Power Arrangements Research Articles

Conscience and Convenience: How Social Workers Pursue Rehabilitation in Chinese Community Corrections

The establishment of community corrections in China marks a restructuring of the Chinese penal field and a possibly differentiated arrangement of penal power. Social forces and community actors are now enabled and encouraged to participate in penal affairs and to share devolutionary penal power with the authoritarian state. Yet little research attention has been allotted to examine how these burgeoning social organizations, professional service providers, and community actors manage their participation in rehabilitative work and negotiate their rehabilitative aspirations with state ideologies and policy mandates as they work within Chinese community corrections (CCC). Drawing on observational data and in-depth interviews with social workers within CCC, we show the ways in which social workers actively create strategies to pursue their professional values of service and implement rehabilitative ideals and caring ethos while, at the same time, minimizing the risk of challenging state authority and jeopardizing penal policy priorities. Three devised approaches are presented, and their implications are discussed.

Higher education policy in practice: digitalization and the governance reform in an Italian university (1988-2021)

ABSTRACT Academic research has extensively inspected the changing modes of governance in higher education systems through systemic and comparative research. This article aims to investigate these processes from a different perspective and vantage point. In particular, the translation of (trans)national instances into local micro-policy and practice is examined by historicising the social construction of digitalisation as a policy field in an Italian university over three decades (1988–2021). The emergence of knowledge and power arrangements across the complex entanglement of broader cultural history and local microhistory is thus examined. A hybrid configuration emerges in the observed university that features aspects from both its legacy bureaucratic mode of governance and the entrepreneurial paradigm. These institutional dynamics are consistent with wider systemic patterns in Italian higher education. The divergence between planned policy change and experienced realities is thus confirmed.

The Politics of Banana Planting in Waingmaw Township

Abstract: Since 2018, a steady stream of media reports has described the rapid expansion of tissue banana plantations in the Waingmaw area of Kachin State in Northeast Myanmar, noting the widespread environmental degradation and disenfranchisement of local residents. We conducted field research in two villages connected to banana plantations, interviewing residents, plantation workers, government officials, and health workers. Using assemblage theory, we analyze the local political ecology of food production, and how the particularities of local geography, especially in peripheral regions, result in different practical political settlements. These settlements involve a range of different actors including ethnic armed organizations, foreign merchants, government officials, and local brokers. Arrangements of power in border areas are implicit and negotiated, rather than explicit and formalized. These are appropriated through new spatial arrangements (e.g., banana plantations) and spatial relationships (e.g., migrant workers from Rakhine State) in which older identities and modes of living are redefined. A key component of this frontier assemblage is the banana itself, in particular, the practice of cultivating imported tissue strains which are reliant on imported technology and fertilizers. This, in turn, influences the form of the assemblage and power relations within it, illustrating the critical role of material and technological elements within assemblages.

Tacit consent and political legitimacy

Though historically important, the notion of tacit consent plays little role in contemporary discussions of political legitimacy. The idea, in fact, is often dismissed as obviously implausible. The ambition of this paper is to challenge this assumption and show that tacit consent can become a key ingredient in a theory of legitimacy. Instead of defining tacit consent through residence (where, according to John Locke or Plato's Socrates, staying in the country amounts to tacitly consenting to its system of rule), the paper explores a different strategy, delimiting tacit consent as an absence of active dissent. The basic idea starts from the fact that widespread anti-government protests and demonstrations always carry a potent delegitimating force. Political legitimacy is therefore never permanent and unchangeable, regardless of the nature of the regime, and can be undermined at all times by active dissent from the population. Having established the relationship between dissent and delegitimation of political power, even the inverted, stronger claim is defended: the absence of active dissent (i.e., tacit consent) can, under certain circumstances, serve to legitimize political power. The paper sets up and defends several conditions that need to be met for the right normative mandate to be created by the population tacitly accepting the existing power arrangements. If those are fulfilled (especially when full freedom of expression and information is granted), tacit consent can become a vital element of political legitimacy.

“A Great Invention of the East, Unsurpassed in History”: Tŭngsap’an Mimeography in Korea, 1910–1945

Abstract In 1912, Horii Duplication opened a branch office in Keijō, or present-day Seoul, aiming to sell what the company optimistically described as “a great invention of the East,” its patented tōshaban (K. tŭngsap’an) duplicator. The tŭngsap’an was, indeed, a remarkably accessible technology. It was simple and inexpensive to operate; it could reproduce images, roman letters, and East Asian scripts; and it was capable of generating duplicates on any type of paper using readily available ink. Tŭngsap’an technology was deeply implicated in Japanese expansionism from its inception, and in Korea, its role in enabling knowledge production, surveillance, and other forms of political control furthered the reach of the colonial state. Even so, tŭngsap’an duplication was widespread beyond official use, and its unique combination of affordances led colonial authorities to view the tŭngsap’an as both a tool for and a target of state surveillance, especially as independence activists utilized tŭngsap’an duplication in fluid and interactive ways to further resistance efforts. The paradoxes that tŭngsap’an duplication embodied make it a unique site of textual practice, and a rich vantage point from which to study how arrangements of power in colonial Korea were enacted, experienced, navigated, and contested.

Conceptualising change in equality, diversity and inclusion: A case study of the Irish film and television sector

Research is key to supporting diversity and inclusion practices in media and creative industries because it articulates the structural and cultural barriers to participation by workers with a broad range of underrepresented social identities. However, currently there is a lack of research that problematises how change happens with regard to equality, diversity and inclusion in creative industries. Very little research looks beyond specific initiatives, particular employers or individual organisations to explore how change is adopted more broadly within the sector. This article seeks to address that gap by applying a number of literatures on policy and organisational or cultural change to generate a schema that allows the complexity of change to be understood through a unified model of a policy regime. This article adopts a qualitative case study methodology to examine equality, diversity and inclusion regime change in the film and television industries in Ireland from 2015 to 2021. Key findings map how policy goal changes, paradigm shifts in thinking on equality, organisational coalitions and a change in power arrangements all combined resulting in significant change in the gender and equality regime in Irish film and television work. This framework is valuable because it provokes questions about how equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives can be more effective, how various cases of change compare with each other and how some efforts at change ultimately fail.

Prison Policy from the “Bottom Up”

Prison Policy from the “Bottom Up”

Science & Dissent: Alternative Temporalities, Geographies, Epistemologies

The analysis of dissent, or the mobilization of scientific claims to challenge existing political arrangements, has a long history in STS and was central to the formation of the field of STS itself and its current contours. Based on a conference that sought to bring together analysts and activists from around the world and from varied disciplines, this collection illuminates new temporal, geographic, and epistemological lenses through which scientists and other people have creatively challenged relationships of power. First, by attending to long-past practices and to the long-term development of styles and forms of dissent and resistance in Latin America, South Asia, Africa, Europe, and the USA, contributors show how geography and situated forms of politics are mobilized in scientific dissent. Second, contributors also examine how political arrangements shape the ways that the movement of bodies, as well as their sensory qualities, is central to many forms of technoscientific dissent. A third focus, on epistemic politics, demonstrates how building parallel or alternative structures and systems of knowledge pose challenges to power arrangements, even when those systems are not mobilized to make formal legal or administrative challenges.

Partnering with immigrant families to promote language justice and equity in education.

Despite USfederal legislation mandates institutions to provide meaningful access and participation to students and families in educational settings, culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) families and caregivers of children in special education experience cultural and linguistic barriers. A Community Advisory Team (CAT) of parents, advocates, community interpreters and translators, researchers, and teachers explored CLD families' experiences and advocacy efforts. Critical bifocality and circuits of dispossession, privilege, and resistance informed the documentation of inequities and resistance to understand the linkages of structural arrangements of power. Focus groups with families (n = 21) speakers of Spanish, Portuguese, and Cantonese were conducted. Findings indicate perceived discrimination, poor and inadequate interpretation and translation services impact children's access to special education services, hinder family's communication with schools and reduce the perceptions of schools as trustworthy institutions. Families advocate relentlessly for their children and recommend schools listen to families and hire culturally and linguistically competent interpreters and translators. Community psychologists can make significant contributions to promote language justice in education settings through participatory approaches to inquiry that value CLD families' knowledge and expertise.

Like wildfire: creating rumor content in the face of disaster

ABSTRACT Rumors spread during disasters as community members seek information and attempt to make sense of unexpected, anxiety-producing events. While considerable sociological research has examined the transmission and spread of rumors, less attention has been given to the creation of rumor narrative content itself. Drawing on interviews with wildfire survivors in one rural Northern California county, this study shows that rumor narrative creation reflects existing cultural values and power arrangements. In a contested post-disaster landscape, rumors are used to frame new information to maintain coherence with existing cultural beliefs while reinforcing prevailing ideas about safety, deservingness, and class. In this case, rumors are created to reflect cultural schemas such as beliefs about the government and environmental protection, and normative power arrangements instantiated through symbols of spatial stigma. The data presented in this article extends research on stigma, culture, and disaster by arguing existing dominant cultural values shape the content of rumors by dictating which pieces of information are seen as reasonable and reliable, providing residents with opportunities to frame information to explain and justify unequal disaster outcomes. In disaster situations where the transmission of reliable information is especially important, local culture enables and restricts which narratives are produced, shared, and believed.

Large-capacity and long-distance distributed acoustic sensing based on an ultra-weak fiber Bragg grating array with an optimized pulsed optical power arrangement.

A large-capacity, long-distance distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) system without inline optical amplification was proposed and experimentally demonstrated using an ultra-weak fiber Bragg grating (UWFBG) array and coherent detection. The effect of the finite extinction ratio of an acousto-optic modulator and the Stokes signal of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in UWFBGs on the performance of DAS was simulated and revealed. A high extinction ratio and a balanced input pulsed optical power can improve the capacity and distance of the DAS. The dynamic acoustic signal can be well reconstructed for a serial array of 10828 near-identical UWFBG with a length of 54.14 km. An acoustic signal sensitivity of 189.54 pɛ/√Hz and a signal SNR of 40.01 dB with a spatial resolution of 5 m can be achieved at the far end.

Research on day-ahead transactions between multi-microgrid based on cooperative game model

Microgrids are one of the most common forms of distributed energy participation in the electricity market. This paper discusses the lack of market competition among independent microgrids as a factor in setting up a cooperative alliance among microgrids. Independent microgrids aim to minimize the system's overall operating costs. The first principle is to maximize scenery output and consumption. We develop and solve an optimization model to obtain the interactive power with the distribution network and the charging and discharging power arrangement for the energy storage module. We then construct a cooperative game model among multiple microgrids on this basis. Nash bargaining is used to coordinate the distribution of benefits among microgrids, as well as to analyze the optimal trading power and tariffs among microgrids. The research proves that the cooperative game among microgrids can realize the flexible consumption of renewable energy in the region. Microgrids also have lower operating costs. The Nash bargaining helps the members in the coalition to get satisfactory trading power and tariff. Additionally, it effectively improves the overall operational efficiency and market competitiveness of microgrid systems.

“The Empire that Shaka Zulu was Unable to Bring About”: Ethnicizing Sovereignty in Apartheid South Africa, 1959–1970

Abstract Arrangements of sovereignty in Africa fundamentally shifted during the era of decolonization, temporarily bringing about political possibilities beyond empire or nation-state. The apartheid state drew on this “federal moment” and attempted to save white minority rule by creating ethnically defined self-governing “homelands,” or bantustans, that could be fashioned as “independent” nation-states within a Southern African confederation. This article examines the ethnicization of sovereignty in the planning of KwaZulu, a bantustan for Zulu people. Rather than solely focusing on the central state, it explores how bureaucrats, royal family members, and other African leaders made claims to the boundaries of ethnicity and the proper arrangements of power. Initially, the government assumed that the Zulu homeland could be built atop the former Zulu kingdom. The planned bantustan, however, included both territory and populations that never recognized the Zulu monarchy before colonialism. As Zulu royal allies advocated for an expansive bantustan under a re-empowered monarchy, ethnologists and other bureaucrats clashed over the geographic limits of Zuluness and the relationship between the Zulu king and Africans across the Natal province. As the government retreated from its plan to empower the monarchy, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, an influential royal cousin, used competing historical claims to marginalize the royal house and position himself as the rightful hereditary leader of both the future bantustan and the Zulu kingdom. Ideas of a Zulu ethnic sovereignty that would shape the late apartheid period and democratic transition, I argue, initially emerged through these contingent struggles in the 1960s over territory, populations, and authority.

A Divisive Intellectualist Leader

Abstract Initially, the article concentrates on a major change in ancient Mediterranean religions that can be understood as an “intellectualization of religion.” Focusing on the text-based practices of early Christian religious specialists, it looks at this phenomenon as a facet of an urban religion rather than an inherent quality of early Christ religion. The article goes on to address heterarchy, i.e., the tendency toward a nonhierarchical arrangement of power, as a further element that characterizes city life as well as relations among cities. Not linearly ranked and topographically fractionated, the first urban Christ groups also constituted heterarchical formations shaped by the assorted types of power coalescing in urban environments. Zooming in on the imperial city of Carthage in the mid-3rd century, the article then analyzes the intersection of the two phenomena. It demonstrates the effects that the enforcement of a textually designed and conceptually sophisticated project of Church order produced on the Christ networks by arguing that, in urban contexts characterized by a host of powers, authority claims, and forms of capital, Cyprian’s intellectualized religion contributed to breaking apart existing coalescences of people united by religion.

Review: Life-Destroying Diagrams, by Eugenie Brinkema

Review: <i>Life-Destroying Diagrams</i>, by Eugenie Brinkema

Becoming Mutant

Abstract Reimagining human-nature relationships in the climate change era conjures mutants, creatures from the deep that help surface modes of becoming for a drenched world of rising tides, plastic oceans, and soaked cities. Re-imaging deep, embodied relations with watery ecologies, then, also involves attention to speculative climate fictions (cli-fi) and the potential worlds they help fathom. Cli-fi renderings of climate disaster provide critical insight into possible alternative arrangements of power, meaning, and ontological status. As such, this article explores the depths of the 1995 cli-fi film Waterworld, offering an ecocritical analysis of how the film’s mutant imaginary might help us fathom how to flourish amid floods and contest the very human forces/forms that shape them. In Waterworld, the authors find queer elemental bodies collaborating with ecology and embracing their inherent impurities. This classic cli-fi film provides an important touchstone for a future in which dominant petro-masculine approaches to pelagic place are found to be drowned, dead ends. This article amplifies how mutant corporeal formations and elemental agencies in Waterworld swirl together to submerge systems of power and privilege and drench binaries. Ultimately, Waterworld’s queer ecology helps morph what and how it means to live in a flooded future as speculative seascapes seep into everyday contemporary climate life.

The AltaVoces project: A digital narrative approach to anti-oppressive social work research with Latino youth

Although digital narrative methods lend themselves well to participatory, action-oriented inquiry, these relatively new methods also raise questions about potential risks involved in using digital technologies to engage marginalized groups in social work research. This article examines the feasibility, challenges, and opportunities of using digital narrative methods in anti-oppressive social work research (AOSWR) by providing empirical insights from the AltaVoces project—an AOSWR project that used digital narrative methods to engage Latino youth. This case study demonstrates the compatibility and feasibility of digital narrative methods in AOSWR by examining to what extent the AltaVoces project: (1) used methods that center the contexts, voices, and experiences of oppressed peoples, recognizing the social construction of knowledge and the politics inherent in knowledge creation, (2) critically interrogated power arrangements within research relationships and made efforts to form authentic, collaborative relationships and share power with co-researchers, and (3) acknowledged oppressive systems and institutions and reflected a commitment to transforming, dismantling, or abolishing them through the research purpose, process, and products. We found that digital tools offered new possibilities for centering the voices of Latino youth, rebalancing power in research relationships, and connecting knowledge to action through digital products, in alignment with AOSWR, but also introduced new power hierarchies and risks related to producing digital material. The AltaVoces project provides one example of how digital narrative research may be implemented and evaluated using the integrative AOSWR framework, exposing several aspects of digital narrative research that warrant specific attention and presenting practical strategies for doing so.

Power, knowledge and the transformative potential of marine community science

Community science has gained momentum as a participatory knowledge production approach that can transform governance into more transparent, socially relevant, and democratic endeavours. In the marine context, where the rationalisation of economic knowledge and the marginalisation of local communities are growing concerns, community science is advanced as a potential solution to environmental governance challenges. By increasing monitoring efforts and empowering members of the public to take political action to protect the oceans, community science has helped to transform marine management to address issues, such as, sea-level rise, overfishing, and ocean acidification. However, many community science projects do not realise their transformative potential and, instead, contribute toward reinforcing the status quo of governance, meaning that management challenges remain unsolved. To understand how the full potential of community science can be achieved, research must reframe what transformation is and assess why projects often fail to instigate change. Within community science research, there is an under-appreciation of how transformational change must involve actions that challenge prevailing power relations. We seek to address this gap by initiating a discussion on the political and power dimensions of community science. Drawing on the broader field of co-production, we argue that community science has been depoliticised to reinforce, as opposed to alleviate, unequal arrangements of power that inhibit societal transformation. To combat this, we suggest that community science must develop a more explicit comprehension of power and how it relates to the use and production of knowledge. Informed by the Foucauldian concept of power/knowledge, we argue for a politicised paradigm of community science that recognises how transformation requires pluralism, the contestation of knowledge, and learning amongst all community science actors. This review concludes by considering how transformative community science could introduce new ways of knowing to marine governance and facilitate more active community participation.

Race, Power, and Philanthropy: Exploring the Role of Race in Non-governmental Socioeconomic Interventions: Insights from Makhanda, South Africa

ABSTRACT Non-governmental socioeconomic intervention exists within a framework and history of racialised proximity to power and privilege. The arrangements of race and power in and beyond the sector along with the inequitable distribution of material and nonmaterial resources have therefore been used to affirm the sector’s affinity to colonial relations of exploitation and racism. This paper recounts the genealogy of this affinity and outlines the ways in which current arrangements of poverty, power and non-state mediation interpolate with the historical arrangements of race and power through non-state interventions. Data collected with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in Makhanda in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province inform the proposition that race and power remain central features of socioeconomic intervention in part, through organisational structures, traditions of engagement with communities, dominant explications of poverty and depictions of “the poor”. The paper concludes that the world and work of NGOs—despite dominant assertions of its independence and neutrality—is inextricably bound to its historical and sociopolitical context and is thus a site wherein race and power are not only present but at play.

Outlining Agents and Policies of Value in the Touristic Economy of the Sacred Valley of Cusco

In this article, I draw from ethnographic and theoretical notes in turn of describing aspects of the tourist market in the Sacred Valley of Cusco, Peru. Guided by Victoria, I address the region’s productive chain composed of multiple actors, power arrangements, and vigorous production of difference embedded in historical circumstances. I highlight the actions of Victoria in the community of Accha Alta, the presence of World Vision, and The Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco as they aggregate value in the processes of coordinating exchanges in the tourism market. In view of this network of touristic production in the Valley´s circuit, I raise the questions: are women like Victoria being exploited and victimized by scalability and an oppressive market? Are exogenous projects and cultural transactions under the imperatives of the market the villains of Peruvian and much of Latin American histories? Although there is no easy answer to such massive entanglements, I argue that couched in the methodological lens of tourism it is possible to glimpse the extensive and multifaceted commercial chain in the Valley marked by developmental discourses and transnational authorizations.