scholarly journals Rainbow Flag and Belongings/Disbelongings: Öckerö Pride and Reclaim Pride in Gothenburg, Sweden 2019

Author(s):  
Cathrin Wasshede

Abstract In spite of the rainbow flag’s importance as a symbol for transnational queer belonging and its meanings for the survival of queers all over the world, much critical queer Anglo-Saxon research and activism concerning the rainbow flag and the celebration of Pride claims that it has lost its radical potential through processes of normalisation, mainstreaming, homonationalism and commercialisation. In order to address other queer political issues, alternative Pride events are organized in parallel with conventional Pride celebrations. This chapter will discuss two Pride events held in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2019, Reclaim Pride and Öckerö Pride, drawing on auto-ethnographic methods. It will reflect on two connected questions: What meanings, emotions, actions and temporalities are (re)produced as a result of the relationship between the events, the rainbow flag, the concept of Pride and the activists/participants—including the author? In what ways do the rainbow flag and the concept of Pride work as co-producers of belongings as well as disbelongings—and how does the author’s position as a Swedish, middle-class, white, lesbian, feminist, mother, former activist and now sociologist affect her feelings of belonging and disbelonging? It is shown that the rainbow flag is a very topical and heated cultural artefact in the Swedish political arena, in which racism, homophobia and Islamophobia are growing. The author’s experiences and emotions at the two Pride events reflect the ambivalent struggle that takes place at the borders of belonging and disbelonging. Temporality and space are important aspects of the contextualisation that needs to be applied in order to grasp the different effects that processes of inclusion and exclusion have on queer people in different places and situations.

Author(s):  
H. S. Jones

E. A. Freeman is best remembered as an historian, but he was also an extensive contributor to the ‘higher journalism’ of the mid-Victorian period. Yet his prolific journalistic output has never attracted sustained attention from historians. This essay analyses the relationship between Freeman’s historical work and his journalism in order to explore his place in Victorian intellectual life. It asks how far his journalism was reliant upon an authority derived from his distinction as an historian. While Freeman drew rather promiscuously on a number of analytically distinct ways of understanding the relationship between history and politics, he responded to accusations of ‘antiquarianism’ and ‘historical-mindedness’ by clarifying what he saw as the role of the historian in public life. Since history, he thought, would inevitably be deployed in political controversy, the important thing was that historical error should be expunged in order to clarify political issues.


2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Habibul Haque Khondker

This review essay discusses works of a leading sociologist and a leading economist on the subject of inequality and globalization. The books raise fresh ideas of inequality in the context of globalization by raising questions on the relationship between globalization and inequality throughout history. Although Therborn raises some fundamental questions about inequality, problematizes the concept, and broadens the discussion by adding multiple dimensions to it, Bourguignon’s study deepens our understanding of the problem of inequality by presenting the paradox of its linkage with globalization, which in the last century reduced international inequality while it widened intranational inequality, and the two processes are interrelated. Bourguignon suggests that the growing intranational inequality that threatens economic, political, and social stability can be overcome by concerted efforts of the states. Therborn pins his hope in the rising middle class across the world and their solidarity, which could create a more egalitarian society.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 212
Author(s):  
Ângela Leite ◽  
Diogo Guedes Vidal ◽  
Maria Alzira Pimenta Dinis ◽  
Hélder Fernando Pedrosa e Sousa ◽  
Paulo Dias

This study presents a review about what great figures of history thought about the existence of God and a worldwide comparison between religious believers and non-believers using the World Social Survey (WSS) database, comprising a sample of 90,350 respondents. Results reveal that most people believe in the existence of God and consider that God is important and very important in their lives. Believers are mainly women; younger than non-believers; mostly married; less educated than non-believers; most of whom work, though fewer hours than non-believers; and perceive themselves as belonging to the middle class. There are more believers with no formal education than non-believers. The diversity of religious believers and non-believers, visible in the perspectives of humanity’s important personalities, mirrors the diversity of ordinary people towards the relevance of God. The results obtained point to a correlation between the belief in God and the studied sociodemographic variables but also suggest that the difference between believers and non-believers may be artificial, having resulted from the adopted methodology. The relationship found between being a believer and defending traditional values also corroborates with previous studies, suggesting that humankind needs God to give meaning to the world around them, namely, in morality and conduct terms.


decency, compassion. Neighbours resembles the down-home, wholesome populism of a Frank Capra comedy except that its suburban protagonists are saved the trouble of traveling to and from a big city to discover their true values. 8 Differences are resolved, dissolved, or repressed The characters are “almost compulsively articulate about problems and feelings” (Tyrer 1987). Crises are solved quickly, usually amicably. Conflict is thus managed almost psychotherapeutically by and within the inner circle of family, and the outer circle of Ramsay Street. Witness the episode broadcast on April 23, 1992 in Australia: after fire destroys much of Gaby’s clothes boutique, three female neighbors remake the lost stock, while three male neighbors clear up the debris from the shop. As the theme song has it: “Neighbours should be there for one another.” Incursions of conflict from the social world beyond these charmed circles are treated tokenistically or spirited away. The program blurs or represses differences of gender politics, sexual preference, age, and ethnicity. Domestic violence and homosexuality, male or female, are unknown. Age differences are subsumed within family love and tolerance. Aboriginal characters manage a two-episode plot line at most (Craven 1989: 18), and Greeks, despite the real Melbourne being the third largest Greek city in the world, figure rarely. Neighbours-watchers could likewise be forgiven for not knowing that Melbourne has the largest Jewish community in Australia. The program elides questions of disability, alcoholism, or religious difference. It displaces drug addiction on to a friend outside immediate family circles (Cousin 1992). Unemployment as a social issue is subordinated to the humanist characterization of Brad, for instance, as dopey, happy-go-lucky surfie. Neighbours counterposes suburban escapism to the high-gloss escapism of Santa Barbara. 9 Depoliticized middle-class citizenship These “cosy parish pump narratives,” as Ian Craven calls them, depoliticize the everyday (Craven 1989: 21). Such good middle-class suburban citizenship is roundly condemned by no less than Germaine Greer: The world of Neighbours is the world of the detergent commercial; everything from the kitchen worktops to the S-bend is squeaky clean. Everyone’s hair and underwear is freshly laundered. No one is shabby or eccentric; no one is poor or any colour but white. Neighbours is the Australian version of the American dream, owner-occupied, White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant paradise. (Greer 1989) In this blithely comfortable middle-class ethos, the characters seem never to have problems with mortgage repayments. Commenting on the opening episodes of Neighbours, a British critic underlines its property-owning values:

2002 ◽  
pp. 111-111

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 1064-1082 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josep Garcia-Blandon ◽  
Josep M. Argilés-Bosch ◽  
Diego Ravenda

This article examines the relationship between CEO characteristics and firm performance with a sample formed by the best performing CEOs in the world according to Harvard Business Review. The empirical analysis is based on descriptive statistics techniques and studies the universe of CEOs included in the 2016 ranking “The Best-Performing CEOs in the World” released by Harvard Business Review. Moreover, it addresses performance at various levels: financial performance, environmental, social and governance performance (ESG) and overall performance. The findings of the study show: 1) a strongly negative association between financial and ESG performance; 2) outsider CEOs outperform insider CEOs in overall performance; 3) CEOs with engineering degrees show significantly higher ESG performance; 4) CEOs with longer tenures in the firm present stronger financial performance though weaker ESG performance; and 5) the CEO’s country of origin emerges as an important driver to explain the different types of performance. Results in this field contradict the conventional wisdom of Anglo-Saxon CEOs as the best performers CEOs.


2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 198-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Kelly

Is civility an end in itself, or a means to other ends? The relationship between means and ends marks theoretical debates about the meanings and implications of civility. This article addresses how these tensions played out in the context of the particular forms of civility promoted by pacifists in Second World War Britain. More specifically, it focuses on the experiences of those pacifists who set up community farms as a way to try and merge both means and ends through a form of sociality marked by love, mutual labour and conscience. The paper makes two arguments. First, the attempt to merge means and ends meant that the compromises of the present could be hard to overcome. The distinctly pacifist civility of Second World War Britain tended to reproduce particular middle class and masculine ways of being in the world. Second, it was the very tension between means and ends, however, that gave claims of pacifist civility fraught potency. For many British pacifists, pacifist forms of civility were an attempt to propose an alternative, not despite, but because of the space between their aspiration for cooperation and love, and the disappointments of experience. Pacifist civility was therefore understood as a form of potential. It is also important to note though that potentiality is marked by two possibilities: the potential to do; and the potential not to do. It is on this delicate balance between the inequities of the here and now and the aspired for future that pacifist civility stood.


Human Affairs ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Passini

AbstractIn the past few years, a wave of protest has spread across the world. The particularity of these uprisings lies in the way the Internet is used to support them. Scholars have analyzed these movements as being closely related to a generation that relies on the Internet as a means of organizing themselves as a force of social change. That is, the Internet is seen as a way of promoting the active participation of young people in political issues. Public opinion and the mass media hail the Arab Spring revolutions as movements beneficial to the democratization of oppressive regimes. By contrast, when disobedient movements emerge in democratic countries, they are generally more cautious in evaluating these movements as enriching democracy. This cautious opinion also concerns the use of social media. In this article, the so-called Twitter revolutions are discussed in light of the theories of social psychology that analyze the relationship between disobedience and democracy.


2006 ◽  
pp. 133-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Arystanbekov

Kazakhstan’s economic policy results in 1995-2005 are considered in the article. In particular, the analysis of the relationship between economic growth and some indicators of nation states - population, territory, direct access to the World Ocean, and extraction of crude petroleum - is presented. Basic problems in the sphere of economic policy in Kazakhstan are formulated.


Author(s):  
Emma Simone

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.


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