scholarly journals Moving to new generational beats: Lived experiences of capitalism, student-led (re)makings of knowledge, and the evolution of critical research agendas

2021 ◽  
pp. 030981682199711
Author(s):  
Ian Bruff
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
Teaching And Research ◽  
Seminar Room ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Collective Influence ◽  
Development And Evolution

Via a reflection on the evolution of a module on comparing capitalisms that I have been teaching for more than a decade, this article discusses the collective influence of new generations of students on how knowledge is (re)made. I deploy a conjunctural understanding of the term ‘generations’ in order to make sense of how students’ interpretations of the topics covered by the module have, across the 2010s, led me to increasingly question the field that was, in an earlier conjuncture, essential for my intellectual foundation and development. Their lived experiences of capitalism are more likely to be dominated by themes such as political, economic and social crises and conflicts, inequality, personal indebtedness and precarity, and in some cases activism. This has had profound and long-lasting effects on my teaching and research, discomfiting me in an ultimately beneficial way; most notably, through the recognition that future critical work on comparing capitalisms ought to move away from previous attempts to engage immanently with dominant, mainstream approaches and towards the articulation of a more confident, autonomous position. Hence, a key aspect of the development and evolution of critical research agendas occurs in and through educational exchanges in the seminar room.

scholarly journals Within and Beyond Modernity: Lived experiences and ethical interruptions of the Tablighi Jamaat in West Bengal

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
FERNANDE W. POOL
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
West Bengal ◽  
Social Exchanges ◽  
Alternative Modernities ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
Societal Level ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Village

AbstractThis article examines the implications of the growing presence of the Tablighi Jamaat in Joygram, a Muslim-majority village in rural West Bengal, India, drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2013. The analysis of reformist Islam as a moral regeneration movement embedded in dharma and catalysing an alternative modernity contributes to the scholarship on lived experiences of Islam, modernity, and ethics. The Tablighi Jamaat in Joygram gains popularity in a political economic context of moral degradation and marginalization, which inspires engagements with globally resonant modern and anti-modern models of the self enveloped in the practice, discourse, and performance of Islamic reformism. These models mutually interact and conflict with locally particular practices and exclusionary categorizations. On the village level, the drive towards modernity ensues in conflicts over moral personhood and social exchanges. On the societal level, the modern aspirations of Joygrami Tablighis go beyond piety to ‘good culture’ and respected citizenship, and are embedded in anti-modern critiques of the hegemonic categorizations of the secular nation-state by which they are nevertheless confined. It is suggested that reformist Islam should not be misunderstood as pre-modern, anti-secular, or secular, but might better be called ‘post-secular’ because it encompasses those ideologies in vernacularized forms on the basis of a different ideal conception of society. Islamic reformism in Joygram may resonate with moral regeneration and reactionary movements elsewhere. This analysis of the Tablighi Jamaat demonstrates the potential challenges social movements face in the transition to alternative modernities.

scholarly journals The Conditions of the Global Digital Working Class: The Continuing Relevance of Friedrich Engels to Theorising Platform Labour

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 154-170
Author(s):  
Shahram Azhar
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Technological Infrastructure ◽  
Digital Capitalism ◽  
Friedrich Engels ◽  
Economic Understanding ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Surplus Population ◽  
Digital Capital

This paper examines the conditions of the global digital class of platform labourers by drawing on the theoretical paradigm proposed by Engels in his pioneering contribution, The Conditions of the Working Class in England (CWC). Using a host of empirical sources – surveys, oral narrations, medical and legal journals, and journalistic accounts – the paper develops a political-economic understanding of the working conditions of contemporary crowdworkers while paying close attention to the national and gendered disparities within them. Following Engels’s dialectical mode of presentation in the CWC, the paper proposes a framework that contextualizes the lived experiences of crowdworkers in relation to: 1) the technological infrastructure of platforms, 2) emerging contractual and managerial modes of exploitation, 3) the gendered and racial articulation of labour extraction via Engels’s notion of inter-worker competition, and 4) the macro dynamics of “surplus population” that push workers into precarious employment. The paper argues that the four qualitative attributes of capitalist labour identified in the CWC have experienced quantitative transformation under digital capitalism and at the core remain fundamental to a theoretical appreciation of the impact of digital capital on the lived experiences of the global digital working-class.

scholarly journals “I Know Which Devil I Write for”: Two Types of Autonomy Among Czech Journalists Remaining in and Leaving the Prime Minister's Newspapers

2021 ◽  
pp. 194016122110452
Author(s):  
Johana Kotisova ◽  
Lenka W. Císařová
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Professional Autonomy ◽  
Media Ownership ◽  
A Value ◽  
Semistructured Interviews ◽  
The Media ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Media Power

This paper examines two different understandings of professional autonomy among journalists currently and formerly working at Mafra, a Czech media house acquired in 2013 by Andrej Babiš, who in 2017 became the Czech Prime Minister. We build on existing research of local trends in media ownership and journalistic autonomy to ask the following questions: What differentiated the experience of journalists who exited the organization after the ownership change from that of those who stayed put? How did the two groups understand professional journalistic autonomy? Based on the thematic analysis of twenty semistructured interviews with ten journalists who stayed in the media house after Babiš's acquisition and ten journalists who left, we argue that in the journalists’ narratives, the two decisions reflect two different notions of autonomy: autonomy-as-a-practice and autonomy-as-a-value. While our findings add to the scarce empirical research on journalists’ lived experiences of the region's mediascape marked by growing comingling and concentration of political, economic and media power, we also suggest that the autonomy-as-a-practice and journalists’ agency should be further studied as a possible way how to perform and promote journalistic autonomy even in illiberalizing contexts—in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond.

scholarly journals On Politics in Comparative and International Higher Education

2021 ◽  
pp. 50-68
Author(s):  
Anatoly Oleksiyenko
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Academic Freedom ◽  
International Higher Education ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
Internationalisation Of Higher Education ◽  
World Class ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
World Class Universities ◽  
Intellectual Leadership

This paper draws attention to key conundrums facing researchers of comparative and international higher education in the age of post-truth and resurgent authoritarianism. The analysis focuses on three salient concerns: world class-universities and academic freedom; power brokerage in the internationalisation of higher education; and challenges of intellectual leadership – that dominated research agendas in the field. Situated at the crossroads of major arguments in the literature and observations derived from academic praxis in the three areas, the critique sets out to explain how politics have been gaining more weight in the construct of comparative and international higher education at a time when corporate elitism is on the rise and the freedoms of inquiry and communication are declining. The study warns about the failures of integrity in this context, and manifests imperatives for safeguarding academic freedom and critical research in the field.

WhatsApp as 'technology of life': Reframing research agendas

First Monday ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edgar Gómez Cruz ◽  
Ramaswami Harindranath
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Almost All

In this paper, we present a few ethnographic vignettes on the use of WhatsApp from a study in Mexico City. We suggest WhatsApp is a paradigmatic example of how a particular technology becomes an infrastructure to sustain, and therefore shape, a wide range of quotidian activities, from personal to economic, from spiritual to political. WhatsApp exemplifies what we call technologies of life, as such technologies mediate almost all aspects of social life. On this basis, we propose two interventions into the research agenda that go beyond data-centric approaches and focus on the lived-experiences of individuals, families, and communities.

Accountability in higher education: A comprehensive analytical framework

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Metz
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Comprehensive Framework ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Theoretical Reflection

Concomitant with the rise of rationalizing accountability in higher education has been an increase in theoretical reflection about the forms accountability has taken and the ones it should take. The literature is now peppered by a wide array of distinctions (e.g. internal/external, inward/ outward, vertical/horizontal, upward/downward, professional/public, political/economic, soft/ hard, positive/negative), to the point that when people speak of ‘accountability’ they risk speaking past one another, having some of these distinctions in mind and not others. Furthermore, often these distinctions are vague and cross-cut each other in ways that are as yet unclear. The field could benefit from having a comprehensive framework in which to place these distinctions and to view their relations. My aim in this article is to provide an analytical tool by which to classify important debate about what accountability in higher education has been and ought to be. Beyond organizing such debate, this schema will serve the purposes of revealing ambiguities in terms, conflations of ideas, assumptions that warrant questioning, and gaps in present research agendas.

scholarly journals Television and its Impact on Latinx Communities

2018 ◽  
pp. 461-484
Author(s):  
Mari Castañeda
Keyword(s):  
Market Power ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Global Television ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Culturally Embedded

The chapter investigates the intersections of television with Latinx communities, and the ways in which the evolving televisual context is mediating diasporic translatinidades. It focuses on five areas: (1) the role of Latinas in television set manufacturing, (2) the representation of Latinos in mainstream television, (3) the rise of Spanish-language television, (4) the importance of telenovelas in global television, and (5) the emergence of TV streaming as new venues for translatinidades. Taken together, these five topics construct an ample canvas in which we can investigate television and how it reflects social, political, economic, and cultural lived experiences. Ultimately, the goal of this chapter is to investigate how television and its relationship with Latinx communities cannot be uniformly characterized as one static practice but must in fact be recognized as a multilayered and evolving formation that is culturally embedded as well as closely interconnected to market power.

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