Debtor spaces: Austerity, space, and dispossession in Michigan’s emergency management system

In recent years, debt has become a major focus of geographic research as debt relations have become increasingly central to today’s financialized capitalist economy. This paper bridges two aspects of the debt literature: (1) the emergent literature on debt spatiality, which argues that space plays an active role in the creation and maintenance of debt relations, and (2) the broader literature examining processes of debt-driven dispossession (e.g., foreclosure, eviction, austerity, etc.). Recent literature in geography, led by Harker’s work on debt spaces, has argued that debt should not only be understood as a temporal relation (a promise of future labor) but a spatial relation as well. This literature has examined the active role of space in creating debt relations but has been less attentive to the ways in which debt is a key mechanism of dispossessive economies. Analyzing Michigan’s emergency management laws, a system of forced, localized austerity, I chronicle how the social production of space is central to dispossessive debt projects. I conclude by offering a new concept, debtor spaces, to characterize the socio-spatial formations which enable practices of debt-based dispossession.

Solidarities Across: Borders, Belongings, Movements

What is the role of affinity, friendship, and care, as well as of conflict and dissonance, in creating possibilities of and hindrances to transnational solidarities? Building on an emergent literature on everyday and affective practices of solidarity, this chapter offers a set of diverse ethnographic accounts of activist work oriented to recognizing and challenging inequalities and relations of oppression based on race, ethnicity, religion, and class, alongside gender and sexuality. Engaging a variety of material from feminist and LGBTI+ activisms, the chapter highlights ambivalences inscribed in the making of collective resilience, resistance, and repair by: First, problematizing activist efforts to build solidarity across geographic and contextual divides; second, highlighting the importance of solidarity as shared labor in challenging state actors and institutions and reversing colonial processes; and third, unpacking the implications of transnational solidarity campaigns in different locales. The chapter ends with reflections on how feminist scholarship can advance conceptualizations of solidarity across difference.

How Does Green Training Boost Employee Green Creativity? A Sequential Mediation Process Model

Despite accumulated evidence from previous studies that green creativity is highly emphasized in various industries, limited research has been conducted in the context of public sectors. Drawing on the dynamic componential model of creativity and innovation in organizations, this paper aims to propose and sequentially test the relationship between green training and employees’ green creativity through green values and green intrinsic motivation. Based on the data collected in Chinese public sectors (N = 464) at two different time points, the results indicate that green training is positively related to green creativity. Moreover, this relationship is sequentially mediated by green values and green intrinsic motivation. The results in our study advance the emergent literature on green human resource management in the public sector for the practical applications of training and creativity in terms of green management.

Near Co-Laborations

The contribution discusses the formation and collaboration in the VERSUS project (Versorgung und Unterstützung in Zeiten von Corona/Provisioning and support in times of Corona) as a relational epistemic practice. VERSUS formed as research project to investigate how provisioning recon-figured during the pandemic in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The researchers involved come from different yet ‘near’ scholarly backgrounds: anthropology, sociology, and political theory. Such ‘near’ interdisciplinarity poses specific challenges and frictions for a co-laborative project. In analysing our own forms of working on working together, we aim to contribute to an emergent literature that focuses on co-laboration in projects of such ‘near’ disciplines used to take their differences serious. We discuss VERSUS through the notions of a) co-laboration, working with a shared epistemic orientation (tertium) for creating knowledge for specific fields, and b) collaboration as the everyday practice of working together during the unfolding pandemic. The collaborative software Slack enabled quick and less formal interaction, yet the instant-ness of the platform created challenging situations that we then discuss as important and generative moments in the project.

Gender, Education, and Attitudes toward Women’s Leadership in Three East Asian Countries: An Intersectional and Multilevel Approach

Despite their achievements in the past few decades, women remain largely excluded from impactful leadership positions in many countries and fields. In this research, we focus on how gender and education shape public opinions that favor men over women for political and economic leadership in three East Asian countries. Utilizing an intersectional theoretical framework and multilevel methodological approach to analyze the World Value Survey data, we investigate the heterogeneous effects of education on gender attitudes between men and women and how such heterogeneity is conditioned by national contexts. We found that the negative association between higher levels of education and traditional gender attitudes is much stronger among women than among men, especially in Japan. National contexts not only directly shape gender attitudes but also modify the main and interactive effects of gender and education on attitudes toward women leadership. This research contributes to the emergent literature on the contingency of intersectionality and highlights the utility of multilevel analysis in intersectional and/or comparative studies.

Disenchantment and renewal

This chapter shows how the tide turned against technocratic internationalism in the 1970s and 1980s. The first section describes a general backlash against bureaucracy as an organizational form that also affected international organizations. Thomas G. Weiss’s criticism of the United Nations and their bureaucracy serves as a key work to illustrate the shifting perception. The chapter then discusses the return of the state and intergovernmentalism in international theory. A new generation of liberal-internationalist literature, influenced by economics and rational choice theory, put the emphasis on actors’ behaviour, on political will, and on the conditions under which international cooperation was negotiated. Few authors now seemed to believe that objective problem pressure alone would induce international cooperation. Yet other elements of the functionalist account remained almost unquestioned. This is illustrated with the emergent literature on global environmental problems, to be tackled by new international ‘regimes’, which became a new field for expert-driven, de-politicized governance. Technocratic ideas about public planning were still present on the left of the political spectrum. The partisans of a New International Economic Order suggested global administrative bodies should manage and re-distribute the world’s resources, such as the minerals of the deep seabed.

The Political Theory of Data: Institutions, Algorithms, & Formats in Racial Redlining

Despite widespread recognition of an emergent politics of data in our midst, we strikingly lack a political theory of data. We readily acknowledge the presence of data across our political lives, but we often do not know how to conceptualize the politics of all those data points—the forms of power they constitute and the kinds of political subjects they implicate. Recent work in numerous academic disciplines is evidence of the first steps toward a political theory of data. This article maps some limits of this emergent literature with an eye to enriching its theoretical range. The literature on data politics, both within political theory and elsewhere, has thus far focused almost exclusively on the algorithm. This article locates a further dimension of data politics in the work of formatting technology or, more simply, formats. Formats are simultaneously conceptual and technical in the ways they define what can even count as data, and by extension who can count as data and how they can count. A focus on formats is of theoretical value because it provides a bridge between work on the conceptual contours of categories and the technology-centric literature on algorithms that tends to ignore the more conceptual dimensions of data technology. The political insight enabled by format theory is shown in the context of an extended interrogation of the politics of racialized redlining.

Can Team Resilience Boost Team Creativity Among Undergraduate Students? A Sequential Mediation Model of Team Creative Efficacy and Team Trust

Although recent literature has highlighted the critical role of resilience in creativity literature, existing findings have failed to indicate the processes through which resilience contributes to creativity at the graduate level. The current study fills this gap by hypothesizing the influence of team resilience on team creativity through a sequential mediating mechanism. A time lagged research study was conducted, and a sample of 201 undergraduate students and their teacher filled out questionnaires at three different time points (with 2-week intervals). After aggregating the data at the team level, we employed the PROCESS macro in SPSS to analyze data and test all the hypotheses through performing a sequential mediation analysis. We found that (a) team resilience would predict team creativity; and (b) team efficacy and team trust sequentially mediated the relation between team resilience and team creativity. The results in our study advance the emergent literature on linking resilience and creativity for the practical applications of resilience and creativity in education settings.

Pregnancy and Reproduction

Until recently, monographs addressing reproduction were relatively rare in scholarship on the Atlantic world. Although studies of gender have proliferated over the last thirty years, the field still has no single body of literature on reproduction itself. Rather, there are multiple distinct—and sometimes overlapping—thematic fields and national or regionally based literatures. Within these, pregnancy has implicitly and explicitly intersected with questions of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, healthcare, mortality, religion, enslavement, and justice. Emergent literature has developed with particular vigor around themes of slavery and the slave trade, colonization and empire, and eugenics. This article approaches the Atlantic world as a global crossroads that is fundamentally interconnected with other world regions. This approach has led to an emphasis on the Americas, especially Latin America and the Caribbean, as they are regions profoundly influenced by empire and enslavement. There is a particular dearth in the historical scholarship on reproduction in Atlantic Africa, although this article includes a few histories of motherhood in East Africa; also although historical scholarship is lacking, there is a wealth of work on pregnancy and childbirth in contemporary Africa. Some of the most important thematic trajectories across these bodies of scholarship are demarcated here, with emphasis on breadth, methodological innovation, geographic coverage, and impact in the field. Also included is a sampling of classics and newer scholarship, with some reference to emerging scholarship as well. Whenever possible non-English language work is highlighted, as it is far too often marginalized and uncited. Monographs are prioritized whenever possible, and readers should note that many of the scholars cited below have a wealth of relevant articles in addition to their books. The collections are not intended to be exhaustive, but rather suggestive and generative. Following the first sub-section, which is on Primary Sources: Online Collections and Digital Databases, the subsections are organized alphabetically by subtitle. In 2018, Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming, and Lauren Kassell published an admirable and sweeping Cambridge history entitled Reproduction: From Antiquity to the Present Day. The volume includes forty-three chapters and has wide temporal and geographic scope. Although the Cambridge textbook includes the Atlantic world, the chapters are more globally oriented, and do not present an Atlantic view per se. In the works cited below, readers will see the arc of a particularly Atlantic story—one centering issues of justice, freedom, intimacy, and agency, as well as cultural negotiation, conflict, and change. These all manifest in the contexts of colonialism, postcolonialism, and the interconnected worlds of African, Indigenous, Asian, and settler-European communities in the Americas. Finally, a focus on women’s reproduction reifies the essentialized category of normative cis-gender maternity. This reflects a trend in the literature itself, which—with the work of Rachel Ginnis Fuchs on paternity being a notable exception—tends to pay more attention to women’s reproduction than to male contributions to reproduction and childrearing.

“Depends who it is”: Towards a relational understanding of the use of adult-child touch in residential child care

This article theorises adult-child touch in residential child care as a relational practice, contributing to an emergent literature on residential child care, and conceptualises residential child care as a Lifespace. It responds to an on-going debate surrounding the use of touch in the sector, which has attracted academic attention since the early 1990s as a result of abuse scandals, the ensuing ‘no touch’ policies and a growing body of research identifying touch as an important aspect of child development. The paper draws upon a six-month ethnographic study of residential child care, which was explicitly designed to observe everyday interactions between residential care workers and young people. The findings suggest that touch cannot be discussed in isolation from either relationships or a contextual understanding of relationships in the specific context of residential child care. The study found that touch is unavoidable, relational and that dichotomous understandings of touch continue to present issues for both theory and practice.