproduce patterns of social distance that allow for racialized stigma and discrimination. I apply the framework of symbolic interactionism and draw from literature on symbolic boundaries to explore how immigrant street market workers experience and resist racialization throughout the interaction order. I show that racialization underlies perceptions of the immigrant “other,” especially in the case of Greece where race is often ignored as a crucial factor.

Click here to read more about Max’s research.

Marnia Lazreg gave a talk on “L’Orient de Foucault, de la Tunisie au Japon:  L’indéchiffrable Enigme Culturelle” at the  CRASC

Posted on January 24, 2020 by - Department News, Other News

Marnia Lazreg (Faculty)

On January 7, 2020, Prof. Lazreg gave a talk on “L’Orient de Foucault, de la Tunisie au Japon:  L’indéchiffrable Enigme Culturelle” at the  CRASC (Centre de Recheche en Anthropologie Sociale et Culturelle,” in the city of Oran.

On January 11, 2020, she was also interviewed on channel 4 of the Algerian National Radio as a guest on “Papier Bavard”, a book discussion program, about the book, “Le Réveil de la Mère,” by Meriem Belkethoum, published by Aframed in July 2019.

Samuel Farber wrote a piece in the Jacobin Magazine

Posted on January 24, 2020 by - Department News, Other News

Samuel Farber (Professor Emeritus)

Wrote a piece in the Jacobin Magazine titled “We Can’t Cede Transparency to Liberals”

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A long time ago, the leaders of the socialist organization I belonged to, the now-defunct International Socialists (IS), decided, with the approval of the group’s annual convention, to cease distributing to members the minutes of the political leadership body’s deliberations. This new policy was designed to prevent the revelation of political differences among national leaders, which, they argued, encouraged the factionalism that had led to the splits in the organization’s recent past.

While the concern was well-founded, I always thought that for an organization like the IS, one of the most democratic on the US left, the remedy lied in changing the political culture of the group through discussion and education on that issue instead of heavy-handed organizational measures that deprived members of information necessary to make democratic decisions. Since I was one of those that most strenuously objected to the new policy at the annual convention that approved it, one of the leaders criticized me for advocating what he called “fishbowl” political deliberations, deliberations that were completely transparent.

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