Embodied Institutions and Epistemic Exclusions: Affect in the Academy

This paper explores the intersection between affect, emotion, social imaginaries, and institutions through the lens of epistemic power in the academy. It argues that attending to this intersection is critical for a fuller understanding of how affective and emotional dynamics can assist to entrench, but also disrupt, asymmetries of epistemic privilege that cut across lines of race, sex, and other markers of social difference. As part of this discussion the paper reflects on the possibility of intervening in dominant social imaginaries that become sedimented in the routine operations of the modern university, and which produce affective ecologies that sustain epistemic exclusions within academic institutions.

Articulating the Pueblo Cubano: Women’s Politicization and Productivity in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959 to 1969

How do political actors forge social solidarity across preexisting axes of social difference? This article investigates how political elites undertaking projects of political articulation—understood as linking together diverse constituencies to create integrated political blocs—contend with preexisting cultural constraints embedded in the social fabric. I do so by tracing how the post-1959 Cuban regime attempted to build a population-wide revolutionary identity despite persisting cultural understandings of women primarily as apolitical housewives. Through systematic analysis of a large corpus of state discourse in the form of speeches and women’s magazines, I show how regime leaders negotiated, with varying degrees of success over time, the cultural constraints that gender posed to their unifying project. Ultimately, the regime’s initiatives to politicize women through including them in mass campaigns and radicalizing their traditional household tasks were relatively successful, but cultural backlash against women’s increasing presence in the labor force prompted the institutionalization of a gendered division of labor in the economy that traditionalized their initially radical entry into the workplace. Analyzing how political elites confront and manage social differences within political blocs promises to contribute to a better understanding of the political production of social solidarity and its downstream effects on categorical inequalities.

Beyond “Women's Traits”: Exploring How Gender, Social Difference, and Household Characteristics Influence Trait Preferences

Demand-led breeding strategies are gaining importance in public sector breeding globally. While borrowing approaches from the private sector, public sector programs remain mainly focused on food security and social impact related outcomes. This necessitates information on specific user groups and their preferences to build targeted customer and product profiles for informed breeding decisions. A variety of studies have identified gendered trait preferences, but do not systematically analyze differences related to or interactions of gender with other social dimensions, household characteristics, and geographic factors. This study integrates 1000minds survey trait trade-off analysis with the Rural Household Multi-Indicator Survey to study cassava trait preferences in Nigeria related to a major food product, gari. Results build on earlier research demonstrating that women prioritize food product quality traits while men prioritize agronomic traits. We show that food product quality traits are more important for members from food insecure households and gender differences between men and women increase among the food insecure. Furthermore, respondents from poorer households prioritize traits similar to respondents in non-poor households but there are notable trait differences between men and women in poor households. Women in female headed household prioritized quality traits more than women living with a spouse. Important regional differences in trait preferences were also observed. In the South East region, where household use of cassava is important, and connection to larger markets is less developed, quality traits and in ground storability were prioritized more than in other states. These results reinforce the importance of recognizing social difference and the heterogeneity among men and women, and how individual and household characteristics interact to reveal trait preference variability. This information can inform trait prioritization and guide development of breeding products that have higher social impact, which may ultimately serve the more vulnerable and align with development goals.

Characterizing the energy use of disabled people in the European Union towards inclusion in the energy transition

Designing environmental policy to take account of social difference is increasingly recognized as essential to address both effectiveness and justice concerns. So far there is limited research on the experiences of disabled people in the environmental literature, amounting to a failure to recognize this substantial constituency. Here we compare disabled households’ embodied energy use, income, risk of poverty and energy poverty, and other socio-demographics with other households in the European Union. We find that households including an economically inactive disabled person earn less and consume 10% less energy than other households, and are more likely to experience energy poverty. Disabled households have lower consumption than other households in most categories, with the exception of basic consumption such as food, energy at home (gas and electricity), water and waste services: in effect they have less—and sometimes inadequate—access to resources. We conclude that more attention should be paid to disabled households needs to ensure a just energy transition.

The End of the Right to the City: A Radical-Cooperative View

Is the Right to the City (RTTC) still a useful framework for a transformative urban politics? Given recent scholarly criticism of its real-world applications and appropriations, in this paper, we argue that the transformative promise in the RTTC lies beyond its role as a framework for oppositional struggle, and in its normative ends. Building upon Henri Lefebvre's original writing on the subject, we develop a “radical-cooperative” conception of the RTTC. Such a view, which is grounded in the lived experiences of the current city, envisions an urban society in which inhabitants can pursue their material and social needs through self-governed cooperation across social difference. Growing and diversifying spaces and sectors of urban life that are decoupled from global capitalism are, we argue, necessary to create space for this inclusionary politics. While grassroots action is essential to this process, so is multi-scalar support from the state.

Forget what you hear: Careless Talk, espionage and ways of listening in on the British secret state

As the covert and clandestine practices of states multiplied in the twentieth century, so did these practices’ footprint in public life. This footprint is not just visual and material but sonic and aural, sounding the ‘secret state’ into being and suggesting ways of ‘listening in’ on it. Using multisensory methodology, this article examines Careless Talk Costs Lives, a UK Second World War propaganda campaign instructing citizens on how to practice discreet speech and listening in defence against ‘fifth columnist’ spies. This campaign reproduced the British secret state in the everyday: it represented sensitive operations as weaving in and out of citizens’ lives through imprudent chatter about ‘hush-hush’ activities and sounds you shouldn't overhear. The paradox at the campaign's heart – of revealing to people the kind of things they shouldn't say or listen to – made the secret state and its international operations a public phenomenon. Secret sounds therefore became entangled within productions of social difference, from class inequalities to German racialisation. Sound and listening, however, are unwieldy phenomena. This sonic life of the secret state risked undermining political legitimacy, while turning public space and idyllic environments into deceptive soundscapes – for international espionage, it seemed, sounded like ordinary life.

“There’s a Rainbow on the River”: The Affordances of Boy Soprano Bobby Breen in 1930s Hollywood

This chapter discusses the cultural and industrial significance of boy soprano and child star Bobby Breen, who starred in a series of popular musical films in 1930s Hollywood. It argues that Breen’s status as a presexual child allowed his queer-coded voice and persona to escape the condemnation of gender-nonconforming adult male singers that was prevalent at the time, opening up spaces for queer reception, resistance, and celebration. An interdisciplinary, intersectional framework is applied to identify Breen’s particular affordances, offering a broad and inclusive application of the word “queer” to demonstrate how Breen’s boy soprano activated multiple kinds of social difference. Breen’s narratives place his characters in direct opposition to white, middle-class, masculinist, heteronormative men and the institutions they represent, giving representation and agency to otherwise marginalized groups as central narrative actors, industry professionals and audience members, including gender-variant and queer people, women, working-class white ethnics, and Black and other communities of color.

Construction of the Policy Network Analysis Framework for the Implementation of China’s Higher Education Informatization Policy

The research on higher education informatization policy is actually a theoretical abstraction of realistic policy implementation, and it is also a research direction that is fully applicable to China’s local application and theoretical interpretation. Due to the special nature of education policy, it is not advisable to explain policy results purely based on actors or structural characteristics of the policy network. It should be more in line with the social reality of multi-party’s full participation in benefit games, multiple social organizations, and the social difference pattern of China, and step from the causality between a specific policy network and a specific policy result towards a concrete policy network interpretation framework.

Klass i begåvningsreservens tidevarv: Taxonomiska konflikter inom och genom svensk utbildningsforskning, ca 1945–1960

Class in the age of the pool of talent: Taxonomic struggles in and through Swedish education research, c. 1945–1960. This article studies conceptualisations of social class in Swedish education research, c. 1945–1960. The article follows knowledge produced about talent and class in state commissions and in the newly expanded social sciences, and how it in turn was interpreted and used in political debates and in the media. I show that the taxonomy of the population in social groups (Socialgrupper) was key for conceptualising notions of talent and framing education policy, beginning with debates around ”the pool of talent” (Begåvningsreserven) in 1948. At the same time as becoming a standard tool for mapping social difference in Sweden, the social group taxonomy was criticised for being unscientific.