The special theme of this issue of Soundings is "transversal politics"--a term which attempts to conceptualize a democratic practice of talking across difference. The idea is to find ways of doing things which involve neither the imposition of a single universal which refuses to recognize that there really are "differences," nor the retreat into those differences as tightly-bound, exclusivist and essentialist; to find creative ways of crossing (and possibly redrawing) the borders that mark significant politicized differences; and to find forms of empathy not based on sameness, ways of shifting which don't involve tearing up your roots.
Pragna Patel Knihy
