Centre for Asian Research

The body of the museum visitor has become key for examining power relationships, behavioural practice and theory within exhibition spaces in recent decades. Since the 1980s, the emergence of a postmodern worldview has required museums to seem more socially relevant, reflexive and inclusive, especially with regard to the overcoming of modern bodily dualisms through interactive exhibitions. By exploring the transition of societies from modernity to postmodernity and beyond this article aims to explore first the emergence of a dualistic perception of the body and subsequently whether the emergence of postmodern museums hails the end of said dualisms. The article will then address the impact that a growing consumer culture has on museum practice and ultimately prove that consumption problematizes the postmodern exercise to liberate the self from its dual existence.

Since the middle of the 20th century the rights manifest in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have provided protection for people against the abuses of power by states and relatively clear answers to complex moral and political issues. This article will explore how and why the modern law-based approach to human rights has nevertheless largely failed in delivering people from suffering and trauma. It will explore how bureaucracy and conventionalism have lead to a growing gap between the implementational mechanisms of human rights advocacy and its original goals. The article will assess how an alternative, arts-based approach to human rights advocacy can reach those for whom the written and spoken word is inaccessible or incomprehensible and thus provide a more universal, yet specific, basis for the advancement of peace, security and dignity across the world.

Diasporas have emerged as powerful, if contentious, actors with a complex impact on global political processes. This includes the provision of governance to their homelands in the form of remittances but also through more direct involvement in the provision of public
goods and services. Puzzlingly, governance research, which empirically investigates public goods provision by state and non-state actors alike, has largely steered clear of investigating diasporas. This paper argues that the reason for this blind spot is that diasporas pose an uncomfortable conceptual challenge to governance researchers. By taking a diaspora perspective on governance, we can see that state-centrism still has a firm, if elusive, grip on much governance research, which manifests as an insistence to differentiate between external and internal actors. It is this inbuilt assumption, that external and internal actors have quintessentially different properties, which does not match the often ambivalent quality of diasporas as they engage in governance in their homelands. This article will tease out some of the contradictions inherent in governance research by thinking about governance through
diasporas and point out ways in which diaspora research itself has addressed the problem of state-centrism.

In recent decades state-based diaspora engagement institutions have proliferated. Meanwhile, the surge in diaspora engagement initiatives by non-state global governance actors is also on the rise. However, such ‘global-ising’ of diaspora engagement does not describe a simple ‘scaling-up’ of policies from the domestic to the supranational level.
Rather, it suggests a reconfiguration of policies, actors and spaces by and through which diasporas are now being engaged/governed. No doubt, this calls for a reassessment of existing analytical frameworks. This paper makes the case for a new ontological perspective for studying global diaspora governance. It proposes that existing analyses of diaspora governance lack explanatory power for a number of reasons. They either fall into the trap of methodological nationalism, and thus fail to account for the complexities of contemporary global social and political configurations, or, if they do problematise complexity, they do so in a way that depoliticises global governance processes. Instead, this paper argues for a critical realist ontology, which suggests that we think about global diaspora engagement through the concept of the assemblage. Assemblages, this paper argues, allow us to consider global diaspora engagement as complex relations between human and non-human agents whose configurations shape the conditions of possibility for action in a particular circumstance. When paired with Bourdieusian practice theory, the assemblage can also act as the (de-/reterritorialised) field within which practices are hierarchically ordered, thus enabling the study of how political struggles unfold inside specific configurations of global diaspora engagement.