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Abstract Lawsuits are representational arenas, as well as legal events. They serve as integrative spaces for power relations, symbolic orders, and moral economies. This article focuses on the ‘social lives’ of two lawsuits brought by indigenous communities to litigate issues arising from oil extraction on their territories: the Texaco lawsuit in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Beaver Lake Cree Nation lawsuit in Alberta, Canada. I analyze the narratives of indigeneity and modernity that they challenge, as well as their potential to order and disorder social fabrics beyond the legal sphere. I argue that lawsuits are ethnographic dramas that make visible how various social actors ‘order’ the world into categories, such as ‘value’, ‘modernity’, ‘commons’, and ‘sovereignty’, and in the process render legible the constructed nature of symbolic life.

This essay provides a psychoanalytic examination of James Joyce’s Eveline, arguing that the protagonist’s immobilization is a symptom of profound psychic conflict rather than a simple failure of will. It contends that Eveline’s inability to escape her oppressive home stems from unconscious attachments to the familial superego, a melancholic identification with her mother’s sacrificial fate, and the internalization of patriarchal prohibitions. The analysis draws on Freudian concepts of melancholia and the death drive, Lacanian theory regarding the foreclosure of the symbolic order and the intrusion of the Real, and Kristevan ideas of abjection. Further perspectives from Marcuse and Žižek illustrate how surplus-repression and ideological impasse contribute to her paralysis. The narrative structure is read as a representation of the conflict between Eros and Thanatos, demonstrating how Eveline becomes suspended between desire and duty. Her final refusal to act is revealed as a forced choice, where trauma precedes its cause and the symbolic frameworks for meaning and action collapse entirely, leaving only a hysterical symptom. By foregrounding the Žižekian notion that the symptom can precede its cause and by situating Eveline’s paralysis within the maternal abject, this essay extends existing psychoanalytic readings of the story, offering an interpretive framework that moves beyond trauma and inertia to reveal the deeper ideological and structural mechanisms that shape her immobilization.

In this paper we improve an earlier result by Bukhgeim and Uhlmann [1], by showing that in dimension n ≥ 3, the knowledge of the Cauchy data for the Schrödinger equation measured on possibly very small subsets of the boundary determines uniquely the potential. We follow the general strategy of [1] but use a richer set of solutions to the Dirichlet problem. This implies a similar result for the problem of Electrical Impedance Tomography which consists in determining the conductivity of a body by making voltage and current measurements at the boundary.

Research framework: With the democratization of photography, the practice of keeping a family album has become widespread. Objects produced from snapshots, texts, drawings and collages have imposed themselves as founding structures of unique affective communities. Yet, since this practice has entered the field of research, this medium has only been considered in terms of sociology leaving aside the study of forms, as well as in terms of artistic disciplines, thus projecting a particularism preventing any hermeneutics.Objectives: This article aims to reread the practice of family album through its materiality so as to apprehend its significance for the subjects represented within a group whose specificities we must understand. Methodology: In order to do this, we will rely on the collections of the Niepce Museum (Burgundy, France) and the consultation of nearly a thousand items, 219 of which form the core, mainly French photographic albums produced between 1880 and 1980. Results: This research observes the important fragmentation of the album space, which it will consider as a place that gathers, preserves and secures the sensitive expression of a fantasized family. It also examines the album through the prism of play and the experiments in social relationships that it allows. Conclusion: Thus, the album is at the heart of the discipline, social aesthetics, and sociological dimensions, which confirms their co-dependence and testifies to the expressive scope of the object itself. Contribution: To our knowledge, no study has considered a sufficiently large corpus of relics and disciplines are often dissociated by research in order to consider the family album in its entirety, for its form and its content.

Contemporary sacramental theology construes the sacraments as a symbolic gift exchange between God and humanity; God initiates in the ministry of Jesus Christ, and human beings acknowledge and respond to God’s gift. The gratuity of that initial gift is ensured not only by reference to God’s all-sufficient nature, but also in many cases by excising economic value and economic exchange from the symbolic realm within which the sacramental gift exchange proceeds. This poses an intellectual and a practical problem. Intellectually, economic exchange is fundamentally symbolic and even ritualistic, so that the division between them is difficult to define and maintain. Practically, economic behavior is morally relevant, and the sacraments ought to give some purchase on marketplace behavior. In this essay, anthropological and economic work on “consumption rituals,” based on the work of Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, is brought to bear on defining the relationship between sacraments and economic exchange and articulating the sociological preconditions for experiencing market exchange as an extension of sacramental gift exchange.

We consider a model case for a strictly convex domain Ω ⊂ ℝd of dimension d ≥ 2 with smooth boundary ∂Ω ≠ ∅, and we describe dispersion for the wave equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions. More specifically, we obtain the optimal fixed time decay rate for the smoothed out Green function: a t1/4 loss occurs with respect to the boundary less case, due to repeated occurrences of swallowtail type singularities in the wave front set.

I have been playing pickup soccer for the last decade with members of my local Midwestern US community. In practical terms, we all behave as if little is more important to us than our ongoing game. We suffer injuries, tolerate rehabilitation, and spend hours and days away from our closest friends and family members in order to play. But we also miss no opportunity to deny the importance of the game. We are quick to admonish one another for taking it too seriously, for not just having fun, for forgetting that it’s just a game. If we behave practically as if soccer carries genuine social import, then why won’t we admit to this belief when we talk about it? In this essay, I demonstrate that, in fact, the two sides of this seeming paradox are the necessary supports for one another. Although it is counterintuitive, the seriousness of our play depends upon our refusal to acknowledge in language the significant space that soccer occupies in our lives. We are free to invest our game with a surprising degree of profundity so long as we steadily and periodically remind one another that we are not doing so. To support this thesis, I draw on classic commentary on the sociology of play by Johan Huizinga, on Robert Pfaller’s concept of interpassivity, and on several ideas from Lacanian psychoanalysis as read by Slavoj Žižek. This triangulation of thinkers allows me to clarify the logic of an everyday experience. It will also help explain the apparent contradiction between how a large group of soccer players experience their excessive attachments to a game and the sport’s minor status within our shared social reality.

Alison Bechdel's graphic memoirs— Fun Home, Are You My Mother? and The Secret of Superhuman Strength —explore the relationship between word and image, both in their form, as comics, and narratively, via Bechdel's musings on self-expression, sexuality, psychoanalysis, and exercise. On each of these sites, she is deeply concerned with the pervasive dichotomies of subject/object, self/other, and past/present. The fraught dichotomy between words and images forms the organizing force for how she writes and draws about all dichotomies, as she disrupts the hierarchy between word and image of Lacan's symbolic order without, as many feminists scholars have, deeming the symbolic order of language inherently patriarchal. Drawing from Julia Kristeva's theorizing of Lacan's symbolic order, Hillary Chute's comics theory, as well as W.J.T. Mitchell's work on the relationship between word and image, I analyze each book sequentially. In her memoirs, Bechdel disrupts the very distinction between word and image. When she recreates book passages and letters, these are not simply transcriptions, but drawings of physical pages, treating words as images. Chute and DeKoven's definition of comics focuses on it as a dual medium, but in Bechdel's memoirs, the relationship between word and image is not as stable as duality. It is a collaboration requiring constant renegotiation.

The rationalist-constructivist divide that runs through the discipline of International Relations (IR) revolves around two figures of agency, the rational actor and the constructivist “self.” In this article I examine the models of agency that implicitly or explicitly underpin the study of international politics. I show how both notions of the rational actor and the constructivist self have remained wedded to individualist understandings of agency that were first incarnated in the discipline's self-understandings by Hobbes's natural individual. Despite its turn to social theory, this persistent individualism has hampered constructivism's ability to appraise the ways in which the actors and structures of international politics mutually constitute one another “all the way down.” My purpose is to lay the foundations for a nonindividualist, adequately relational, social theory of international politics. To this end I propose a third model of agency, Lacan's split speaking subject. Through a Lacanian reading of the Leviathan, I show how the speaking subject has in fact laid buried away in the discipline's Hobbesian legacy all along.

We want to make one very simple claim that we hope might contnbute to the developing discourse on the disciplinary and institutional governance of academic criminology: the Ethics Committee is one of a growing number of little others that attempt to compensate for the loss of the traditional symbolic order. While our focus is on the Ethics Committee and criminology, we believe that much of what we have to say is also applicable to other forms of academic governance that characterize the social sciences in the contemporary university. We will take a rather circuitous route to this conclusion in the hope that we might encourage criminological researchers to think seriously about the ways in which Slavoj Žižek's philosophical framework can be used to theorize criminology's position in the current post-political social order.