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.

Five Years and Count(er)ing: Memoir after Memoir

CounterText ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-32
Author(s):  
Norbert Bugeja
Keyword(s):  
Guest Editor ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Terror Attack ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
Personal Perspectives ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Ongoing Project

In this retrospective piece, the Guest Editor of the first number of CounterText (a special issue titled Postcolonial Springs) looks back at the past five years from various scholarly and personal perspectives. He places particular focus on an event that took place mid-way between the 2011 uprisings across a number of Arab countries and the moment of writing: the March 2015 terror attack on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, which killed twenty-two people and had a profound effect on Tunisian popular consciousness and that of the post-2011 Arab nations. In this context, the author argues for a renewed perspective on memoir as at once a memorial practice and a political gesture in writing, one that exceeds concerns of genre and form to encompass an ongoing project of political re-cognition following events that continue to remap the agenda for the region. The piece makes a brief final pitch for Europe's need to re-cognise, within those modes of ‘articulacy-in-difficulty’ active on its southern borders, specific answers to its own present quandaries.

Decolonizing Refugee Studies, Standing up for Indigenous Justice: Challenges and Possibilities of a Politics of Place

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 371-390
Author(s):  
Sedef Arat-Koc
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Third World ◽  
Refugee Studies ◽  
Politics Of Place ◽  
White Settler ◽  
Standing Up ◽  
Global North ◽  
Analytical Step ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Political Solidarity

This paper interrogates the challenges and potentials for solidarity between refugees and Indigenous peoples by bringing decolonial, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist critiques in different parts of the world, including in white settler colonies and in the Third World, into conversation with each other and with Refugee Studies. The first section of the paper offers two analytical steps towards decolonizing mainstream Refugee Studies. The first step involves identifying, analyzing and problematizing what we may call “an elephant in the room,” a parallax gap between Refugee Studies and studies of International Politics. The second analytical step is problematizing and challenging the popular discourses of charity and gratitude that dominate refugee discourses and narratives in the Global North. The second section of the paper engages in a more direct and detailed discussion about challenges to and possibilities for solidarity between refugees and Indigenous peoples. Articulating historical and contemporary parallels between refugee displacement from land and Indigenous dispossession of land, this section demonstrates that there are nevertheless no guarantees for political solidarity. It argues that potentials for solidarity are contingent on a politics of place, as articulated by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars; and also possibly on a reconceptualization and reorientation of refugee identity different from the ways it has been constituted in colonial discourses.

The Politics of Debt and Europe's Relations with the 'South'

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Essential Feature ◽  
The South ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Past Injustice ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Individual ◽  
North And South

While debt has the capacity to sustain social relations by joining together the two parties of a debt relation, it also contains the risk of deteriorating into domination and bargaining. Throughout history, different understandings of debt have therefore gravitated between reciprocity and domination, making it a key concept for understanding the dynamics of both social cohesion and fragmentation. The book considers the social, spatial and temporal meanings of this ambiguity and relates them to contemporary debates over debts between North and South in Europe, which in turn are embedded in a longer global history of North-South relations. The individual chapters discuss how debts incurred in the past are mobilised in political debates in the present. This dynamic is highlighted with regard to regional and global North-South relations. An essential feature in debates on this topic is the difficult question of retribution and possible ways of “paying” – a term that is etymologically connected to “pacification” – for past injustice. Against this backdrop, the book combines a discussion of the multi-layered European and global North-South divide with an effort to retrieve alternatives to the dominant and divisive uses of debt for staking out claims against someone or something. Discovering new and forgotten ways of thinking about debt and North-South relations, the chapters are divided into four sections that focus on 1) debt and social theory, 2) Greece and Germany as Europe’s South and North, 3) the ‘South’ between the local, the regional and the global, and 4) debt and the politics of history.

Slippage: An Anthropology of Shamanism

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-22
Author(s):  
Bruce Grant
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Real World ◽  
History Of Anthropology ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
History Of

If our knowledge of shamanism has been so abidingly partial, so impressively uneven, so deeply varied by history, and so enduringly skeptical for so long, how has its study come to occupy such pride of place in the anthropological canon? One answer comes in a history of social relations where shamans both are cast as translators of the unseen and are themselves sites of anxiety in a very real world, one of encounters across lines of gender, class, and colonial incursions often defined by race. This article contends that as anthropologists have cultivated a long and growing library of shamanic practice, many appear to have found, in a globally diverse range of spirit practitioners, translators across social worlds who are not unlike themselves, suggesting that in the shaman we find a remarkable history of anthropology.

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.

scholarly journals Anthropocene and “Development”: Intertwined Trajectories Since the Beginning of The Great Acceleration

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 400-413
Author(s):  
Marina Dantas de Figueiredo ◽  
Fábio Freitas Schilling Marquesan ◽  
José Miguel Imas
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Model ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Environmental Consequences ◽  
The North ◽  
Development Policies ◽  
Global North ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Great Acceleration ◽  
North And South

ABSTRACT Objectives: We aim to propose the thesis that the trajectories of the Anthropocene and the current mainstream understandings of development are intertwined from the beginning. It means that the Anthropocene and the “development” are coetaneous: the implementation of development policies for the so-considered underdeveloped regions started to happen at the same time of what is known as The Great Acceleration of production, consumption and environmental degradation in a global level. Method: In this conceptual paper, we adopt a decolonial critique as an analytical lens and argue that different geopolitical positions may be necessary for approaching the issue of the Anthropocene from epistemological reflections that can include the cultural and political context of the production and reproduction of local knowledge. Results: Our theoretical argumentation sheds light on the role of Global North and South relations in shaping the environmental crisis. Latin America (LA) exemplifies the modus operandi of the intertwinement of the practical effects of development policies and the environmental consequences underlying the Anthropocene, in which natural resources are over-explored to satisfy export-oriented trade, from the South toward the North. LA is not only a propitious context to show the validity of our thesis, but also the source of alternatives to such developmental model. Conclusion: The emphasis on development as a cause of the Anthropocene supports The Great Acceleration thesis. The proposition of the name Developmentocene comes from the thesis that development and Anthropocene are coetaneous, the intertwinement of both resulting in the very definition of the new epoch.

scholarly journals Cultural contradictions of post-Fordism in the context of the transformation of European peripheries through the prism of the class of subcontractors

2021 ◽  
pp. 103-125
Author(s):  
Tadeusz Popławski
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Broad Class ◽  
Transformation Process ◽  
Life Chances ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
New States ◽  
Market Opportunities ◽  
Historical Comparative ◽  
Cultural Contradictions ◽  
The Moment

The presented paper deals with the basic issues, dilemmas and social and cultural contradictions in the Polish transformation process against the background of Central and Eastern Europe, the processes of the establishment and development of new states and nations as well as the new markets. The author views these problems through the light of the emergence of a broad class of subcontractors in a turbulent environment and the new modes of production, which are a result of changes in the structure of human labour introduced by post-Fordism (in its final stage, lean management) and postmodernity. The author also analyzes the social change as a consequence of social relations resulting from exchanging the life chances of the actors for the class-conditioned market opportunities in the existing social and political situation (conjoncture) and at the present stage of transformation at the moment when the emergent markets get shaped and mature. The study makes use of the hermeneutic method, which is finding out the essence of the present phase of transformation through the light of new concepts against the background of the historical-comparative analysis. The present article is not aimed at ordering reality but it is an inspiration for studies and for approaching transformation in accordance with a new conceptual apparatus of social sciences, sociology, management and political economy.

The Principle of Legal Certainty: whether there Can Be Gaps in the Public Law?

2020 ◽  
Vol 2(22) ◽  
pp. 29-36
Author(s):  
Maria A. Kapustina
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Social Regulation ◽  
Legal Certainty ◽  
The Public ◽  
Legal Literature ◽  
The Moment

Legal regulation is caused by the necessity to provide legal order of social regulation. The legal order of regulation is provided by formal legal certainty of regulatory provisions (legal prescripts) and their legal substance. However, there exist relations, whose content, namely, subjective rights and juridical responsibilities of the parties are not strictly prescribed in the legislative norms. Because a legislator cannot foresee all the variety of social relations that may occur in real life and prescribe their formal and legal substance in corresponding legislative acts. In such cases, we usually talk about gaps in law, about the uncertainty of legal regulation. Gaps are taken for granted, considered as an obligatory element of any legal system. Nonetheless, whether there can be gaps in the public law, if in the public law sphere norms are created purposively? In public law, norms are created purposefully (with a goal in mind), public law institutions are artificially established and rationally modernized. The lack of a norm of a statute can mean the refusal of the legislator to legally regulate the question, at least at the moment. This is so-called in legal literature “qualified silence of the legislator” that should not be considered as a gap in law.

Digital Resources and Approaches Adopted by User-Centred Museums

2014 ◽  
pp. 181-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludovico Solima
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
User Involvement ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Digital Resources ◽  
Open Content ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Individual

Society is experiencing unprecedented changes, largely attributable to the evolution of communication technologies, which are steadily reframing our way of life, and the methods we use to establish and maintain social relations. Museums are therefore facing numerous challenges, in general as a result of these developments: apps, open content, and the Internet-of-things. A complex relationship can be created between visitors and the museum, and this also opens new unexplored opportunities for user involvement in the museum's activities, even during the course of the visit itself. It is worth taking care to identify all the variables involved in the museum-visitor-relationship, which also encompasses the social dimension. Both the museum and the individual are active participants in a gradually expanding relationship, namely the growth of the so-called Web 2.0 and social media. Therefore, we can assume the need for museums to develop a conscious strategy for their social media presence, a real social media strategy, which forms part of the museum's wider digital strategy. The increasingly pervasive spread of e-mobile technology is a foretaste of the moment when museumgoers will radically change both the way of establishing relations with these organisations and the actual ways of using museum services. This chapter focuses on digital resources and approaches adopted by user-centred museums, where there is an increasing impact from the internet and social media.

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