Creativity

The study of creativity is about how people generate novel ideas and products, as opposed to reproducing or mimicking things that already exist. In this chapter, the author characterizes the study of creativity as the three Ms of mechanism, modulator, and meme. The mechanisms of creativity include the modification of existing products and the blending of two or more products to create stylistic fusions. Modulators of creativity include both individual-level factors (e.g. personality) and social factors (e.g. political constraints). The notion of a ‘meme’ reflects the cultural evolutionary concept that creative products either flourish or die out as a result of the critical reception they receive. A central question for the psychology of creativity is whether creativity depends more on domain-specific or domain-general mechanisms, or some combination of the two.

Tweeting is Leading

Social media is changing the business of representation and lawmaker reputation building, and this book uses the US Senate to illustrate the constituent-driven nature of political communication. I offer a critical analysis of senators’ communication on Twitter, the forces that shape it, and the agendas that result. Senators strategically communicate a political image that reflects their unique political persona. They have to decide what they want to be known for, crafting communications that prioritize legislation, constituent service, and party politics in ways that meet the interests of their constituencies and foster promising electoral returns. Senators’ communicated, public priorities—what is termed in this book as the rhetorical agenda—offer a necessary tool for understanding how senators link their carefully crafted public image with potential voters. The rhetorical agenda uses more than 180,000 lawmaker tweets to challenge what we know about representation, removing the institutional and political constraints on congressional communication and giving lawmakers a messaging platform where individual discretion is high, the relative costs are low, and someone is always watching.

Situatedness and Performativity

Translating and interpreting are unpredictable social practices framed by historical, ethical, and political constraints. Using the concepts of situatedness and performativity as anchors, the authors examine translation practices from the perspectives of identity performance, cultural mediation, historical reframing, and professional training. As such, the chapters focus on enacted events and conditioned practices by exploring production processes and the social, historical, and cultural conditions of the field. These outlooks shift our attention to social and institutionalized acts of translating and interpreting, considering also the materiality of bodies, artefacts, and technologies involved in these scenes.

A Transitory Settlement on the Way back to Venezuela: A Tale of Vulnerability, Exception, and Migrant Resistance in times of Covid-19

Due to the economic and social consequences of the Covid-19 emergency of 2020, many vulnerable Venezuelan migrants scattered across South America decided to return to their country overland. Simultaneously, exceptional measures imposed during the pandemic resulted in increased domestic and international political constraints to their mobility. Different strategies to resist and overcome such restrictions emerged in this scenario. Drawing upon the concept of Temporary Migrant Multiplicities (Tazzioli, 2020), I analyse how to camp became one of those collective strategies. I present the results of a digital ethnography focusing on a transitory settlement built (and later abandoned) by some 500 persons returning to Venezuela, between May and July 2020 in the outskirts of Bogotá (Colombia). I thereby explore how vulnerabilities can turn into vehicles of resistance in contexts of arbitrary control over precarised human mobility, such as Covid-19 exceptional politics.

Transnational (Im)mobilities and Informality in Europe

People around the globe rely on informal practices to resist, survive, care and relate to each other beyond the control and coercive presence of institutions and states. In the EU, regimes of mobility at multiple scales affect various people on the move who are pushed into informality in order to acquire social mobility while having to combat border regimes, racialization, inequalities, and state bureaucracies. This text explores how mobilities and informality are entangled with one another when it comes to responding to the social, political, and economic inequalities that are produced by border and mobility regimes. Within this frame, the ethnographic articles in this special issue go beyond national borders to connect the production of mobility and informality at multiple interconnected scales, from refugees adapting to settlement bureaucracies locally to transit migrants coping with the selective external borders of the EU, or from transnational entrepreneurs’ ability to move between formal and informal norms to the multiple ways in which transnational mobility informally confronts economic, social and political constraints. In sum, this volume brings together articles on informality and mobility that take account of the elusive practices that deal with the inequalities of mobility and immobility.

Uneven vaccine roll-outs will widen recovery gaps

Budgetary, logistical and political constraints will shape what economic recovery path individual countries can adopt