scholarly journals For an international journal in transnational times

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (267-268) ◽  
pp. 213-218
Author(s):  
Joseph Sung-Yul Park
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Academic Capitalism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Academic Journals ◽  
Linguistic Practice ◽  
A Site ◽  
Colonial Capitalism

Abstract Academic journals are a site of tension between the perspective of the transnational and international – between an emphasis on the agency and creativity of linguistic practice that transcends boundaries of nations and languages and a focus on the enduring relations of colonial capitalism that impose bounded and hierarchized order upon our social and linguistic life. Being an international journal in transnational times comes with the challenge of having to facilitate transnational flows of knowledge without reifying the oppressive structure of the political economy of knowledge production. The International Journal of the Sociology of Language’s response to this challenge may lie in its commitment to solidarity and collaboration, where it serves as a ground for resisting the pressures of academic capitalism and for collectively seeking an agenda for research which dismantle hierarchies and boundaries that sustain and rationalize inequalities.

How the Political Economy of Knowledge Production Shapes Education Policy: The Case of Teacher Evaluation in Federal Policy Discourse

2021 ◽  
pp. 016237372110039
Author(s):  
Sarah Reckhow ◽  
Megan Tompkins-Stange ◽  
Sarah Galey-Horn
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Teacher Evaluation ◽  
Education Policy ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Policy Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Financial Infrastructure ◽  
Congressional Hearing ◽  
Elite Interviews ◽  
Support Teacher

Using congressional testimony on teacher quality from 2003 to 2015 and analysis of 60 elite interviews, we show how the political economy of knowledge production influences idea uptake in education policy discourse. We develop and assess a conceptual framework showing the organizational and financial infrastructure that links research, ideas, and advocacy in politics. We find that congressional hearing witnesses representing groups that received philanthropic grants are more likely to support teacher evaluation policies, but specific mentions of research in testimony are not a factor. Overall, our study shows that funders and advocacy groups emphasized rapid uptake of ideas to reform teacher evaluation, which effectively influenced policymakers but limited the use of research in teacher evaluation policy discourse.

scholarly journals Distributing productive play: a materialist analysis of Steam

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Interaction Design ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sales Promotions ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
New Space ◽  
A Site

Valve Corporation’s digital game distribution platform, Steam, is the largest distributor of games on personal computers, analyzed here as a site where control over the production, design and use of digital games is established. Steam creates and exercises processes and techniques such as monopolization and enclosure over creative products, online labour, and exchange among game designers. Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding framework places communication at the centre of the political economy, here of digital commodities distributed and produced by online platforms like Steam. James Gibson’s affordance theory allows the market Steam’s owners create for its users to be cast in terms of visuality and interaction design. These theories are largely neglected in the existing literature in game studies, platform studies, and political economy, but they allow intervention in an ongoing debate concerning the ontological status of work and play as distinct, separate human activities by offering a specific focus on the political economy of visual or algorithmic communication. Three case studies then analyze Steam as a site where the slippage between game-play and work is constant and deepening. The first isolates three sales promotions on Steam as forms of work disguised as online shopping. The second is a discourse analysis of a crisis within the community of mod creators for the game Skyrim, triggered by changes implemented on Steam. The third case study critiques Valve Corporation’s positioning of Steam as a new space to extract value from play by demonstrating historical continuity with consumer monopolies. A concluding discussion argues Steam is a platform that evolves to meet distinct crises and problems in the production and circulation of its digital commodities as contradictions arise. Ultimately, Steam shows how the cycle of capital accumulation encourages monopolization and centralization.

The Biopolitical Logics of Settler Colonialism and Disruptive Relationality

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
René Dietrich
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Way

This essay argues that the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism function according to a naturalization in Western thought of politics as a project of hierarchically ordering life in relation to the sphere of politics. Significantly, such a mode of thinking discredits socio-political orders that operate on the basis of a non-hierarchical place-based relationality of all life forms including the land. Through a reading of Foucault and Agamben in their use of Aristotle, I want to show how hierarchy as a principle of the political is already implemented in the premise they draw upon for analyzing the biopolitical. In the same way it remains unrecognized in their analysis of biopolitics, this principle also becomes operative within settler colonial logics of life and land. Recently, however, Indigenous scholars and writers have mobilized relationality in its formative characteristic for Indigenous polities and politics as strategy to disrupt biopolitical logics and denaturalize settler colonial rule, which I want to show through engaging Daniel Heath Justice’s Indigenous fantasy trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles as a site of disruptive relationality and political knowledge production.

Digital media communication, intellectual property, and the commodification of language

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-266
Author(s):  
Joseph Sung-Yul Park
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Media Communication ◽  
For Profit ◽  
A Site ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract Focusing on fansubbing, the production of unauthorized subtitles by fans of audiovisual media content, this paper calls for a more serious sociolinguistic analysis of the political economy of digital media communication. It argues that fansubbing’s contentious position within regimes of intellectual property and copyright makes it a useful context for considering the crucial role of language ideology in global capitalism’s expanding reach over communicative activity. Through a critical analysis of Korean discourses about fansubbing, this paper considers how tensions between competing ideological conceptions of fansub work shed light on the process by which regimes of intellectual property incorporate digital media communication as a site for profit. Based on this analysis, the paper argues for the need to look beyond the affordances of digital media in terms of translingual, hybrid, and creative linguistic form, to extend our investigations towards language ideologies as a constitutive element in the political economy.

Sociology’s encounter with the decolonial: The problematique of indigenous vs that of coloniality, extraversion and colonial modernity

2020 ◽  
pp. 001139212093114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sujata Patel
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Politics Of Difference ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Everyday Knowledge

How did the process of decolonization reframe the social sciences? This article maps the interventions made by theorists of and from the ex-colonial countries in reconceptualizing sociology both as practice and as an episteme. It argues that there are geographically varied and intellectually diverse decolonial approaches being formulated using sociological theory to critique the universals propounded by the traditions of western sociology/social sciences; that these diverse knowledges are connected through colonial and global circuits and that these create knowledge geographies; that collectively these diverse intellectual positions argue that sociology/social sciences are constituted in and within the politics of ‘difference’ organized within colonial, nationalist and global geopolitics; that this ‘difference’ is being reproduced in everyday knowledge practices and is being structured through the political economy of knowledge; and that the destabilization of this power structure and democratization of this knowledge is possible only when there is a fulsome interrogation of this political economy, and its everyday practices of knowledge production within universities and research institutes. It argues that this critique needs to be buffered by the constitution of alternate networks of circulation of this knowledge.

Gender, identity, and the political economy of language: Anglophone wives in Tunisia

1996 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Walters
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Gender Identity ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Mixed Marriages ◽  
A Site ◽  
Political Economy Of Language ◽  
Tunisian Arabic

ABSTRACTUsing the frameworks of the political economy of language, and of language use as acts of identity, this study attempts to describe and analyze the situation of natively anglophone wives living with their Tunisian husbands in Tunisia – a speech community characterized by Arabic diglossia and Arabic/French bilingualism. Particular attention is devoted to these women's beliefs about using Tunisian Arabic (TA), the native language of their husbands, and the ways in which access to TA or the use of it becomes a site of conflict between husbands and wives, or mothers and children, in these mixed marriages. (Gender, identity, political economy of language, ideology, Tunisia, Arabic, francophonie, diglossia, code-switching, bilingualism, multilingualism, family relations)

Resisting Piratic Method by Doing Research Otherwise

Sociology ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Tilley
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The Political ◽  
The South ◽  
The Core ◽  
Intellectual Commons

The reconstruction of sociology into connected sociologies works towards a truly global and plural discipline. But if undoing the overrepresentation of European epistemology in sociology requires a deeper engagement with epistemologies of the South or worlds and knowledges otherwise, how can we ensure that such engagements do not simply reproduce colonial forms of appropriation and domination? Here I consider means of resisting extractive, or ‘piratic’ method in sociology research by drawing lessons from recent debates around geopiracy and biopiracy in geography and the life sciences. The core claim of this article is that any decolonial knowledge production must involve a consideration of the political economy of knowledge – its forms of extraction, points of commodification, how it is refined as intellectual property, and how it comes to alienate participating knowers. Against this I suggest a relearning of method in an anti-piratic way as a means of returning our work to the intellectual commons.

scholarly journals Distributing productive play: a materialist analysis of Steam

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Interaction Design ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sales Promotions ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
New Space ◽  
A Site

Valve Corporation’s digital game distribution platform, Steam, is the largest distributor of games on personal computers, analyzed here as a site where control over the production, design and use of digital games is established. Steam creates and exercises processes and techniques such as monopolization and enclosure over creative products, online labour, and exchange among game designers. Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding framework places communication at the centre of the political economy, here of digital commodities distributed and produced by online platforms like Steam. James Gibson’s affordance theory allows the market Steam’s owners create for its users to be cast in terms of visuality and interaction design. These theories are largely neglected in the existing literature in game studies, platform studies, and political economy, but they allow intervention in an ongoing debate concerning the ontological status of work and play as distinct, separate human activities by offering a specific focus on the political economy of visual or algorithmic communication. Three case studies then analyze Steam as a site where the slippage between game-play and work is constant and deepening. The first isolates three sales promotions on Steam as forms of work disguised as online shopping. The second is a discourse analysis of a crisis within the community of mod creators for the game Skyrim, triggered by changes implemented on Steam. The third case study critiques Valve Corporation’s positioning of Steam as a new space to extract value from play by demonstrating historical continuity with consumer monopolies. A concluding discussion argues Steam is a platform that evolves to meet distinct crises and problems in the production and circulation of its digital commodities as contradictions arise. Ultimately, Steam shows how the cycle of capital accumulation encourages monopolization and centralization.

scholarly journals The Curious Case of ‘Schools’ of IR: From the Sociology to the Geopolitics of Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongjin Zhang ◽  
Peter Marcus Kristensen
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Core ◽  
A Site ◽  
Epistemic Diversity ◽  
Recent Insight

Abstract This article interrogates the questions evoked by the curious case of ‘schools’ of thought in International Relations (IR) through the twin perspectives of the sociology of knowledge and geopolitics of knowledge. Drawing inspirations from the tradition of the sociology of IR pioneered by E. H. Carr, the paper first explores how geo-epistemic diversity can help understand the sociologically problematic nature of IR knowledge production in the existing discipline. Taking cues from Randall Collins’s sociology of philosophies, the article moves to identify four clusters of sociological conditions and dynamics that, we argue, facilitate the formation and sustain the operation of schools of thought in IR. Taking seriously the recent insight from geopolitics of knowledge, the article then looks at why and how school labelling constitutes a battleground for contestation and legitimation of knowledge. While the ‘core’ uses the school label to create a parallel, and explicitly inferior, universe of knowledge production to localize theoretical noises from the peripheries, the school label, we argue, has been proactively appropriated by those at peripheries and semi-peripheries for three strategic purposes: to engage in a purposely contentious politics, to question the claim of the American ‘core’ as the creator, depositor, and distributor of universal knowledge, and to unveil the geo-historical linkage between the political and the epistemic. School labelling matters, we further argue, because it has become a site of contestation of geopolitics of knowledge and reflects the perils and promises in our collective pursuit of constructing a truly global IR.

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