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The World Bank is often portrayed by human rights scholars as a 'legal black hole' where the workings of international law have been suspended. In a recognizable routine of human rights activism, consistent attempts are therefore made to throw out the normative net of international law over this institutional domain. A familiar response by the institution is the assertion of its autonomous international legal status and constitutional limitations. Rather than reaffirming a specific position in this deadlocked doctrinal debate, this article enquires into the performative effects of this jousting routine between human rights activists and the World Bank. The account points to the potentially problematic political effects indirectly and unwillingly engendered by repeated enactments of these deeply engrained juridical juxtapositions. This analysis provides an innovative, relational understanding of international law with analytical value beyond the scope of this particular debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fluid performances of gender online by gender-diverse individuals facing discrimination and fetishization raises questions about whether these acts are a source of empowerment or reinforce prevailing prejudice. We combine virtual ethnography and interviews with transwomen sex workers in Singapore (n = 14) to explore the dynamic between sociostructural oppression and agentic resistance. First, heterosexual power relations manifest online via digital practices of access, surveillance, and intervention to discriminate against and objectify respondents' identities and bodies. Second, the online response can be categorized into specific digital practices of avoidance involving privacy and anonymity, accommodation via subtle practices of submission, and collaboration via community mobilization. Finally, gender performativity on sites for sex solicitation manifests in the presentation of both essentialist (submissive femininity) and provocative (hyper-sexual) embodiments, defying simplistic characterization into the structure-agency dynamic. We discuss the co-constructive nature of socially situated gender performances and the potential for challenging normative regimes of gender. Online spaces allow people to perform their gender more fluidly. We studied how gender-diverse people's online media use can lead to both personal empowerment and social oppression. Social forces oppress gender-diverse people through online harassment and abuse. We classify these progressively intrusive digital practices as access, surveillance, and intervention. However, gender-diverse people also respond to such oppression through digital strategies such as avoidance, accommodation, and collaboration. Transwomen sex workers in Singapore perform femininity online in submissive and hyper-sexual ways. Our material suggests that they do this to both affirm their transgender identities and also to attract customers. These nuances blur the line between individual choice and compliance with social demands. Indeed, the informants' quotes suggest that the digital strategies that seem to accommodate client desires may in fact empower these transwomen sex workers. Yet, it is uncertain if this individual empowerment leads to broader social change for gender-diverse communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents author concern towards the opera studies. Topics include idea of performative designates attention from closed structures to an open process, which resists the linearity; and the domain of twentieth century structure musicology as a plethora of theoretical perspectives such as hermeneutics, deconstruction and feminism.

The article provides information on the nature of dramatic or artistic performance in opera. Topics include elision of demarcation lines operates increasingly on social and artistic grounds as society wide mediatization; and sense of reflexivity about interaction with cultural forms heightened endemic mediatization hence allows quotidian to appear performative.

The article focuses on concept of the Regietheater and Performative in opera performances. Topics include tendency to deconstruct texts and recombine them produce frictions through juxtaposition with material; observes reception and production as clinging to demands for loyalty to the text and work; and emphasis on semiotic potential of staging draw attention towards the experience of opera performances.

By studying letters written to the dead published in the popular Israeli press between 1997 and 2014, this paper examines the practices that constitute communicative acts toward a deceased person using interpersonal and mass media, in order to embody the recipiency of the dead. Using an analytical framework that draws on media ecology, communication theory, and discourse analysis, the paper demonstrates how the epistolary and mass media rhetoric operate to reconstruct the performance of the dead as an addressee. By exploring this understudied phenomenon and revisiting core notions of communication in light of written technologies, distance, and death, the paper argues that this communicative constellation, as a whole, is a performative act that offers a 'communicative resurrection' to the dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre's notion of the production of space and Michael Callon's work on performativity in economics, this article examines the material and discursive practices through which the internet 'home-sharing' platform Airbnb has produced new social relations of domestic property. Through a critical examination of the discourses and practices of Airbnb in the popular media, courts of law and public hearings, I argue that internet-based platforms such as Airbnb represent a fundamental reworking of social relations of property based on radically new socio-material assemblages. These assemblages--which have served to further commoditise housing by constructing a new market in short-term rentals--have entailed the disruption of not just the hospitality sector, but of the socio-spatial relations of urban housing. As emerging spaces of domestic entrepreneurialism, short-term rentals have generated their own forms of localised opposition. With the spread of Airbnb transforming the lived spaces of housing across New York City, a discursive struggle has ensued over the meanings of this new form of domestic property. In the popular press, courts of law and the chambers and steps of city halls, the stakes have been nothing less than the means and ends of urban governance itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out to analyze experiences related to refugeeness, or "becoming refugee." It does so not as a technology of governmentality, but rather as the condition of possibility to political agency based on the capacities of asylum seekers to become attentive toward the figure of the refugee, to raise awareness of shared grievances and injustices and, ultimately, to mobilize individually and collectively. The study is based on an analysis of interviews carried out with asylum seekers in January 2015 in Cairo, a city that hosts one of the biggest UNHCR operations in North Africa and the Middle East. Approaching refugee subjectivities through the lens of performativity, we suggest that becoming refugee is one significant instance where people employ their mundane political agencies, both challenging and reproducing the complex socio-political and sociomaterial relations that constitute the refugee regime. We conclude that a focus on the subjective dynamism involved in performing refugeeness may be helpful in understanding political mobilization in demanding and oppressive situations in Cairo and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies of civil war have problematized frameworks that rely on a strict binary between state-sanctioned order and anarchy. This paper extends these insights and combines them with theories of performativity to examine welfare practices during the Syrian conflict (2011-2015). Specifically, we argue that conceptualizing the state as a construct--as an effect of power--can expand the study of civil war beyond its quantifiable aspects and embrace the performative dimensions of political life. By means of everyday, iterative acts such as welfare provision, competing groups summon the state, and the political order it seeks to enshrine, into existence: they make it both tangible and thinkable. During civil war, the ability to perform these prosaic acts becomes a matter of pressing military and political concern. Through close scrutiny of various cases, we dissect the impact of subsidized bread provision by the Assad regime, the Free Syrian Army, and armed Islamist groups as they struggle to perform the state. Our aim is to bring attention to under-studied governance practices so as to analyze the otherwise opaque relations between welfare provision, military success, and civilian agency during Syria's civil war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for a practice of reflexive role ascription in International Relations (IR) to prevent actor normalization. Roles are useful and often applied in narratives to facilitate our understanding of particular actors or subject positions. Yet, recurrent and non-reflexive ascriptions give rise to normalization, shaping how actors become understood. Awareness of performativity, over-generalization, and over-determining roles would thus contribute to more nuanced understandings of actors and prevent limited yet insightful role ascriptions from becoming the norm. The article builds on two largely compatible turns in IR--the reflexive and narrative turns--with a view to enlarging the concept of role beyond the domain of interaction and drama. It thus reviews the manner in which roles have been conceptualized in IR and extends their definition. Then, by focusing on the notions of attribution, predication, and Judith Butler's performativity, the article propounds a two-level approach to reflexive role ascription-derived from Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics--that deters narratives and their roles from normalizing subject positions in IR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the financialization of sovereign debts as a process that reconstitutes statehood. Focusing on Israel, we argue that the financialization of its sovereign debt and the professionalization of this debt's management reconfigured the state's relationship with its citizens and transformed it into a market relationship. Drawing on observations and in-depth interviews conducted in the Israeli Government Debt Management Unit, we develop a microanalysis of Israel's macro-economic policy on its debt. We follow the aftermath of a historical transition in Israel's debt management. In its first decades of existence, Israel issued and priced bonds through direct negotiations between state representatives and pension funds. In the 1990s and 2000s, the Israeli Ministry of Finance transitioned to issuing bonds to financial markets and directed pension funds to invest in these markets. The state assumed a Janus-faced agency: on the one hand, it became disentangled from pension funds and began interacting with them as an individualized, cost-minimizing financial market actor; on the other hand, the state operates as regulator of a market, which governs and disciplines pension funds. The article investigates three factors in Israel's debt management, which perform this new state agency in the present: the professionalization of sovereign debt management, the utilization of risk management models and the standardization of sovereign bonds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performative writing is an art form that seeks to enliven our discourse by including the senses as a primary source of information processing. Through performative writing, one is seduced into engaging with the aesthetic. My art is music. My craft is Music Therapy. My theme is performing theory. Listen to the sound and silence of words, phrases, punctuation, syllables, format. My muses? I thank D. Soyini Madison, Ron Pelias, Philip Glass, Elliot Eisner, and Tom Barone for inspiration, and my teachers/Indigenous Elders and knowledge keepers who embraced the long tradition of oral transmission of knowledge and the healing power of sound. Stay, stay in the presence of the aesthetic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arts-based research (ABR) has emerged in music therapy in diverse ways, employing a range of interpretive paradigms and artistic media. It is notable that no consensus exists as to when and where the arts are included in the research process, or which music therapy topics are most suited to arts-based study. This diversity may pose challenges for music therapists who are developing, reading, and evaluating arts-based research. This paper provides an updated review of arts-based research literature in music therapy, along with four questions for researchers who are developing arts-based research. These questions are 1) When should the arts be introduced? 2) Which artistic medium is appropriate? 3) How should the art be understood? and 4) What is the role of the audience? We argue that these questions are key to understanding arts-based research, justifying methods, and evaluating claims arising from arts-based research. Rather than defining arts-based research in music therapy, we suggest that arts-based research should be understood as a flexible research strategy appropriate for exploring the complexities of music therapy practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ethnography of Communication research agenda, as it has been incorporated into the field of Communication over the past 3 decades, has made considerable contributions to our understanding of the cultural and social coding of language-in-use. This article argues that further development of this research agenda requires ethnographies that attend to processes of encoding, including their precoded phases, and pay greater attention to the temporality, performativity, and materiality of communication. This is illustrated with reference to the rapidly shifting contemporary techno-social environments communicators face today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of intermediary organisations in the development of the ‘bioeconomy’. Focusing on the strategies employed by UK funding agencies to coordinate research in the emerging field of synthetic biology, I explore the spatiality of contemporary science and research policy and the practices engaged by research support bodies. While forms of territorial coordination have constituted a crucial strategy in the promotion of biotechnological clusters, regions and cities, a range of ‘geographical imaginations’ have dominated political and policy discourse on the bioeconomy and institutional responses to the emergence of synthetic biology. Developing a notion of the reflexive creation of hybrid forums, drawn from Callon et al. (2002), in this paper I develop an alternative concept of the performative enactment of interactive spatialities. I argue that in coordinating research in synthetic biology intermediary institutions are engaged in the active composition and management of new networks of actors and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special section analyses the practices and the performativity of intermediaries. Rather than conceiving intermediaries as agents that passively transfer knowledge and objects between the worlds of science, policy and the economy, the focus is on how they mobilise, reframe and structure expertise and policy imperatives. The papers demonstrate that intermediaries come to: collectively explore new worlds and ventures; perform, define and constitute new scientific fields; and actively constitute logics such as scientification or forecasting in the development of techno-logical regulation. In this way, the papers that comprise this special section contribute to a performative understanding of the practices engaged in intermediation that extend and challenge documentary and ideographic modes of analysis that dominate current scholarhip. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the pedagogical significance of non-static and hybrid utopian readings and writings by focusing on Margaret Cavendish's educationally-philosophically neglected female utopia The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World. It questions the exaggerated, inflated and exclusivist emphasis on the pedagogical benefits of homologous spatial signifiers of entry into utopia and return to home and draws examples of utopian passages across genres, texts, minds and worlds from the writing of Cavendish. Such passages can be read as performative ways of hybridising and reinventing both the utopian topos and the traveller's identity. New space is thus opened for learning as imitation and re-writing rather than as a return to, or manifestation of, an original self. Finally, new performative means for fashioning pedagogical authorship, nurturing the other's learning, and fashioning intellectual growth are promoted. Such means comprise mutuality of pedagogical initiatives, improvisation through imitation and supplementarity of cooperative writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

J. L. Austin showed that performative speech acts can fail in various ways, and that the ways in which they fail can often be revealing, but he was not concerned with understanding performative failures that occur in the context of poetry. Geoffrey Hill suggests, in both his poetry and his prose writings, that these failures are more interesting than Austin realized. This article corrects Maximilian de Gaynesford’s misunderstanding of Hill’s treatment of this point. It then explains the way in which Hill’s understanding of the performative restrictions on poetry relate to his conception of poetry’s role, analogous to that of the Saturnalian misruler, in establishing the authority of ordinary language. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Structuralism has dominated the field of applied linguistics, which has consequences for the positioning of applied linguistics vis-a-vis policy makers, educational practice, and also theoretical and methodological innovations. These consequences pertain to how the field advocates, takes sides, balances its descriptive modes with its discursive affections, and how it allows the ‘real world’ which Applied Linguistics claims as its territory. Poststructuralism, with its intensely moral claims, its playful, often dense discursive style, its plural forms and puns, and its mood of critical scepticism allows the structuralist foundations of applied linguistics and their violence or potential violence, to be seen from different vantage points. This article explores the relationship between solidarity, linguistic hospitality, poststructuralism, and a particularly real aspect of the world. It does so through a performative discussion of a case study relating to a changing auto-ethnographic research project and the sudden appearance of intimate pain and political imperative in a project which began with structuralist intent and moved through experience and practice into poststructuralist narrative. As such, the article performs a narrative and poetic commentary on the contested place accorded affect in scholarship and how these relate to questions of linguistic hospitality, solidarity, and poststructuralism when faced with real-world questions and survival of their contradictions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Looking at two sets of conversations, among Greek adolescents, and between Japanese and Australian workers, this article shows how a poststructuralist understanding of the ways in which participants use and mix elements of their language repertoires implies a view of language as performative. Although the poststructuralist element of our approach on the one hand foregrounds a questioning of stable categories of language, identity, and assumed modes of mixing, our development of an understanding of performativity allows us to consider seriously the processes by which language and identity are constantly being remade. For the participants themselves, this is not simply a question of fluid language practices, but rather the interplay of fixed and unfixed language elements, cultural identifications, and social relationships. Reinvigorating Butler’s account of performativity, our analysis and comparison of these two sets of data shows how a poststructuralist consideration of performativity sheds light on the relationship between the ongoing production of subjectivity and the deployment of fixed, stable, or stereotypical categories of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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The article discusses approaches to analyzing the performative aspects of operatic productions. The author describes the use of hermeneutic and semiotic theory in theater studies and suggests that the theory of performativity can be used to analyze opera as performance. The author focuses on the sensual experience of voice, the perception of aural and visual elements of operatic performance, and perception as audience participation in performance. The author discusses the 2004 production of Wolfgang Mozart's opera "Entführung aus dem Serail" direcyed by Calixto Bieito at the Komische Oper Berlin in Germany. Also discussed as stagings of operas directed by Patrice Chéreau.

This article gives an overview of the methodology used to study letters as sources for the history of medicine, describing the shift from a social to a cultural history of medicine, and its effect on the analysis of correspondence, based on both an overview of secondary literature and on the analysis of over 2,300 Dutch manuscript letters written by the Dutch elite from 1770 to 1850. The first part of the article outlines how the letter was used by social historians of medicine, who mostly concentrated on the contents of letters in regard to disease and patients' attitudes to physicians. Cultural historians, on the other hand, focus on the making of meaning and the second part of the article discusses how health and illness in letters may be analysed in terms of language use, omissions and a focus on the functions of correspondence, specifically on the performative use of letters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much of the best contemporary work in the philosophy of language and content makes appeal to the theories developed in generative syntax. In particular, there is a presumption that—at some level and in some way—the structures provided by syntactic theory mesh with or support our conception of content/linguistic meaning as grounded in our first-person understanding of our communicative speech acts. This paper will suggest that there is no such tight fit. Its claim will be that, if recent generative theories are on the right lines, syntactic structure provides both too much and too little to serve as the structural partner for content, at least as that notion is generally understood in philosophy. The paper will substantiate these claims by an assessment of the recent work of King, Stanley, and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is 'remembering' an intentional activity, residing in the subject's autonomy, or does it belong to the realm of receptivity, interrupting the subject? Or is it both at once? This jointly authored paper sets these questions in the context of a recently renewed interest in memoria in cultural theory and the humanities, as well as of an increasing pluralism in Western societies. The impossibility of sharing memories as a common good and a common truth is explored by putting the theme of historical responsibility, to which every gesture of memoria is tied, in a new light. The paper first demonstrates that the concept of performativity, as developed in particular by Jacques Derrida through a critical reading of Austin and Searle, can be a fruitful theoretical model in the analysis of memoria and of its double status: active and receptive at the same time. A reflection on the practice of testimony, again starting from Derrida, will further articulate this coherence between performativity and memoria. After this theoretical clarification, the value of performativity as a model for memoria will be tested through a detailed reading of the German writer W.G. Sebald's (1944-2001) story 'Max Ferber', focussing on the delicate way this story stages an impossible testimonial drama. The authors will, finally, enquire as to the relevance of the performative model for a theological view of memoria and testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the performative utterances in classical Syriac. Signs of utterances; Difficulties in performative interpretations; Evaluation of the translation technique of Syriac versions in the Bible.