Between global and local: Roma Pentecostal Church identity in Serbia

Joel Robbins (2003) described Pentecostalism as both continuous, taking into account local ontologies, and discontinuous, rupturing against certain social structures or epistemologies. He refers to this as Pentecostalism’s double paradox. In this framework, Pentecostalism is local in that it often addresses the questions and issues emerging from a particular context. However, there is also a global Pentecostal identity which is reinforced through conferences, mission partnerships, shared music, and sermons. Roma Pentecostals in Southeastern Europe are also in the process of negotiating their Pentecostal identity. On the one hand, Pentecostalism is the dominant form of Christianity spreading among the Roma in Serbia because of its flexible ecclesiology, its openness to miraculous signs and wonders, its non-hierarchical structure, and its emotive personality. On the other hand, there is a rising number of mission agencies and Western missionaries working with Roma churches. Roma leaders are often negotiating what to accept and what to reject in terms of Christian theology and praxis, teaching, and programs and activities. Thus, the Pentecostal identity of their churches is being shaped in response to their own local questions and needs but also in response to the partnership from others, both through good experiences and negative ones. This paper will explore this church identity negotiation, looking at two case studies of Roma churches in Serbia. First, this paper will establish the wider conversation in Pentecostal studies regarding the relationship between inculturation and globalization. Next, this paper will analyse some of the factors of the decisionmaking process regarding how Roma leaders decide what to accept and what to reject in terms of outside influences. This analysis will bring to the foreground the operating cultural and religious values and how that contributes to the dialectical process of Pentecostal identity.

Honolulu’s colonial legacy of marginalization: A cycle of emergency and urban development

Relying heavily on newspaper archives, this article explores the ‘first rough draft’ of Honolulu’s early urban frontier to rescue the spectacle of environmental and emergency management in the early twentieth-century town of Kakaako. Analysing the interdependent discursive and material processes in response to public health crisis ‐ viewed here serving as a continuation of colonialism ‐ I show how Kakaako existed as a release valve for detritus as part of a dialectical process towards development. Spaces like Kakaako proved central to the partitioning of urban space, serving as receptacles of bio-sociocultural waste. This article details how cycles of emergency cordoned-off spaces utilized to contain, discipline or assimilate certain groups, provoking the development and evacuation of that which is judged as unfit and unworthy while engendering the notion of profitability as a necessary precondition to inhabiting city space.

Tribes at the Margin of Tribal Space: Urban Socio-Spatial Exclusion

Unlike the cities of the global North, where poor indigenous communities are primarily immigrants attracted to cities to secure better livelihoods, the tribals of Jharkhand in urban spaces are mostly ‘original inhabitants’. In Ranchi, their original state has been increasingly dwindled or marginalised and led to a dialectical process of socio-spatial poverty traps. This study attempts to understand the socio-spatial integration of the tribal community within Ranchi city through the identification of tribal toponymy and the patterns of clustering and concentration vis-à-vis the process of land association and dissociation. Further, it brings together the attributes of such a produced spatiality. Location Quotient, based on secondary data, and Key Informant Interviews with field observations are applied to measure the tribal concentration and the processes of spatiality, respectively. The findings present a dismal picture, where the tribals mostly find themselves at the margins of the city space, especially in the core-inner city and the microperipheral localities. The continuous inflow of outsiders, the issue of land rights and land alienation, the pattern of socio-spatial clustering and disadvantages, and the dynamics of tribal identity associations are all integrally connected in perpetuating tribals’ urban spatial exclusion and thereby their socio-spatial segregation.

Huey Newton’s Lessons for the Academic Left

The Black Panther Party was founded to bridge the radical theorizing that swept college campuses in the mid-1960s and the lumpen proletariat abandoned by the so-called ‘Great Society’. However, shortly thereafter, Newton began to harshly criticize the academic Left in general for their drive to find ‘a set of actions and a set of principles that are easy to identify and are absolute.’ This article reconstructs Newton’s critique of progressive movements grounded primarily in academic debates, as well as his conception of vanguard political theory. Newton’s grasp of revolution as a gradual, open, and above all dialectical process, not only provides a corrective to many dominant academic accounts of the nature of progressive change but, more importantly, it also grounds an emancipatory philosophy that can direct collective struggle, precisely because it remains grounded in the imperfect and internally conflicted lives of those whose freedom is to be won through it.

When Digital Technologies Enable and Threaten Occupational Identity: The Delicate Balancing Act of Data Scientists

Occupations are increasingly embedded with and affected by digital technologies. These technologies both enable and threaten occupational identity and create two important tensions: they make the persistence of an occupation possible while also potentially rendering it obsolete, and they magnify both the similarity and distinctiveness of occupations with regard to other occupations. Based on the critical case study of an online community dedicated to data science, we investigate longitudinally how data scientists address the two tensions of occupational identity associated with digital technologies and reach transient syntheses in terms of “optimal distinctiveness” and “persistent extinction.” We propose that identity work associated with digital technologies follows a composite life-cycle and dialectical process. We explain that people constantly need to adjust and redefine their occupational identity, i.e., how they define who they are and what they do. We contribute to scholarship on digital technologies and identity work by illuminating how people deal in an ongoing manner with digital technologies that simultaneously enable and threaten their occupational identity.

Synthesising Inclusive and Didactic Research – a Way to Ensure the Participation and Learning of Every Student?

The aim of this paper is to compare research criteria for inclusive education in relation to criteria for didactic research. The inclusive researchers that were selected defined inclusive education as removing barriers to social participation and learning for all students. The didactic researchers that we have selected referred to the tradition of successful reading and writing, focused on schools and teaching practices with favourable outcomes. The results indicated that the inclusive education researchers study school mainly from an organisational point of view. In contrast, the didactic researchers focus on a pedagogical approach, that is, on the teachers’ teaching strategies concerning the ways in which each student learns best. Within both fields under study it is considered that in-service training is most effective when it is based on the teachers’ actual working situation and when it emphasizes the importance of cooperative school cultures where the teachers also meet researchers. A reflection is that the inclusive education researchers in the study strive to transfer new knowledge to the teachers, in order to help them broaden their views on reducing social and organisational barriers to inclusion. The reading and writing researchers presented in this study represent a more dialectical process aimed at developing both the teachers’ didactic professionalism, the researchers’ own research questions and, in the end, the students’ learning. Another reflection is that if inclusive education and didactic researchers were to develop collaborative research cultures, this would shorten the way to the common goal: to ensure the participation and learning of all students.

Pluralist Economics as a Democratizing Force: A Review Essay about The Routledge Handbook of Heterodox Economics and Democratizing the Economics Debate: Pluralism and Research Evaluation

The Routledge Handbook of Heterodox Economics and Democratizing the Economics Debate: Pluralism and Research Evaluation, two recently published books about heterodox economics and its role in broader academic and policy discourses, serve as an antidote to some recent popular narratives equating economics and economists with policies that are inherently pro-market, anti-regulation, and based in neoclassical theories. These texts illuminate challenges in current economic discourse about (1) the place of economic pluralism, (2) the role economics and economists should play in guiding policy relative to other social science disciplines, and (3) the consequences of the reliance of policy-makers on economists that train at the most elite institutions that are likely to recommend a narrow band of policies informed by a restricted range of economic theories. The Routledge Handbook of Heterodox Economics, edited by Tae-Jee Ho, Lynne Chester, and Carlo D’Ippoliti, presents positive visions for new questions that heterodox economists are researching, alternative explanations for global economic dynamics, and a counter-narrative to the notion that economists are bound to propose neoliberal policies based on neoclassical and new classical economic theories, and that economic analysis must demonstrate causality using different statistical methodologies to validate its rigor. Carlo D’Ippoliti’s Democratizing the Economics Debate examines the dialectical process by which economic rankings prioritize economic work informed by a narrow range of theories, and serve as a springboard for economists studying and working at the most elite institutions to land in powerful government advisory positions. D’Ippoliti highlights the stakes for governments that continue to hire economic policymakers from these top-tier programs with limited demonstrated curiosity in theories that might be considered heterodox, and the benefits for the economics discipline as a whole for better engagement with pluralist economics writ large.

Combining Spiritual Aging and Geropsychological Development

Combining some life stories with aspects of my professional career is a task more easily described than accomplished. By illuminating personal connections between spiritual aging and geropsychological development, I hope to inform and assist readers in apprehending and applying a dialectical process that spirals in fits and starts, in descent and ascent.

When the Past Lives in the Present. Agrarian Landscapes and Historical Social Dynamics in the Southern Andes (Quebrada de Humahuaca, Jujuy, Argentina)

This article examines the agrarian landscape in one part of the southern Andes (Quebrada of Humahuaca, Jujuy, Argentina). The region possesses extensive and well-preserved archaeological remains of agricultural systems, which stretch back to pre-Hispanic times. In this study, we employ an interdisciplinary approach in our analysis of the components that structure the agrarian landscape, especially those historical processes that intervened in its formation. The creation of a cartographic base, built from remote sensing and fieldwork data, allowed for the identification of four principal components of the landscape, each of which correspond to distinct phases or periods that mark the region’s history. Our study shows that, in contrast to what is observed in many other rural areas, the successive productive dynamics that developed in the area did not result in the destruction of previous productive structures. Rather, the agrarian landscape in the study area presents a multi-temporal agglutinating combination or composition, which transcends historical discontinuities in the productive matrix. This is owing to the partial reutilisation of previous structures in each period; however, religious and cultural factors play an important role. The agrarian landscape we studied is not only a passive result of human activity, but also a force influencing the productive and lifestyle decisions of the peasant populations that live there today. Our research amplifies the understanding of agrarian landscapes in the Andes and shows how past temporalities are articulated with the present through a dialectical process.

Dialectical Waves of Change: Using Dialectics, Emerging Issue Analysis and the Futures Wheel to Develop a Tool for Applied Futures Research

The dialectical method is a well-known and often used framework for the analysis of historical processes. We argue that its features could also be useful in futures studies. This idea was confirmed during a case study for an arts center in Flanders, Belgium, when an exploration of the history of the cultural landscape made clear that dialectics would present an interesting lens for looking forward too. The need for a practical tool using dialectical analysis presented itself. This article further builds upon Timothy E. Dolan’s protocol to use dialectics as a framing tool in futures, which is worked into a technique that can be used in applied futures exercises by implementing mechanics that take into account the time it takes for emerging issues to develop within a dialectical process, as well as ways to reflect on those developments over time. In this article, different iterations of dialectics through history are explored, as well as arguments for using it in futures studies. Next, a model of “dialectical waves of change” is created by combining Dolan’s concept of “emerging contradictions” with features of Marxist dialectic, as well as with aspects of existing futures techniques such as emerging issue analysis and the futures wheel. The use of this new tool in the case study for the Flemish arts center nOna is explained and learnings from the project are discussed.