scholarly journals Globalizing local understanding of fragility in Eurasia

2021 ◽  
pp. 187936652110448
Author(s):  
Prajakti Kalra ◽  
Siddharth Shanker Saxena
Keyword(s):  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Community Resilience ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Kyrgyz Republic ◽  
Fragile States ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Global Institutions ◽  
Complex Adaptive ◽  
Global North ◽  
Conceptual Underpinning

The article aims to introduce the underlying motivation and conceptual underpinning to the special issue entitled “Globalizing Local Understanding of Fragility in Eurasia.” The main purpose of this article is to problematize the popular opinion and portrayal of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) and more generally the countries of Eurasia and the Caucasus as inherently fragile states which are politically unstable and thus on the brink of collapse. This article also seeks to question narratives of modernity that are singular and constantly out of reach for large swathes of the world’s populations because of the narrowness and hegemonic nature of the architecture of global governance. By carefully considering the ways and means through which international institutions categorize countries as fragile and/or failed, the article aims to provide the theoretical foreground for the special issue which focuses on locating inherent community resilience strategies. We explain how the non-participatory norm making behavior of international organizations privilege certain actors, largely the Global North, and simultaneously ignore the majority of Eurasian states. In other words, a demand predicated in the linear evaluation of institutions and norms dictated by global institutions clash with the Eurasian model of inherent complex adaptive capability and introduce fragility. The focus thus is on understanding the ‘local’ based on the historical analysis of development in the region, nodal points of urban development and community life, forms of social capital, and community resilience strategies in the wider Eurasian region.

scholarly journals The materiality of languages in engagements with the environment

Multilingua ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Siragusa ◽  
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Related Language ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Human Actors

Abstract Communication, an apparently intangible practice, does in fact affect the way people engage with their social worlds in very material ways. Inspired by both ethnographic and archival-driven research, this special issue aims to fill the gap in studies of language materiality by addressing entanglements with other-than-human agencies. The contributions of this special issue on verbal and non-verbal communicative practices among Indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in the Global North and the South interpret language materiality as practice- and process-oriented, performative, and embodied relations between humans and other-than-human actors. The articles cover three major sub-themes, which ostensibly intertwine to a greater or lesser degree in all the works: (in-)visible actors and elements-related language; language materiality narrating and producing sociality; and the emotions and affect of language. The topic of this special issue, the materiality of languages, manifested in multiple engagements with the environment, proves particularly critical at the moment, given the current environmental crisis and the need to comprehend in more depth social relations with numerous other-than-human agencies.

Population Control in the “Global North”?: Canada’s Response to Indigenous Reproductive Rights and Neo-Eugenics

2021 ◽  
Vol 102 (s3) ◽  
pp. s876-s902
Author(s):  
Erika Dyck ◽  
Maureen Lux
Keyword(s):  
Family Planning ◽  
Birth Control ◽  
Reproductive Rights ◽  
Population Control ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Access To Health Services ◽  
Reproductive Politics ◽  
The North ◽  
Access To Health ◽  
Global North

An historical analysis of reproductive politics in the Canadian North during the 1970s necessitates a careful reading of the local circumstances regarding feminism, sovereignty, language, colonialism, and access to health services, which differed regionally and culturally. These features were conditioned, however, by international discussions on family planning that fixated on the twinned concepts of unchecked population growth and poverty. Language from these debates crept into discussions about reproduction and birth control in northern Canada, producing the state’s logic that, despite low population density, the endemic poverty in the North necessitated aggressive family planning measures.

Discourses of integration: Language, skills, and the politics of difference

Multilingua ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mi-Cha Flubacher ◽  
Shirley Yeung
Keyword(s):  
Special Issue ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Politics Of Difference ◽  
Language Communication ◽  
Global North ◽  
Migrant Integration ◽  
Social Orders ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Migrant Integration Policies

AbstractIn this introduction, we outline the most relevant concepts for this special issue on integration and the politics of difference. This introduction characterizes “integration” as a dominant policy orientation and discursive regime concerned primarily with understandings of language, communication, and skill which constitute a (trans)national politics of difference. In various sites and national contexts of the global north, migrant “integration” policies render difference and mobility the site of both discursive elaboration and management. This introduction highlights the salience of critical ethnographic analyses for understanding “integration” beyond policy realms, arguing for attention to situated practices, emergent social categories and types, political-economic stakes, logics of linguistic (dis)engagement, and the reproduction of mono- and multilingual social orders. In particular, we propose to untangle this complex by describing three central processes that run through all of the contributions and which, we suggest, are indispensable for the analysis of current and emergent regimes of integration: processes of categorization, of selection, and of activation.

scholarly journals A Queering-to-Come

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-376
Author(s):  
Kirk Fiereck ◽  
Neville Hoad ◽  
Danai S. Mupotsa
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
Global North ◽  
To Come ◽  
Academic Study

This introduction outlines the idea of the queer customary and how various African articulations of it engage, contest, and nuance central concerns of queer theory produced in the global North, particularly around ideas of normativity—hetero and homo. It speculates on the customary’s reworking of temporality and what that reworking does to historical time and the problems and possibilities in reading the colonial archive in the search for a useable past for both lived African sexual and gendered experience and the academic study of it. The customary is seen as an iterative containment of ancestral time, a powerful form of self-fashioning in the present, and as an invitation to futurity. Brief framings of how the various essays in the special issue elaborate what we are calling the queer customary follow.

Language and Social Psychology Approaches to Race, Racism, and Social Justice: Analyzing the Past and Revealing Ways Forward

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-28
Author(s):  
Natasha Shrikant ◽  
Howard Giles ◽  
Daniel Angus
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Justice Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Justice Research

Issues of race, racism, and social justice are under-studied topics in this journal. This Prologue, and our Special Issue (S.I.) more broadly, highlights ways that language and social psychology (LSP) approaches can further our understanding of race, racism, and social justice, while suggesting more inclusive directions for their theoretical development. Acknowledging the inspiration from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, we begin by discussing our deeply-held personal and emotional connections to recent societal events, including police violence against innocent Black civilians and the prevalence of anti-Asian hate. What follows, then, is: a historical analysis of past JLSP publications on these issues, a proposal for more intersections between LSP and communication social justice research, and an overview of the BLM movement together with the four articles that follow. We conclude by advocating for individual and institutional practices that can create socially-just changes by LSP scholars in the academy.

Raising African Voices in the Global Dialogue on Care-Leaving and Emerging Adulthood

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Du Plessis van Breda ◽  
John Pinkerton
Keyword(s):  
Emerging Adulthood ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The South ◽  
African Experience ◽  
Global North ◽  
North And South

Globalization of knowledge and scholarship raises the challenges of dialogue between Global North and South. Northern knowledge and voice remain privileged, while writing from the South often goes unread. This is true also in emerging adulthood and care-leaving scholarship. The special issue of Emerging Adulthood titled “Care-Leaving in Africa” is the first collection of essays on care-leaving by African scholars. It presents both care-leaving and emerging adulthood scholars from the Global North a unique opportunity to consider the implications of a rising African voice for global dialogue. This article, coauthored by scholars from North and South, argues in favor of North–South dialogue but highlights several challenges inherent in this, including the indigenizing and thus marginalizing of African experience and scholarship and divergent constructions of key social concepts. The authors argue the need for mutually respectful discourse between North and South and present specific recommendations for fostering such global dialogue.

Afterword

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 146-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo Kohn
Keyword(s):  
Research Group ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Group Project ◽  
The Way

This afterword reflects on how the Matsutake Worlds Research Group project can be considered as ontological. The multispecies ethnographic engagements presented in this special issue manifest not only the concepts inherent in the worlds of others that defy the categories of Western metaphysical thought (e.g., life forms seen as ‘events’ rather than mere things), but also the way in which non-human life forms themselves can demand that we practice another kind of thought and embrace another vision of our own selves. By succumbing to the allure of the matsutake fungus, the Matsutake Worlds Research Group has begun one of the most suggestive and original conceptual enterprises today, a practice that perhaps could be named ‘heeding headless thoughts’.

Postcolonial sociology as a remedy for global diffusion theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (6) ◽  
pp. 1179-1195
Author(s):  
Zophia Edwards
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Diffusion Theory ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Trade Disputes ◽  
World Polity ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Subaltern Agency ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Common ◽  
Global Diffusion

The dominant theoretical approaches that aim to explain the origins and subsequent global diffusion of modern norms, practices, and institutions have reached an impasse. World polity theory and ‘coercion’ perspectives describe a process in which norms originate in the Global North and spread to the rest of the world. For the former, diffusion occurs via the willful imitation of shared values; for the latter, it occurs due to economic/political pressure and/or force. However, both approaches are unable to account for norms that emerge in the Global South and get adopted globally. This article argues that postcolonial sociology can help overcome the common pitfalls of the existing theories and provide a theoretical framework for analyzing global diffusion through its analytical focus on subaltern agency, ‘relationalism,’ and colonial contours of power. The utility of postcolonial sociology is demonstrated using archival data and an historical analysis of the 1938 Trade Disputes (Arbitration and Inquiry) Ordinance, which emerged in Trinidad and Tobago and was subsequently adopted by a number of colonies across the British empire.

scholarly journals Introduction: Critical Visual Theory

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 202-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Ludes ◽  
Winfried Nöth ◽  
Kathrin Fahlenbrach
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Visual Theory ◽  
Visual Discourse ◽  
Global North ◽  
Gendered Gaze ◽  
North And South

The studies selected for publication in this special issue on Critical Visual Theory can be divided into three thematic groups: (1) image making as power making, (2) commodification and recanonization, and (3) approaches to critical visual theory. The approaches to critical visual theory adopted by the authors of this issue may be subsumed under the following headings (3.1) critical visual discourse and visual memes in general and Anonymous visual discourse in particular, (3.2) collective memory and gendered gaze, and (3.3) visual capitalism, global north and south.

scholarly journals An International Conversation on Disabled Children’s Childhoods: Theory, Ethics and Methods

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 302-327
Author(s):  
Kathryn Underwood ◽  
Marisol Moreno Angarita ◽  
Tillie Curran ◽  
Katherine Runswick-Cole ◽  
Donald Wertlieb
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Early Childhood Development ◽  
Service System ◽  
Childhood Development ◽  
Disabled Children ◽  
Institutional Processes ◽  
Global Institutions ◽  
Global North ◽  
International Advisory ◽  
Inclusive Early Childhood

This article brings together members of the International Advisory Committee for the Inclusive Early Childhood Service System (IECSS) project, a longitudinal study of interactions with institutional processes when families have a young child with disabilities. The article introduces international discourses on early childhood development (both individual and community) and raises questions about the ethics of these discourses in the context of historical and current global inequalities. We consider the exporting of professional discourses from the global north to the global south through directives from global institutions, and the imposition of medical thinking onto the lives of disabled children. We discuss theoretical positions and research methods that we believe may open up possibilities for change.

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