scholarly journals The Inadequate Life: Rural Industrial Pollution and Lay Epidemiology in China

2013 ◽  
Vol 214 ◽  
pp. 302-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Lora-Wainwright

AbstractBased on fieldwork in a heavily industrialized Yunnan village, this article examines how villagers understand and respond to pollution-related health risks. Building on Robert Weller's (2006) concept of environmental consciousness, it shows that Baocun villagers have developed an acute environmental health consciousness. However, despite earlier instances of collective activism, they no longer act as a community to oppose the harm to their bodies caused by pollution. The article investigates the role of uncertainty surrounding illness causation in deterring action. It argues that uncertainty about pollution's effects on health is reinforced by the social, political and economic contexts and developments in the past few decades. As a result, villagers engage in a form of “lay epidemiology” to make sense of the effects of pollution on their health, but not in a “popular epidemiology” consisting of collective action against presumed health damages. The article concludes with some thoughts on how locals act within and despite uncertainty.

Sexualities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 136346072110136
Author(s):  
Caroline Bem ◽  
Susanna Paasonen

Sexuality, as it relates to video games in particular, has received increasing attention over the past decade in studies of games and play, even as the notion of play remains relatively underexplored within sexuality studies. This special issue asks what shift is effected when sexual representation, networked forms of connecting and relating, and the experimentation with sexual likes are approached through the notion of play. Bringing together the notions of sex and play, it both foregrounds the role of experimentation and improvisation in sexual pleasure practices and inquires after the rules and norms that these are embedded in. Contributors to this special issue combine the study of sexuality with diverse theoretical conceptions of play in order to explore the entanglements of affect, cognition, and the somatic in sexual lives, broadening current understandings of how these are lived through repetitive routines and improvisational sprees alike. In so doing, they focus on the specific sites and scenes where sexual play unfolds (from constantly morphing online pornographic archives to on- and offline party spaces, dungeons, and saunas), while also attending to the props and objects of play (from sex toys and orgasmic vocalizations to sensation-enhancing chemicals and pornographic imageries), as well as the social and technological settings where these activities occur. This introduction offers a brief overview of the rationale of thinking sex in and as play, before presenting the articles that make up this special issue.


2011 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 9-16
Author(s):  
Mayo Fuster Morell

In order for online communities to assemble and grow, some basic infrastructure is necessary that makes possible the aggregation of the collective action. There is a very intimate and complex relationship between the technological infrastructure and the social character of the community which uses it. Today, most infrastructure is provided by corporations and the contrast between community and corporate dynamics is becoming increasingly pronounced. But rather than address the issues, the corporations are actively obfuscating it. Wikiwashing refers to a strategy of corporate infrastructure providers where practices associated to their role of profit seeking corporations (such as abusive terms of use, privacy violation, censorship, and use of voluntary work for profit purposes, among others) that would be seen as unethical by the communities they enable are concealed by promoting a misleading image of themselves associated with the general values of wikis and Wikipedia (such as sharing and collaboration, openness and transparency). The empirical analysis is based on case studies (Facebook , Yahoo! and Google) and triangulation of several methods.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Safy Mahmoud ◽  
Hoda Mitkees

Malaysia has adopted several developmental plans since 1969 starting with the New Economic Policy (NEP), passing by the National Development Plan (NDP) and ending with the Vision 2020 adopted in 1991 under the rule of Mahathir Mohammed (1981-2003), whereby Malaysia has aimed to become a developed country by 2020. Looking for the future, Malaysia 2020 should build upon the older developmental plans; however there are some new elements that need to be considered if Malaysia is to continue on its successful developmental path. This paper aims at focusing on the issues that still need to be considered in Vision 2020 from an outsider point of view. This paper addresses the questions of what Malaysia’s economic plans adopted in the past which were able to achieve high economic growth rates while preserving at the same time the social aspects. And the paper focuses on trade policy in Malaysia under Mahathir rule, identifying how was it shaped and how likely it will continue in 2020. The paper identifies the challenges likely to be faced by Malaysia in the coming period and how such issues should be tackled in Vision 2020.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hana Shepherd

Organizational practices are important dimensions of the social contexts that shape relationship formation. In workplaces, the formation of relationships among coworkers are resources for personal outcomes, and they can be channels through which workers might identify common grievances, form workplace solidarity, and engage in collective action. Using a unique dataset of retail workers across the United States, The Shift Project, this paper examines two potential pathways by which organizational practices common in precarious jobs in the retail industry in the U.S. might shape the formation of workplace relationships. I find evidence of the role of both pathways: practices that limit the opportunities for regular contact and practices that negatively impact the conditions of contact among employees are both associated with fewer workplace ties. I discuss the implications of these findings for the study of collective action, and network ecology.


Politeja ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2(65)) ◽  
pp. 189-204
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Marcol

The Role of Language in Releasing from Inherited Traumas. Negotiations of the Social Position of the Silesian Minority in Serbian Banat The aim of the paper is to show the dependence between language, collective memory (also post-memory) and sense of identity. This issue is analysed using the example of an ethnic minority living in the village of Ostojićevo (Banat, Serbia) called ‘Toutowie.’ Their ancestors came in the 19th century from Wisła (Silesian Cieszyn, Poland); they left their homes because of great hunger and were looking for jobs in Banat. Narratives about the past contain traumatic experiences of the past generations transmitted in the Silesian dialect and constituting communicative memory. At the same time, a new Polish national identity is being constructed, supported by institutions and authorities; it carries a new image of the world and creates a new cultural memory. This new identity – shaped on the basis of national categories – leads to changes of its self-identification and gives the opportunity to raise its social position in the multi-ethnic Banat community.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0142064X2110647
Author(s):  
Katja Kujanpää

When Paul and the author of 1 Clement write letters to Corinth to address crises of leadership, both discuss Moses’ παρρησία (frankness and openness), yet they evaluate it rather differently. In this article, I view both authors as entrepreneurs of identity and explore the ways in which they try to shape their audience’s social identity and influence their behaviour in the crisis by selectively retelling scriptural narratives related to Moses. The article shows that social psychological theories under the umbrella term of the social identity approach help to illuminate the active role of leaders in identity construction as well as the processes of retelling the past in order to mobilize one’s audience.


Author(s):  
Michael P. Roller

The conclusion revisits the three major inquiries addressed in the text, drawing together the evidence and contexts provided in the previous seven chapters. The first investigates the role of objective settings, such as the systemic and symbolic violence of landscapes and semiotic systems of racialization in justifying or triggering moments of explicit subjective violence such as the Lattimer Massacre. The second inquiry, traces the trajectory of immigrant groups into contemporary patriotic neoliberal subjects. In other terms, it asks how an oppressed group can become complicit with oppression later in history. The third inquiry traces the development of soft forms of social control and coercion across the longue durée of the twentieth century. Specifically, it asks how vertically integrated economic and governmental structures such as neoliberalism and governmentality which serve to stabilize the social antagonisms of the past are enunciated in everyday life.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle P. Ochoa ◽  
Eric Julian Manalastas ◽  
Makiko Deguchi ◽  
Winnifred R. Louis

Men have an important role as allies in reducing discrimination against women. Following the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA), we examined whether men's identification with women would predict their allied collective action, alongside moral convictions, efficacy, and anger. We also examined whether identification with their own ingroup would decrease their willingness to improve women's situation. We tested the SIMCA, extended to consider ingroup identification among men, in Japan (N = 103) and the Philippines (N = 131). Consistent with the SIMCA, moral convictions and group efficacy predicted men's willingness to engage in collective action to fight discrimination against women. However, anger was not significant, and identification with the advantaged and disadvantaged groups played different roles in the two countries. We discuss the possible role of norms and legitimacy in society in explaining the pattern of results.


2001 ◽  
Vol 46 (S9) ◽  
pp. 107-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Potukuchi Swarnalatha

This paper examines the form, content, and role of petitions in the context of protests occasioned by the handloom weavers of colonial Andhra, particularly the northern districts of the northern Coromandel region, between 1770 and 1820. Minor and major protests and revolts by weavers erupted with increasing frequency from around the middle of the eighteenth century, whenever their socioeconomic structures and conditions of work and trade were under threat from the old and new elites, as well as from the commercial interests of the colonial state. On these occasions, weavers expressed their grievances through petitions and representations, either in combination with other strategies or independently. These petitions therefore offer opportunities to study and identify the economic and social conditions that prompted weavers to resort to collective action. Careful analyses of the petitions yield considerable insights with respect to the causes of the protests; their spatial and social diffusion; the social profile of contending parties, and their mentalities; the changing organizational structure of the textile industry; the petitions' consequences; and, finally, the attitude of the colonial state towards these petitions.


ICL Journal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shams Al Din Al Hajjaji

AbstractThe social contract in Egypt has changed dramatically five times in the past decade. Mubarak made substantial amendments in 2005 and 2007, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) ratified the 2011 Constitutional Declaration, the Muslim Brotherhood adopted the 2012 Constitution and, finally, Al-Sisi/Mansur proclaimed the 2014 Constitution. Currently, Egypt faces social, economic, political and legal problems. The Egyptian judiciary plays a vital role in the inability to respond to these problems. This research argues that the call for judicial reform should be revived to face contemporary challenges. These challenges are the result of the absence of serious judicial reform in the past four decades. The 1973 Judicial Authority Law was a result of the social contract presented in the 1971 Constitution. The research lists the reasons for adopting a new judicial authority law. In the first section, the social aspect is embodied in the protection of freedoms, judicial transparency and judicial legitimacy. The second section dealing with economic reasons for reform is divided into two parts. The first deals with Independent Bodies and Regulatory Agencies. The second issue reveals the role of the judiciary in the successive failures of the IBRA. The third section deals with the role of the judiciary in political life. The fourth section presents the legal reasons for judicial reform.


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