Editorial
Editorial
Welcome to Issue 12 of Under Construction @ Keele , our first of 2021 and my third and final as Editor in Chief , once again produced amidst the Covid-19 pandemic . This issue saw further staff changes and I want to repeat the Editorial Board ’ s welcome to all our new committee members . The fresh ideas and enthusiasm they brought to tweaking our editing processes as well as to honing articles along has , I think , had a positive impact on this issue . The challenges of postgraduate study are manifold , and the fact that so many people are always willing to take up the challenge of helping Under Construction continue and thrive shows the enthusiasm and dedication across Keele ’ s postgraduate networks .
What Under Construction hopes to convey , through the selection and development of these articles , is the plurality of our postgraduate community ’ s intellectual contributions , as well as the plethora of issues facing the university , local area and contemporary society at large . I am delighted that we are able to showcase such wide ranging work . This issue deals with : conceptual and ethical issues around political power and governance in relation to subjectivity based around mutual self-determination as opposed to coercion : rediscovery and reassessment of notation paradigms within social science ; the historically-grounded and continuously valent question of gender as historically contingent , contested and performed , alongside the consequent counterdominant power behind performing practices differently ; and the uses of visual and literary genre to interrogate established senses of the world as well as mapping existential anxieties around the ‘ human ’ and its relationship to lifeworld . These essays enter into a dialogue with the enduring legacies of major figures within the 20 th and 21 st Century traditions , from Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud to Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek , whose work has been engaged with across HUMSS in a series of lively , often agonistic ways , in relation to questions of power and collective autonomy , desire , ‘ realism ’ and the political Real : in each case , these cease to become simply questions of technical definition and are used to engage with specific disciplinary concerns , texts and wider contemporary or epochal notions selfhood .
In commissioning and developing these pieces , articles have emerged out of the Keele HUMSS network of research forums and blogs , supported as ever by Keele ’ s own KPA : in