She continues: Sometimes, though, an event more than perturbs; it disturbs, creates a louder noise that opens up a field of debate about expertise, modes of description, narration, evaluation, argument, and judgment.
The first volume of the double issue Making the Case examines professional practices and conventions, their histories and what they mean for how we organize knowledge, justice, and care. The second volume, Missing Persons forthcoming in Fall 2007 looks at the ways kinds of people are used as examples of things. For example, why do we assume the close-up increases what we know about someone rather than weirdly twists or distorts it? What if the history of the working class looked at servants and not industrial workers? What does a disrupted personality type such as in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder tell us about the ways we think of ordinary personality? Together these two issues offer a compelling introduction to an important emerging field of inquiry.
This is why the topic of the case matters: the conventions of the case, of the fate of singularity in exemplifying narratives and expert commentary, are honed by debates about consensus sensibility, Berlant writes. Any time is a good time for some reflection on that.
Making the Case: Summer 2007
Peter Goodrich The New Casuistry
Diana Taylor Double Blind: The Torture Case
Nasser Hussain Beyond Norm and Exception: Guantnamo
Lauren Berlant Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency
Claire Pentecost Appetites/Sovereignty
John Forrester On Kuhns Case: Psychoanalysis and Paradigm
Jessica Dubow Case Interrupted: Benjamin, Sebald, and the Dialectical Image
James Chandler The Face of the Case: Conrad, Lord Jim, and the Sentimental Novel
Christopher Nealon The Poetic Case
Missing Persons: Fall 2007
Candace Vogler The Moral of the Story
| Contact: Suzanne Wu swu@press.uchicago.edu 209-608-2038 University of Chicago Press Journals Source:Eurekalert |