Collectivity and Crisis in the Long Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-489
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Academic Entrepreneurship ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Collaborative Authorship ◽  
Self Organized ◽  
Academic Labor ◽  
Emancipatory Politics ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Research Collective

Abstract In this essay the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) addresses the question of “what is and isn’t changing” in literary studies by reflecting on the material conditions that structure its disciplinary workscape. The essay notes that the pressures of a specifically academic form of capitalism, responding to and flourishing in a period of institutional crisis, tend to replicate top-down, marketized models of academic entrepreneurship in the ways we read. Departing from more widely favored models of “collaboration” and “interdisciplinarity” as solutions to this problem, the essay reflects instead on the history and potential of the collective as a form of self-organized, nonhierarchical knowledge production. It argues that the interlinked crises of how to read in world-literary terms, and on what scale, unavoidably index more general crises of the humanities and of academic labor when considered against the backdrop of an unstable neoliberal hegemony, particularly that of the mass automatization and shedding of labor. The essay concludes by considering political and literary examples of collaborative authorship before addressing the question of WReC’s own process, a form of joint working-through that the collective regards as fundamental to any emancipatory politics.

Silenced Registers of Ethnomusicological Academic Labor under Neoliberalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 83-95
Author(s):  
Ana Hofman
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Collaborative Research ◽  
The Self ◽  
Institutional Practice ◽  
The Public ◽  
Academic Labor ◽  
Applied Ethnomusicology ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Structural Mechanisms ◽  
Production Labor

This chapter explores ethnomusicology as knowledge-production labor in contexts of neoliberal institutions. By discussing some important (and often silenced) aspects of knowledge production, it aims to demonstrate how the transformation of material conditions of academic labor, commodification, and precarization radically reconfigure a praxis of collaborative research. The chapter strives to demonstrate how the claims for alternative knowledge production cannot be made without addressing the structural mechanisms behind neoliberalization of academia, by addressing the following questions: How do current transformations of labor and material conditions for scholars reshape the public-oriented scholarship and the praxis of “applied ethnomusicology”? How can we discuss a more diverse, critical, and impactful future for ethnomusicology in the sense of the “self-transformation” and “self-emancipation” of the discipline as institutional practice and academic labor?

“This Room is Yours, Personal!”: The Rise and Fall of Middle-Class Decoration Expertise in the Bedrooms of America’s Teens, 1900–1985

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-129
Author(s):  
Jason Reid
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Room Design ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This article also examines how the decline of teen-oriented room décor expertise reflected significant changes in the way gender and class influenced teen room culture during the tail end of the Cold War. Earlier teen décor strategies were often aimed towards affluent women; by contrast, the child-centric, do-it-yourself approach, as an informal, inexpensive alternative, was better suited to grant boys and working class teens from both sexes a greater role in the room design discourse. This article evaluates how middle-class home décor experts during the early decades of the twentieth century re-envisioned the teen bedroom as a space that was to be designed and maintained almost exclusively by teens rather than parents. However, many of the experts who formulated this advice would eventually become victims of their own success. By the 1960s and 1970s, teens were expected to have near total control over their bedrooms, which, in turn, challenged the validity of top-down forms of expertise.

Gender Identity without Gender Prescriptions

1998 ◽  
pp. 104-111
Author(s):  
Janet C. Wesselius
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Identity ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Emancipatory Politics ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Categories ◽  
Susan Bordo

The feminist philosopher Susan Bordo suggests that the dilemma of twentieth-century feminism is the tension between a gender identity that both mobilizes a liberatory politics on behalf of women and that results in gender prescriptions which excludes many women. This tension seems especially acute in feminist debates about essentialism/deconstructionism. Concentrating on the shared sex of women may run the risk of embracing an essentialism that ignores the differences among women, whereas emphasizing the constructed natures of sex and gender categories seems to threaten the very project of a feminist politics. I will analyze the possibility of dismantling gender prescriptions while retaining a gender identity that can be the beginning for an emancipatory politics. Perhaps feminists need not rely on a reified essentialism that elides the differences of race, class, etc., if we begin with our social practices of classification rather than with a priori generalizations about the nature of women.

Adaptation to Industrialization: German Workers as a Test Case

1970 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 303-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Stearns
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Consumption Patterns ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
First Time

Historians, in their somewhat defensive perusal of sociology for sweeping theoretical statements, perhaps underestimate the careful, often narrow, empiricism of much sociological research. Sociologists unearth facts for subsequent historians to work on and sometimes to interpret more broadly. Historical sociologists to the contrary, fact-grubbing services are mutual in the two disciplines. German sociologists were the first to study the social effects of industrialization extensively. By the early twentieth century, when masses of workers were still entering factory industry for the first time, sociologists were ready to investigate the process of adaptation through systematic interviews. British researchers in the same period, besides being dedicated amateurs for the most part, focused on the urban poor and on material conditions too exclusively still. French efforts were even more scattered. Maurice Halbwachs did some valuable studies of consumption patterns, while Le Play and his school contributed rather conservative portraits of individual workers. For purposes of understanding the working class in manufacturing, German sociological research was long unrivaled.

scholarly journals Textbooks, Postcards, and the Public Consolidation of Nationalism in Latin America

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-542
Author(s):  
Anna Kyriazi ◽  
Matthias vom Hau
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The Public ◽  
National Ideology ◽  
Market Driven ◽  
Popular Nationalism

Abstract The existing macro-historical scholarship tends to assert rather than demonstrate the wider impact of nationalism. Yet, state-sponsored national ideologies permeate the broader reaches of society to varying degrees. To investigate variations in the consolidation of official nationalism, this paper combines the content analysis of school textbooks as state-regulated and picture postcards as primarily market-driven sources. Building on this novel methodological approach, we find that textbooks published in mid-twentieth-century Argentina, Mexico, and Peru promoted a similar popular nationalism that portrayed the lower classes as “true” national subjects. However, picture postcards from the same period demonstrate that the consolidation of this official national ideology varied. In Mexico and Peru, the new state-sponsored conceptions of nationhood gained presence in public life, but they did not to take hold in Argentina. We conclude that studying the top-down nationalist messages promoted by states should not be equated with studying their ideological impact in public life.

Indigenising Eurocentric sociology: The ‘captive mind’ and five decades of sociology in Nigeria

2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (6) ◽  
pp. 831-848 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ifeanyi Onwuzuruigbo
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Sociological Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Conditions

Over the years, the social sciences and related disciplines in postcolonial societies have agitated against the dominant Eurocentric mode of knowledge production. In this case, the grouse against Eurocentric knowledge production is that it undermines attempts at indigenising Eurocentric sociology in Nigeria. This article is an engagement with efforts to evolve a Nigerian sociology. It draws upon the concept of the captive mind, developed by Syed Hussein Alatas, a Southeast Asian intellectual, to critically explore the indigenisation of sociology in Nigeria. In doing so, the article explores the development and entrenchment of Eurocentric sociology as well as attempts at indigenising it over five decades of the production of sociological knowledge in Nigerian universities. It portrays the ways in which the ‘captive’ Nigerian sociologists, students of sociology and the antagonistic material conditions of producing and propagating knowledge connive against the indigenisation of sociology in Nigeria.

scholarly journals The “Second Academic Revolution”: Interpretations of Academic Entrepreneurship

1969 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Peijun Zheng
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Triple Helix ◽  
Academic Entrepreneurship ◽  
Resource Dependence ◽  
Academic Capitalism ◽  
Resource Dependence Theory ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Triple Helix Model ◽  
Mode 2 ◽  
Dependence Theory

The number and scope of faculty and institutions involved in academic entrepreneurship continues to expand, and this has significant implications for universities, involving potentially wonderful opportunities but also dire risks. This paper looks beyond academic capitalism, a theory that currently dominates the study of higher education, by introducing several other theoretical frameworks for interpretation of academic entrepreneurship: resource dependence theory, the Triple Helix model, and Mode 2 knowledge production. Acknowledging the fact that academic capitalism significantly furthers our understanding of academic entrepreneurship, I argue that these other conceptual propositions are constructive in enlightening perspectives on the various aspects of academic entrepreneurship, although as of yet no single work completely explains all facets of this complicated issue.  

scholarly journals Introduction

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-210
Author(s):  
Gotelind Müller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Thematic Issue ◽  
Republican China ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Chinese Dream ◽  
Chinese Case ◽  
Global Modernity ◽  
Western Historiography

The article provides a short introduction to the main topics and aims of this thematic issue on history, culture and modernity in China. It outlines the multi-faceted approaches to a (or more than one) modernity between and beyond Westernisation and Sinicisation as formulated in the twentieth century, be it in Republican China, Taiwan or the People’s Republic, and how this is reflected in “Western” historiography on China. For China, (re)articulations of “alternatives” would open up the possibility for more than just one single, homogenising, culturalist-essentialist (and top-down defined) “Chinese dream”. Since discussions of modernity are always closely linked to the concerns of the present, shifts in global economy and politics might, in turn, also lead to new conceptions of what a “global modernity” (if such a single entity exists) should mean and how the Chinese case might relate (or contribute) to it.

Anglican Mission in Twentieth-Century Africa

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth E. Prevost
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Global Dynamics ◽  
Political Dissent ◽  
Sub Saharan

Anglican mission in Africa had the capacity to challenge and unseat social, political, and religious hierarchies and identities as much as to create and reinforce them. This chapter considers how twentieth-century movements in colonial statecraft, welfare and development, anti-colonial nationalism, and decolonization found expression in Anglican mission in sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, it looks at how the Anglican missionary commitment to indigenization played out in government and society, education and knowledge production, ritual and spirituality, political dissent, and devolution—often in unexpected ways that thwarted the intent of mission establishments and reshaped the character of Anglicanism. Approaching missions as communities, structured by changing norms of authority and social cohesion, can reveal the complex interrelationships of local, regional, and global dynamics of Anglican ideology and practice.

Nonregulated Assessment in Music Education

2019 ◽  
pp. 494-511
Author(s):  
Nasim Niknafs
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Music Teaching ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Proactive Approach ◽  
Self Organized ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Local Activism ◽  
Do It Yourself

Without access to official state-sanctioned, public music education, Iranian youth, specifically rock and alternative musicians, follow a self-organized and anarchistic path of music making. Expertly negotiating between the act of music making and the unpredictable situations they face daily, they have become creative in finding new ways to propagate their music and learn the rules of their profession. Meanings attached to assessment in these circumstances become redefined and overshadow the quality of music being created. Assessment becomes a local activism that countervails the top-down, summative model. This chapter provides some characteristics of assessment in music teaching and learning in urban Iran that follow Nilsson and Folkestad’s (2005) ecocultural perspective, consisting of four elements: (a) Gibson’s (1979) concept of affordances, (b) orality, (c) theories of play, and (d) theories of chance. Consequently, assessment in urban Iranian music education can be categorized as follows: (1) do-it-yourself (DIY) and do-it-with-others (DIWO), (2) interactive and decentralized, (3) local anarchism, and (4) lifestyle. This chapter concludes that the field of music education should take a “slightly outside perspective” (Lundström, 2012, p. 652) and proactive approach toward assessment, rather than the reactionary approach to music teaching and learning in which assessment becomes an end goal rather than an approach embodied within learning.

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