Administrating Violence through Coal Ash Policies and Practices

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin R. Eldridge

Coal ash, the waste generated at coal-burning power plants, is one of the largest waste streams in the United States, and it contains a range of contaminants, including arsenic and mercury. Disasters at coal ash waste sites in recent years have led to increased public scrutiny of coal ash in communities and have sparked policy debates, lawsuits, and complaints throughout the country. With emphasis on federal and state coal ash policies since the 1970s, this article highlights the synthesis of government and corporate power in coal ash politics, and the bureaucratic processes affecting communities near coal ash sites. Based on ethnographic research following the 2008 Tennessee Valley Authority coal ash disaster, as well as preliminary research on the “social life” of coal ash in North Carolina, this article specifically offers ethnographic insight into the lived experiences of social and ecological violence created, perpetuated, and normalized through bureaucratic processes.

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Phu Van Han

After more than 30 years of national reform, Ho Chi Minh City has made great changes in economy, living standards and society for all population groups, including the Cham Muslim community. The study clarifies the social characteristics, community development trends in the current sustainable development process of the Cham Muslims. At the same time, explore the adaptability of the community, clarify the aspects of social life and the development of Cham Muslims in Ho Chi Minh City. Thereby, providing insight into a unique cultural lifestyle, harmony between religion and ethnic customs, in a multicultural, colorful city in Ho Chi Minh City today.


Inner Asia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-171
Author(s):  
Hildegard Diemberger

AbstractIn this paper I follow the social life of the Tibetan books belonging to the Younghusband-Waddell collection. I show how books as literary artefacts can transform from ritual objects into loot, into commodities and into academic treasures and how books can have agency over people, creating networks and shaping identities. Exploring connections between books and people, I look at colonial collecting, Orientalist scholarship and imperial visions from an unusual perspective in which the social life and cultural biography of people and things intertwine and mutually define each other. By following the trajectory of these literary artefacts, I show how their traces left in letters, minutes and acquisition documents give insight into the functioning of academic institutions and their relationship to imperial governing structures and individual aspirations. In particular, I outline the lives of a group of scholars who were involved with this collection in different capacities and whose deeds are unevenly known. This adds a new perspective to the study of this period, which has so far been largely focused on the deeds of key individuals and the political and military setting in which they operated. Finally, I show how the books of this collection have continued to exercise their attraction and moral pressure on twenty-first-century scholars, both Tibetan and international, linking them through digital technology and cyberspace.


2021 ◽  
Vol 123 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Jeanne M. Powers ◽  
Kathryn P. Chapman

Background In the past decade, the laws governing teachers’ employment have been at the center of legal and political conflicts across the United States. Vergara v. California challenged five California state statutes that provide employment protections for teachers. In June 2014, a California lower court declared the statutes unconstitutional because they exposed students to “grossly ineffective teachers.” Purpose The purpose of the article is to document and analyze how Vergara was presented in the print news media. It is important to understand how the print news media presents education policy debates to the public, because the print news media shapes the general public's understanding of education and other public policy debates by providing frames and themes for interpreting the issues in question and people associated with them. Research Design Using the social construction of target populations and political spectacle as conceptual lenses, we conducted a content analysis of print news media articles on the Vergara case published between June 2012 and November 2014. We provide a descriptive overview of the full corpus of articles published during this period and a thematic analysis of the 65 unique news articles published in the aftermath of the decision. The latter focuses on news articles because they are intended to provide more objective coverage of the case than opinions or editorials. Findings In the print news media coverage, the word “teacher” was often paired with a negative qualifier, which suggests that Vergara was an effort to change the relatively advantaged social construction of teachers. Similarly, metaphors and the illusion of rationality associated with political spectacle were used in ways that bolstered the plaintiffs’ claims. While Vergara consumed a substantial amount of philanthropic and public dollars, ultimately it did not change the policies that govern teachers’ employment in California. Vergara may have been more successful in shaping the general public's perceptions of teachers and the conditions of teachers’ employment in the period following the trial.


Author(s):  
Mark Goodman ◽  
Stephen Brandon ◽  
Melody Fisher

<p>In 1968 social movements sparked rhetorical discourses which occurred in many nations and on hundreds of colleges and in communities across the United States.  These rhetorical discourses ultimately changed the direction of human events.  Sometimes these points of ideological protests shared views on specific issues, especially demonstrations against the Vietnam War, but each conflict was also its own local conflict.  There is no evidence that any specific group organized the protests, or that speakers motivated demonstrations, or that the rhetoric of one protest caused other protests.  Yet, the protests were not just spontaneous fires that happened to occur in the same year. So, how is it that so many protesters shared the desire for change and shared rhetoric, but each protest was sparked by local issues?  Answering that question provides insight into how the rhetoric of social movements occurred in 1968. </p><p>               Many scholars call for the study of the social movements of the 1960s.  Jensen (1996) argues, “The events of the 1960s dramatically increased the interest in studying social movements and forced rhetorical scholars to reconsider their methods for studying public discourse” (p. 28). To Lucas (2006), “Words became weapons in the cultural conflict that divided America” (x). Schippa (2001) wrote, “Many accounts identify the 1960s as a turning point. For better or for worse, there was a confluence of changing rhetorical practices, expanding rhetorical theories, and opportunities for rhetorical criticism. The cultural clashes of the 1960s were felt perhaps most acutely on college campuses. The sufficiency of deliberative argument and public address can be said to have been called into question, whether one was an antiwar activist who hated LBJ's war in Vietnam or a pro-establishment stalwart trying to make sense of the rhetoric of protest and demonstration. Years later, scholars would characterize war itself as rhetorical. What counted as rhetorical practice was up for grabs”(p. 261).</p>               First, this paper will frame the protest movement of 1968.  Then, we will search for the common factors that shaped the protests of 1968, focusing on the role of music. This analysis will provide insight into how music became a rhetorical force in a significant social movement of the 20th Century.


Author(s):  
Benjamin Huf

Over the past two decades, labor historians in America and Australia have deployed a range of new analytic tools to challenge older, essentialist interpretations of working-class politics in each country (rendering them anomalous compared to their European forebears) and better evaluate workers’ thoughts and actions on their “own terms.” This chapter continues this process of revision. It compares workers’ responses to major pieces of welfare reform in each country during the Depression era, not to assess them as agents of social change but for insight into their self-understanding as political subjects. Specifically, reactions to the contributory principle that underpinned both the Social Security Act in the United States and the National Insurance Act in Australia highlights the ways in which workers’ negotiation of institutional change might affirm or alter political self-understandings. American workers’ acceptance of the contributory principle accompanied the construction of a newfound “self-governance” and “consumer citizenship” among white, working men, whereas Australian workers’ hostility to the principle was couched in a pre-existing sense of “independence” and “self-reliance” undergirded by existing social and wage policies. A comparative approach thus stresses the historicity and contingency of working-class subjectivities even in two countries much alike for their “liberal hegemony” and helps open up the possibility of rethinking institutional forms and their relations with constituting new subjectivities in late-capitalist societies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 88-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan C Clift

In the context of social welfare austerity and non-state actors’ interventions into social life, an urban not-for-profit organization in the United States, Back on My Feet, uses the practice of running to engage those recovering from homelessness. Promoting messages of self-sufficiency, the organization centralizes the body as a site of investment and transformation. Doing so calls to the fore the social construction of ‘the homeless body’ and ‘the running body’. Within this ethnographic inquiry, participants in recovery who ran with the organization constructed moralized senses of self in relation to volunteers, organizers, and those who do not run, while in recovery. Their experiences compel consideration of how bodily constructions and practices reproduce morally underpinned, self-oriented associations with homeless and neoliberal discourses that obfuscate systemic causes of homelessness, pose challenges for well-intentioned voluntary or development organizations, and service the relief of the state from social responsibility.


Augustinianum ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-65
Author(s):  
Miklós Gyurkovics ◽  

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that the teaching of Clement of Alexandria on marriage is closely related to the author’s soteriology and cosmology. The study focuses on the Third Book of Stromateis, which provides insight into the different Christian views on marriage at the end of the second century. Study of the Third Book of Stromateis also reveals Clement’s unique method of argument, by means of which he corrects the theological positions of his opponents. Last but not least, Clement’s discussions of family life provide a window onto the social life of the Late Empire from the point of view of a second-century Christian philosopher.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 301
Author(s):  
Xin Huang

From the perspective of history, literature and translatology, this article discusses in depth the translation of Bosson and holds that: (1) his selection of source language text (SLT) should be timely&mdash;his adaptation to the social and historical context of the United States and the theme of the era; (2) his interpretation of SLT is much accurate since Bosson has devoted all his life to Tibetan and Mongolian studies; however, there still exists some under-translation&mdash;the translation carries less information than the original, Bosson fails to reproduce the deep meanings of SLT related to Tibetan culture; (3) his literal translation or foreignization, making the version featured by a purely linguistic translation method, in order to help the intended readers to insight into the laws how to render the Mongolian, or Tibetan into English; and (4) his expression in the version tends to be colloquial, and be rich in foreignized expressions. All these reflect the subjectivity from Bosson, as a linguistic translator, non-literary translator. Furthermore, Bosson&rsquo;s subjectivity is not only an adaptation to the social and historical context, the theme of the era, but also a limited transcendence of these constraints.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-97
Author(s):  
Anne H. Fabricius

Th is paper will discuss a particular hashtag meme as one example of a potential new manifestation of interjectionality, engendered and fostered in the written online context of social media. Th e case derives from a video meme and hashtag from the United States which ‘went viral’ in 2012. We will ask to what extent hashtags might perform interjectional-type functions over and above their referential functions, thereby having links to other, more prototypically interjectional elements. Th e case will also be discussed from multiple sociolinguistic perspectives: as an example of the (indirect) signifying of ‘whiteness’ through ‘black’ discourse, as cultural appropriation in the context of potential policing of these racial divides in the United States, and as a case of performative stylization which highlights grammatical markers while simultaneously downplaying phonological markers of African American English. We will end by speculating as to the implications of the rise of (variant forms of) hashtags for processes of creative language use in the future.


2020 ◽  
pp. 152483992097460
Author(s):  
Linda Sprague Martinez ◽  
Cristina Araujo Brinkerhoff ◽  
Bailey Conner ◽  
Magalis Troncoso Lama ◽  
C. Eduardo Siqueira ◽  
...  

In order to better understand factors that influence the health and well-being of Dominican immigrants, we explored the ways in which immigration influences cultural practices, health behavior, and health. Dominican immigrants (n = 42) took part in five reflective and unstructured group discussions and (n = 5) participated in an intergenerational photovoice group. The loss of the familial and social context in which Dominican dietary practices traditionally take place was a salient theme. For participants, eating became a rushed, perfunctory activity involving fewer people and less socializing. Dietary practices in the Dominican Republic are set in the context of familial norms and social processes, which provide support as well as opportunities for socializing and the transmission of cultural practices across generations. In the United States, broader sociopolitical forces are guided by individualism and do not support the development or maintenance of these factors for Dominicans. Policies that promote work–life balance may have important implications for dietary practices in new immigrant communities.


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