scholarly journals Critical is not political

Seminar.net ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fieke Jansen
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Prominent Feature ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Data Literacy ◽  
Technical Systems ◽  
Data Environment

Data literacy is slowly becoming a more prominent feature of contemporary society. Some argue that people need to obtain new competencies to mitigate and engage with the multiplicity of ways in which they are affected by data. Literacy as such is positioned as a pathway towards empowerment, enable people to make informed choices about their data environment and increasing their ability to actively participate in the discussion that determines the socio-technical systems that will impact their lives. In this article, I will argue that we need to account for the externalities that emerge from the mere act of centring data in a literacy approach and unpack the assumptions that underpin the concept. To advance the argument that data literacy needs to be (re)politicize, both in terms of the perceived competencies need in a data society and the 'neutrality of the practice in itself. To ensure that the audience will have more thoughtful and actionable pathways forward data literacy should learn from other disciplines that have a more thorough analysis of dismantling power structures, engaging with inequality and encouraging political participation.

Women in Power and Decision making Positions : Conditions and Restraints

1970 ◽  
pp. 53-57
Author(s):  
Azza Charara Baydoun
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Policies And Procedures ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Slow Progress

Women today are considered to be outside the political and administrative power structures and their participation in the decision-making process is non-existent. As far as their participation in the political life is concerned they are still on the margins. The existence of patriarchal society in Lebanon as well as the absence of governmental policies and procedures that aim at helping women and enhancing their political participation has made it very difficult for women to be accepted as leaders and to be granted votes in elections (UNIFEM, 2002).This above quote is taken from a report that was prepared to assess the progress made regarding the status of Lebanese women both on the social and governmental levels in light of the Beijing Platform for Action – the name given to the provisions of the Fourth Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. The above quote describes the slow progress achieved by Lebanese women in view of the ambitious goal that requires that the proportion of women occupying administrative or political positions in Lebanon should reach 30 percent of thetotal by the year 2005!

scholarly journals School of Data and Shifting Forms of Political Subjectivity

2021 ◽  
pp. 45-67
Author(s):  
Valentin Dander ◽  
Felicitas Macgilchrist
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Open Data ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Document Analysis ◽  
Political Subjectivity ◽  
Skills Acquisition ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Educational Work ◽  
Data Literacy ◽  
Political Theories

AbstractDigital media are increasingly ‘data media’ and data media are involved in various forms of political activism. This chapter reconstructs political subjectivities around figurations of the ‘digital citizen’ within the field of (open) data activism. The authors draw on interviews, document analysis and concepts from modern and post-sovereign political theories of subjectivation to explore the transformative educational work of the Datenschule (School of Data) project, focusing on the intersection between open data and anti-discriminatory activism. The chapter suggests that although School of Data explicitly positions its work as supporting ‘skills’ acquisition (data literacy), indicating a modernist understanding of subjectivity, the project also generates an understanding of political subjectivation as a multiplicity of distributed transformative processes, entangling data literacy with power structures, data-related and organisational practices.

Toward a Critical Literacy of the Citizen Marketer Approach

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Penney
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Critical Literacy ◽  
Peer To Peer ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Digital Inequality ◽  
Symbolic Action ◽  
The Media ◽  
Political Realities

This concluding chapter addresses the controversy of “slacktivism” and argues that mediated symbolic action does not necessarily become a substitute for other forms of political participation. However, it does present several notable risks: in addition to potentially exacerbating political polarization and partisanship, it may also attenuate the connection between symbolic victories in the media and complex political realities on the ground. The challenge, then, for those who adopt these practices is to work to retain and strengthen connections between style and substance, which requires introspection about the political content they spread to others and what they hope to achieve by doing so. In addition, a critical literacy of citizen marketing must also include an enhanced awareness of the broader power structures that bear upon it, from elite attempts to shape peer-to-peer political messaging flows to serve institutional agendas to gaps in technological access and skills that reproduce digital inequality.

scholarly journals The Juggernaut of Modernity Collapses. The Crisis of Social Planification in the Post COVID-19 era

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Lusardi ◽  
Stefano Tomelleri
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
Instrumental Rationality ◽  
Shared Responsibility ◽  
Future Scenarios ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Technological Processes ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Millennium

This article arises from the urgent need to reflect on the current situation resulting from the dramatic consequences of a crisis which appears to be epochal and which, as sociologists, questions us at first hand. This is to understand the socio-cultural, economic and technological processes that triggered it and to attempt to imagine future scenarios. At the dawn of the third millennium, it seems as if the juggernaut of modernity, with its dream of unlimited progress and cargo of unconditional trust in instrumental rationality, has abruptly slowed down. The pandemic challenges contemporary society to develop a different weltanschauung, alternative to the performative and conformist idea of social planification supported by the neoliberal paradigm. It compels us to finally acquire the consciousness that the complexity of knowledge and global interdependency require collective awareness, political participation, and shared responsibility.

scholarly journals Political Participation and Power Relations in Egypt: The Scope of Newspapers and Social Network Sites

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-63
Author(s):  
Mostafa Shehata
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Social Network Sites ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Mainstream Media

The political use of media in Egypt post-2011 revolution brought about drastic transformations in political activism and power structures. In the context of communication power theory, this article investigates the effects of newspapers and social network sites on political participation and political power relations. The research employed a mixed methodology, comprised of a survey of 527 Egyptian youth and semi-structured interviews of 12 political activists and journalists. The results showed a significant relationship between reading newspapers and youth’s political participation, but not between using social network sites and political participation. In addition, newspapers and social network sites were platforms for a series of conflicts and coalitions that emerged between pro- and anti-revolution actors. Despite the importance of social network sites as key tools for informing and mobilizing the public, they eventually failed to empower new political actors, and this was because old actors, supported by newspapers and other mainstream media, managed to obstruct the new actors’ progress.

scholarly journals Un mondo governato da dati e algoritmi. La data literacy attraverso il cinema

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-13
Author(s):  
Davide Bennato
Keyword(s):  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Data Literacy ◽  
Digital Society ◽  
Collective Process

The digital society focuses on the use of technologies that incorporate every individual and collective process. New infrastructures of contemporary society are the algorithms that define social dynamics by producing data, true raw materials of this condition. All this necessitates a relatively new competence in data literacy, understood as the ability to read and understand data. To train in this competence, cinema can be a useful tool, in particular the films that put data at the center of the story.

scholarly journals A Survey on Unsupervised K-Means Algorithm in Big Data Environment

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Fatama Sharf Al-deen ◽  
Fadl Mutaher Ba-Alwi
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Information Technology ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Relational Databases ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Learning Technologies ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Prominent Feature ◽  
Data Environment

Due to the rapid development in information technology, Big Data has become one of its prominent feature that had a great impact on other technologies dealing with data such as machine learning technologies. K-mean is one of the most important machine learning algorithms. The algorithm was first developed as a clustering technology dealing with relational databases. However, the advent of Big Data has highly effected its performance. Therefore, many researchers have proposed several approaches to improve K-mean accuracy in Big Data environment. In this paper, we introduce a literature review about different technologies proposed for k-mean algorithm development in Big Data. We demonstrate a comparison between them according to several criteria, including the proposed algorithm, the database used, Big Data tools, and k-mean applications. This paper helps researchers to see the most important challenges and trends of the k-mean algorithm in the Big Data environment.

Good Living as a Living Law

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-40
Author(s):  
Carlos E. Gallegos Anda
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Legal Principle ◽  
Good Living ◽  
Legal Formalism ◽  
Small Clusters ◽  
Social And Economic Rights

In 2008, Ecuador reformed its Constitution after a prolonged period of economic, social and political crises. The momentary rupturing of power structures, that had limited political participation to small clusters of elites, opened participatory spaces for historically marginalised social groups to engage in the process of constitutional drafting. As a result of this unprecedented political shift in participation and inclusiveness, alternative notions of cultural, social and economic rights surfaced. This progressive constitutionalism is thus a novel attempt at overcoming legal formalism in favour of aLiving Law, a law that embraces the contextual settings where it will be applied by scrutinising the historic power structures that have moulded it.Good Livingas a legal principle underlines the enactment of aLiving Law.

scholarly journals Disciplinary Power, Surveillance, and the Docile Body in Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 2675-2690
Author(s):  
Hasanain Riyadh Abdulzahra ◽  
Zainor Izat Zainal ◽  
Mohamed Ewan Awang ◽  
Hardev Kaur Jujar Singh
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Valuable Insight ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Prominent Feature ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Negative Impacts

Power in contemporary society is a prominent feature in literary works, especially in postmodernist literary works. Mark Dunn is an American novelist who deals with the subject of power prominently in his works, especially his first novel Ella Minnow Pea (2001). While previous studies on Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea focused on aspects of violence, sexuality, and psychological aspects of power, this study concentrates on disciplinary aspects of power, such as surveillance, which is used to subjugate subjects without the use of violence to transform them into productive, docile bodies. The study explores Ella Minnow Pea through Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, surveillance, and docile body. In Foucault’s view, disciplinary power is used as a conversion method to force individuals into submission to authority characterised by conformity and obedience, or docility. The study examines power manipulation, disciplinary practices, and the effectiveness of surveillance as methods for converting people into productive docile bodies and how the novel achieved this result. In addition, it delves into the characters’ responses in the novel to these machinations, which ultimately reveal that the negative impacts of repressive disciplinary power contrast with the benefits anticipated by the authoritarian state. This study provides a valuable insight on the use of Foucauldian concepts in literary criticism as the concepts chosen for this analysis have not previously been applied to this text.

Women's Participation in Village Autonomy in China: Evidence from Zhejiang Province

2009 ◽  
Vol 197 ◽  
pp. 145-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiajuan Guo ◽  
Yongnian Zheng ◽  
Lijun Yang
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Gender Gap ◽  
Rural Women ◽  
Zhejiang Province ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Local Power ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Women's Political Participation

AbstractDrawing on the data collected from three surveys in China's Zhejiang province during the period from 1999 to 2006, this article attempts to examine women's political participation in village autonomy and village elections in China. The data show that while men and women have obtained a very similar level of self-awareness and motivation in terms of political participation, China's patriarchal system, embedded in various forms of mindset and political practice, continues to constrain rural women's political involvement in a substantial way. The gender gap remains and the proportion of rural women in local power structures is declining. The article explains both the similarities and differences between men and women in rural political participation, and identifies some major causes for the decline of women's share in grassroots leading positions. It shows that there is no causal linkage between economic development and the improvement of women's political participation, and that the lack of political and other systematic supports leads to the low proportion of women in local power structures.

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