scholarly journals In the wake of logistics: Situated afterlives of race and labour on the Magdalena River

2020 ◽  
pp. 026377582097094
Author(s):  
Austin Zeiderman
Keyword(s):  
Racial Formations ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Fluvial Transport ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
Magdalena River ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Racial Hierarchies ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Racial Slavery

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted aboard a cargo boat on Colombia’s Magdalena River, and on historical accounts of fluvial transport, this article examines the racial formations on which logistics depends. Logistics is organized around flows at the heart of capitalist modernity, which are made possible by labour regimes whose racial underpinnings have both persisted and changed over time. Tracking continuities and divergences in riverboat work along the Magdalena River, I propose that our understanding of logistics is enriched by attending to historical articulations of race and labour. Inspired by scholars who reckon with the afterlives of racial slavery as well as by those who track precisely how that legacy unfolds in geographically and historically situated ways, I propose the analytic of situated afterlives, which focuses attention on the persistence of racial hierarchies and on their perpetual instability.

Feeling at Home in the Neighborhood: Belonging, the House and the Plaza in Helsinki and Madrid

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 213-237
Author(s):  
Kaisa Kuurne (Ketokivi) ◽  
M. Victoria Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Social Belonging ◽  
Everyday Politics ◽  
Feeling At Home ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Web ◽  
At Home

Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork in two historic, attractive, and socially mixed neighborhoods, Kumpula in Helsinki and Malasaña in Madrid, this paper examines what makes people feel at home (or not) in their neighborhood. Marrying the literatures on social belonging and materiality, we analyze the interactions through which local places, people, and materials become familiar and personal. We identify the house in Kumpula and the plaza in Madrid as “everyday totems” that weave local life and community together. In both neighborhoods, the testimonies of home are accompanied with an attachment to the local totem and related lifestyle, but the house and the plaza generate different everyday politics of belonging. House–based belonging in Kumpula requires resources and long–term engagement that over time contributes to a personal, but rather exclusive web of belonging. Plaza–based belonging in Malasaña is more inclusive and elastic, but joining the web of belonging requires time and sociability.

scholarly journals What is Communicable? Unaccounted Injuries and “Catching” Diabetes in an Illegible Epidemic

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Moran-Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Disease Transmission ◽  
Communicable Disease ◽  
Treatment Access ◽  
Infectious Disease Transmission ◽  
The World ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Non Communicable Disease

Long-accepted models of causality cast diseases into the binary of either “contagious” or “non-communicable,” typically with institutional resources focused primarily on interrupting infectious disease transmission. But in southern Belize, as in much of the world today, epidemic diabetes has become a leading cause of death and a notorious contributor to organ failure and amputated limbs. This ethnographic essay follows caregivers’ and families’ work to survive in-between public health categories, and asks what responses a bifurcated model of infectious versus non-communicable disease structures or incapacitates in practice. It proposes an alternative focus on diabetes as a “para-communicable” condition—materially transmitted as bodies and ecologies intimately shape each other over time, with unequal and compounding effects for historically situated groups of people. The article closes by querying how communicability relates to community, and why it matters to reframe narratives about contributing causalities in relation to struggles for treatment access.

On the ethical dimension of irregular migrants’ lives: Affect, becoming and information

2020 ◽  
pp. 204382062094006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Tedeschi
Keyword(s):  
Affective State ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Ethical Dimension ◽  
Irregular Migration ◽  
Irregular Migrants ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Over Time

This article operationalises Simondon’s theory of becoming and Deleuze and Spinoza’s ethics and unfolds their conceptualisations in the lives of a group of irregular migrants in Finland. From an ontological and ontogenetic perspective, individuals and their environment are always in a non-complete, non-linear and ethically affective state of becoming. In this sense, migrant bodies register the positive and negative affections accumulated over time, and, via information, make them a material, yet unfinished, and ready to be challenged again, part of their becoming. Applying these concepts to ethnographic fieldwork, this article highlights three dimensions of the observed irregular migrants’ becoming: their relentless efforts of becoming themselves through hardships; non-linear tensions with disparate realities, such as the bureaucratic procedures, and the negative affections the latter entail; and the struggle towards positive affections in temporary stabilities (e.g. in community life). In focusing on the processual and ontological making of migrants in their environment, the article contributes to broader debates regarding the non-linear and ethical dimensions of their everyday lives, as well as their capacity of transforming themselves, and aims at opening up dialogues on the significance of an ontogenetic approach to the field of irregular migration and beyond.

The Collective Dynamics of Genocidal Violence in Cambodia, 1975–1979

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 411-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter B. Owens
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Central State ◽  
Collective Dynamics ◽  
Complex Interactions ◽  
Individual Effects ◽  
Local Patterns ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Over Time

While previous research conceptualizes genocide as an outcome of complex interactions between multiple social factors, the specific ways in which these factors interact and combine with each other, and how their individual effects may be mediated through such interaction, remain to be empirically specified. Using historical accounts given by survivors of the Cambodian genocide, and drawing from insights in the collective action literature, this study presents a configurational and comparative analysis of the collective dynamics of genocidal violence. The analysis focuses on how changing local patterns of relational and cognitive collective mechanisms created distinctly local patterns of violence, affecting both levels of victimization and the targeting of different groups over time. While the expansion and consolidation of central state power accounts for a generalized increase in violence, official framing practices mediated how groups became targeted. These findings confirm and extend the insights of other meso-level studies of genocide, and demonstrate the utility of comparative configurational methods for further inquiry.

scholarly journals Classification Accuracy as a Substantive Quantity of Interest: Measuring Polarization in Westminster Systems

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Peterson ◽  
Arthur Spirling
Keyword(s):  
Classification Accuracy ◽  
British Politics ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Technical Performance ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
Parliamentary Systems ◽  
Supervised Learning Algorithms ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Over Time

Measuring the polarization of legislators and parties is a key step in understanding how politics develops over time. But in parliamentary systems—where ideological positions estimated from roll calls may not be informative—producing valid estimates is extremely challenging. We suggest a new measurement strategy that makes innovative use of the “accuracy” of machine classifiers, i.e., the number of correct predictions made as a proportion of all predictions. In our case, the “labels” are the party identifications of the members of parliament, predicted from their speeches along with some information on debate subjects. Intuitively, when the learner is able to discriminate members in the two main Westminster parties well, we claim we are in a period of “high” polarization. By contrast, when the classifier has low accuracy—and makes a relatively large number of mistakes in terms of allocating members to parties based on the data—we argue parliament is in an era of “low” polarization. This approach is fast and substantively valid, and we demonstrate its merits with simulations, and by comparing the estimates from 78 years of House of Commons speeches with qualitative and quantitative historical accounts of the same. As a headline finding, we note that contemporary British politics is approximately as polarized as it was in the mid-1960s—that is, in the middle of the “postwar consensus”. More broadly, we show that the technical performance of supervised learning algorithms can be directly informative about substantive matters in social science.

Origins of the Stoning Punishment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Eltantawi
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Islamic Legal History ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Over Time

This chapter explores the deepest layer of the sunnaic paradigm, the Islamic legal history of the stoning punishment. This chapter contrasts the stoning punishment’s perceived stability and incontavertability among contemporary Northern Nigerians against early Islamic intellectual historical accounts which understand the stoning punishment as highly contested and unstable legally and epistemologically. The chapter surveys early pre-Islamic societies’ legalization of the stoning punishment, including Mesopotamia and Judaic sources, and shows how the punishment made its way into the Islamic tradition. This chapter also surveys Qur’an, hadith, linguistic, aphoristic and Islamic legal treatment of the stoning punishment, and explores the analytic tools used by Islamic jurists to make a debatable punishment legal over time.

Development and Structure of Environmental Worries in Germany 1984–2019

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (5) ◽  
pp. 322-337
Author(s):  
Jörg Hartmann ◽  
Peter Preisendörfer
Keyword(s):  
Older People ◽  
Unemployment Rate ◽  
Environmental Attitudes ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Environmental Movement ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
Survey Question ◽  
Important Group ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Over Time

Abstract Referring to a survey question in the German socio-economic panel, which measures worries about protecting the environment, the article looks at the development of environmental worries in Germany for the timespan 1984–2019. The analyses mainly have descriptive character. We explore several expectations and assumptions discussed in historical accounts of the environmental movement in Germany and in empirical studies on environmental attitudes and their determinants. Results show that the overall development can be divided into a period of rising environmental worries in the 1980s, a considerable decline in the 1990s, and a relative stability since 2000. From 2018 to 2019, however, a sizable upswing can be observed. Environmental worries are associated negatively with the unemployment rate and economic worries over time. In the 1980s and early 1990s, younger people were more worried than older people, but, in the meanwhile, this no longer holds. Education and (less so) income yielded significant differences in the 1980s and 1990s, but also these differences have faded away since 2000. Data confirm that environmental worries are shared more broadly in the population and that previously important group differences are increasingly leveling out.

Reflections on ethnographic fieldwork across a lifetime

Ethnography ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146613812098335
Author(s):  
Joan Gross
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Student ◽  
Digital Communication ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Communication Equipment ◽  
Over Time

In this ‘Tale from the Field’, I reflect on the practice of ethnographic fieldwork with folk puppeteers over time, using my own experiences in a single fieldwork site at two points, 38 years apart. I describe my fieldwork as a graduate student in 1982 and as a professor towards the end of my career in 2020. I reflect on differences based on digital communication equipment and on my own changing positionality. My 2020 fieldwork was interrupted by the covid-19 confinement which adds a new wrinkle to contemporary participant observation.

scholarly journals Sexual Harassment or Volunteer Work?

Intersections ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Lapina
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Volunteer Work ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Racial Formations ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Sexual Services ◽  
Over Time

This article applies the notion of affordance to analyse affective, intersectional emergence of differentiated whiteness in the context of East to West migration after the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. I draw on autoethnography and memory work, juxtaposing encounters with two elderly, white, single and physically impaired Danish men in their homes in 2004 and 2014. Cleaning Ole’s apartment in 2004, I was invited to provide sexual services, passing as a sexualized, too young, unemployable female Eastern European love migrant of limited social value. In contrast, interviewing Carsten for my PhD in 2014, I came across as able-bodied, middle-class researcher, progressively feminine and fluent in, perhaps even, Danish. I heard no sexual undertones in Carsten’s invitation to ‘visit again’, instead perceiving it as a suggestion to become a voluntary visitor. Analyzing the affective flows in these encounters, I trace how markers of difference intersect to afford different whitenesses. I discuss how whiteness functions as an affordance, accumulated over time, emerging in situated, affective encounters and constraining bodies’ possibilities for interactions, movement and becoming. The article contributes to research on whiteness and intersectionality and to scholarship that explores emergence of ‘Europe’ by examining relations between centre/periphery and racial formations.

States of Memory

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Yates
Keyword(s):  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Significant Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
Persian War ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Of Greece ◽  
Over Time

The Persian War was one of the most significant events in ancient history. It halted Persia’s westward expansion, inspired the Golden Age of Greece, and propelled Athens to the heights of power. From the end of the war almost to the end of antiquity, the Greeks and later the Romans recalled the battles and heroes of this war with unabated zeal. The resulting monuments and narratives have long been used to elucidate the history of the war itself, but they have only recently begun to be used to explore how the conflict was remembered over time. In the present study, Yates demonstrates (1) that the Greeks recalled the Persian War as members of their respective poleis, not collectively as Greeks, (2) that the resulting differences were extensive and fiercely contested, and (3) that a mutually accepted recollection of the war did not emerge until Philip of Macedonia and Alexander the Great shattered the conceptual domination of the polis at the battle of Chaeronea. These conclusions suggest that any cohesion in the classical tradition of the Persian War implied by the surviving historical accounts (most notably Herodotus) or postulated by moderns is illusory. The focus of the book falls on the classical period, but it also includes a brief discussion of the hellenistic commemoration of the war that follows those trends set in motion by Philip and Alexander.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document