Disabled Children in Disaster Management

Disabled children have a wide range of impairments, talents, and capacities, which collide with a wide range of circumstances and societal attitudes. The following article discusses disaster management in the context of disabled children. Disaster, disability and its management is discussed in the context of international practices in general and suited to India in particular. The research follows a review of the United States National Commission on Children and Disaster and its extrapolations to India. In addition to this Disaster Medicine as one approach to Disaster Management concerning disabled children has been explored. The research concludes that the understanding of particular issues of Children with disabilities as one stakeholder and their capacity to engage, as well as a shift in mindset and power relations in which children with disabilities contribute to DRR projects, are fundamental to disability-inclusive DRR.

“We” in the EU: (De) legitimizing power relations and status

The article analyzes how the leaders and the candidates of the main parties in Romania built a European field of power and subject positions in the context of the 2019 European elections. We adopt the premise that the (re) positioning of these politicians towards the EU is part of their ongoing strategies of (de) legitimization. In this respect, the study focuses on how they assign themselves a “European authority” in relation to audiences through their positioning as actors in the field. On the basis of a mainly critically discursive methodological framework, we analyze a corpus consisting of electoral messages on Facebook. The research reveals the ways in which the political actors build claims, representations and positionings about the EU through naturalizing (a) symmetric relations, statuses, and symbolic power hierarchies.

The testosterone barrier in sport

World Athletics (formerly known as IAAF) has recently published the eligibility regulations for female classification that apply to running events from 400 meters up to the mile. The regulations have prevented some elite women athletes with DSD (Difference of Sexual Development) to compete or have made some of them to change their preferred running event in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. According to World Athletics, female hyperandrogenism (a biological anomaly that naturally produces a high level of testosterone) must be in some way “compensated” to respect the fair play of the competition. Nonetheless, such argument rests upon a problematic assumption: hyperandrogenic women are not “natural” women —at least when it comes to compete in sports— so their “not-normal” condition must be fixed to meet the standards. Norbert Elias’s process-sociology helps to place the case of hyperandrogenic sportswomen within a broader context of power relations. In this fashion, we see that the case becomes problematic because these women athletes are perceived as a threat/disruption of one of the vertebral categories of sport: sex/gender. The testosterone barrier is to sex/gender what the colour barrier was to race in sports: a disciplinary strategy to maintain what is considered the “natural” sports categories of a certain era.

The Art of Resistance in Islam

Based on first-hand ethnographic insights into Shi'i religious groups in the Middle East and Europe , this book examines women's resistance to state as well as communal and gender power structures. It offers a new transnational approach to understanding gender agency within contemporary Islamic movements expressed through language, ritual practices, dramatic performances , posters and banners. By looking at the aesthetic performance of the political on the female body through Shi'i ritual practices – an aspect that has previously been ignored in studies on women's acts of resistance -, Yafa Shanneik shows how women play a central role in redefining sectarian and gender power relations both in the Middle East and in the European diaspora.

LANGUAGE BOUNDARIES, PUBLISHING, AND POWER

Applied anthropologists in the English-speaking world tend to disregard publications in other languages; institutions emphasize English-language publishing and give less credence or value to work in other languages. Even applied anthropologists writing in non-English languages often privilege English sources. The invisibility of non-English applied anthropology diminishes the richness of our field, as we miss opportunities to gain insights from different academic, practice, and cultural traditions. This paper, based on a panel held at the 2021 SfAA Meetings, presents reflections on the challenges of language in the circulation of global knowledge for anthropological practice. We highlight the power relations embedded in language, as well as opportunities for applied anthropologists to promote communication and collaboration across boundaries.