A World Without Innocence

Public Seminar, , 2020

A refugee, by legal definition, is someone who is fleeing a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a social group. But the category has always exceeded its legal core. The classic image of the refugee, also understood often as an individual in exile, used to make room for the heroic: the freedom fighter, the revolutionary. Political persecution was seen as the exemplary form of persecution. A refugee was an active, not passive, figure-even when this was romanticized. But over the past fifty years, the category of the refugee has shifted in meaning. If asylum was only ever for exceptional cases, as Hannah Arendt acknowledged in 1951, it nevertheless allowed for an exceptionally active person. Innocence is now the key qualifier for someone who claims to be a refugee. Paradoxically, as part of this moralized regime, innocence is also claimed by those who grant asylum. The qualification that refugees must be seen as innocent can change their fate at different points. Those requesting asylum may not even be allowed to make a claim, if they are not considered innocent. They may be deported before this happens, since discretionary power over who can claim asylum is increasingly given to border control officials, especially in the United States. And if people reach the territory, this implicit qualification plays a role in the evaluation of their claims.

Postmodern Openings, 2020

This article begins with a discussion of changing understandings of children and childhood. Conceptualizations of children and childhood have varied over time and place. Although children were once viewed as innocent, they are increasingly regarded as players in a power struggle with their parents or, in the case of children seeking refuge in the U.S. from other countries, as threats to established political, economic, and moral conventions or as potential consumers of public services who lack any basis for such entitlement. The author argues for the rectification of the structural inequities that underlay society's adverse treatment of children and urges therapists to become more conscious of their potential role as political actors to highlight children's vulnerability and need for protection.

This essay explores the implications of what we call attachments to innocence for scholarship and politics. After tracing the appearance of innocence in various strands of contemporary thought, we turn to how it shields individuals and groups from facing the depth of our own participation in oppression. This evasion of responsibility works in our perspective as a hindrance to understanding power and engaging with others ethically. The essay also examines how the reductionist and authoritarian dimensions of innocence merge with the neoliberal uptake of progressive politics in university and activist settings. We are interested in how academics and activists are rewarded for cultivating their innocent-selves through discursive and material interventions that leave power relations untouched. It is not merely monetary or status rewards that perpetuate this, but the crisis produced by our implication in the very violence we reject. Working with and through the mobility of agency, power, abuse, and justice, we explore what is at stake in shedding our attachments to innocence in the hope of a different sort of encounter-one that proceeds from the recognition that innocence is not a precondition for our engagement in political life.

Las Torres de Lucca. International Journal of Political Philosophy, 2022

This essay explores the implications of what we call attachments to innocence for critical scholarship and progressive politics. After tracing the appearance of innocence in various strands of contemporary thought, we turn to how it shields individuals and groups from examining the depth of our own participation in oppression and harm. This evasion of responsibility works in our perspective as a hindrance to understanding power and engaging with others ethically. The essay more concretely examines how the reductionist and authoritarian dimensions of innocence dovetail with the neoliberal uptake of ‘progressive’ politics in university and activist settings. We are interested in how academics and activists of different kinds are rewarded for cultivating their innocent-selves through discursive and material interventions that leave power relations untouched. It is not merely monetary or status rewards that perpetuate this, but the crisis produced by our implication in the very violence...

Harvard International Journal of Press-politics, 2002

German Politics and Society, 2021

••• 2 ••• become the basis for action in the present and future. Miriam Ticktin has shown the politics of innocence at work in the field of humanitarian interven tion, where the projection (or withholding) of moral purity onto designated Others enables interventions in their name, be they refugees, migrants, casu alties of violence, or even nonhuman actors such as animals or the environ ment. 3 Our focus is narrower but concurs with her framing of innocence as fundamentally about policing the boundaries of purity, and hence identity. As such, the politics of innocence sets important parameters within which memory work unfolds. Theorizing Myths of Innocence By invoking myths in the title of this issue, we aim to convey a dual mean ing that can be read across the following articles. First, the articles discuss specific narratives of innocence in the German context that serve mythical functions by addressing questions of group identity and embodying "ideals to which members of the group aspire." 4 These myths are not dependent on their truth value, because even if they rely on notions of a shared past, that vision of the past is mostly aspirational. The critical reaction to such narratives is, most commonly, to scrutinize them for factual errors and then debunk them for falsification of a specific history. This remains an important critical endeavor. But equally important is to understand such quests for innocence as attempts to delineate, in the first place, what counts as political and thus contestable, who counts as worthy of recognition, and who can be held accountable. Second, the articles show collectively how innocence itself functions as a myth (independent of the specific case), acting to conceal what Michael Rothberg has called our implication in structural and historical injustices. 5 Innocence, especially when juxtaposed to guilt in a binary way, empowers subject positions to claim a space seemingly unencumbered and unimpli cated by those complex causalities that fit uneasily into individualistic and legalistic notions of responsibility. The myth of innocence thus brackets implication; yet in so doing, it implicates its subjects even more-innocence and implication are intertwined. Memory can be a powerful resource in laying bare this entwining of inno cence and implication, but it can also be employed to divert attention from it. The politics of innocence thus intersects with the politics of memory in complex ways, which these articles seek to bring out. We highlight here three particularly salient analytical intersections, although there are surely many

Auckland University, 2019

Disrupting historical constructions of innocence is central to the formulation of a critical discussion of racialised, gendered and classed people in the settler capitalist state. By perpetuating embedded constructions of innocence, contemporary anti-racist, feminist, and intersectional projects risk reproducing the violence they seek to undo. This thesis examines how historical and contemporary understandings of identity create contradictory forms of oppression, and suggests a more nuanced view of innocence as a stepping stone towards decolonisation. First, I consider the formation of the innocent subject in the historical context of the settler capitalist state of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Second, I examine empathy and dehumanisation in narratives and modern liberal discourse, arguing that the settler drive to construct an absolute innocent victim may be antithetical to humanising narratives. While innocence suggests settler empathy, it presupposes dehumanisation of raced, mixed-race, and gendered subjects. Third, I turn to contemporary sentencing practices, analysing the role of legal discourse in maintaining constructions of innocence and of prisons as receptacles of the non-innocent. I point to unsettling themes within settler capitalist discourse, to challenge the innocence of social justice projects. This thesis is a prison abolitionist work, insofar as I intend to set out the social conditions required to fundamentally rethink role of the state through innocence. I suggest that the poetic abolitionist imagination can be deployed to materially undo its logic. To imagine the death of innocence is to imagine spaces beyond social constructs of the innocent/guilty binary, to challenge settler capitalist norms, and move towards a lived practice of decolonisation.

68 Fla. L. Rev. 1569, 2016

Innocence is an issue that pervades various areas of research and influences numerous topics of discussion. What does innocence mean, particularly in a system that differentiates between innocence and acquittal at sentencing? What is the impact of innocence during plea bargaining? How should we respond to growing numbers of exonerations? What forces lead to the incarceration of innocents? Has an innocent person been put to death and, if so, what does this mean for capital punishment? As these and other examples demonstrate, the importance and influence of the innocence issue is boundless. As the group, representing various perspectives, disciplines, and areas of research, discussed these and other questions, it also considered the role of innocence in the criminal justice system more broadly and examined where the innocence issue might take us in the future. What follows is a collection of short essays from some of those in attendance - essays upon which we might reflect as we continue to consider the varying sides and differing answers to the issue of innocence. Co-authors: LUCIAN E. DERVAN, RICHARD A. LEO, MEGHAN J. RYAN GREGORY M. GILCHRIST, WILLIAM W. BERRY III

Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 2010

Building from an analysis of Wedekind and Foucault, it will be argued that modern childhood has been constructed as both natural and in need of cultivation and regulation. Through practices which seem to protect and nurture innocence, a particular account of the ‘natural purity’ of children can be materially and discursively produced without this seeming to be an artificial imposition. Moreover, I shall propose that imputing innocence to children allows a covert ontology to be constructed for particular groups of adults or society more generally; claims about the nature of the particular groups of adults, or society generally, can be smuggled into such accounts via claims about the child they may once have been. I shall depict innocence discourses as complex: capable of beneficial effects but also complicit in the production, stabilisation and occlusion of potentially troubling effects on relations of power, emotion and meaning in modern societies.