Labour power, materiality and protests in Ghana’s petroleum and gold mines

We examine the role of resource materiality in extractive labour protests in Ghana. Focusing on petroleum and gold mining, we centre contestations as part of the resources’ socio-natural constituents. Research data was obtained from social conflict databases, newspapers and field interviews. The analysis focused on themes and discourses on protest emergence, mobilisation, negotiation and impacts. Findings show how petroleum labour protesters use passivity and chokepoints to impede gas supply to households. Ghana petroleum workers attempt to garner structural power through workplace power, albeit unsuccessfully. Conversely, gold mineworkers protest by actively reappropriating machinery and extraction spaces. They centre protests in mining towns to emphasise their work as lifeblood. The ‘landedness’ of gold and the introduction of surface mining reshaped such protest tactics. Thus, materiality can help excavate the relational and comparative logic, tactics and potentialities of labour power in resource extracting countries. We suggest extractive labour to forge stronger cross-class coalitions to align workplace exploitation with broader issues of accumulation by dispossession.

Correlation of inhibitions to structural aspects of chloroplast proteins: A murburn perspective

In this manuscript, we we first present a brief review of the structural awareness on chloroplasts, the two photosystems (PS I & PS II, along with the respective light harvesting complexes and chlorophyll binding proteins). Thereafter, with an in silico approach, we attempt to correlate the photoactive proteins’ inhibition by various class of molecules, particularly weedicides. The prevailing understanding relies on topographical-affinity driven binding based explanations for electron transfers and inhibitions. The murburn model of photosynthesis deems DROS (diffusible reactive oxygen species) mediated constructive outcomes as the physiological mechanism for overall outcomes. We unravel key anomalous observations on the inhibitory aspects of the photosynthetic machinery, which were also noted in DROS involving systems like microsomal xenobiotic metabolism and mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation. Via a comparative logic and applying Ockham’s razor, we infer that inhibitory outcomes in several photolysis-photophosphorylation processes are better explained by the murburn model.

Social Work on the Whiteboard: Governing by Comparing Performance

This article explores a number-based comparative logic unfolding around a particular kind of meeting in a social work setting: a daily and short gathering referred to as a “pulse meeting”. At such meetings, staff gather around a whiteboard visualizing individual statistics in terms of the number of client meetings performed or assistance decisions made. The statistics function as a basis for further division of work tasks. As such, it is a particular way of representing what social workers do at work. Ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the social services revealed how such openly exposed individual performance and the related number-based comparative logic can trump alternative logics ranging from the overall collective performance, competing views on clients’ needs and efficiency, and the social worker’s sense of professionalism. When participants of the study compared themselves to each other and in relation to standards and goals, certain conclusions were drawn about what should be done by whom and in what order. Such conclusions became embedded in an objectivity status difficult for anyone to argue against. Finally, the number-based logic also found its way into the counter-practices formulated by social workers unsatisfied with what was visualized on the whiteboard.

Transformations through Polarizations and Global Threats to Democracy

This volume collects and analyzes eleven country case studies of polarized polities that are, or had been, electoral democracies, identifying the common and differing causal mechanisms that lead to different outcomes for democracy when a society experiences polarization. In this introduction, we discuss our goals for the volume, the comparative logic we apply to the cases, our overall methodological approach, and the concepts that ground the analyses. The goal of this volume is to explore pernicious polarization, i.e., when and how a society divides into mutually distrustful “us vs. them” blocs, which endangers democracy. Accordingly, we discuss the effects of such polarization on democracies, and start building a foundation for remedies. In this introductory article, we highlight and explain the inherently political and relational aspects of polarization in general and pernicious polarization in particular, present the concept of formative rifts, and discuss how opposition strategies should be part of an explanation of severe polarization.

The Progressives’ Deadly Embrace of Cartels

This chapter traces the comparative logic of the traditional classical liberal and the Progressive approaches to problems of industry concentration, with special reference to agriculture and labor. Part 1 addresses the question of how the Old Court conservatives—the targets of the Progressive movement—addressed the unified treatment of industrial and labor combinations that acted in restraint of trade, and it defends their analytical approach. Part 2 switches focus to address the institutional challenges and resource misallocations that took place once the Clayton Act irretrievably split the regulation of business from the regulation of labor and agriculture. It covers the economic effects of cartel arrangements as well as evaluates why the electoral systems set up in labor and agricultural markets sparked political success of Progressive politicians. These politicians used those devices to consolidate political support, especially in the 1930s, by the active promotion, organization, and support of these cartel arrangements.

ARISTOTLE'S COMPARATIVE LOGIC: A MODEST PROPOSAL

Both W.D. Ross's and J. Brunschwig's editions of Aristotle's Topics contain the following passage: ἔτι εἰ τοῦ αὐτοῦ τινος τὸ μὲν μᾶλλον τὸ δὲ ἧττον τοιοῦτο· καὶ εἰ τὸ μὲν τοιούτου μᾶλλον τοιοῦτο, τὸ δὲ μὴ τοιούτου, δῆλον ὅτι τὸ πϱῶτον μᾶλλον τοιοῦτο. (Γ 119 a20-2) The passage is translated in the revised Oxford translation as follows: ‘Moreover, if in any character one thing exceeds and another falls short of the same standard; also, if the one exceeds something which possesses the character, while the other exceeds something which does not, then clearly the first thing exhibits that character in a greater degree’.

Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Sentiment in the United States

Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment have existed as parts of the religious landscape since Europeans first arrived in North America. The long history of these antipathies is a balance between continuities of received wisdom regarding Islam and Muslims and historically specific outbursts sparked and shaped by current social, economic, political, and military events. Tapping into enduring suspicions, some provocateurs deliberately aim to perpetuate stereotypes, broadcast misinformation, promote discrimination, and even instigate violence. A comparative logic drives the skepticism, wariness, and—occasionally—outright hostility toward, at different times, Islam as a religion, a specific Muslim, or Muslims as a religious, racial, or ethnic stereotype. This comparison presupposes a positive American norm that Islam and Muslims fail to meet in terms of theology, development, sexism, and nationalism.

Introduction Out Of Africa? 2

The introduction to this second special issue aims to probe the epistemological conditions of possibility of African Americanist anthropology. In particular, it highlights the problematic of definitions of units of analysis in the comparative logic on which this particular field of inquiry has long been based. Given the conceptual instability of the categories 'Africa' and 'America' discussed in the previous number of this special double issue, attention is given to how scholars variously became implicated in the creation of 'African horizons', and to potential ways in which past approaches might not only be opened up to 'symmetrical analyses', but in fact transcended.