Mapping Discord’s darkside: Distributed hate networks on Disboard

Discord, a popular community chat application, has rhetorically distanced itself from its associations with white supremacist content through a public commitment to proactive moderation. However, Discord relies extensively on third-party services (like bots and server bulletins), which have been overlooked in their role in facilitating hateful networks. This study notes how Discord offloads searchability to server bulletin sites like Disboard, to deleterious effect. This study involves two parts: (1) we use critical technoculture discourse analysis to examine Discord’s blogs, policies, and application programming interface and (2) we present data scraped from 2741 Discord servers listed on Disboard, revealing networks of hateful and white supremacist communities that openly use “edgy,” raiding-oriented, and toxic messaging. These servers exploit Discord’s moderation tools and affordances to proliferate within Discord’s distributed ecology. We argue that Discord’s policies fail to address its reliance on unmoderated third-party services or the networked practices of its toxic communities.

NAVIGATING THE ILLEGIBLE STATE: EVERYDAY EXPERIENCES OF STATELESSNESS AMONG SHAN YOUTH IN NORTHERN THAILAND

<p>Home to more than half-a-million stateless persons, Thailand provides a unique case study for understanding modern-day statelessness. Since 2005, the country has significantly expanded the rights of non-citizen children to allow access for basic education, civil registration, universal birth registration and healthcare, but still restricts physical mobility of stateless persons to the provincial level and has made the level of education a criterion for citizenship. These new regimes of governing statelessness both marginalise and include stateless people in the formal state systems. This thesis examines the complex dynamics between exclusion and inclusion that stateless Shan youth in northern Thailand experience in their everyday lives. Based on 13-months of ethnographic fieldwork over the course of three years (2015-2018) conducted in the wake of UNHCR’s Global Campaign to End Statelessness, this thesis describes how childhood statelessness in the 21st century is interpreted, determined and governed by the Thai state, and how stateless Shan youth make sense of the label of statelessness, make decisions about their future, challenge the idea of national identity and negotiate their place within the society that simultaneously includes and excludes them. I explore how, despite the Thai state’s public commitment to resolve statelessness in the past few years, the path toward Thai citizenship for many stateless youth is still fraught with various legal obstacles that tie together remnants of the legal and social exclusion from the past with a complex politics of proof in the present. In this thesis, I use the framework of “state illegibility” to capture the Thai state’s past and present opaqueness, inscrutable, contradictory and unpredictable bureaucratic practices, and demonstrate the burdens placed on stateless youth to “read” the state and navigate its opacity in their everyday life. Having learned the roles of documents and aesthetics in mediating membership, I demonstrate how Shan youth negotiate the impact of statelessness through various strategies such as using their bodies to perform “Thainess” and assert belonging, acquiring false documents, emphasising their Shan identity to get scholarships, and secretly obtaining Myanmar citizenship as an alternative option. Through these ethnographic accounts, I not only explore the effects of new regimes of governing statelessness, but also the way such regimes are adopted, manipulated, and enacted by the stateless youth to produce liveable futures for themselves.</p>

NAVIGATING THE ILLEGIBLE STATE: EVERYDAY EXPERIENCES OF STATELESSNESS AMONG SHAN YOUTH IN NORTHERN THAILAND

<p>Home to more than half-a-million stateless persons, Thailand provides a unique case study for understanding modern-day statelessness. Since 2005, the country has significantly expanded the rights of non-citizen children to allow access for basic education, civil registration, universal birth registration and healthcare, but still restricts physical mobility of stateless persons to the provincial level and has made the level of education a criterion for citizenship. These new regimes of governing statelessness both marginalise and include stateless people in the formal state systems. This thesis examines the complex dynamics between exclusion and inclusion that stateless Shan youth in northern Thailand experience in their everyday lives. Based on 13-months of ethnographic fieldwork over the course of three years (2015-2018) conducted in the wake of UNHCR’s Global Campaign to End Statelessness, this thesis describes how childhood statelessness in the 21st century is interpreted, determined and governed by the Thai state, and how stateless Shan youth make sense of the label of statelessness, make decisions about their future, challenge the idea of national identity and negotiate their place within the society that simultaneously includes and excludes them. I explore how, despite the Thai state’s public commitment to resolve statelessness in the past few years, the path toward Thai citizenship for many stateless youth is still fraught with various legal obstacles that tie together remnants of the legal and social exclusion from the past with a complex politics of proof in the present. In this thesis, I use the framework of “state illegibility” to capture the Thai state’s past and present opaqueness, inscrutable, contradictory and unpredictable bureaucratic practices, and demonstrate the burdens placed on stateless youth to “read” the state and navigate its opacity in their everyday life. Having learned the roles of documents and aesthetics in mediating membership, I demonstrate how Shan youth negotiate the impact of statelessness through various strategies such as using their bodies to perform “Thainess” and assert belonging, acquiring false documents, emphasising their Shan identity to get scholarships, and secretly obtaining Myanmar citizenship as an alternative option. Through these ethnographic accounts, I not only explore the effects of new regimes of governing statelessness, but also the way such regimes are adopted, manipulated, and enacted by the stateless youth to produce liveable futures for themselves.</p>

Democratic Law

This chapter argues for a communicative conception of democracy and democratic law by appealing to a duty of respect that we owe to our fellow citizens. To nurture and sustain the social bases of self-respect, citizens must convey to each other their convictions of mutual equality, their commitments to respect essential human needs and moral rights, and their mutual commitment to cooperate and provide every member with a stable place of belonging. Fulfilling these duties of communication requires a public commitment authored by all of us, undertaken through articulate action. Law has qualities of substantive expression that mere discursive messages lack. Law is public and takes the form of an ongoing, articulate commitment. But for law to convey the message that citizens must convey, each of us must be able to contribute to its formation. Hence, for law to play this special function, it must be democratically forged and sustained.

Collective Public Commitment: Young People on the Path to a More Sustainable Lifestyle

Society’s development toward more sustainable lifestyles can only succeed if changes are also performed at the individual level. We, therefore investigated whether the participation of teenagers (14–19 years old) in a collective public commitment and accompanying workshop on plastic consumption strengthened their willingness and ability to take action. Previous projects such as the EcoTeam Program served as workshop templates. Over a period of five weeks, the teenagers met once a week for the workshop, an exchange of ideas, and the establishment of weekly goals for their commitment. Semi-structured interviews were carried out to investigate the outcomes directly after the project and three years later. Participants developed a more conscious environmental perception, which led to behavioral changes and the willingness to maintain or improve those changes. Beyond this outcome, most participants functioned as multipliers and ambassadors for a more sustainable lifestyle in their social environment. Even three years after the commitment project, all former participants had maintained their behavioral changes. Collective public commitment could thus be a suitable method for ESD, and a vehicle to support young people on their path to a more sustainable lifestyle.

Taking Your Team Behind the Curtain: The Effects of Leader Feedback-Sharing and Feedback-Seeking on Team Psychological Safety

Although scholars have highlighted the benefits of psychological safety, relatively few studies have examined how leaders establish it. Whereas existing research points to the importance of seeking feedback, we draw on theories of self-disclosure, trust, and implicit voice to propose that leaders can also promote psychological safety by sharing feedback—openly discussing criticisms and suggestions they have already received about their own performance. In Study 1, naturally-occurring feedback-seeking and feedback-sharing by CEOs independently predicted board member ratings of top management team psychological safety. In Study 2, a longitudinal field experiment, randomly assigning leaders to share feedback had a positive effect on team psychological safety one year later, whereas assigning leaders to seek feedback did not. In Study 3, to explore the processes through which feedback-sharing had an enduring effect but feedback-seeking did not, we conducted qualitative interviews with participating leaders and employees two years later. We found that leaders initiated vulnerability through seeking feedback, but it dissolved due to defensiveness and inaction. In contrast, sharing feedback normalized and crystallized vulnerability as leaders made a public commitment to keep sharing and employees reciprocated, which opened the door for more actionable feedback, greater accountability, and ongoing practices that allowed psychological safety to endure. Our research suggests that to achieve enduring improvements in psychological safety, it may be particularly effective for leaders to share criticism they have received—and that doing so does not jeopardize their reputations as effective and competent.

Overcoming a corporate crisis: The role of a hegemonic elite – The Banco Ambrosiano case (1982)

This article explores how an elite was able to facilitate the recovery of one of the greatest European banks, the Banco Ambrosiano, from a corporate crisis which led it to bankruptcy. Drawing on Gramsci’s theory of ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ or ‘hegemony’, this study undertakes a critical analysis of the role played by an elite, mainly composed of public servants, in enabling financial and political forces to avoid the loss of the great heritage of the bank, built over decades of success and public commitment. The study reveals how this elite positively constructed the path to allow the recovery process, using accounting data to identify the forward-looking solutions. This research helps expand historical and critical studies on crises, pointing out how accounting has been an instrument enabling new governing technologies while Gramsci’s theory has been applied extensively to interpret an institutional setting and an action towards an apt solution for protecting public interest.

Why We Should Reject the Uptake Condition

This chapter argues that we should reject the Uptake Condition, according to which an action falls within the scope of consent only if the consent-receiver successfully interprets the consent-giver’s behaviour as motivated by an intention to permit this action. We should reject this condition on the grounds that a public commitment can be sufficient for consent in the absence of uptake with the consent-receiver. Since the Uptake Condition is implied by the Successful Communication Principle for the scope of consent, we must also reject the Successful Communication Principle. However, since the Behavioural View is not committed to the Uptake Condition, it does not follow that we must reject the Behavioural View.

Prevalence and Effects of Daily and Major Experiences of Racial Discrimination and Microaggressions among Black Individuals in Canada

The prevalence and correlates of different forms of racial discrimination among Black Canadians are unknown. This article aims to examine the prevalence of different forms of racial discrimination (daily, major and microaggressions) and their association with self-esteem and satisfaction with life among Black Canadians. A convenience sample of 845 Black Canadians aged 15–40 was recruited. We assessed frequencies of everyday and major racial discrimination, and racial microaggressions against Black Canadians and their association with self-esteem and satisfaction with life, controlling for gender, age, job status, education, and matrimonial status. At least 4 out of 10 participants declared having being victims of everyday racial discrimination at least once per week. Between 46.3% and 64.2% of participants declared having been victims of major racial discrimination in various situations including education, job hiring, job dismissal, health services, housing, bank and loans, and police encounters. Significant gender differences were observed for everyday and major racial discrimination with higher frequencies among female participants. A total of 50.2% to 93.8% of participants declared having been victims of at least one episode of racial microaggressions. Results showed a significant negative association between racial discrimination and satisfaction with life ( b = –0.26, p = .003), and self-esteem ( b = –0.23, p = .009). This study highlights the need to stop colorblind policies in different sectors in Canada, and for a public commitment to combat racism at the municipal, provincial and federal levels. Implications are discussed for prevention, research and public health.

Irpinia Earthquake and History: A Nexus as a Problem

Forty years from the 23 November 1980, Irpinia-Basilicata earthquake date represents much more than a commemoration. It has been a fracture for the history of Italy. Important for many reasons, this earthquake has been a watershed for the studies and the public role of research. Historians have been solicited to work on the topic by scholars of the geological and seismological sciences: in the face of the repetition of disastrous seismic events in Italy, earthquakes remained ‘outside the history’. However, the real difficulty of socio-historical science is not neglecting seismic events and their consequences, but rather the reluctance to think of ‘earthquake’ as a specific interpretative context. This means to deal with the discipline ‘statute’ as well as the public commitment of scholars. In this way, the circle earthquake-history-memory requires broad interdisciplinarity, which offers insights to work on historical consciousness and cultural memory: important aspects to understand the past as well as to favour a seismic risk awareness.