Concept Of Assemblage Research Articles

The Linguistic and Sociological Dimensions of the Concept of Jamʿ: A Deleuzian Approach

In this article, I explore the Arabic concept of jamʿ, and relate it to the Deleuzian concept of assemblage. I argue that jamʿ is central in the formation of Arabic language, Islamic theology, Islamic law, Sufism, a number of modern Islamic discourses, such as wasaṭiyyah, and several social,economic, and political formations in Arab modern states. I will limit my scope in this article to establishing the theoretical foundations of jamʿ and studying its effect on the formation of language. After defining jamʿetymologically, I will present a brief discussion of assemblage, as presented in Deleuze and Guattari, and then will divide the rest of the article into three parts, where I will discuss, first, the concept of naẓm as a type of jamʿ that aims to articulate meaning, second, the effect of jamʿ on the formation of the metaphor, and, third, the theological and philosophical foundations of jamʿ in the Deleuzian understanding of virtuality, and the Bergsonian understanding of time.

Necessary Principles Around Marketing Deconstruction

Traditionally, the concept of marketing is used as a synonym for irresponsible marketing. It is synonymous with actions that, without an ethical vision, focus on increasing sales through a series of strategies. It is common to link marketing to ideas such as "manipulation" or to advertising efforts that denigrate people with the aim of increasing sales or positioning brands. This article is an interdisciplinary effort that aims to deconstruct the traditional and dominant ideas surrounding marketing. To carry out this analysis, two proposals are put forward. First, the approach to consumer systems by making a historical review of the contribution that some disciplines, such as economics and psychology, have made. Second, the concept of assemblages as a means of analyzing the relationships that these systems currently possess, and the possible emerging relationships. An example is given of the impact of advertising and other marketing efforts with sexist content and how this Impact is related to different systems, from creative design to the social context in which this type of content is framed; which not only enables its construction, but also contributes to an irresponsible marketing notion, helping to reproduce and naturalize this model. Realidad Empresarial No. 10, 2020: 52-64

Forced migrant families' assemblages of care and social protection between solidarity and inequality

The article analyses various forms of care and social protection that forced-migrant transnational families exchange despite their individual members living in different countries. It presents outcomes of a small-scale empirical study of the family practices of mobile individuals from Syria and Afghanistan who arrived in Germany during and after the "long summer of 2015". Building on social protection research and transnational care studies, the article introduces the concept of care and protection assemblages, which highlights the heterogeneity, processuality and multi-scalar quality of migrant families’ efforts to improve well-being. It includes an empirical analysis that illustrates key elements of the proposed concept and shows the significance of cross-border circulation of remittances, the selectivity in the cross-border circulation of emotions and limitations on the cross-border circulation of hands-on and practical care. These findings are framed by an analysis of solidarity organizations at the meso-level and (multiscalar) securitized asylum policies at the macro-level in the German context. The proposed conceptual framework takes into consideration migrant families’ simultaneity of solidarity and inequality experiences by locating the examination of family-making at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of analysis.

Digital technologies in policy assemblages in Ireland and Norway: A visual network analysis

Increasingly, school leaders and teachers are being expected to use digital technologies to collect data to analyze, plan and organize teaching and learning. Such expectations can be traced to a number of policy initiatives over the last decade. This study is concerned with how educational policy puts forward ambitions of digital school leadership and teaching practices by deploying the concept of policy assemblage. We analyzed six policy documents from Ireland and Norway to identify the actors assembled to fulfill governmental ambitions and practices with digital technologies in schools. The unpacking of actors that may partake in such assemblages was visualized and analyzed using visual network analysis. The findings indicate digital school leadership and teaching practices in Ireland and Norway have the potential to be steered by digital actors that facilitate multiple activities at once and shed light on the diverse and multifaceted relationships that make up these governing practices.

LGBTIQ+ break-up assemblages: At the end of the rainbow

This article explores Finnish LGBTIQ+ people’s break-ups. The long battle for equal rights has placed LGBTIQ+ people’s relationships under pressure to succeed. Previous studies argue that partners in LGBTIQ+ relationships try to appear as ordinary and happy as possible, and remain silent about the challenges they face in their relationships. Consequently, they may miss out on opportunities to receive institutional and familial support. This study aims to move beyond recurrent frameworks that take the similarity or difference between LGBTIQ+ relationships/break-ups and mixed-sex relationships as a predefined point of departure. The analysis draws on ethnographic observations of relationship seminars for the recently separated, an online counselling site for LGBTIQ+ people, survey data, and interviews with LGBTIQ+ people who have experienced recent break-ups. It employs the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of assemblages in order to show how different components and manifold power relations come to matter in different ways in the course of the open-ended becomings of relationship break-ups.

Environmental influence on the inter-annual demographic variation of the narrownose smooth-hound shark (Mustelus schmitti, Springer 1939) in the Northern Argentine Coastal System (El Rincón, 38–42°S)

ABSTRACT Understanding the environmental influence on the demographic structure of a shark population within a specific ecosystem has direct implications for developing effective management and conservation measures. We studied the physical environment influence on the inter-annual demographic variation of the narrownose smooth-hound shark (Mustelus schmitti) in a key coastal ecosystem. The analyses were based on the size assemblage concept of co-occurring length classes that share common traits. We used bottom-trawl datasets (n = 334) collected over 8 spring periods (1994-2012). The analyses indicated that the population was structured in eight size assemblages that represented its main ontogenetic levels. Those corresponding to sub-adult females, young adult males, and juveniles contributed to most of the population similarity. The population structure presented high (>57.7%) inter-annual dissimilarities and showed three main similarity levels with significant differences associated with a higher abundance and similarity contribution of the main assemblages. All size assemblages were more abundant in shallow (<34.5 m), warmer (>14.9 °C), and fresher (<33.24) waters. Although the temperature variations better explained the spatial distribution of abundance, the inter-annual variation in the population similarity matched the spatial coverage of low salinities (<33.5). Overall, the environmental variation explained the variability in the abundance of size assemblages in consecutive years.

Rethinking border walls as fluid meshworks

We tend to see border walls as stable concrete fortifications. This article seeks to offer an alternative understanding of walls by suggesting a shift in border studies from network thinking to meshwork thinking. Despite references to multiplicity, concepts of networks and assemblages in border studies continue to provide neat narratives of walls. This article reimagines the border beyond sovereign–disciplinary–biopolitical networks and assemblages. It argues that border walls are constituted by and constitutive of the ever-shifting transformative movements of lines: colonizing lines, crack lines and lines of flight. By tracing the lines of the Separation Wall in the West Bank, this article reveals that, on the border, all these lines coexist, entangle with one another, and in their entanglements, they alter each other to form a fluid meshwork. Meshwork thinking shows the constant mobility of the border and shifts our attention to the power of molecular movements beneath the state in creating, sustaining and disrupting power politics. By presenting a less state-centric, more complex picture of the Separation Wall, this article aims to highlight the movement of the lines that transform the border into a meshwork.

Campo, conexión y desigualdad. Hacia una economía política de las prácticas en la era del capitalismo digital

En este artículo se presenta una reflexión sobre las potencialidades que, para el estudio de lo digital, presenta el marco teórico desarrollado por Pierre Bourdieu. Se parte de tres premisas epistemológicas: la existencia de una cierta continuidad estructural con la sociedad predigital, el rechazo del dualismo digital-analógico y una concepción del poder y la desigualdad que va más allá de lo puramente conectivo o informacional. A lo largo del texto se expone como la teoría de Bourdieu puede ser una herramienta potente a la hora de abordar algunos de los debates que se han planteado en el seno de la sociología digital: los debates en torno a la presencia de actores no humanos, el ensamblaje ciborg digital o el concepto de prosumidor. Se defiende también la potencialidad del concepto de capital cultural objetivado para integrar lo digital en el universo de las prácticas sociales. Este concepto da cabida a elementos como el cuerpo, el espacio, los datos o la infraestructura en la explicación de la desigualdad.

Sociospatial ties and postdisaster reconstruction: An analysis of the assemblage in the mega-fire of Valparaíso.

Disasters affect sociospatial links in a dynamic and unstable meshwork of aspects that are reconfigured. In this sense, accounting for this complexity is central to analyze the transformation of the sociospatial linkage of the affected people and communities. Addressing from community environmental psychology, we propose the concept of assemblage to guide a situated reading of subjective, material, and community aspects present in a reconstruction process after a disaster. Following a qualitative methodology, using spatially referenced narrative interviews (n = 16) and thematic analysis, it is described how these links are presented in a community that lived the mega-fire of a part of the city of Valparaíso in Chile. The results describe that the experience of being a community is a variable flow within a process defined by an ever-emerging configuration of spatial, technological, personal, social, and sensory characteristics. We conclude by pointing out the qualities of the communities when considered from an assemblage perspective.

Screen-Camera-Cars

Self-driving cars have long been depicted in cinematic narratives, across genres from science fiction films to fantasy films. In some cases, a self-driving car is personified as one of the main characters. This article examines cinematic representations and imaginaries in order to understand the development of the self-driving technology and its integration in contemporary societies, drawing on examples such as The Love Bug, Knight Rider, Minority Report and I, Robot. Conceptually and methodologically, the article combines close readings of films with technological concerns and theoretical considerations, in an attempt to grasp the entanglement of cinematographic imaginaries, audiovisual technologies, artificial intelligence and human interactions that characterise the introduction of self-driving cars in contemporary societies. The human–AI machine interaction is considered both on technological and theoretical levels. Issues of automation, agency and disengagement are traced in cinematic representations and tackled, calling into question the concepts of socio-technical assemblage.

Recoding of an industrial town: bioeconomy hype as a cure from decline?

ABSTRACT We study placemaking in Äänekoski, a small Finnish industrial town, by analyzing how the local government utilizes a recent large-scale bioeconomy investment in its attempts to reinvent the town, and how components of place conform to the image building ‘script’. We deploy an assemblage concept and study local place as a combination of material and expressive properties, forces of (de-)territorialization, acts of (de-/re-)coding and relations of exteriority. Äänekoski was known as a shrinking mill town before Metsä Group Corporation decided to build a bio-production complex there in 2014. We analyze how the local government attempts to recode the town with the help of bioeconomy-based place branding, town planning and extensive material investments in the townscape. Despite support from the national ‘bioconomy hype’ and political narratives, several material, expressive and deterritorializing elements (e.g. declining population, unemployment, environmental debates) work against this growth-oriented recoding. The results allow us to draw critical conclusions on small and industrial town image building.

The affective assemblage of internationalisation in Japanese higher education

Positive attributes stick to higher education internationalisation, and it is a policy paradigm with performative effects. Internationalisation draws on imagined virtuous flows of knowledge production and exchange, and is presented as an assemblage of detraditionalisation, expansiveness and epistemic and cultural opportunity for individuals, organisations and nation states. Policies target bodies, minds and affect, yet are presented as an unquestionable good in an imagined genderneutral, borderless, meritocratic and benign global knowledge economy. This paper explores the affective economy of internationalisation drawing upon interview data gathered in fifteen private, five national and eight public universities in Japan with thirty-four migrant academics and thirteen international doctoral researchers. We aim to contribute to internationalisation theory by exploring the sticky micropolitics of internationalisation in relation to affective assemblages, and how the gendered, racialised, linguistic and epistemic inequalities constituting academic mobility are frequently disqualified from discourse. Our discussion includes consideration of the Japanese policy context, the concept of affective assemblages, navigating gender regimes, precarity and linguistic imperialism. We conclude that the immaterial or affective labour that is required to unstick, install and maintain an internationalised academic identity and navigate the translations and antagonisms from everyday encounters with difference is substantially under-estimated.

Touchless classes and absent bodies: teaching physical education in times of Covid-19

ABSTRACT Bodies have been claimed to be an ‘absent presence’ and touch ‘risky business’ in physical education (PE). We have now witnessed how these claims are intensified in pandemic times of Covid-19, particularly in countries that have adopted extreme lockdown measures. This paper explores how PE practices have become ‘touchless’ and bodies absent using the theoretical concepts of risk and assemblage. The paper focusses on a group of pre-service PE teachers who were keen on undertaking their PE practicum experience and who were forced to switch to online mode. Data were collected through participant-produced drawings and comments on the drawings. Results suggest that the pre-service teachers are experiencing a mix of emotions during this time, miss the physical contact with students and believe the subject of PE is losing its identity as a consequence of the current situation. The conclusions of this study reveal a shift in the way that bodies are being constituted as assemblages now, and the possibility that pre-service teachers are missing out on an important aspect of their practicum experiences because of the lack of direct contact with students. We also wonder if pre-service teacher education programmes should put more emphasis on better preparing the students to teach online, and what will be the long-term consequences in the teaching of PE because of the current Covid-19 pandemic situation.

Approaching Archaeological Museum Collections through the Concept of Assemblage: The Case Study of the Jesuit Mission San Ignacio Miní (1610–1631)

In Brazil, as in most countries, history and natural history museums are the repositories of rich collections of excavated archaeological material. One of the major challenges in working with these collections is the paucity of information available regarding the original excavations, which raises important questions that archaeologists and museum studies professionals have been grappling with for several decades: what interpretive value do these collections have without any contextual information, and are they worth maintaining in museum archives that are facing continuing crises in space and resources? This article uses the concepts of entanglement and assemblage to discuss a collection of ceramics excavated from one of the first Spanish Jesuit missions in colonial Paraguay, San Ignacio Miní (1610–1631), and housed at the Museu Paranaense in Curitiba, Brazil. Despite the lack of contextual information from the 1963 excavation, we can begin to explore the entangled pasts, present, and future of these objects by tracing the trajectory of the collection from the initial formation through excavation and contemporary analysis. Innovative approaches are needed to address methodological and theoretical concerns in analyzing archaeological museum collections to ensure that the knowledge and potential insights entangled in these collections are not lost.

Merritt-Hawkes’ Becoming-Persian in Persia: Romance and Reality

Merritt-Hawkes’ much-neglected travel narrative, Persia: Romance and Reality, offers a very interesting account of her journey to Persia in 1935 and of her interactions with Persian women. Unlike her male counterparts, she is allowed entry in to Persian domestic spaces, which has proved productive in her active engagements with and opening up to the women. Drawing on a Deleuzo-Guattarian framework with a focus on the concepts of assemblage, lines, territory and becoming, this study fleshes out Merritt-Hawkes’ responses to the Persians and their culture. It argues that Merritt-Hawkes goes on a process of becoming-Persian through inventing her lines of flight from the rigid majoritarian codes prescribed by home for translating the encountered difference. Engaging with the Persian women in the contact zone, she revisits, questions and even ruptures home’s hierarchical spatial and power frameworks determining relationships between the majority/self and the minority/other. She surpasses the barriers set by racial, national and cultural determinants which hamper her interactions with the Persian women; adopting Persian women’s viewing position, she betrays home by indicating receptivity to and recognizing the encountered different cultural traits as diversity. Merritt-Hawkes appears as a writer of flight and of becoming who makes interventions in home’s patriarchal Orientalist tradition by offering an alternative outlook to difference in her revisionist take.

Theorizing large-scale societal relations through the conceptual lens of cross-border assemblages

The concept of assemblage has recently become fashionable in studies of cross-border, global and transnational relations. In addressing the most important elements of this approach, the article provides an analytical vocabulary for analysing the processes of societalization in the context of global and transnational realms. After critically reflecting on the classical sociological approaches to society and social differentiation, the article argues that, because of its poststructuralist basis, the concept of assemblage is the appropriate conceptual tool for studying societal macro-relations of power and inequality while avoiding the modernist heritage of classical social theory. Furthermore, by synthesizing poststructuralist thinking, intersectional theory and multiscalar approaches to space, the article suggests that the assemblage theory can be used to better understand the current forms of cross-border social inequalities in the multiple and partly overlapping contexts of postcolonialism, postsocialism and the EU political project. In a nutshell, it is not a plea to adopt the assemblage approach as a new ‘grand theory’ but rather as a flexible conceptual tool that allows an inductive theory-building.

Smart Security Cameras: The Corporatization of the Surveillant Assemblage

Using a political economy approach, this paper considers how home smart security cameras function as part of the surveillance-industrial complex and strengthen the relationship between law enforcement agencies and multinational technology companies for the benefit of private interests. This dynamic is maintained by the surveilled citizens themselves, who finance the smart security camera industry and participate in a culture of surveillance. The concepts of surveillant assemblage and panoptic surveillance will be used to ground these claims. This paper will reference scholarly articles and news pieces about Amazon Inc.’s Ring doorbell to illustrate two important consequences of the proliferation of smart security cameras: the outsourcing of policing and the shaping of consumer behavior.&#x0D;

Love in early childhood teaching: reading data diffractively with Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts

Love is a significant, complex, and problematic aspect of early childhood teaching that is simultaneously valued, undervalued, feared, and overlooked. This article investigates complexities and tensions within perceptions and experiences of love in early childhood teaching from a posthumanist perspective. Data from a research study exploring emotions in early childhood teaching are analysed using concepts of affect and assemblage; and sense, nonsense, and paradox. Diffractive data analysis teases out flows of affect and forces that enable and constrain ways that love is continuously becoming in early childhood teaching and delves into the process of sensing in between bodies and language. This theoretical framework and methodology provides opportunities for productive ways of perceiving children, teachers, researchers and other-than-human components of early childhood assemblages as continuously produced within complex, unpredictable, and significant loving relationalities.

Space and practices: Engagement of children under 3 with tablets and televisions in homes in Spain, Sweden and England

Young children’s engagements with digital technologies form part of their emergent everyday literacy practices. The study reported here derives from the pan-European study ‘A Day in the Digital Lives of Children aged 0-3’. The methodology was centred on the videoing of an entire day’s experiences of a child aged under 3, together with a reflective interview with the parents and inventories related to digital access, skills and activities of the child. In this paper, we look at three children in Spain, Sweden and England, respectively. We examine our data through three prisms. (1) Spatio-temporal: We consider the children’s engagements in terms of their appropriation of space, in relationships with others in the home and the intimate geographies of young children’s digital literacies. (2) Parental discourse: We use the tensions and contradictions for families framework to examine the selection and monitoring of digital literacies. (3) Practice: Drawing on the first two prisms, we zoom into how children engage with tablet devices and television. Our research demonstrates richness, diversity and agency in these young children’s practices with technologies. We propose the concept of living-room assemblage as an analytical metaphor to understand the macrohabitats of young children’s digital literacies and practices, which emerge as multi-layered, creative and co-occurring with other family activities.Our analysis also explores the challenges presented to parents and the ways in which they navigate tensions and contradictions in their media and digital environments, which are condensed in family practices and discourses around tablets and television.

In Praise of Eclecticism: Relational Thinking and Theoretical Assemblage

In this essay I trace a path through the intellectual history of the last thirty-five years by using the idea of relationality to connect widely different theoretical frameworks that have been used in the fields of ethnomusicology and musicology. These perspectives are all part of a generalized move away from the fixity of structuralism and towards more contingent, dynamic, and anti-foundationalist modes of understanding power, identity, embodiment, technology, and the sensory. Although philosophical perspectives must be addressed, I am fundamentally more interested in exploring the application of these ideas to empirical work—historical and ethnographic. To this end I sing in praise of theoretical eclecticism: the practice of selecting the most productive ideas from philosophy, social theory, and other fields, according to how well they can illuminate and frame an empirical project. To borrow a concept from a recently fashionable philosopher, I suggest that creating theoretical assemblages with clear points of connection to the principle topic of research might serve us well. Deleuze famously advocated for a rhizomatic rather than arborescent understanding of interconnection: “unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21). Or more pithily: “We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much” (15). Assemblages, for Deleuze and Guattari, are non-hierarchical consistencies that develop among these connections and they may link different strata. After tracing an outline of the legacy of relational thinking I will show how and why I have applied an anthropological assemblage theory of ethics and morality to my work on Malian balafonist Neba Solo in conjunction with older social and cultural theories. This essay also addresses the limits of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage, and philosophical perspectives more generally, as resources for socially engaged empirical musical studies. The need to engage issues of power, inequality, diversity and gender inequality, I argue, requires engagement with the social sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and economics. Emphasis on these social theoretical resources encapsulates one historical difference between musicology and ethnomusicology in terms of relational thinking.