2nd Global Conference
Wednesday 3rd September - Saturday 6th September
2008
Mansfield College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 1: Multiculturalism – Critical Assessments
Chair: Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Affective and Political Categories in Multicultural Debates about Social Justice
Breda Gray
Department of Sociology, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
In this paper I examine the recent emergence of an emotional regime of empathy and its relationship to multicultural questions of social justice. Like Enlightenment notions of sympathy, empathy takes humanity as its object and resonates with contemporary political claims-making based on ideologies of multiculturalism and human rights. The combination of empathic identification and human rights sets up a complex relationship between emotion and principles as grounds for multicultural social justice. However, the opposition of affect and the political is partly responsible for complicating questions of social justice. This is because, as Habermas argues (1989), affective categories like empathy, and social and political categories like the public sphere and the citizen, are mutually constitutive. While some multicultural theorists focus on the limits of empathy and how it lines up with neo-liberal governance (Dean, 2000), others see it as basic to human experience and central to the search for social justice (Nussbaum, 1990 and 1996). These debates are critically engaged with in this paper in order to identify what is at stake in the apparent tensions between emotion and principles in debates about multicultural solidarity and the grammar of political claims making in the twenty-first century. Thus, the paper addresses the ‘affective economies’ (Ahmed, 2004) of contemporary multicultural politics.
The Plural Self & The Social: Some Considerations for Political Theory
Muriel Kahane
Government Department, Political Theory. London School of Economics (LSE), London, United Kingdom
This paper explores notions of multiple identities in relation to political theory: in particular autonomy and multiculturalism. Multiple identities refer to those instances whereby agents may hold more than one societal model influencing them. Who one is and how one reflects this is at the heart of theories of autonomy: autonomy is intrinsically tied to identity. Multiculturalism posits that the social matters for individuals. Although springing from the same body of literature, intersectional theories stress what might be a conflicting view - whereas socialisation tends to focus on externalist criteria, that is, how the external world affects the individual, plural identities focuses on the individual’s response to these effects: how an agent views her identity frameworks and negotiates or responds to possible conflicts amongst these.
By analysing strategies used to negotiate identity this paper will show that consideration of intersectionality is crucial in order to think about autonomy and plurality. Agents will emerge as non-homogenous and ever-changing: this is critical in order to challenge ideas about cultural authenticity and thus foster non-ethnocentric feminism. Furthermore, the analysis will also point at the difficulty in asserting that autonomy is necessarily an emancipatory strategy that will lead to pre-defined political and social consequences.
Download Draft Conference Paper - 
Recognition between Self Respect and Self Esteem, or: Recognition between the Redundant and the Self Contradictory?
Nahshon Perez
Department of Political Science, UCLA, USA
This paper critically examines some theories of recognition, mainly A. Honneth’s. Honneth differentiates between three levels of recognition: self confidence, self respect and self esteem. Self confidence is connected to primary relations, self respect to legal relations, while self esteem is connected to the values that exist at the relevant community or surroundings.
For Honneth, only a society that fulfills all three levels, achieves the normative goal of full recognition. Self confidence requires primary relations such as love and caring from one’s parents, while self respect requires the universal equal treatment which is usually assigned through one’s rights. Being eligible for both stems from one's humanity, and is not conditional upon one's achievements.
Self esteem, however, is not granted unconditionally to all. Rather, self esteem is the result of the way in which one’s peers evaluate one’s achievements. These evaluations are the result of people’s free judgment, which consists (among other things) of their evaluation of a given individual’s achievements. A reasonable claim would be, that such evaluations should not be, and indeed can not be, a part of the state’s responsibilities towards its citizens.
Why? Because trying to force universal self esteem would imply that people would be under a duty to positively evaluate the achievements of any given person, and that would violate their free judgment and therefore: their self respect. This would present recognition theory with a clear self contradiction: there is no way, in which self esteem can be universally achieved, without contradicting self respect.
There are three possible ways to answer this challenge. First, to waive the argument about self esteem and to satisfy oneself with the more modest claim of self respect. Second, to claim that self esteem is more utopian in nature, as it requires changes in the values of the entire society. The positive evaluations of one's achievements would not be coerced, but a natural result of the changes that transpire in a given society. Lastly, to argue that positive evaluations given untruthfully are rejected by recognition.
I shall analyze these potential responses in the paper itself, but I shall argue that they fail, for various reasons, to answer the challenge presented above.