Looking to the Future

The future of surveillance is simply more of it. No entity has any incentive to reduce the level of surveillance. It has value to the watcher. What is expected to change is the amount and the way in which it is done. Trends in the cultural, social, economic, and political landscapes will have an influence on the way in which the different contexts of surveillance will proceed. In addition, it is expected that the technologies of surveillance will get more efficient, making the processes more accessible and invisible to the surveilled.

Political Communication and the Nigerian Democratic Experiment: Critical Insights from Yorùbá Philosophy

Nigeria’s political sphere is fraught with violence, electoral frauds, unfulfilled promises and negligence on the part of the ruling class, hence political communication in Nigeria have been faced with hostility from electorates spurred by public distrust of the mass media. This essay philosophically argues for a culture-bound understanding of political communication in a way that enables a strategic decolonization of communication concepts and ideologies. This cultural understanding advocates the need for the domestication of information prior to their application in a way that enable us to properly reflect on and engage with the existential complexities of Africa’s political landscapes. The central claim of the Yorùbá political communication is that local and national communicative principles in political discourses should be subsumed under epistemic, ontological, and ethical dimensions drawn from Yorùbá histories, cultures, and values. This essay therefore deploys Yorùbá philosophical insights underlying the creation, distribution, use and control of information as a political resource that could be adopted by governments, organizations, the media, and individuals in Nigeria.

Epilogue

This chapter explores the transformed religious, economic, and political landscapes in Europe and the United States at the time of Graham’s return to Berlin and London in 1966. It explains why Graham was now facing sharper criticism: the theological climate had shifted even further away from Graham’s rather fundamentalist theology, which now appeared outdated. The 1960s counterculture articulated an increasing consumer critique that zoomed in on Graham’s unconditional support for American business culture and the American way of life. And the Vietnam War, from which Graham never really distanced himself, loomed large over his revival meetings, where he now faced open political protest. But even more so, the increasing secularization of crusade cities such as London and Berlin made it significantly harder to rally support for Graham’s revival work at the same time when Graham’s highly professionalized revivalism was increasingly perceived as secular and formulaic.

Regulating Chinese education in colonial Macao: political struggle and the role of “the Chinese Educators' Association of Macau” (c. 1914–1949)

PurposeThe study aims to trace the history of Chinese education in Macao in the first half of the 20th century, emphasizing macro- and meso-level political influences.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reviews published works including official documents, rare books, newspapers, etc. and provides a three-part analysis: first, discussion of the colonial Government's education policy during the early 20th century and the establishment of the Chinese Educators' Association of Macau (CEAM); second, contextualization of the major upset and change in educational policy during the Sino-Japanese War (World War II in Asia); and third, considering the reinstatement of laissez-faire education policies regarding Macao's Chinese community and the CEAM's shifting political loyalties in the post-war period.FindingsThe colonial Government created a vacuum into which both the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) muscled, seeking to manipulate education from across the border via control of the CEAM. Mainland China's shifting political landscapes thus significantly altered the political orientation of the CEAM, especially around 1949. Soon afterward, various Catholic and other schools withdrew from the CEAM, primarily separating Chinese schools in Macao into blue (Catholic et al.) and red (pro-CCP) camps.Originality/valueThe paper reviews Macao Chinese education history from 1914 to 1949 while providing better comprehension of an analogous situation in neighboring Hong Kong.

The Political Asceticism of Mamata Banerjee: Female Populist Leadership in Contemporary India

Operating within the androcentric premises that support idealized models of populist leadership, self-representations cultivated by female populist leaders often involve precarious balancing acts, compelling them to appropriate contextualized traditionalist discourses and modes of power to qualify for conventional leadership models. This article engages with the stylistic performance of populist leadership by Mamata Banerjee of the All India Trinamool Congress in the state of West Bengal, India, focusing on her adoption of the discursive mode of political asceticism, nativist rhetoric, and religious iconography. Through an interpretive analysis of selected party documents, autobiography, and semistructured interviews with Banerjee's followers and critics, the article delineates Banerjee's populist self-fashioning as a political ascetic and explores perceptions of her leadership. The article argues that while the self-makings of female populist leaders remain fraught and contested, they contribute substantially toward redrawing the boundaries of both conventional leadership models and the broader political landscapes they inhabit.

On Perspective and Possibility in Mediterranean History

Transnational patriotism widens our understanding of the Mediterranean and the interactions and entanglements that constituted its social and political landscapes at a conjuncture of great transformation. Zanou's anti-teleological reading of early nineteenth-century intellectual mobility challenges hegemonic frameworks of the nation-state that obscure her book's protagonists in national historiographies. The perspective of the Ionian and Dalmatian characters (to simplify the complex array of languages of expression and locations of origin) retells in compelling fashion the history of modernity's possibilities and contributes to a growing body of scholarship on these Adriatic worlds. Zanou takes the reader on a journey beyond the sea's shores and into various hinterlands, but we also travel beyond ideas about exchange and interaction that insist upon port cities as primary nodes in regional connectivity. That geographical framework has come to dominate much of the recent historiography in and of the Mediterranean and, in Zanou's book, we learn how invariably intertwined are patterns of social and political relocation. She illustrates how ‘patria’ and belonging are at the centre of these mercurial intellectual circles, but that their definitions do not conform to ex post facto renderings imposed by the social and political containers of the nation-state. In focusing on this transformative conjuncture of meaning which defines the transition from early modern to modern worlds, Transnational patriotism is a welcome addition to the historiography of the Mediterranean.

Has sustainability science turned left?

As the urgent need for societies to steer towards sustainability is becoming increasingly apparent, sustainability science as a research community is facing difficult challenges successfully navigating the intensifying and often harsh political debates. An important line of conflict is (still) between the political left and right, although other conflicts are gaining increasing attention. As private corporations are stepping up their conservation agendas and non-governmental organizations are increasingly embracing market mechanisms to achieve healthier ecosystems, the scholarly community of sustainability science appears to be turning more to the political left. To navigate these entangled scientific and political landscapes, accomplishing constructive debates emphasizing the value of nurturing a broad spectra of viewpoints should be given higher priority in all forums where issues of sustainability are discussed.

How fast societies reach consensus over elections?: a methodology to study the evolution of Twitter conversations before election day

Technological developments in media and communications such as press, radio, and television have disrupted electoral processes and reshaped political landscapes. Similarly, the development of surveys enabled the social sciences to study the voting processes and measure consensus in a population prior to democratic elections. Literature on social networks and elections has focused on predicting electoral outcomes rather than understanding how the discussions between users evolve over time. As a result most studies focus on a single election and few comparative studies exist. In this article, a methodology to analyze Twitter conversations about election candidates is proposed. Using DeGroot’s consensus model-an assumption that all users are attempting to persuade others to talk about a candidate-the methodology allows to identify the structure and strength of connections of the mention networks on each month prior to an election day. It also helps to make comparisons between elections and identify patterns on different contexts. In the end, an analysis on the elections where the incumbent was running and the political regime is presented.

Is Skrei a Historical Norwegian Figure? The Nomadic Symbiosis of Fish and Humans in the Lofoten Islands

This paper draws from short ethnographic fieldwork and collected oral histories in the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway in 2019. In this paper I follow “skrei”, the Norwegian codfish (Gadus morhua). I explore what I call the “nomadic symbiosis” of islanders and skrei via their diachronic entanglements, as these appear in historical and present narratives, in changing ideas around economic development and progress, but also in the changes in the physical and political landscapes. These moments of connection, all challenge human-centric views arguing for skrei’s agency in cuisine-making, but also vis-à-vis identity-making, as skrei became recognized conjuring a newfound sense of belonging and becoming part of an imagined community within the Lofoten islands and beyond. I argue that these meaningful interactions create worlds that decenter human agency and revisit the notion of cuisine and nation-building processes as truly multispecies entanglements.