Constructing the digital self in the Global South

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baird Campbell ◽  
Nell Haynes

Abstract The papers in this special section examine how people in various contexts of the Global South “construct the self” in online spaces. With examples from Chile, Senegal, and Trinidad, the papers show the wide range of discursive practices, encompassing the textual and the aesthetic, which individuals use to enact gendered and sexual selves online. By privileging gender and sexuality as central components of selfhood, we draw from the longstanding attention paid to gender and sexuality in linguistic studies of identification (see Bucholtz & Hall 2004). In placing this concept within digital worlds, we pay attention to the ways in which daily life is now lived and experienced online. Authors in this issue think critically about practices of self-formation and the performance of gender and sexuality that differ from those that have normalized in the Global North, considering both revolutionary possibility, and re-entrenchment of constraint.

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaspal Naveel Singh

The Global South is a postcolonial imagined community that bears the potential to imagine powerful south-south solidarity between the struggles for decoloniality of diverse populations across the world. To prepare our field’s pan-global future, this year-in-review overrepresents literature on gender, sexuality and language from/on the Global South. This decolonial move aims to notice and promote southern tactics of resistance, southern epistemologies and southern theories and evaluate what can be learnt if we look southward on our way forward. Some literature from the Global North will be considered too. The review is structured using three overlapping foci: (1) embodied and linguistic resistance, (2) mediatisation and scale and (3) fragile masculinities. I conclude by suggesting that our research should stay locally situated and globally radical.


2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-149
Author(s):  
H Bao

In this article, through a critical reading of the published diaries written by gay ‘patients’ who received aversion therapy in south China in the 1990s, I examine how the transformation of subjectivities from gay to straight was made possible by such ‘self-technologizing’ practices as writing and communication. I also consider the centrality of the body and affect in the process of subject (trans)formation, and ask how a new, coherent and authentic ‘self’ was fabricated through bodily and affective experiences. This discussion not only reveals the social construction of the self as central to China’s postsocialist governmentality, but also the central role that gender and sexuality play in processes of self-formation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Inka Stock ◽  
Ayşen Üstübici ◽  
Susanne U. Schultz

AbstractThe term “externalization” is used by a range of migration scholars, policy makers and the media to describe the extension of border and migration controls beyond the so-called ‘migrant receiving nations’ in the Global North and into neighboring countries or sending states in the Global South. It refers to a wide range of practices from controls of borders, rescue operations, to measures addressing the drivers of migration. The ambition of this Special Issue is to contribute to the mapping of the responses to externalization dynamics. The different articles in this volume are chosen to exemplify some of these processes at different levels of analysis. Through diverse disciplinary perspectives, the authors show how practices of externalization are being confronted, succumbed, modified and contested by individual (would-be) migrants, civil society actors and the host states’ institutions in different parts of the globe. In an effort to move away from a sole focus on border zones in the Global North, the Special Issue contributes to emerging literature shifting the locus of analysis to places in the Global South, which are conventionally understood as “transit” or “sending” countries in Africa, America as well as within Europe itself.


2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 398-404
Author(s):  
Diana Portan ◽  
Gabriela Strnad ◽  
Andrei Marian Feier ◽  
Octav Marius Russu

A class of intensively studied materials with application in areas where complex structures with precise geometry are needed (i.e. electronics), are the self-organized nanomaterials. Polymer, metallic and composite self-organized nanomaterials have been in researchers� attention the last decades. They are not only appealing scientifically, by revealing the intrinsic atomic and molecular interactions that might be difficult to detect otherwise but may also hold the key for the development of novel functional structures and devices. The different mechanisms and forces involved in the self-formation of organized nanostructures are discussed in the present manuscript. Further on, key formation fundamentals involved in the fabrication of self-organized nanostructures are described. Between the known manufacturing methods, the electrochemical synthesis is considered extremely simple and cost effective. On the other hand, it involves a wide range of synthesis parameters (e.g. voltage, electrolyte type, temperature, experiment duration, pH etc.) that may lead to the formation of ingenious structures with complex geometries at different length scales. Finally, some representative scientific investigations are mentioned together with applications of self-organized nanomaterials in different engineering and life areas.


2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongwei Bao

In this article, through a critical reading of the published diaries written by gay ‘patients’ who received aversion therapy in south China in the 1990s, I examine how the transformation of subjectivities from gay to straight was made possible by such ‘self-technologising’ practices as writing and communication. I also consider the centrality of the body and affect in the process of subject (trans)formation, and ask how a new, coherent and authentic ‘self’ was fabricated through bodily and affective experiences. This discussion not only reveals the social construction of the self as central to China’s postsocialist governmentality, but also the central role that gender and sexuality play in processes of self-formation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
B Camminga

In 2011, Miss Sahhara, a transgender woman from Nigeria with UK refugee status, was crowned First Princess at the world’s largest and most prestigious beauty pageant for transgender women—Miss International Queen. The then Cultural Minister of Nigeria when contacted for comment responded that if she was transgender, she could not be Nigerian, and if she was Nigerian, she could not be transgender—a tacit denial of her very existence. In recent years, LGBT people “fleeing Africa” to the “Global North” has become a common media trope. Responses to this, emanating from a variety of African voices, have provided a more nuanced reading of sexuality. What has been absent from these readings has been the role of gender expression, particularly a consideration of transgender experiences. I understand transgender refugees to have taken up “lines of flight” such that, in a Deleuzian sense, they do not only flee persecution in countries of origin but also recreate or speak back to systems of control and oppressive social conditions. Some transgender people who have left, like Miss Sahhara, have not gone silently, using digital means to project a new political visibility of individuals, those who are both transgender and African, back at the African continent. In Miss Sahhara’s case, this political visibility has not gone unnoticed in the Nigerian tabloid press. Drawing on the story of Miss Sahhara, this paper maps these flows and contraflows, asking what they might reveal about configurations of nationhood, gender and sexuality as they are formed at both the digital and physical interstices between Africa and the Global North.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-21
Author(s):  
Todd Backes ◽  
Charlene Takacs

There are a wide range of options for individuals to choose from in order to engage in aerobic exercise; from outdoor running to computer controlled and self-propelled treadmills. Recently, self-propelled treadmills have increased in popularity and provide an alternative to a motorized treadmill. Twenty subjects (10 men, 10 women) ranging in age from 19-23 with a mean of 20.4 ± 0.8 SD were participants in this study. The subjects visited the laboratory on three occasions. The purpose of the first visit was to familiarize the subject with the self-propelled treadmill (Woodway Curve 3.0). The second visit, subjects were instructed to run on the self-propelled treadmill for 3km at a self-determined pace. Speed data were collected directly from the self-propelled treadmill. The third visit used speed data collected during the self-propelled treadmill run to create an identically paced 3km run for the subjects to perform on a motorized treadmill (COSMED T150). During both the second and third visit, oxygen consumption (VO2) and respiratory exchange ratio (R) data were collected with COSMED’s Quark cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) metabolic mixing chamber system. The VO2 mean value for the self-propelled treadmill (44.90 ± 1.65 SE ml/kg/min) was significantly greater than the motorized treadmill (34.38 ± 1.39 SE ml/kg/min). The mean R value for the self-propelled treadmill (0.91 ± 0.01 SE) was significantly greater than the motorized treadmill (0.86 ± 0.01 SE). Our study demonstrated that a 3km run on a self-propelled treadmill does elicit a greater physiological response than a 3km run at on a standard motorized treadmill. Self-propelled treadmills provide a mode of exercise that offers increased training loads and should be considered as an alternative to motorized treadmills.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-56
Author(s):  
Thomas Alkemeyer

Two forms or rather perspectives of observations appear alongside practice theories: The first perspective can be called the „theatre perspective“: practice here is observed as a regular, spatiotemporally ordered, socially structured, and therefore recognizable historical form of „practical doings and sayings“, in which participants are understood as mere carriers of practices and their bodies as the raw material for processes of formation. In the other perspective, understood as the perspective of the participants themselves, practices come into view as ongoing, conflictual, and contingent accomplishments, in which participants occur as intelligently collaborating contributors with so called „lived bodies“. These bodies are affectable, sites of experience, and media of a sensitivity that allow an embodied self to orientate itself (with)in a practice. This paper proposes a methodological mediation of both perspectives by taking into account both a sociological analysis of discipline, formation, or adjustment, and the reflexive sensing in action, which can be modeled phenomenologically. Thus, a „lived-body-in-accomplishment“ comes into view that serves the material basis of subjectivation procceses, i. e. the (self-)formation of a constitutionally conditioned (political) agency.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Wiesner

With a conscious attempt to contribute to contemporary discussions in mad/trans/queer/monster studies, the monograph approaches complex postmodern theories and contextualizes them from an autoethnographic methodological perspective. As the self-explanatory subtitle reads, the book introduces several topics as revelatory fields for the author’s self-exploration at the moment of an intense epistemological and ontological crisis. Reflexively written, it does not solely focus on a personal experience, as it also aims at bridging the gap between the individual and the collective in times of global uncertainty. There are no solid outcomes defined; nevertheless, the narrative points to a certain—more fluid—way out. Through introducing alternative ways of hermeneutics and meaning-making, the book offers a synthesis of postmodern philosophy and therapy, evolutionary astrology as a symbolic language, embodied inquiry, and Buddhist thought that together represent a critical attempt to challenge the pathologizing discursive practices of modern disciplines during the neoliberal capitalist era.


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