scholarly journals Interrupting White Possession and Unsettling State Borders

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-59
Author(s):  
Fiona Nicoll
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
Whiteness Studies ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
White Subject ◽  
Race Ethnicity

It is both a pleasure and a significant responsibility to review two field-shaping works in critical indigenous studies. The White Possessive showcases the unique intellectual contribution of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, both within Australia and internationally. Prising apart concepts of race, ethnicity and cultural difference, her book makes visible and accountable the patriarchal white subject of possession that subtends them. Mohawk Interruptus is a rigorous ethnographic account of the intra-subjective and intersubjective dimensions of academic disciplines and political practices that produce and police the ‘authenticity’ of Indigenous people. Both books should be read and studied by scholars across academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. In particular, they break new ground for researchers in law, sociology, women’s studies, critical race and whiteness studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, political theory and cultural studies.

The White Possessive and Whiteness Studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
George Lipsitz
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Whiteness Studies ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Change Leaders ◽  
Radical Transformation

Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive performs its own important truths through evidence, ideas, and arguments about property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty. Its arguments about the links between Indigenous dispossession and whiteness are compelling in themselves, but they also serve as provocations to think more generally about how scholarly truths are forged through often uninterrogated deployments of temporality, causality, universality, and particularity. The book’s challenges to the naturalization of the racial state in US whiteness studies, and to the institutionalization of sovereignty and cultural difference in Indigenous studies, are part of a broader pattern in the study of social identities and power. The defeats suffered by the egalitarian and democratic movements of the mid-twentieth century and the rise of neoliberal regimes of racialized austerity and (in)security have given rise to the realization that it is not enough to change leaders and laws: a more radical transformation of social relations and identities, culture, and knowledge needs to take place. Critical race theory and feminist studies, postcolonial critique and decoloniality, queer and disability studies, animality studies and Afro-pessimism, subaltern studies and poststructuralism all emanate from similar frustrations about the gap between the structures of domination and our understandings of them. Moreton-Robinson’s work helps us see the important role in that trajectory of placing Indigenous dispossession at the center of our studies. Doing so will not be easy, but it can no longer be avoided.  

Local Histories/Global Designs

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter D. Mignolo
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Central America ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
South Central ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Border Thinking ◽  
East West

This book is an extended argument about the “coloniality” of power. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, this book points to the inadequacy of current practices in the social sciences and area studies. It explores the crucial notion of “colonial difference” in the study of the modern colonial world and traces the emergence of an epistemic shift, which the book calls “border thinking.” Further, the book expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling on the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. The book's concept of “border gnosis,” or sensing and knowing by dwelling in imperial/colonial borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to manage, and thus limit, understanding. A new preface discusses this book as a dialogue with Hegel's Philosophy of History.

Moral Reasoning Among Croatian Students of Different Academic Orientations

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 208
Author(s):  
Andrea Tokić ◽  
Matilda Nikolić
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Nursing Students ◽  
Social Studies ◽  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Humanities Students ◽  
Health Care Law

Previous studies demonstrated that different academic contexts could have different effects on moral development, i.e. in most cases formal education enhances moral reasoning, but sometime erodes it (for example for medical students). The aim of this study was to examine differences in moral reasoning among students of different academic disciplines (health care, law, social sciences and humanities). In research participated 386 students (Mage=23,12): 154 law students, 55 nursing students, 123 other social sciences students, a 53 humanities students. Participants took Test of Moral Reasoning (TMR) (Proroković, 2016) which measures index of moral reasoning (in range from 0 to 1), and idealistic orientations (humanistic and conservative). The results showed that there was no difference in the moral reasoning index among students of different academic orientations. Furthermore, students of different academic disciplines differed in the humanistic orientation in a way that students of social studies were more humanistically oriented than law students. Some of the possible explanations for the lack of differences with regard to academic orientations is that overall stimulating environment that college provides is perhaps more important for moral reasoning development than specific academic contexts. Findings of this study are consistent with the findings of some of the previous studies.

Reconsidering American Power

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
American Power ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Sponsorship ◽  
To Come

Postcolonial studies, postmodern studies, even posthuman studies emerge, and intellectuals demand that social sciences be remade to address fundamentals of the human condition, from human rights to global environmental crises. Since these fields owe so much to American state sponsorship, is it easier to reimagine the human and the modern than to properly measure the pervasive American influence? Reconsidering American Power offers trenchant studies by renowned scholars who reassess the role of the social sciences in the construction and upkeep of the Pax Americana and the influence of Pax Americana on the social sciences. With the thematic image for this enterprise as the ‘fiery hunt’ for Ahab’s whale, the contributors pursue realities behind the theories, and reconsider the real origins and motives of their fields with an eye on what will deter or repurpose the ‘fiery hunts’ to come, by offering a critical insider’s view.

Marginalization, Assimilation, and Resurgence: Indigenous People in Central America since Independence

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Gabbert
Keyword(s):  
Central America ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Central American ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Access To Education ◽  
Land Loss ◽  
Agricultural Export

While the end of colonial rule brought formal equality it did not end discrimination and marginalization of the indigenous population in independent Central America. Many suffered land loss and proletarianization in the emerging agricultural export economy. However, indigenous people were not mere victims of exploitation, displacement, and ladinization but played an often active role in Central American politics. Participation in the market economy and access to education fostered stratification within the indigenous population. The emergence of well-off and educated Indians and changes in international politics promoting multiculturalism contributed to the emergence of indigenous movements in recent decades. While some progress has been made concerning the recognition of cultural difference and autonomy, land rights are still a much disputed issue.

The Political Theory of Data: Institutions, Algorithms, & Formats in Racial Redlining

2021 ◽  
pp. 009059172110278
Author(s):  
Colin Koopman
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
The Political ◽  
Know How ◽  
Data Points ◽  
Emergent Literature

Despite widespread recognition of an emergent politics of data in our midst, we strikingly lack a political theory of data. We readily acknowledge the presence of data across our political lives, but we often do not know how to conceptualize the politics of all those data points—the forms of power they constitute and the kinds of political subjects they implicate. Recent work in numerous academic disciplines is evidence of the first steps toward a political theory of data. This article maps some limits of this emergent literature with an eye to enriching its theoretical range. The literature on data politics, both within political theory and elsewhere, has thus far focused almost exclusively on the algorithm. This article locates a further dimension of data politics in the work of formatting technology or, more simply, formats. Formats are simultaneously conceptual and technical in the ways they define what can even count as data, and by extension who can count as data and how they can count. A focus on formats is of theoretical value because it provides a bridge between work on the conceptual contours of categories and the technology-centric literature on algorithms that tends to ignore the more conceptual dimensions of data technology. The political insight enabled by format theory is shown in the context of an extended interrogation of the politics of racialized redlining.

Diaspora ohne Religion? Zur Konjunktur des Diaspora-Konzepts in den Sozialwissenschaften

2009 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Clara Tiesler
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
International Migration ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Muslims In Europe

AbstractTaking a critical perspective on the loss of analytical categories, this article discusses the enormous proliferation of Diaspora concepts in social sciences at large, and in particular with regard to discourses on Muslims in Europe. In the era of international migration, the experience of homelessness, deriving from the loss of the myth of religio-cultural and ethno-linguistically singularity in contemporary societies, seems to become an universal phenomenon. Questions of home and belonging are key issues in the current discourses on Diaspora which, since the turning point of 1989, developed aggressively beyond those academic disciplines concerned with religion.

scholarly journals LEXICAL BUNDLES IN JOURNAL ARTICLES ACROSS ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 131
Author(s):  
Deny Arnos Kwary ◽  
Dewantoro Ratri ◽  
Almira F. Artha
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Health Sciences ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Lexical Bundles ◽  
Referential Expressions

This study focuses on the use of lexical bundles (LBs), their structural forms, and their functional classifications in journal articles of four academic disciplines: Health sciences, Life sciences, Physical sciences, and Social sciences. The corpus comprises 2,937,431 words derived from 400 journal articles which were equally distributed in the four disciplines. The results show that Physical sciences feature the most number of lexical bundles, while Health sciences comprise the least. When we pair-up the disciplines, we found that Physical sciences and Social sciences shared the most number of LBs. We also found that there were no LBs shared between Health sciences and Physical sciences, and neither between Health sciences and Social sciences. For the distribution of the structural forms, we found that the prepositional-based and the verb-based bundles were the most frequent forms (each of them accounts for 37.1% of the LBs, making a total of 74.2%). Within the verb-based bundles, the passive form can be found in 12 out of 23 LB types. Finally, for the functional classifications, the number of referential expressions (40 LBs) is a lot higher than those of discourse organizers (12 LBs) and stance expressions (10 LBs). The high frequency of LBs in the referential expressions can be related to the needs to refer to theories, concepts, data and findings of the study.

scholarly journals Fateful Triangles in Brazil: A Forum on Stuart Hall’s The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, Part II

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-470
Author(s):  
Sharon A. Stanley ◽  
João Nackle Urt ◽  
Thiago Braz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Hybrid Identity ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
Racial Mixture ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
Human Difference ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Identity And Difference

Abstract Stuart Hall, a founding scholar in the Birmingham School of cultural studies and eminent theorist of ethnicity, identity and difference in the African diaspora, as well as a leading analyst of the cultural politics of the Thatcher and post-Thatcher years, delivered the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard University in 1994. In the lectures, published after a nearly quarter-century delay as The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (2017), Hall advances the argument that race, at least in North Atlantic contexts, operates as a ‘sliding signifier,’ such that, even after the notion of a biological essence to race has been widely discredited, race-thinking nonetheless renews itself by essentializing other characteristics such as cultural difference. Substituting Michel Foucault’s famous power-knowledge dyad with power-knowledge-difference, Hall argues that thinking through the fateful triangle of race, ethnicity and nation shows us how discursive systems attempt to deal with human difference. In ‘Fateful Triangles in Brazil,’ Part II of Contexto Internacional’s forum on The Fateful Triangle, three scholars work with and against Hall’s arguments from the standpoint of racial politics in Brazil. Sharon Stanley argues that Hall’s account of hybrid identity may encounter difficulties in the Brazilian context, where discourses of racial mixture have, in the name of racial democracy, supported anti-black racism. João Nackle Urt investigates the vexed histories of ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nation’ in reference to indigenous peoples, particularly Brazilian Indians. Finally, Thiago Braz shows, from a perspective that draws on Afro-Brazilian thinkers, that emphasizing the contingency of becoming in the concept of diaspora may ignore the myriad ways by which Afro-diasporic Brazilians are marked as being black, and thus subject to violence and inequality. Part I of the forum – with contributions by Donna Jones, Kevin Bruyneel and William Garcia – critically examines the promise and potential problems of Hall’s work from the context of North America and western Europe in the wake of #BlackLivesMatter and Brexit.

Othering and Fear

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maggie Griffith Williams ◽  
Jenny Korn
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

Television is a significant socialization tool for children to learn about their social worlds. The children's brand, Thomas & Friends, targets preschool audiences with manifest messages about friendship and utility as well as troubling, latent messages about race, ethnicity, and difference. Through critical visual and verbal discursive analyses of the film, Hero of the Rails, we expose Thomas & Friends' investment in racial hierarchies despite its broader message of friendship. We identify four ways that Hiro is “othered” in the film: (1) his glamorized description as “strange,” (2) his consistently heavily accented voice, (3) his Japanese origin story, and (4) his pigmentation and powerlessness. Using theories of “othering,” we argue that the representation of cultural difference to the preschooler audience is fearful and propagates racist discourses of yellow peril and Orientalism.

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