A political ecology of data

Conservationists, governments, and corporations see promise in digital technologies to provide holistic, rapid, and objective information to inform policy, shape investments, and monitor ecosystems. But it is increasingly clear that environmental data does more than simply offer a better view of the planet. This special issue makes a single overarching argument: that we cannot fully understand the current conjuncture in global environmental governance without understanding the platforms, devices, and institutions that comprise environmental data infrastructures. The papers draw together scholarship from political ecology and science and technology studies to demonstrate how data has become a significant site in which contemporary environmental politics are waged and socionatures are materialized. We address: (1) the contested practices of utilizing and maintaining data infrastructures; (2) the ways they are governed and the territorial statecraft they enable; (3) the socionatural materiality they arise within but also produce. The papers in this special issue show that, against its dominant representation, data is material, governed, practiced, and requires praxis. Political ecologists could adopt such an approach to make sense of the emerging ways in which data technologies shape environments and their politics.

Micro-celebrities from the North: Young North Korean defectors’ vlogging on YouTube

By analyzing YouTube channels of young North Korean defectors, this article examines the cultural meanings of social media in these marginalized young people’s resettled lives. The article focuses on four YouTube channels managed by four young North Korean defectors living in South Korea. The four channels show how defectors, a majority of whom remain almost invisible in the South Korean public sphere, use digital platforms to display their identity as real people. Moreover, these channels involve digital storytelling of how the defectors negotiate their inter-Korean identities and interact with South Korean viewers. Furthermore, the four YouTube channels reveal how creative labor is professionalized and incorporated into the digital attention economy. This article suggests that, with some restrictions, such as restrictive technological affordances and profit-seeking algorithm, digital platforms allow defector youth to engage with social media storytelling and question the dominant representation of defectors.

The Psychology of Reaching: Action Selection, Movement Implementation, and Sensorimotor Learning

The study of motor planning and learning in humans has undergone a dramatic transformation in the 20 years since this journal's last review of this topic. The behavioral analysis of movement, the foundational approach for psychology, has been complemented by ideas from control theory, computer science, statistics, and, most notably, neuroscience. The result of this interdisciplinary approach has been a focus on the computational level of analysis, leading to the development of mechanistic models at the psychological level to explain how humans plan, execute, and consolidate skilled reaching movements. This review emphasizes new perspectives on action selection and motor planning, research that stands in contrast to the previously dominant representation-based perspective of motor programming, as well as an emerging literature highlighting the convergent operation of multiple processes in sensorimotor learning.

Representación social y construcción identitaria juvenil en el colectivo Hakib’al, del pueblo transfronterizo maya chuj

The research revolves around the construction of the social representation that is made of the “being young” within the Hakib'al collective, whose members, from Guatemalan families of the Mayan-Chuj people who were refugees, have had to migrate for academic reasons. In Mexico, their ethnic identity has been negatively affected by the disrespectful naturalization process of their discriminatory culture, policies and dynamics, which, as a group, they seek to confront through their cultural reivindication. Analyzing these representations, with a methodological triangulation contrasted with their cultural knowledge, an intention to extend their youthful condition is first distinguished, which breaks their conceptualization as a mere transition stage; that his dominant representation of “being a good young” reaches his entire being chuj and that the main transformation, product of his participation in the group and the completion of his studies, takes place among women.

Cultural-Historical Psychology as a Theory of Subjectivity in the Works of F. González Rey

Theory of subjectivity developed by Brazilian psychologist F. González Rey is considered as a result of rethinking some of Vygotsky’s ideas in the context of modern critical psychology based on the works of M. Foucault, L. Althusser, feminist and postcolonial theories etc. In critical psychology subjectivity is conceptualized as produced by the forces of social regulation, so it appears oversocialized and reduced to discursive constructions. It is argued that the theory of subjectivity in the framework of cultural-historical psychology developed by F. González Rey makes it possible to overcome social reductionism of critical approaches without falling into the pre-critical concept of subject. On the base of Vygotsky’s ideas about the unity of affect and intellect, sense and perezhivanie as psychic units, González Rey developed a new ontology of psychological science that allows to overcome the dominant representation of ‘psyche as a container’ of cognitive processes, emotions, personal traits etc. and to rethink the relationship between individual and social. In the light of theory of subjectivity, the importance of qualitative methodology for cultural-historical psychology is discussed.

Through East Asia to the sound of ‘Giovinezza’: Italian travel literature on China, Korea and Japan during the Fascist ventennio

During the Fascist ventennio, prominent Italian writers and journalists, such as Mario Appelius, Raffaele Calzini, Arnaldo Cipolla, Arnaldo Fraccaroli, Roberto Suster and Cesco Tommaselli, reported from China, Japan and Korea for Il Popolo d'Italia, Corriere della Sera and La Stampa. Their travel narratives were crucial for the creation and diffusion in Italy of the dominant representation of China and Korea as remote, decadent and exotic societies; and of Japan as a progressive society resonant with Fascist Italy. The narrativisation of these countries in Italian travelogues from the Fascist ventennio was part of a widespread discursive practice by Italian intellectuals willing to subscribe to, and actively disseminate, the guiding principles of Fascism. When emphasising China's and Korea's irreconcilable difference from, and Japan's affinity with, Fascist Italy, these intellectuals extolled the Italian race and culture, justified Italy's position in geopolitical dynamics, and propagandised the exceptionality of the Fascist ideology.

Staging the Lived Experience and Socialist Everyday Life in Post-Yugoslav Theater

Authoritative models of remembering Yugoslavia tend to exclude experiences of living people while often reproducing the memory trope of “totalitarian legacy.” Several theater performances that appeared in 2010 and 2011 challenged these memory models, as they centered on performers’ personal experiences and recollections as legitimate sources of understanding, imagining, and discussing the past. This article investigates how lived experience is (re)constructed in the theater and whether these performances differ from dominant narratives. Reception analysis of selected performances has shown that public and media appear to find affective memories of socialism more acceptable if told from the position of victims and “authentic” witnesses. Performances widened and diversified the cultural memory of socialism and directed attention to positively evaluated experiences of socialist culture and everyday life, such as multicultural and supranational interactions in Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, the dominant representation of Yugoslav state as totalitarian was not challenged, but rather sidestepped. The focus on popular and everyday culture thus remains the predominant memory model for remembering Yugoslavia in theater, which can be seen as a part of wider processes of gradual reevaluation of socialist life in post-socialist Europe.

Gazelles in services: what are the specifics of their existence in Slovakia?

Young dynamic service enterprises – gazelles – represent the modern economy phenomenon, which stimulates the growth by its operation, in particular of local economy. This article identifies the position of gazelles in services and defines their characteristic features with regard to knowledge intensity of their production. Research results document the dominant representation of gazelles in services within the framework of their sectoral distribution and their growing economic effects in the Slovak Republic. Knowledge intensity of production is determinant of gazelle innovativeness in services, and the result is supported by knowledge of higher intensity perception of innovation effects in a knowledge-intensive production of services.

Time River Body

Relying on sustained, relentless personification, Drayton’s chorographical epic Poly-Olbion retains the ethical work of The Faerie Queene’s allegory in restoring to the national narrative the embodied immanence of the people within it; but Drayton’s poem takes personification as its dominant representation mode. The poem explores and exploits the paradoxical nature of personification, a device that is simultaneously evocative and anti-mimetic. The case of personification demonstrates the ways description distances itself from its subject, and Poly-Olbion uses its personified topography to interrogate the very possibility of representing space—in cartographic image or topographical text—by troubling the temporal assumptions underlying the cartographic and problematizing the relationship between description and detail. In doing so, the poem generates a mode of descriptive writing reliant on the generative distortion of its subject, ultimately positing an anti-mimetic program—one that lays bare the limitations and fictions of the cartographic—for the representation of space.

The American Grand Strategy Debate in International Relations

This chapter engages in a comprehensive analysis of the grand strategy debate contained in the pages of Foreign Affairs, which represents a leading elite publication that bridges scholarly debate and the policy oriented writing of experts and political practitioners. The chapter also examines how the main theoretical perspectives of mainstream IR have informed competing grand strategy visions, further detailing the concept of hybrid discourses of American grand strategy: hegemonic engagement and hegemonic restraint. These expert visions reproduced the dominant representation of American exceptionalism and military supremacy, while advocating political practices that partially reformulated and negated this hegemonic role, such as the liberal-institutionalist concept of ‘deep engagement’, or neorealist ideas of ‘offshore balancing’.