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Warlpiri women, as with other groups across Indigenous Australia, sing to sustain and nurture their relationships with Country and jukurrpa (dreamings). For the custodians of these singing traditions, spiritual agency and power are consigned to songs and their singers, and performances are centred around nurturing relational links between people with Country and to other participants. Within contemporary contexts, in which Warlpiri singers are finding fewer opportunities to perform and pass on songs, new performance spaces are being created to continue to carry forward the significant cultural work of maintaining social and spiritual order through song. In this article we consider a number of performance instances of Warlpiri women's yawulyu (ceremonial songs) and discuss the inter—group dynamics and negotiations which are central to these events. We explore the ways in which Warlpiri women are continuing the cultural work of maintaining the relational aspects central to yawulyu through these performances despite shifting purposes and performance contexts. We illustrate through examples from contemporary events, how the dynamics of the particular performance instances involving ceremonial songs, dances, and other activities, direct the ways in which participants assert and reshape their intimate links to Country and to broader social networks of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue analyses how forced migrants' and non-citizens' kinning and de-kinning practices and their struggles of 'doing family' constitute navigations of citizenship. Forced migrants and non-citizens need to manoeuvre an intersecting net of different bureaucratic, political and legal, but also kin-related social and cultural regimes. In their encounters with state authorities, bureaucrats, and humanitarian workers, and through the material cultures these engender, forced migrants and non-citizens are marked and categorised – often with wide-ranging consequences for themselves and their significant others. This Special Issue traces how legal and bureaucratic inscriptions derive from, but also shape forced migrants' and non-citizens' familial status and intimate ties to fictive, legal or consanguineal kin. Centring on migration and displacement to and in Europe and the Middle East, we combine analytical debates from anthropology, gender, migration and citizenship studies. Collectively, this Special Issue suggests that the nation-state and its migration regime are experienced in relational ways, and impact on migrants' ability to care for and be in relation with significant others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life history methods are gaining popularity in Development research, linked to attempts to capture narratives marginalised by dominant accounts of Development. In this paper, we reflect on using life history methods with NGO activists in India. We explore how this approach led us to develop particular understandings of the participants as ‘vulnerable’, and the implications of this for the research process and the knowledges it produced. We explore how activists’ individual biographies were interwoven with institutional narratives, complicating but also enriching our understanding of activists’ experiences of Development. Secondly, we analyse the relationality of our subjects’ vulnerability and our own positionality as global North Development scholars. We reflect on how our engagement with Development actors we consider as vulnerable takes place through and against the relational histories and presents that brought us together. We explore the implications of this for the ways the research created both discursive and physical spaces for meeting and talking, and what this means for our approach to vulnerability. This requires an uncomfortable acknowledgement that Development research may reproduce vulnerabilities, even as it seeks to challenge them. The paper contributes to broader theorising of vulnerability, recognising vulnerability as embedded in the relationalities of the research moment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article queries the pervasiveness of binary thinking in contemporary identity studies. Reviewing the genealogy of binary alterity beginning with the synergies between the European Enlightenment and colonialism, I note the binary logics that remained embedded within the apparently disparate schools of structuralist and poststructuralist theory. Even the social constructionism of post-colonial scholarship became transmuted through a celebration of radical relativism into a legitimation of continued racialised or culturalised inequalities. To counter this position, I build on but also critique efforts to theorisations of relationalities. A reconstituted identity studies requires the theorisation of unequal globe-spanning imperial power and its contestations through domains of mutual practice. If we set aside an assumption of binaries of difference, such domains of relationship can be found as people meet in terms of their commonalities of experience and aspirations for equality, justice and respect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]