Ambiguous Relationship Research Articles

Slippers, canes and hospitalisations: adult to child violence in 1970s UK comics

ABSTRACT UK comics in the 1970s had an ambiguous relationship with violence. Whilst portrayals of children who committed violent acts were deemed dangerous and provocative, adult to child violence was permissible. Using a range of comics and stories from the time period but focusing particularly on Dennis the Menace, the star of the popular pre-teen humour title, the Beano, this article argues that the social acceptability of parental physical chastisement in particular rendered any potential harm to the child invisible. The wider context in which physical abuse was being conceptualised in the UK at this time is presented, and how what happened in comics was in stark contrast to real events such as the terrible murder of seven-year-old Maria Colwell in 1973. Maria’s death led to changes in the law and provoked the artist Sonia Lawson to produce a striking and distressing cartoon reflecting the incident. Whilst physical chastisement remained part of the Beano well into the late 1980s, nevertheless it is argued that the Beano’s decision to eradicate smacking in its pages pre-empted wider cultural views.

Religious History in Portugal from Lusitania Sacra (1720) to the Enciclopédia de História Religiosa (2023): An Overview

The religious history in Portugal remains fragmented despite the progress made, especially in the last four decades, compared with other European historiographies. This article intends to identify factors that explain the Portuguese religious history landscape through an exhaustive diachronic presentation of the main works and authors. It aims to present the fundamental milestones of the field’s evolution, both thematically and institutionally. The ambiguous relationship between national memory and the hegemonic Catholic religious tradition, the ideological and political debates surrounding the late modern reset of national identity benchmarks, and the impacts of a dictatorial experience that conditioned the academic landscape for almost 50 years are the reasons for the late emergence of religious history in Portugal and its discreet presence in the academy. After establishing the essential chronology and underlining the main results, this article will outline Portuguese religious historiography’s most pressing tasks and challenges.

The Vagaries of Sonic Neighborly Life: Privacy at Home and Sound Politics in Post-Socialist Mass Housing

The article contributes to understanding of how collective life in post-socialist mass housing is ordered by discussing the ambiguous relations that exist between sound, privacy, and home. It demonstrates how residents of Severnaya Dolina, a large housing estate in St. Petersburg, Russia, experience certain neighborly sounds as nuisances and calls to action to react to and prevent sonic intrusions. Privacy at home is a collective achievement: Residents assemble complex combinations of materials, regulations, relationships, and practices to achieve privacy in their apartments. Analyses of sources, circulation, articulations, evaluations, and contestations of sound in Severnaya Dolina demonstrate how residents, who can hardly rely on the local authorities to create and regulate privacy, employ various sound politics. They define who and what is accountable for sound circulations and evoke various means to create privacy.

The bishop’s ‘fine tact’: the ambiguity, ambivalence, and relationality of Catholic peacebuilding from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Flores, Indonesia during the Asia-Pacific War

In the ongoing debate about the role of religion in peacebuilding, particular attention has been paid to religious attitudes toward violence as a locus of the peacebuilding potential of religions. In this article, I turn to the case of the Catholic Church’s ambiguous and ambivalent relationship to Japan’s war in the Asia-Pacific region. The focus of my analysis is an exceptionally well-documented case of four Japanese Catholic priests on a Japanese Imperial Navy-sponsored ‘religious propaganda’ mission to Flores, Indonesia during the Japanese occupation. The four priests, including two leaders of the Catholic Church in Japan at the time—Bishop Yamaguchi Aijiro of Nagasaki and Apostolic Administrator Ogihara Akira of Hiroshima—worked closely with European missionaries left on the island of Flores to protect the church’s interests against Japanese military aggression. This unusual case of war-time cooperation between civilians from enemy nations in the context of the otherwise brutal war in Asia offers a rare glimpse into Japanese Catholic Church leaders’ engagement with Japan’s war efforts. The article demonstrates tact as a self-consciously limited and yet distinctively relational mode of peacebuilding that capitalises on layers of ambiguity and ambivalence.

Confucianism: Ancient ideology or driving force of the future? A scoping review on the effect of Confucian culture on innovation

AbstractThis paper explores the ambiguous relationship between Confucian culture and innovation based on the scholarly literature. Applying a scoping review approach, the purpose of the literature review is to uncover the reasons behind the ambiguities of empirical research results and conceptualizations of how Confucianism affects innovation on the individual and on the organizational level. The paper builds on the assumption that the different operationalizations of Confucian culture are behind these contradictions. Since Confucianism is an ideology that has developed for over 2000 years, and even its most often cited virtues and principles are quite heterogenous, approaches to its operationalization in the field of management are also diverse. The results of the literature review indicate that different approaches to Confucian culture indeed show homogeneity in the conceptualization of the Confucianism-innovation relationship. Virtues and principles related to rigid hierarchies and great power distance have a detrimental effect, while others a rather positive one. Therefore, the paper argues that a more specific denomination of cultural factors should be necessary to avoid biased and unspecified results in both theoretical and empirical approaches.

Author Functions and Freedom: ‘Michel Foucault’ and ‘Ayn Rand’ in the Anglophone ‘Culture Wars’

Freedom was a core theme of Michel Foucault's later writings, as well the central tenet of the work of pro-capitalist writer Ayn Rand. This article firstly demonstrates some surprisingly similar arguments made in the oeuvres of these unlikely bedfellows regarding how cultivation of the self/holding the self as one’s highest value (in Foucault's and Rand's respective lexicons) can lead to an ethic of freedom. Secondly, the article examines the ways in which both ‘author functions’ (in Foucault's sense) have recently been deployed in political discourse to stand in for caricatured versions of the freedoms of right-wing greed and left-wing moral relativism. Foucault is doubly problematized, moreover, since, as well as being used as a metonym for the perceived dangers of identity politics by the right, his ambivalent and ambiguous relationship with neoliberalism proves a problem to many scholars who wish to fit him squarely into a left-wing continental canon.

Keeping Promises? Democracies’ Ability to Harmonize Their International and National Climate Commitments

Abstract Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, global emissions have put the world beyond its goals. While there are calls for increasing ambition, countries must match their current international commitments at the national level. Democracies were assumed to comply with their own international commitments, yet their ability to adopt national mitigation policies that are consistent with their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) varies. This study applies the Vertical Policy Harmonization Index to quantify the extent to which countries’ mitigation commitments are vertically harmonized in their NDCs and national policies. Using qualitative comparative analysis, I investigate the role of institutions, interests, and ideas in shaping the vertical (dis)harmony of twenty-four democracies. I find that fossil fuel dependency constrains the harmonization of mitigation commitments, even in the face of high vulnerability and low abatement costs. Moreover, the results support the previous findings of an ambiguous relationship between veto points and mitigation commitment. However, the roles of an established green party and public opinion in shaping disharmony remain unclear.

Firm Size and Productivity in the Informal Sector: Evidence from India

The study analyses the debate around the ambiguous relationship between firm size and performance. We explore how productivity varies across firm sizes in the informal sector, where firm size is sensitive to formal regulations. Additionally, the study also looks into the informal firms’ quantity and quality of employment by observing wage and performance dispersion across firm sizes, thus indicating capital accumulation and exploitation. Considering the data limitations, a pseudo-panel data design was adopted by combining the three, only available, independent cross-sectional surveys by the National Sample Survey Office, spanning from 1999–2000 to 2015–2016. Potential issues such as time-invariant unobserved firm-level heterogeneity were accounted for by using panel random effects regression. Using total firm employment and total factor productivity as the primary measures of firm size and performance, we find a positive relationship between the two across all major industries. Our results stand robust against alternative firm size and performance measures. However, this positive association between size and performance indicated capital accumulation (increasing productivity with increasing size) at the expense of labour exploitation (stagnant wages across firm sizes). The obtained findings convey important policy implications for adopting a carrot-and-stick approach for the gradual formalisation of the economy. JEL Codes: D22, L25, O25

Slow-release synthesis of Cu single-atom catalysts with the optimized geometric structure and density of state distribution for Fenton-like catalysis

Single-atom Fenton-like catalysis has attracted significant attention, yet the quest for controllable synthesis of single-atom catalysts (SACs) with modulation of electron configuration is driven by the current disadvantages of poor activity, low selectivity, narrow pH range, and ambiguous structure-performance relationship. Herein, we devised an innovative strategy, the slow-release synthesis, to fabricate superior Cu SACs by facilitating the dynamic equilibrium between metal precursor supply and anchoring site formation. In this strategy, the dynamics of anchoring site formation, metal precursor release, and their binding reaction kinetics were regulated. Bolstered by harmoniously aligned dynamics, the selective and specific monatomic binding reactions were ensured to refine controllable SACs synthesis with well-defined structure-reactivity relationship. A copious quantity of monatomic dispersed metal became deposited on the C3N4/montmorillonite (MMT) interface and surface with accessible exposure due to the convenient mass transfer within ordered MMT. The slow-release effect facilitated the generation of targeted high-quality sites by equilibrating the supply and demand of the metal precursor and anchoring site and improved the utilization ratio of metal precursors. An excellent Fenton-like reactivity for contaminant degradation was achieved by the Cu1/C3N4/MMT with diminished toxic Cu liberation. Also, the selective ·OH-mediated reaction mechanism was elucidated. Our findings provide a strategy for regulating the intractable anchoring events and optimizing the microenvironment of the monatomic metal center to synthesize superior SACs.

‘We deserve new things’: (anti-)bricolage in Lomé’s makerspaces

AbstractThis article traces bricolage in the city of Lomé, Togo, as it is given meaning, practised and resisted by the ‘makers’ involved in the city’s makerspaces. While the Lévi-Straussian definition of bricolage as ‘making do’ given limited resources is heralded as an innovative practice in the Euro-American Maker Movement, Lomé’s makers appear to distance themselves from the concept due to its perceived stigmatization in both Lomé and Francophone Africa as a devalued survival practice through improvisation. Through their identification as ‘makers but not bricoleurs’, and their expression ‘we deserve new things’, I unpack the ambiguous relationship Lomé’s makers have with bricolage, and how their disavowal of the concept reveals more about the global infrastructural inequalities that surround it. By foregrounding the critical self-awareness of Lomé’s makers, I explore how ethnography allows for the de-centring and decolonization of foundational concepts and ideologies, as the makers challenge and reclaim bricolage to arrive at a future where it is no longer a necessity but a choice.

Entrepreneurs as saviours of socialism? The complicated relationship between East German state socialism and entrepreneurship

The economic policy agenda of the SED has often been described as extremely orthodox in nature and—with the exception of a short period in the 1960s—hostile to reform. It is often overlooked that the GDR entertained the largest private sector of any of the CMEA economies up till the early 1980s. Besides the official propaganda, the SED leadership at no point abolished private entrepreneurship completely in the GDR. In this article, I analyze the ambiguous relationship between the state party and private entrepreneurship. I focus particularly on the late 1980s and the role private entrepreneurs were supposed to play in reforming and saving socialism in East Germany.

Bathroom stories: Capturing embodied practices through screen‐mediated relatedness

Online ethnography is often criticized for being less immersive than traditional ethnography. However, this article argues that the digital medium offers a distinctive way to connect researchers with their interlocutors. Online ethnography can help balance being intimate while respecting research participants by maintaining appropriate distance in anthropological fieldwork. The article presents a case study of bathrooms during the Covid‐19 pandemic. It shows that online ethnography, which only allows access to what is seen and heard on the screen, creates a more limited, transient, flexible and ambiguous relationship with the research participants. This unique form of relatedness makes them more open to sharing their stories, images and videos about their bodily practices in bathrooms. The article emphasizes the potential of digital research methods to reveal the details of embodied practices. It invites anthropologists to explore the different ways of relating to digital and physical spaces in research.

Do geohazards inhibit urban expansion at the regional scale? Evidence from a counterfactual analysis in Southwest China

The inhibiting effect of geohazards on urban expansion has been demonstrated at the site or local scale. At the regional scale, the more ambiguous relationship between urban development and geohazards is attributed to the complexity and adaptability of cities. Therefore, this study focussed on Southwest China because it has the largest number and greatest frequency of geohazards. The cloud model was applied to evaluate the geohazard susceptibility of the research area. Next, a novel econometric model—the endogenous switching regression model (ESRM)—was introduced to conduct a counterfactual analysis. The empirical results passed the robustness test and showed that the proportion of high-susceptibility areas in the study area was 30.4 %. Importantly, the change from low susceptibility to high susceptibility will reduce the expansion intensity by 1.62 %. In contrast, the expansion intensity will increase by 25.9 % if a high-susceptibility area turns into a low-susceptibility area. Nevertheless, geohazards still inhibit urban expansion at the regional scale. Finally, based on the concept of urban resilience, proposals are made to minimize the risk of hazard exposure through various adaptive paths in the post-pandemic era, thereby creating a resilient city that is better suited for urban development.

Ti3C2Tx quantum dots as high-performance additive in lubrication application

The research on Ti3C2Tx as a liquid lubricating additive is still in its infancy, and some problems exist, such as ambiguous relationship between Ti3C2Tx structure and lubricating performance. Herein, Ti3C2Tx was adjusted to improve its tribological properties in polyethylene glycol 200 (PEG200). Hydrothermal method was employed to prepare spherical Ti3C2Tx quantum dots (MQDs), with size of approximately 6 nm. The additive of MQDs significantly improved the tribological properties of pure PEG200, where the average friction coefficient was reduced by 20.0 % and the wear volume was reduced by 69.1 %. MQDs can provide a rolling effect to reduce the friction and repair the worn interfaces by forming an adsorption film through electrostatic adsorption, thereby effectively improving the tribological behaviors of sliding interfaces.

The economic circularity of informality? Evidence from patterns of informal business innovation in Bandung

Urban (physical) and business informality and economic circularity may come together in cities of the global South. In this paper we explore the intersection of business and urban informality and circular economy outcomes in community-based clusters of informal businesses. These intersections are revealed in the relationship of businesses to the home, the localization of linkages (including the use of recycled materials) and the relationship of businesses to the local communities in which they are embedded. We draw on data from 203 questionnaire survey returns from five kampung-based footwear and clothing industry clusters in the Indonesian city of Bandung. The research confirms the ambiguity of the relationship between individual business dynamics and the communities in which they are embedded. Our findings suggest some points of policy leverage centred on business and community institutions, and lead on to avenues for research that might elaborate the ambiguous relationship between business and social innovation with respect to sustainable urban development.

Inequality and informality revisited: The Latin American case

Despite the striking presence in many developing economies of the two distinctive features of high levels of income inequality and significant informal employment, the literature addressing the relationship between these features is scarce, especially for Latin America. In this paper, we highlight the ambiguous relationship between inequality and informality by identifying the various factors that may affect it. We then empirically test this relationship using panel data pertaining to Latin America between 1990–2018. In these context‐specific conditions, our findings reveal a positive association between formalization in the labour market and labour income equality.

Tourist Trap: Cuba as a Microcosm

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who called tourism an industry “whose production is identical to its advertisement”, also wrote about the pitfalls of what he called the “tourism of the revolution” that flourished between the world wars in Soviet Russia. This essay combines both perspectives in a discussion of the experience of making a film about ecology in Cuba in 2019, Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes, which includes a section on the tourist industry. Informed by the perspectives of autoethnography and phenomenology, the author explores the cognitive dissonance of the filmmaker’s ambiguous relationship, as a professional tourist, to the contradictions of the tourist industry as refracted through the small coastal town of Caibarién on the north coast where Hurricane Irma made landfall in 2017.

The great reconciliation of reason and myth

ABSTRACT This paper examines the suggestion in Tae-Yeoun Keum’s Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought that myth and reason can be reconciled in a practice of philosophy. If that practice remains centered around critical reasoning, and myth is resistant to such reasoning, then Keum’s argument seems to suggest that resistance to critical reasoning must be somehow necessary to critical reasoning. How to make sense of this apparent contradiction? Exploring the ambiguous relationship between myth and truth, I explore several ways of understanding Keum’s contribution.

The landscape is a trap: Duck decoys as multispecies atmospheres of deception and betrayal

AbstractDuck decoys are trapping devices designed to catch ducks. From the fourteenth century onwards, duck decoys emerged in riverine lowlands in northwestern Europe. Their operation is based on a rigorously maintained physical structure with a woodland that encloses a water body with protruding extensions called pipes, which end in nets and are surrounded by reed screens. Catching ducks in these places requires a complex interplay between different groups of ducks, a dog, and a human decoyman who together are enmeshed in what becomes a deeply deceptive landscape. This paper explores duck decoys in the Netherlands as relational, situated and co‐designed multispecies atmospheres. Through ethnographic descriptions of field visits, interviews and by drawing on historical accounts, we trace how inter‐ and intraspecies relations and behaviours are interpreted in terms of deception, betrayal, trust and curiosity. The varying interpretations of behaviours and the more‐than‐human knowledges at play reflect the essentially elusive character of the duck decoy. Especially when facing the environmental challenges of the Anthropocene, duck decoys and the ambiguous relations that were until recently maintained in them, encourage us to consider the historical trapping and hunting landscapes as places made by multispecies atmospheres. Even though these atmospheres and the intimate collectives of human and more‐than‐human lives have become increasingly fragile, their afterlives resonate through the changing character of the riverine landscape and its various waterfowl, as well as practices of knowing and conserving biodiversity.

The Battle of the Airwaves: The Role of Radio in Mission and Colonialism/Apartheid

Defining technology according to Aristotle’s idea of “techne” refers to both a practical skill and the systematic knowledge or experience that underlies it. Technology can be described as a means to achieve specific objectives. This article will investigate the role of the radio during the missionary era and the accompanying colonial project. Firstly, the study will consider the genesis of radio broadcasting and its relation to the church and its mission. Furthermore, the study will focus on the ambiguous relationship between the radio during the colonial and apartheid periods in Southern Africa. The article presupposes that the World Council of Churches enabled the African National Congress to operate radio freedom through its Programme to Combat Racism and Special Fund. The article concludes with an overview of how radio served as a tool of social control during apartheid by briefly discussing the battle of the airwaves between Radio Republic South Africa and Radio Freedom.