Juneko J Robinson
My areas of inquiry center around existential issues concerning individual freedom and responsibility in a variety of social and political contexts, existentialist themes in art and film, the politics of artistic self-expression, issues pertaining to freedom and self-determination within the contexts of international human rights, the environment, and property, and public international law. I earned my M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Philosophy from SUNY Buffalo. During that time, I was awarded a Schomburg Fellowship, which consisted of a $40,000 grant and a full tuition waiver for 4 years. My papers, "The Realist (Mis)Interpretation of Hobbes," a work of political philosophy, and "Massacres and Masquerades: Ambiguity, Art, and Ethics in Beauvoir's Writings” were expanded upon in lieu of a thesis for the M.A. My dissertation, entitled The Body Politic: An Existential Ontology of Clothing, Conformity, and the Politics of Self-Expression, focused on personal aesthetic expression as a source and reflection of political contestation. Professor Carolyn Korsmeyer served as the chair of my dissertation committee, which also consisted of Professors Kah Kyung Cho and James M. Lawler. I am currently a member of the American Philosophical Association's Pacific Division, as well as its member groups Women in Philosophy, People of Color in Philosophy, and Philosophers Outside Academia.While working on my Ph.D., I simultaneously earned my Juris Doctor in International Law with a focus on human rights and public international law under the guidance of Professor Makau Mutua. During that time, I served as a Law Clerk and Associate to the Buffalo Environmental Law Journal and, along with my team, was a quarter-finalist in the Philip C. Jessup International Moot Court Competition. Before grad/law school, I worked as a paraprofessional psychiatric social worker and case manager for severely mentally ill adults. For 7 years, I worked as an attorney representing asylum-seekers from around the world, including Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Nepal, Mongolia, and Eritrea. Currently, my focus is on appellate practice and representing asylum seekers before the Bureau of Immigration Appeals and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. My most recent publication is "The Deviance it Deserves: On Punk Rock, Public Harassment, and Pissing People Off," in Punk and Philosophy: God Save the Queen of the Sciences, ed. Josh Heter & Richard Greene (Carus/Open University, Aug. 23, 2022).
Supervisors: Committee Chair: Carolyn Korsmeyer, Kah Kyung Cho, and Philip Lawler
Address: San Francisco Bay Area
Supervisors: Committee Chair: Carolyn Korsmeyer, Kah Kyung Cho, and Philip Lawler
Address: San Francisco Bay Area
less
InterestsView All (69)
Uploads
Books by Juneko J Robinson
Most of the ways in which punk rock is conceptualized in popular and scholarly literature have typically spoken of punk in terms of social deviance models. For example, citing Stanley Cohen's Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Lauraine Leblanc notes that oppositional youth subcultures are often cast as "folk devils," thereby incurring blame for a whole host of social ills ranging from rising crime rates, falling property values, and urban decay. Popular media disseminates such views of subcultures whose members then become subject to public scorn (Pretty in Punk, 2000, 168). In other words, punks are seen as the "peepers."
However, the deviance perspective cannot fully account for the hostility and harassment punks experienced in the early years of punk here in the Bay Area, a period in which popular media attention was sporadic and comparatively low in contrast to the crisis in public perception depicted in Cohen's Folk Devils and Moral Panics, which was spurred on by a highly publicized clash between Mods and Rockers. It also fails to capture the nuances of my own personal experiences of being a punk in San Francisco's scene from 1980-1985. From the late '70s, when I bought my first punk albums, to the early '80s, I saw a slow but gradual increase in the local media coverage of punk as a newly emerging music scene with "bizarre" fashions. Yet, despite our initially small numbers and the absence of news reports about any purported delinquency, our presence was routinely met with public derision, hostility, threats, and violence. Hence, although the deviance model certainly accounts for the common tendency to view youth subcultures in terms of delinquency, it fails to fully capture the phenomenology of appearing "punk." What was it that pissed people off about our appearance? Our detractors often couldn't articulate just what it was that they found so offensive.
Existentialism offers some insights. Punk rock is a consciously reflexive culture: its purpose is to illuminate features of the dominant culture. This "problematizes" many traditional sociological approaches to punk. It is axiomatic that all subcultures are an inherent part of the dominant cultures in which they arise. The relationship between the two is thus a complex, dynamic, dialectical relationship, with both incorporating, influencing, accommodating, rejecting, and reflecting each other back at one another. In other words, society gets the deviance it "deserves." (Schur, 1980, 22) However, unlike most youth subcultures, punk's criticism of the dominant culture and embrace of certain aspects of "deviant" identity were consciously assumed and aestheticized as a form of resistance. Thus, rather than merely occupying the deviant keyhole "peeper" role depicted by Sartre, punks are also the gazers i.e., the witnesses to society's failings. In turn, this stance of "witnessing," was deliberately incorporated into a blend of music, art, and appearance that was literally writ large on the body, for a total aesthetic and highly public display. In the early days of punk, this aesthetic, while not yet labeled as "delinquent" and only seemingly "political" in some vague (and often contradictory) manner, was commonly viewed as highly viscerally provocative. This is because, according to Sartre, there is a dynamic that exists between the seer and the seen, one that necessarily involves the struggle for power.
This paper puts an existential focus on the interactions between punks and non-punks, who often failed to appreciate punk's social reflexivity, since it implicated their own, perhaps unreflectively held, values and conventions. Utilizing philosophical, sociological, and historical literature, media reports, court transcripts, punk lyrics, and personal anecdotes, I examine the deeply existential politics of punk's aesthetic self-presentation and its role in punk victimization, with the aim of articulating why punk has long been seen as a form of "personal politics."
The Path of Philosophy introduces college students to the study of philosophy through a compelling narrative in which the world's most important philosophers appear as characters. Framed by the concept of Wondrous Distress, the text traces the history of western philosophy from its beginnings in ancient Greece to contemporary developments in the modern world. Threads running through the text demonstrate how philosophy is unique and distinct from religion and science, while at the same time showing how all three disciplines are interrelated. Exceptionally well written, and unusual in its cohesiveness, the text leaves readers with a vivid picture of philosophy as a unique and important field of study.
Papers by Juneko J Robinson
Having appeared in no less than four English-language film incarnations, the Invasion of the Body Snatchers series is a prime example of a horror/sci-fi story that we are drawn to again and again precisely because it speaks to these gnawing, existential concerns. Since the first film debuted over fifty years ago, much as been written about the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Commentators typically discuss how the film represents the decline of community, modern alienation, provincialism, a growing distrust of authority, science and the medical community, and fears of the communist threat, and of McCarthyism run amuck.
However, while each of these views has merit what ties all of these various analyses together is that they all stem from our most deep-seated and universal fear; that of the self dissolution that comes with death, of which the fear of inundation, of coerced transformation, of being absorbed into something larger than ourselves, and the loss of self-identity are merely variations.
Humans are apparently alone in their ability to anticipate their own deaths. From the moment of birth, we are in the process of dying. This awareness is so pervasive; forming such an integral part of the human psyche that even metaphorical death evokes the real thing.
Metaphorical death, such as tremendous personal transformation can be experienced as a threat to our physical and mental integrity. While personal transformation can be desirable, we are highly ambivalent about it. Such changes, even if for the better, will result in a fundamental alteration of the self. We fear we will no longer recognize ourselves. In the Invasion films, these fears manifest themselves at times of tremendous uncertainty; from the anxiety about conformity and loss of vitality in the '50s, to the political cynicism and self-analysis of the '70s, from Gulf War I and fears about emerging viruses of the early '90s, to the collective American trauma of September 11.
Each of the Invasion films plays with these fears in slightly different ways, each reflecting the particular anxieties of their times, but underlying all of them is an awareness that we are our own worst enemies and that our loved ones and beloved institutions are instrumental to our self-destruction.
Book Reviews by Juneko J Robinson