scholarly journals Professionalism and Fetishistic Disavowal in Thai and Chinese Journalism

Journalism ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146488492110177
Author(s):  
Jesse Owen Hearns-Branaman
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Fourth Estate

This study reviews how Thai and Chinese journalists talk about power and truth in relationship to their Fourth Estate role through examining twenty qualitative interviews. Adding to a previous study similarly looking at US and UK journalists it finds that, like their western counterparts, truth is heavily fetishized, being an ideal that journalists admittedly can never reach. However power relations are discussed quite differently, showing how the divergent power structures of the four countries create very different discourses of the power of journalists which are not fetishized to the same extent. This article thus finds that there are limitations to the universality of Žižek’s concept of ideology as fetishistic disavowal (that is, being able to actively admit the limitations of one’s profession as long as one still performs it) in the realm of comparative journalism.

Design, power and colonisation: decolonial and anti-oppressive explorations on three approaches for Design for Sustainability

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas B. TORRETTA ◽  
Lizette REITSMA
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Design For Sustainability ◽  
The People ◽  
Reflexive Practice ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Design Power ◽  
Relational Issue

Our contemporary world is organized in a modern/colonial structure. As people, professions and practices engage in cross-country Design for Sustainability (DfS), projects have the potential of sustaining or changing modern/colonial power structures. In such project relations, good intentions in working for sustainability do not directly result in liberation from modern/colonial power structures. In this paper we introduce three approaches in DfS that deal with power relations. Using a Freirean (1970) decolonial perspective, we analyse these approaches to see how they can inform DfS towards being decolonial and anti-oppressive. We conclude that steering DfS to become decolonial or colonizing is a relational issue based on the interplay between the designers’ position in the modern/colonial structure, the design approach chosen, the place and the people involved in DfS. Hence, a continuous critical reflexive practice is needed in order to prevent DfS from becoming yet another colonial tool.

scholarly journals Counter-talk as symbolic boundary drawing: Challenging legitimate cultural practices in individual and focus group interviews in the lower regions of social space

2021 ◽  
pp. 003802612110144
Author(s):  
Riie Heikkilä ◽  
Anu Katainen
Keyword(s):  
Focus Group ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Focus Group Interviews ◽  
Moral Boundaries ◽  
Popular Classes ◽  
Group Interviews ◽  
Symbolic Boundary

In qualitative interviews, challenges such as deviations from the topic, interruptions, silences or counter-questions are inevitable. It is debatable whether the researcher should try to alleviate them or consider them as important indicators of power relations. In this methodological article, we adopt the latter view and examine the episodes of counter-talk that emerge in qualitative interviews on cultural practices among underprivileged popular classes by drawing on 49 individual and focus group interviews conducted in the highly egalitarian context of Finland. Our main aim is to demonstrate how counter-talk emerging in interview situations could be fruitfully analysed as moral boundary drawing. We identify three types of counter-talk: resisting the situation, resisting the topic, and resisting the interviewer. While the first type unites many of the typical challenges inherent to qualitative interviewing in general (silences, deviations from the topic and so forth), the second one shows that explicit taste distinctions are an important feature of counter-talk, yet the interviewees mostly discuss them as something belonging to the personal sphere. Finally, the third type reveals how the strongest counter-talk and clearest moral boundary stemmed from the interviewees’ attitudes towards the interviewer herself. We argue that counter-talk in general should be given more importance as a key element of the qualitative interview. We demonstrate that all three types of counter-talk are crucial to properly understanding the power relations and moral boundaries present in qualitative interviews and that cultural practices are a particularly good topic to tease them out.

Identity propaganda: Racial narratives and disinformation

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110292
Author(s):  
Madhavi Reddi ◽  
Rachel Kuo ◽  
Daniel Kreiss
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Election ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Us Presidential Election ◽  
Social Orders ◽  
Racial Narratives

This article develops the concept of “identity propaganda,” or narratives that strategically target and exploit identity-based differences in accord with pre-existing power structures to maintain hegemonic social orders. In proposing and developing the concept of identity propaganda, we especially aim to help researchers find new insights into their data on misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda by outlining a framework for unpacking layers of historical power relations embedded in the content they analyze. We focus on three forms of identity propaganda: othering narratives that alienate and marginalize non-white or non-dominant groups; essentializing narratives that create generalizing tropes of marginalized groups; and authenticating narratives that call upon people to prove or undermine their claims to be part of certain groups. We demonstrate the utility of this framework through our analysis of identity propaganda around Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2020 US presidential election.

Modeling and Implementation of Formal Power Structures in Enterprise Information Systems

2010 ◽  
pp. 174-188
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Organization Theory ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Enterprise Information ◽  
Enterprise Information Systems ◽  
Organizational Power ◽  
Authority Relations ◽  
Formal Power

The concepts of power and authority are inherent in human organizations of any type. In some organizations power relations on individuals are defined explicitly and formalized in organizational documentation. In other organizations power relations are implicit, less strict and may change depending on contextual conditions. As power relations have important consequences for organizational viability and productivity, they should be considered explicitly in enterprise information systems (EISs). Although organization theory provides a rich and very diverse theoretical basis on organizational power, still most of the definitions for power-related concepts are too abstract, often vague and ambiguous to be directly implemented in EISs. To create a bridge between informal organization theories and automated EISs, this chapter proposes a formal logic-based specification language for representing power- (in particular authority) relations and their dynamics. The use of the language is illustrated by considering authority structures of organizations of different types. Moreover, the chapter demonstrates how the formalized authority relations can be integrated into an EIS.

Werewolf Wollstonecraft

2020 ◽  
pp. 253-274
Author(s):  
Chris Washington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Dynamic Power ◽  
Karen Barad

The judicial bestiary at the heart of eighteenth-century politics has long been evident in Enlightenment social contract debates, as Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics show. In this essay, I argue that Wollstonecraft is nonetheless the first thinker of ‘true’ werewolf out-lawry in her final novel, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman and in her letters to Godwin. In the novel, Wollstonecraft leverages what we now call new materialism as a feminist critique of heteropatriarchal society. Wollstonecraft’s new materialist thinking also scrambles gender across even human and nonhuman distinctions. To counter microcosmic familial and macrocosmic state heteropatriarchy, Wollstonecraft theorizes what I am calling, following the example of wolves and werewolves, not a family but a ‘pack’. The pack manifests as new spacetimes through what Karen Barad terms “quantum entanglements” that produce love between subjects and subjects but that never strives to reproduce binaristic pairings that reproduce the sovereign family. A pack, as Wollstonecraft’s texts demonstrate, emerges from processes of co-creation that iterate new subjects and objects without dynamic power structures structured around stable gender identities or human and nonhuman power relations.

Letter-Writing as a Decolonial Feminist Praxis for Philosophical Writing

Hypatia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 410-423
Author(s):  
Diana María Acevedo-Zapata
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Philosophical Writing ◽  
Spaces Of Resistance ◽  
Writing Practice

AbstractAccording to Chandra Mohanty, there is no apolitical academy; academic and scholarly practices are in themselves political, insofar as they are inscribed in power and validation relations, which answer to and have effects upon the patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist structures to which they belong. In the case of philosophical writing, this means that the forms that regulate writing, that is, what determines how one must write in different contexts, are expressive of the power structures within philosophical academia. These power structures are upheld through time because of, among many other factors, the rendering invisible of the diversity of places of enunciation belonging to those who write and think in philosophy, and of the universalization of the privileges associated with said places of enunciation. In this article, I propose a way of writing letters that appeals to grammatical persons and their relation to the authors of the texts. Through this writing practice it is possible to make explicit the places of enunciation from which we write philosophy. This enables, first, making visible the privileges and oppressions of those writing philosophy; and second, generating small spaces of resistance and transformation of the oppressive power relations within the philosophical academy.

scholarly journals The Surveillance of Children's Mobility.

2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Trine Fotel ◽  
Thyra Uth Thomsen
Keyword(s):  
Remote Control ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Mobile Monitoring ◽  
School Employees ◽  
The Third ◽  
Traffic Regulation ◽  
General Power ◽  
Central Characteristic

The increased protection of children by monitoring them is said to be a central characteristic of modern childhood. In the field of mobility, this aspect of modern childhood is reflected in the fact that children's everyday mobility is to a great extent kept under surveillance, e.g. by parents, kindergarten or school employees and through general traffic regulation. In this article, we investigate the surveillance of children's mobility – primarily bicycling, walking and car usage - from three different angles. In the first, we investigate the general power relations in mobile practice that add to the surveillance and restriction of children's mobility. In the second, we illustrate how parents monitor children's mobility by chauffeuring them. In the third, we look into how parents remote control children's mobility by means of behavioural restrictions and technology. By using statistical material and qualitative interviews, we illustrate how parents perceive and perform their own surveillance of children's mobility. In addition, we comment on how children perceive their monitored mobility and how they cope with it. Finally, we reflect on the differences in parental mobile monitoring and relate this to welfare and socio-economic structures in the families.

Resiliensens åbenbaringer:

2018 ◽  
pp. 21-43
Author(s):  
Alf Hornborg ◽  
Nathalie Keighley Kristensen, oversætter
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Ecological Resilience ◽  
Resilience Theory ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Basic Assumptions ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Neoliberal Ideology

The currently burgeoning discussions on ‘socio-ecological resilience’ tend to mask the power relations, contradictions of interest, and inequalities that to a large extent determine how humans utilize the surface of the Earth. Resilience theory has the potential to radically confront such power structures by identifying some of the basic assumptions of economics as the very source of vulnerability, mismanagement, and crises. It has every reason to critically scrutinise the operation of general-purpose money, the global market, and neoliberal ideology. The ultimate implications of resilience theory, in other words, are vastly more radical and subversive than its current proponents imagine. A strategy to enhance socio-ecological resilience would be to distinguish local from global economic scales by employing separate currencies for the two levels. Proponents of resilience theory are advised to engage more respectfully with social science, particularly its understandings of culture and power. Upon doing so, they would find the idea of a bi-centric economy, as sketched in this article, entirely consistent with the fundamental insights of resilience theory.

scholarly journals Wilful Girliness

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 73-94
Author(s):  
Sara Litzén
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
The Body ◽  
Active Process ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Personal Quality ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Per Se

Through qualitative interviews with eleven people who have investments in girliness, feminism, and fashion, the article centres around the concept of “wilful girliness,” understood as a constructed phenomenon, which focuses on ideas about girliness in relation to consciousness, and in relation to empowerment. This approach to the subject is proposed as a way of moving away from rooting (dis)empowerment within a person’s body, and towards seeing and acknowledging the embodiment of a (feministic) conscious girliness as a historical construction rather than a personal quality. It argues that a wilful girliness is temporarily stabilised through a set of contingent exclusions and should be understood as a consistent site of contest, an active process without origin and end, that takes shape within a specific context, deeply entangled and inseparable from existing power structures. The article highlights the importance of acknowledging the body and its abilities as a crucial starting point in the conditional activity of the negotiation of wilful girliness. It goes on and untangles the responsibility of embodying this fluctuating construction from the girly individual. The article concludes by suggesting the importance of interrogating the mere fact that a wilful girliness is sought after and used as a dominant reference point and criteria in regard to girliness per se and calls for a more varied understanding of girliness.

scholarly journals “So, it is about how negative it is?!” Understanding researcher/researched interactions as relations between intersectional social positions

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sune Qvotrup Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Ethnic Minority ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Minority Men ◽  
Powerful Mechanism ◽  
Insight Into

The article argues that interactions in qualitative interviews and ethnography can be analyzed as relations between intersectional social positions. It draws attention to the importance of class and geographical location in such analysis. It further argues that such interactions work through typifications, that they have a power dimension and that they entail processes of identity formation. The identities being offered through these processes can, however, be negotiated or resisted. The article then analyses such interactions as they were experienced in two research projects the author participated in: His PhD project about young marginalized ethnic minority men, and the collective project INTERLOC which focused on the interplay between gender, class, ethnicity and ‘race’ in an underprivileged Danish suburb. It is demonstrated that relationality influences the assumptions research participants have about the researcher. It is also demonstrated that the research encounter entails powerful mechanism of identity formation. The informants, however, sometimes resist these processes resulting in blurred and unstable, sometimes antagonistic, power relations. It is finally argued that analyses of such interactions can provide central insight into the subject studied.

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