Translation Policy: A Tool to Digitally Empower or to Digitally Disempower Migrant Communities?

Digitally mediated communication in the public sector has changed how citizens and authorities communicate. Within this digital context, it has been identified that language problems may be an underlying cause of social exclusion for migrant groups (see Khorshed and Imran, 2015, p. 347), which seems to indicate that the lack of language proficiency in the host country’s language may give rise to new forms of digital divides in migratory contexts. Bearing this in mind, here we contend that, for migrants with language barriers, access to key digital services within the public sector can happen through translation provision, which may be used as a tool to digitally empower them. Thus, based on this logic, in this paper the digital empowerment (Mäkinen, 2006) of migrant communities is explored assessing to what extent the implementation of translation policy empowers migrants’ digital communication with the host country’ authorities within the public services. To this end, we will focus on a case study, the translation policy implemented in the case of the digital communication between the Spanish ministry for Migration and migrants in the case of two immigration procedures, which will be investigated from a descriptive stance using the methodological concept of domain. Our initial findings suggest that the translation policy implemented by this Spanish ministry results in diametrically opposed levels of migrants’ digital empowerment in our case study. Thus, arguably, even if translation policy could be used as a tool to digitally empower all migrants in our case study, it seems to be used as a tool to empower only some of them; the most powerful group of migrants

Contributing to Historical-Structural Injustice via Morally Wrong Acts

Alasia Nuti’s important recent book, Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress (2019), makes many persuasive interventions. Nuti shows how structural injustice theory is enriched by being explicitly historical; in theorizing historical-structural injustice, she lays bare the mechanisms of how the injustices of history reproduce themselves. For Nuti, historical-structural patterns are not only shaped by habitual behaviors that are or appear to be morally permissible, but also by individual wrongdoing and wrongdoing by powerful group agents like states. In this article, I extend Nuti’s rich analysis, focusing on two questions that arise from her theory of historical-structural injustice: (1) Beyond being blameworthy for wrongful acts themselves, are culpable wrongdoers blameworthy for contributing to structural injustice? (2) Does historical moral ignorance mitigate moral responsibility for past injustice? Regarding (1), I distinguish between the local and societal structural effects of wrongdoing. Though I think this distinction is well-founded, it ultimately leads to tensions with structural injustice theory’s idea of ordinary individuals being blameless for reproducing unjust structures. Regarding (2), I argue that even though it is natural for the question of historical moral ignorance to arise in considering past wrongdoing, at least in the case of powerful group agents, we should not overlook forms of cruelty which present-day moral concepts are not needed to condemn.

PROPERTIES OF THE INVERSE OF A NONCENTRAL WISHART MATRIX

The inverse of a noncentral Wishart matrix occurs in a variety of contexts in multivariate statistical work, including instrumental variable (IV) regression, but there has been very little work on its properties. In this paper, we first provide an expression for the expectation of the inverse of a noncentral Wishart matrix, and then go on to do the same for a number of scalar-valued functions of the inverse. The main result is obtained by exploiting simple but powerful group-equivariance properties of the expectation map involved. Subsequent results exploit the consequences of other invariance properties.

Review of Adrian Dunn's The Black Messiah

The Black Messiah album is a sonic meditation on Black life that confronts the histories of anti-Black racism in the U.S. Showcasing a powerful group of Black artists, the album combines multiple genres including gospel, rap, jazz and opera. The Black Messiah offers a counter to George Handel’s Messiah and a timely response to the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020.

Religious Experience in Seventeenth-Century Quakerism

This chapter traces the precise ways in which the actual religious, emotional, and cultural experience of Quakers changed from the origins of the movement to roughly 1700. Recovering this experience, it becomes clear that Quakerism itself emerged out of a particular response to an awareness of Christ’s presence, and that Friends’ commitment to belief in immediate revelation was continuously affirmed throughout this period of transformation. However, other important religious changes did occur—namely, an altered understanding of divine immanence, the emergence of a powerful group identity, the loss of a distinctive prophetic vocation, and a growing understanding of perfection as moral righteousness. These shifts do not indicate a process of mollification in the pursuit of socio-political respectability, but rather point to a process of theological transformation—as the next chapter will show

The Cocoa Trade in New Spain in the 18th Century

In New Spain, cocoa was a staple food whose high demand at the beginning of the 17th century meant that cocoa beans were imported from Guatemala, Venezuela, and Guayaquil. The viceroyalty of New Spain became the largest world buyer of cocoa because it paid for the product with silver, which was the principal means of exchange at the time. The cocoa trade was monopolized by a small, powerful group of the Consulado (merchants’ guild) of Mexico City who contracted it, redistributed it to the rest of the viceroyalty, and shipped it to Spain. However, the Spanish Crown’s prohibitionist trade policy hindered the expansion of the cocoa trade to meet the demand in New Spain. As Spain intermittently suspended sailing between the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru, the supply of Guayaquil cocoa was limited to shippers who could obtain special licenses and those who smuggled it. When the monarchy required extraordinary funds to finance its wars in Europe, it granted permits to move Ecuadorian cocoa through the Pacific routes. However, it preferred the supply of cocoa from Caracas for geostrategic reasons, a factor that was used by Caracas shippers to raise prices. Mexican merchants preferred to import Ecuadorian cocoa because of its higher profitability. Trade in cocoa from this source was based on a confluence of complex kinship, community, and friendship networks. Finally, in 1789, the Guayaquil cocoa trade was authorized without restrictions, which significantly reduced the demand for Caracas cocoa. In addition, cocoa from Tabasco, Guatemala, and Maracaibo was traded in New Spain. The relationship between the Crown and the commercial elite of Mexico was characterized by a policy of continual ongoing negotiations. The cocoa trade was privileged in exchange for merchants’ contributions over and above regular fiscal payments.

The Red Mirror

This book inquires into Vladimir Putin’s leadership strategy and relies on social identity theory to explain Putin’s success as a leader. The author argues that Russia’s second president has been successful in promoting his image as an embodiment of the shared national identity of the Russian citizens. He has articulated the shared collective perspective and has built a social consensus by tapping into powerful group emotions of shame and humiliation derived from the painful experience of the transition in the 1990s. He was able to overturn these emotions into pride and patriotism by activating two central pillars of the Soviet collective identity: a sense of exceptionalism that the Soviet regime promoted to consolidate the Soviet nation, and a sense of a foreign threat to the state and its people that also was foundational for the Soviet Union. Putin’s assertive foreign policy decisions, culminating in the annexation of Crimea, appeared to have secured, in the eyes of the Russian citizens, their insecure national identity. The top-down leadership and bottom-up collective identity–driven processes coalesced to produce a newly revanchist Russia, with its current leader perceived by many citizens to be irreplaceable. Politics of national identity in Russia are promoted through a well-coordinated media machine that works to focus citizens’ attention on Putin’s foreign policy and on Russia’s international standing. Public fears are played out against the backdrop of Soviet legacies of national exceptionalism and the politics of victimhood associated with the 1990s to conjure a sense of collective dignity, self-righteousness, and national strength to keep the present political system intact.

The dark side of social movements: Social identity, non-conformity, and the lure of conspiracy theories

Social change does not always equal social progress--there is a dark side of social movements. We discuss conspiracy theory beliefs –beliefs that a powerful group of people are secretly working towards a malicious goal–as one contributor to destructive social movements. Research has linked conspiracy theory beliefs to anti-democratic attitudes, prejudice and non-normative political behavior. We propose a framework to understand the motivational processes behind conspiracy theories and associated social identities and collective action. We argue that conspiracy theories comprise at least two components – content and qualities— that appeal to people differently based on their motivations. Social identity motives draw people foremost to contents of conspiracy theories while uniqueness motives draw people to qualities of conspiracy theories.

The Social Architecture of Belonging in the African Pentecostal Diaspora

From megachurches in movie theatres to prayer groups held in living rooms, Pentecostals worldwide are constantly carrying out religious activities that ultimately aim to integrate diverse worshippers into the kingdom of God. Born-again Christians refashion their ‘ways of being’ by breaking down and re-establishing the interpersonal relationships shaped and changed by emerging diasporic modernities. I examined some of these changing ways of being by comparing the discursive practices of African Pentecostal pastors in Johannesburg (South Africa) and Bilbao (Spain). These case-studies demonstrate how these migrant-initiated churches create a ‘social architecture’, a platform on which African worshippers find social and spiritual integration in increasingly globalized contexts. I argue that the subdivision of large congregations into specialized fellowship groups provides African migrants with alternative strategies to achieve a sense of belonging in an expanding diasporic network. Their transformative mission of spiritual education, by spreading African(ized) and Pentecostal values according to age, gender, or social roles, helps to uplift them from being a marginalized minority to being a powerful group occupying a high moral ground.