scholarly journals Recreating Men’s Relationship with Nature: Toward a Profeminist Environmentalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob Pease

While feminist and profeminist scholars are increasingly in agreement with the thesis that hegemonic and destructive forms of masculinity are the source of current environmental crises, there is less agreement on how to address this issue or on the way forward for ecologically conscious and profeminist men. Some forms of ecofeminism essentialize women as being closer to nature than men, while arguing that men are closer to culture. There seems little capacity for men to change in this view. In a parallel development, some ecomasculinity theorists argue that the problem is not with the nature of masculinity per se but with the separation of men’s natural maleness from forms of masculinity that suppress their infinite capacity to care. It will be argued that such latter approaches espouse either an ecofeminine or ecomasculinist perspective rather than a social ecofeminist view. This article will explore the implications of the social ecofeminist critique (or what some writers refer to as feminist environmentalism) for understanding socially constructed masculinism, and what men can do about it, in the context of the social divisions between men across the world.

Author(s):  
Seung-Hyun Lee

From being a simple communication technology to a key social tool, the mobile phone has become such an important aspect of people's everyday life. Mobile phones have altered the way people live, communicate, interact, and connect with others. Mobile phones are also transforming how people access and use information and media. Given the rapid pervasiveness of mobile phones in society across the world, it is important to explore how mobile phones have affected the way people communicate and interact with others, access the information, and use media, and their daily lifestyle. This article aims to explore the social and cultural implications that have come with the ubiquity, unprecedented connectivity, and advances of mobile phones. This article also focuses on the discussion about people's dependence on, attachment and addiction to mobile phones, social problems that mobile phones generate, and how people value mobile phone use.


Author(s):  
Joseph Ezale Cobbinah ◽  
Michael Yamoah

This chapter aims at examining the nature of educational reforms in general, access how they impact on the lives of the citizens, and identify some of the global perspectives of educational reforms. It examines how education could be reformed to make it equitable, address inequality and social injustice that still persists in our society. Educational programs in many parts of the world continue to undergo reformation due to governments' policy changes or ideology, yet so many people seem not to be satisfied with the nature of education delivery. The chapter concludes that educational reform should not only aim at introducing just new courses, restructure the curriculum per se but should aim at ensuring that it equips the citizenry to make them develop entrepreneurial skills, be able to find solutions to their problems and self-reliant. Reforms must also address the social inequality, social injustice, and lack of equity, social and racial discrimination that still persists in our societies today.


Through case studies of incidents around the world where the social media platforms have been used and abused for ulterior purposes, Chapter 6 highlights the lessons that can be learned. For good or for ill, the author elaborates on the way social media has been used as an arbiter to inflict various forms of political influence and how we may have become desensitized due to the popularity of the social media platforms themselves. A searching view is provided that there is now a propensity by foreign states to use social media to influence the user base of sovereign countries during key political events. This type of activity now justifies a paradigm shift in relation to our perception and utilization of computerized devices for the future.


Author(s):  
Janice M. Burn ◽  
Karen D. Loch

Many lessons from history offer strong evidence that technology can have a definite effect on the social and political aspects of human life. At times it is difficult to grasp how supposedly neutral technology might lead to social upheavals, mass migrations of people, and shifts in wealth and power. Yet a quick retrospective look at the last few centuries finds that various technologies have done just that, challenging the notion of the neutrality of technology. Some examples include the printing press, railways, and the telephone. The effects of these technologies usually begin in our minds by changing the way we view time and space. Railways made the world seem smaller by enabling us to send goods, people, and information to many parts of the world in a fraction of the time it took before. Telephones changed the way we think about both time and distance, enabling us to stay connected without needing to be physically displaced. While new technologies create new opportunities for certain individuals or groups to gain wealth, there are other economic implications with a wider ranging impact, political and social. Eventually, as the technology matures, social upheavals, mass migrations and shifts in economic and political power can be observed. We find concrete examples of this dynamic phenomenon during the Reformation, the industrial revolution, and more recently, as we witness the ongoing information technology revolution.


Author(s):  
Taina Bucher

IF … THEN provides an account of power and politics in the algorithmic media landscape that pays attention to the multiple realities of algorithms, and how these relate and coexist. The argument is made that algorithms do not merely have power and politics; they help to produce certain forms of acting and knowing in the world. In processing, classifying, sorting, and ranking data, algorithms are political in that they help to make the world appear in certain ways rather than others. Analyzing Facebook’s news feed, social media user’s everyday encounters with algorithmic systems, and the discourses and work practices of news professionals, the book makes a case for going beyond the narrow, technical definition of algorithms as step-by-step procedures for solving a problem in a finite number of steps. Drawing on a process-relational theoretical framework and empirical data from field observations and fifty-five interviews, the author demonstrates how algorithms exist in multiple ways beyond code. The analysis is concerned with the world-making capacities of algorithms, questioning how algorithmic systems shape encounters and orientations of different kinds, and how these systems are endowed with diffused personhood and relational agency. IF … THEN argues that algorithmic power and politics is neither about algorithms determining how the social world is fabricated nor about what algorithms do per se. Rather it is about how and when different aspects of algorithms and the algorithmic become available to specific actors, under what circumstance, and who or what gets to be part of how algorithms are defined.


Author(s):  
Martin Clayton

Music's uses and contexts are so many and so various that the task of cataloguing its functions is daunting: how can we make sense of this diversity? These functions appear to range from the individual (music can affect the way we feel and the way we manage our lives) to the social (it can facilitate the coordination of large numbers of people and help to forge a sense of group identity). This article argues that musical behaviour covers a vast middle ground in which relationships between self and other or between the individual and the collective are played out. It surveys some of the extant literature on music's functions – referring to literature from ethnomusicology, anthropology, musicology, psychology, and sociology, and discussing a wide variety of musical contexts from around the world – and develops an argument emphasizing music's role in the management of relationships between self and other.


2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 1007-1031
Author(s):  
PAUL LAWRENCE

AbstractThis article analyses the curious development and subsequent refinement of the Photo-FIT system for the identification of criminal suspects, used by police forces around the world from the 1970s. Situating Photo-FIT in a succession of other technologies of identification, it demonstrates that, far from representing the onward march of science and technology (and the way in which both were harnessed to the power of the state in the twentieth century), Photo-FIT was the brainchild of an idiosyncratic entrepreneur wedded to increasingly outmoded notions of physiognomy. Its adoption by the Home Office was primarily determined by the particular context of the later 1960s, and its continued use owed more to vested interest and energetic promotion than to scientific underpinnings or proven efficacy. It did, however, in the longer term, provide the impetus for the development of a new sub-field of psychology and pave the way for the development of increasingly sophisticated facial identification technologies still used today. Overall, the article demonstrates the long persistence of physiognomic thinking in twentieth-century Britain, the way in which new technology is socially constructed, and the persuasive power of ‘pseudo-science’.


Author(s):  
Suparna Dhar ◽  
Indranil Bose ◽  
Mohammed Naved Khan

Digital social networking (DSN) sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram, Pinterest, among many others have garnered millions of users worldwide. It is an instance of information and communication technology that has brought about changes in the way people communicate, interact, and affected human lifestyle and psyche across the world. Some people have become addicted; some see this as beneficial, while others are skeptical about its consequences. This risk-benefit paradox of DSN flummoxes academicians and practitioners alike. This chapter discusses the social and organizational and business risks and benefits of DSN. It goes on to provide a timeline of the evolution of DSN sites, enumeration of typical characteristics of DSN sites, and a systematic comparison of offline and digital social networking. The chapter intends to serve as a cornerstone towards developing a framework for organizational strategy formulation for DSN.


Author(s):  
Henry Louis Gates, Jr

Race is one of the most elusive phenomena of social life. While we generally know it when we see it, it's not an easy concept to define. Social science literature has argued that race is a Western, sociopolitical concept that emerged with the birth of modern imperialism, whether in the sixteenth century (the Age of Discovery) or the eighteenth century (the Age of Enlightenment). This book points out that there is a disjuncture between the way race is conceptualized in the social science and medical literature: some of the modern sciences employ racial and ethnic categories. As such, race has a physical, as opposed to a purely social, dimension. The book argues that in order to more fully understand what we mean by race, social scientists need to engage genetics, medicine, and health. To be sure, the long shadow of eugenics and the Nazi use of scientific racism have cast a pall over the effort to understand this complicated relationship between social science and race. But while the text rejects pseudoscience and hierarchical ways of looking at race, it makes the claim that it is time to reassess the Western-based, social construction paradigm. The chapters in this book consider three fundamental tensions in thinking about race: one between theories that see race as fixed or malleable; a second between the idea that race is a universal but modern Western concept and the idea that it has a deeper and more complicated cultural history; and a third between sociopolitical and biological/biomedical concepts of race. Arguing that race is not merely socially constructed, the chapters offer a collection of views on the way that social scientists must reconsider the idea of race in the age of genomics.


Author(s):  
Eric Hobsbawm

This chapter discusses Marxist historiography in the present times. In the interpretation of the world nowadays, there has been a rise in the so-called anti-Rankean reaction in history, of which Marxism is an important but not always fully acknowledged element. This movement challenged the positivist belief that the objective structure of reality was self-explanatory, and that all that was needed was to apply the methodology of science to it and explain why things happened the way they did. This movement also brought together history with the social sciences, therefore turning it into part of a generalizing discipline capable of explaining transformations of human society in the course of its past. This new perspective on the past is a return to ‘total history’, in which the focus is not merely on the ‘history of everything’ but history as an indivisible web wherein all human activities are interconnected.


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