Undecided life: Standards, subjects, and sovereignty in compensating victims of the war on terror

In this article we examine the relationship between standards and subjectivity in the context of compensating the victims of terrorism. We do so by drawing on a corpus of data that features survivor and bereaved accounts of two 21st-century terrorist attacks. We investigate the distressing period in which compensation claims remained undecided, in some cases for over seven years after the attacks, and how the process of assessment acts as a “technology of desubjectification.” To articulate this we turn to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “undecidability” in which the ambiguity between life and law is used by governing authorities to suspend and blur key distinctions such as what lies inside or outside the juridical order. In particular we aim to clarify that, in the context of claiming compensation for an act of terrorism, being undecided is a means by which the state maintains claimants within a “holding category” of victimhood that prevents their recognition as a political subject. We conclude with some reflection on how technologies of desubjectification operate within an “age of austerity.” Critical psychology needs to update its neo-Foucauldian understanding of subjectivity to include the production of “cranked subjects.”

Struggling to care: A discursive-material analysis of negotiating agency among HIV-positive MSM

A discursive-materialist framework of agency asserts the mutual constitution of agency within cultural discursive, economic, and embodied material structures. Understanding how HIV-positive men who have sex with men in the Philippines negotiate agency vis-a-vis wider social structures, we utilized Foucault's care of the self to locate agency in relationships with the self, others, and the broader world. Using data from narratives of 20 Filipino HIV-positive men who have sex with men, we analyzed the negotiation of agency as HIV-positive as embedded in the unique discursive terrain of Roman Catholicism and the economic materiality of a developing country. Three main processes of negotiating agency are elaborated: (1) questioning the spiritual self and the sexual body in the relationship with the self, (2) navigating interpersonal limits to care giving in the relationship with others, and (3) reclaiming human dignity in health care in the relationship with the broader world. Theoretical insights on the discursive and material constitution of healing in light of discursive and material challenges are discussed.

Acting otherwise: Resistance, agency, and subjectivities in Milgram’s studies of obedience

In this account of the Obedience to Authority experiments, we offer a richer and more dynamic depiction of the subjects’ acts and reactions. To paraphrase Milgram, our account tries to examine the central elements of the situation as perceived by its research subjects. We describe a model of the experimenter–subject system that moves beyond experimentalism and humanism, positing instead a model that considers experimenter–subject relations and extends both spatially and temporally past the experiment’s traditionally assumed limits: the walls of the laboratory and its canonical methods. Following Butler and Krause, we propose an approach that attends to quotidian, subtle, and unregistered ways of acting otherwise. Taking the Yale archive’s collection of Milgram’s subject files, audio recordings, and notes as historical traces of the experimenter–subject system, our analysis introduces a grounded understanding of how Milgram’s cut between obedience and disobedience renders invisible all but the most explicit manifestations of resistance or ways of acting otherwise. Investigating Milgram’s work through an experimenter–subject systems model illuminates previously undocumented affective and temporal dimensions of laboratory life and serves as a template for assessing other experimental situations.