The Non-Sovereign Self, Responsibility, and Otherness

Precarity and the question of children’s relationalities

“…However, with the "ordinary crises" (Berlant, 2011) -or rising racialized inequalities, crumbling social welfare structures, and the diminishing of the working class -marking everyday conditions in late capitalist democracies, like the US, theorists have begun to leverage these devalued relationalities to rethink liberal democracy (Kelz, 2016). While Berlant (2016) makes a compelling case for "belonging" and critiques individuality "as a genre carved from within dynamics of relation rather than a state prior or distinct to it" (p. 395), Graeber (2011) highlights practices of "everyday communism" as that which exceeds a juridical-citizenship based formalization of "duty."…”

“The suffering we collectively inhabit”: Relational understandings of citizenship by the Colombian post-accord generation

“…The potential of this revolutionary comprehension of citizenship lies in the recognition of the struggles that children perceive in the victims of the armed conflict, thus moving from an adultist to a childist comprehension of national belonging (Wall, 2013) based on relational identity with the historically marginalized. This notion of a non-sovereign self (Balagopalan, 2021;Kelz, 2016) tears from traditional understandings of protracted violence as stifling and reshapes them into a binding relationship with the precarious other. The emphasis is no longer on respecting individual autonomy, historically belonging to the adult, white, middle-class man (or the corrupt elite), but on solidarity with the othered collectivities, where everyone, including children, are competent, resilient, and active citizens.…”

Studious Play as an Archê of Creative Music-Making: Repositing “the Scandal of Democracy” in Music Education

“…Incidentally, this is the reason for Trump's preference for engaging in legal proceedings every time a law prevents him from doing as he pleases (Butler 2020). Responding to similar accusations regarding "indiscriminate openness towards the demand of the other" Rosine Kelz (2016) has argued that "this concern … could be mitigated when we recall the philosophical starting point of the notion of otherness. The disposition towards the other where otherness cannot be denied wants to avoid a way of thinking that would reduce the other to the same" (105).…”