Bottom Rung Research Articles

On the coordinate change in the Turkish literary process

Abstract: In this study, the author examines the literary landscape in Turkey given the new dimension opened by the vertical gradation of fiction. The division of literature into high literature (classic), middle-tier (Belles-lettres), and low-tier literature (for mass consumption) is becoming increasingly prominent. Belles-lettres seems to be the most mobile of those, with its representatives being able to, over time, find themselves both at the top and the bottom rung of this paradigm. Zülfü Livaneli's works straddle the line between the high literature and belles-lettres, while books by Barış Müstecaplıoğlu are a perfect example of mass literature becoming regarded as belles-lettres. Another productive approach is horizontal gradation – dividing modern Turkish literature into genres. This is especially true for mass literature, where a clear classification into genres and subgenres is pretty much a precondition for existence. The study singles out such genres of mass literature as detective novels, women's romance novels, and historical adventure novels. Speculative fiction occupies a special place in this, with its genre affiliation being a topic of major discussions. The Turkish literature of the 2000s features several principal genres of speculative fiction: sci-fi (K. Kutlu, G. Berkkan, H. Balçı) with alternative history being a part of such (G. Dayıoğlu, H. Kakınç); fantasy with its subgenres of urban fantasy (S. Yemni, S. Atasoy, G. Elikbank, F. O. Şeran, C. Yücel), "sword and sorcery" fantasy (B. Müstecaplıoğlu, A. Aras, G. Canbaba) and dark fantasy (S. Ersin, G. Öğüt), as well as the genre of dystopia (A. Şaşa). In conclusion, the author argues that analyzing literary pieces necessitates operating with both the vertical and horizontal paradigms simultaneously.

‘County lines’: racism, safeguarding and statecraft in Britain

Government policies relating to dealers in ‘county lines’ drugs trafficking cases have been welcomed as a departure from punitive approaches to drugs and ‘gang’ policing, in that those on the bottom rung of the drugs economy of heroin and crack cocaine are no longer treated as criminals but as potential victims and ‘modern slaves’ in need of protection. However, our research suggests not so much a radical break with previous modes of policing as that the term ‘county lines’ emerged as a logical extension of the government’s racist and classist language surrounding ‘gangs’, knife crime and youth violence. Policies implemented in the name of safeguarding the vulnerable also act as a gateway for criminalisation not just under drugs laws but also modern slavery legislation. The government’s discovery of, and responses to, ‘county lines’ hinge on a moral crisis in the making, which ultimately deepens the state’s pre-emptive and violent criminalisation of the ‘Black criminal other’ at a time of deep political crisis.

Water Tenure Security for Palm Oil, Hydropower, and Geothermal

Oil palm plantation, hydropower and geothermal depend on water to sustain their operations. This paper will analyze two factors affecting its water tenure security: how water is allocated in the legal framework and the relative strength of a particular tenure against other tenures. The case study areas are the Kahayan Catchment (Central Kalimantan) and the Citarum Catchment (West Java). This paper applies FAO’s analytical framework: elaborate tenure typology, map water uses and weigh the security of the particular tenure with some modification. We find that the water tenure security for oil palm is weak since it sits at the bottom rung of the allocation framework. We posited that environmental water use, especially for the prevention of forest fires – as well as water, uses for daily basic needs would be prioritized over commercial water use for smallholder oil palm farmers or corporate oil palm. Furthermore, customary water tenure, although weak in the legal sense (de jure), can be strong in terms of practice (de facto); this could diminish oil palm water tenure security should there be an overlap or intersections among them. Water tenure security for hydropower is “weak to medium” – but this depends on whether they are related to investment schemes that could strengthen their tenure legally. In the legal framework, the allocation for hydropower is prioritized below daily basic needs, drinking water utilities, and smallholder crops. Following a legal analysis, we find that the strength of water tenure for geothermal in conservation area is weak.

Intriguing Capital– Identity Relationship Dalits and Caste in India

The article interrogates the claim that capitalism would replace caste and liberate Dalits. People at the bottom rung of the caste hierarchy are exhorted to support neoliberal capitalism, a crusader against caste. This claim is based on the premise that capitalism abolishes all pre-existing social relations. Dealing with this argument at both empirical and theoretical levels, the article argues that this unilinear understanding of capital’s negotiation with other relationships is ahistorical. Capital does not necessarily abolish non-capitalist social relations but modifies and appropriates them for expansion. Relying on several studies from India, the article points out that interactions between capital and caste have been intriguing, with both entities being altered in the process.

Does City Size Affect International Migrants and Native-Born Workers Differently? Exploring Inequalities in Unemployment and Occupations Across Spanish Cities

The 20th century witnessed populations increasingly concentrated in cities, and this global pattern has persisted into the 21st century. A principal reason for the urban concentration lies in the greater employment advantages offered by bigger metropolises. While this relationship is well documented, few studies have examined whether these benefits differ according to urban dwellers’ birth country. This article analyzes to what extent the migrant–native gap in unemployment and occupational attainment varies according to municipality or city size and, if so, whether that change in inequality is explained by differences in the sociodemographic composition of foreign and native-born populations in big metropolises. Using data from the Spanish General Social Survey, results show that absolute migrant–native labor inequality does vary across city sizes, although in different ways. In larger cities, gross inequality with respect to unemployment seems to be disappearing, whereas in the same places, gross inequality in access to unskilled occupations grows progressively. Controlling for individual, family, and context-related factors explains changes across cities in the unemployment gap, but not in occupational attainment. In other words, big cities do not equalize the risk of unemployment between foreign-born workers and the native-born population but do have a negative impact on equality when it comes to avoiding the occupational ladder's bottom rung. This finding suggests that many international migrants may move to big cities attracted by employment chances, but, in this urban “land of opportunities,” they are more dependent on unskilled jobs and fall into a “trap of precariousness.”

The Lower Clergy and Popular Culture

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of the Christian lower priesthood in local communities in eighteenth–twentieth century Hungary and Transylvania in cultural transmission. The author intends to map out the complex and changing conditions of the social function, everyday life, and mentality of the priests on the bottom rung of the clerical hierarchy. Particular emphasis is placed on the activity of priests active at the focus points of interaction between elite and popular culture who, starting from the second half of the eighteenth century, often reflected both directly and in a written form on the cultural practices of the population of villages and market towns. The theoretical questions and possible approaches are centered around the complex relations of the priest and the community, their harmonious or conflict-ridden co-existence, questions of sacral economy, stereotypes of the “good priest” and the “bad priest” as shaped from above and from below, the subtleties of “priest-keeping”, the intentions related to preserving traditions and creating new customs, and the different temperaments of priests in relation to these issues.

Moody’s downgrades Chemours’s debt

The credit rating agency Moody’s has downgraded corporate debt issued by Chemours to Ba3 from Ba2 and warns that the company’s credit outlook is negative. A Ba3 rating is the bottom rung for noninv...

COVID-19 Cases and Deaths in India: Epidemiological Lessons and Projections from the Trend

Whereas most infections have origin from poor hygiene and deprived nutrition and move upward from bottom rung of social strata, pandemics mostly move top-down beginning with the air travelers. Extensive infliction by COVID-19 has taken the world by surprise, but milder trend in India so far has given us some lessons regarding its behavior. The first case in India was reported on January 30, 2020 and it took 45 days to reach to a mark of 100. Only 30 days later, the tally reached to 10,000. This looks fast but is slow relative to most European countries and the United States. The possible reasons for this are many.[1] We in India now have data of more than 40 days since the emergence of 100 cases to study the trend and make educated projection for immediate future.

DISCERNING STATUS: SUBJECTIVE SOCIAL POSITION AND COGNITIVE HEALTH AMONG OLDER ADULTS IN RURAL SOUTH AFRICA

Rapid population aging in high absolute poverty settings, such as much of South Africa, demands new research on the social context factors that affect cognitive aging in these settings. We investigated the relationships between subjective social position within one’s village and cognitive function and impairment, with the rationale that psychosocial stress induced by low relative social position may affect cognitive aging outcomes independently of absolute socioeconomic conditions. Data were from the population-representative HAALSI study of 5,059 adults aged 40+ in rural Agincourt, South Africa. Subjective social position was assessed using the MacArthur Network social ladder, which asks respondents to indicate how high up a ladder they stand, relative to others, in their village. Cognitive function was a composite z-score of time orientation and word recall tests; scores ≤1.5 standard deviations (SD) below the mean indicated cognitive impairment. Twenty percent of those on the bottom rung had cognitive impairment, declining to 2% on the top rung. In regression models adjusted for age, sex, country of birth, education, literacy, marital status, employment, and asset-based household wealth, each ladder rung increase was associated with an 0.05 SD increase in cognitive z-score (95% CI: 0.04-0.06), and a 17% decrease in odds of cognitive impairment (OR=0.83; 95% CI: 0.79-0.88); these associations were greater in magnitude than those for years of education with these cognitive outcomes. Future work should examine if these relationships persist longitudinally, and investigate the mechanisms of these relationships, including village-level contextual factors that may contribute to subjective social position in this setting.

Hard, Hard Religion: Interracial Faith in the Poor South by John Hayes

Reviewed by: Hard, Hard Religion: Interracial Faith in the Poor South by John Hayes Paul Yandle Hard, Hard Religion: Interracial Faith in the Poor South. By John Hayes. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. x, 238.) John Hayes’s highly readable work takes the reader below the surface of “respectable” middle-class religion in emerging New South towns to view what he argues was a set of faith practices common to poor African Americans as well as whites. As he tries to traces the evidences of Christianity as it was practiced on the fringes of a region in transition, he chides nineteenth and twentieth observers for dismissing the religious practices of poor blacks and whites as escapist, insisting that practitioners of folk religion were quite focused on the world in which they lived. “Perhaps ironically, the New South furnished the material basis for such an interracial alliance by fostering a modern poverty of landlessness and low wages that touched millions of whites and blacks,” Hayes concludes near the end of Hard, Hard Religion (195). The point is a running theme throughout the book. In an instructive introduction and first chapter, Hayes builds a picture of the conditions that, he argues, were the germinal ground for a set of faith practices and a worldview that reflected the marginalization of those caught on the bottom rung of industrial transition. As the post–Reconstruction South, including portions of Appalachia, moved toward manufacturing and extraction industries that pulled the region into larger markets, Protestant denominations—in particular Baptists and Methodists—began to emphasize what Hayes refers to as an “ethos of respectability and domesticity” that reflected a growing middle class (31–32). With the growth of towns, a class-based segregation began to emerge along with race-based Jim Crow, and in the process middle-class African American and white southerners began to denigrate their poorer, rural counterparts mired in debt and tenancy as lazy or irreligious. Hayes argues that the insults were groundless, pointing out that rural areas had networks of lay preachers who supported themselves as farmers or laborers in addition to preaching to rural congregations. These groups of people spread hymns, songs, and other practices across wide swaths of geography as well as between ethnicities. Following the first chapter are four chapters covering a series of topical themes. Chapters two and three deal at the micro level with rural southerners and their treatments of mortality, Christian conversion, and God’s call to preach, in one portion examining in detail variations on a song about death [End Page 114] most likely transmitted by traveling preachers and peripatetic workers as they found various means of income in different locations. Examining similarities between songs about death and medieval Danse Macabre, Hayes concludes that unlike middle-class evangelicals whose faith was becoming increasingly articulated in domestic terms, poorer southerners, whose lives were often marginalized, focused on death as a reminder that life was fragile and precious as they saw themselves as living in a liminal space between the transcendent and the mundane. A fourth chapter, titled “Sacramental Expressions,” builds on the difference even further; as middle-class evangelicals focused on the home as a sanctuary, poorer Christians saw the sacred throughout their landscape, as evidenced by the practices of grave decoration and river baptism away from houses of worship. Chapter five, titled “The Ethics of Neighborliness,” explores how poorer Christians, white and African American, valued hospitality and community as a means of meaningful survival. Immanence is one of the running themes of the book, as Hayes observes that the sacred was never distant from the daily worlds of people for whom survival was a constant struggle (113). Hayes’s concentration on the spiritual opens up another avenue for the study of faith expressions examined by other historians in more temporal contexts; for example, in chapter four, Hayes touches upon the use of clocks to adorn graves, a practice examined in Mark Smith’s seminal work Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill, 1997). Hayes’s expansion beyond class analysis does not mean that he abandons class or race as a lens through which one can...

When feminism encounters New Documentary Movement: an uncompleted academic discussion

ABSTRACTThis article starts with the “encounter” between feminists in the “International Symposium on Chinese Women and Visual Representation” and Chinese documentary filmmaker Xu Tong’s Wheat Harvest, and explores the viewpoints and standpoints of feminist actors. With the analysis of the similarities and differences between the independent documentary perspective and the feminist stance, the author elaborates more deeply on why Chinese female directors do not have the consciousness of “feminism.” China’s independent documentary shows how the issue of feminism in China is intertwined with China’s various complex socio-political issues. The way of Chinese documentary filmmaker as “living with the bottom rung” is a kind of practical behavior that seeks truth by integrating itself with it. This requires great courage and idealism, as well as social experience. The bottom layer is where the dark side of the society exists which is beyond the law and morality. The question raised is precisely how to promote the development of feminism and documentary together to work for an equal and just society itself. The more urgent task of Chinese feminism is how to rethink the relationship between the reality of China and feminism, and how to re-establish effective dialogue and cooperation with various critical forces in this society. In the historical perspective of the feminism development of China over one century, gender and women's issues have never existed in isolation, but have moved forward with various social and political movements. How to re-examine this historic heritage to face China's problems and crises today is an uncompleted answer that China's feminism must hand over.

Measuring the impact of a journal

The Ecological Management & Restoration (EMR) journal's long journey to become listed on the Web of Science (previously referred to as ISI listing) – and thus be included in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) – has now been rewarded. In short, EMR now has an Impact Factor. In the 2016 Journal Citation Report, EMR received a score of 1.139 – which places the journal 115/153 in the Ecology category. Papers from EMR are now being cited widely. For example, the Scopus 2016 database listed 130 EMR papers that were cited in nearly 90 different SCIE journals and publications. This is not bad for a newcomer and is a clear baseline from which the journal can build. There are several issues with the listing process that explain the long time this has taken. One of the main reasons is that a journal needs a minimum qualifying level of citations in papers published in already listed journals to get to the bottom rung of the ladder. This is hard enough for any new journal but is doubly hard for an intentionally applied science journal with a largely management-oriented readership – given that most of the journals already in SCIE are primarily directed to a research readership and may be less likely to cite applied science papers. It is significant, then, that this Impact Factor was attained despite ESA's decision to retain the journal's current scope and format, only making very minimal concessions to improve EMR’s conformity to a science journal format. That is, EMR is, and will remain, primarily a management-oriented journal linking science and practice. But having an Impact Factor means that EMR may now be a more attractive first-choice publication outlet for researchers working in universities – while also retaining a strong representation from management authors and a strong management readership. It is this readership, after all, that is one of the reasons many established researchers send particular (applied) papers to EMR as their first-choice publication outlet. In his interview in this issue, Andrew Bennett – who has been a dedicated executive member of the EMR board since its inception in the year 2000 – reflects on the importance of communicating science to end-users. He is not alone in his view that the motivation behind the work of many scientists working in the nature conservation area is to make the world a better place, requiring researchers to communicate their work not only to other researchers but also to managers. Bennett raises more novel ways being considered by the Australian Research Council (which funds research) to measure the degree a project engages with industry partners and others who may use the research findings. The interview is a good read also because it provides us with some insights into the author's own career, his background, his drive to consider questions at larger and larger scales and his hopes for the future of biodiversity conservation research and practice in Australia. Bennett speaks of the importance of not only spatial scale but also temporal scale. We need longer-term efforts and longer-term research and practice. This is echoed by David Lamb's comment piece in this issue which eloquently challenges both science and practice institutions to take stronger steps to protect long-term data- or old data that can act as a baseline for building upon in the future. Linda Broadhurst and colleagues also take a big picture temporal view in their article on designing protocols for revegetation that can double as experimentation into genetic adaptation in the context of changing climates. The remaining offerings of long and short technical and research reports in this issue epitomize the management relevance of EMR papers. Each of these grapples with measuring the effects of solution-based restoration or management. Of the longer articles, this includes Ben Carr and colleagues’ review of the use of Conservation Action Planning to improve, in particular, the management of private conservation reserves in Australia including on Indigenous lands; Peter Kyne and Pierre Feutry focus on mitigating recreational overfishing; Joseph Stapleton and colleagues focus on trialling the introduction of coarse woody debris to reduce mammalian browsing in revegetation; Chris Gillies and colleagues focus on oyster reef restoration, and Konrad Uebel and colleagues and Steve Sinclair and colleagues focus on the observations of natural recovery of vegetation communities after a range of interventions. Indeed, it is the quality of the applied science papers that will retain and build EMR's Impact Factor, although our applied focus will always limit citations in pure research publications. We know that EMR counts in terms of end-user impact and recommend that it be continued to be considered as such by researchers and the bodies who fund them, rather than now judging EMR by its SCIE Impact Factor alone.

Influence Factors on Gender Wage Gap: Evidences from Chinese Household Income Project Survey

By constructing a gender wage gap evolution model, this paper examines the source and evolutionary process of gender wage inequality from a theoretical perspective. The purpose of this study is thoroughly investigating the factors affecting the gender wage inequality from the perspective of gender discrimination and variations in non-gender endowments. Based on the Chinese Household Income Project Survey Data, this study indicates that: (1) since companies continue to re-evaluate the gender endowment value of gender, the gender wage inequality exhibits an endogenous sustainability and self-reinforcing effect. (2) The gender wage gap of urban residents is derived mainly from the top tier of wages, while the gender wage gap of the migrant people is mainly determined from the bottom rung of wages. (3) Female age has a ‘U-curve’ impact on gender wage inequality from the standpoint of non-gender endowment differences, and the female age has an ‘inverted U-curve’ impact on gender wage inequality as a result of discrimination. (4) Female appearance and actual work hours are insufficient to affect the changing trend of gender wage inequality; however, h-register location and marital status are still considered to be very important.

An innovative application of extended exergy analysis into an industrial park.

Exergy is a thermodynamic term used to account all possible useful work theoretically throughout one process when it is brought into equilibrium with its environment. It however cannot directly incorporate non-physical flows, which can be accounted by extensions of the exergy consumption method. Extended exergy, which builds a bridge between thermal and anthropic dimensions, can both measure resource consumption and economic system. In this study, we applied extended exergy analysis to analyze an industrial park, including material consumption, social investment, and environmental influence. The total extended exergy consumption in the study park amounts to 2.52EJ. The material-based exergy occupies the largest exergy consumption, followed by capital exergy, environmental remediation exergy, and labor exergy in decreasing order. The exergy capacity was proposed to depict the conversion ability from exergy consumption into economic benefits. In the study area, electronic information industry has the largest exergy capacity with a value of 70RMB/GJ, indicating a high conversion power from exergy to money. New energy vehicles and parts manufacturing occupies bottom rung in terms of exergy capacity. From the view of material consumption, other industry consumed a lot more exergy compared to electronic information industry; for the environmental remediation, other industry has the lowest exergy capacity, indicating it discharged more pollutants than other clusters to output the same amount of money. Therefore, other industry needs to be urgently transformed and upgraded. The study could help to optimize industrial structure and environmental management in industrial parks.

Theodora, Actress, Empress, Saint by David Potter

Reviewed by: Theodora, Actress, Empress, Saint by David Potter James Allan Evans Theodora, Actress, Empress, Saint David Potter New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp, ix + 277. ISBN 978–0-190974076–5 Presses are encouraged to submit books dealing with Late Antiquity for consideration for review to any of JLA’s three Book Review Editors: Michael Kulikowski (mek31@psu.edu); Hagith Sivan (helenasivan@yahoo.com); and Dennis Trout (troutd@missouri.edu). It was inevitable that Theodora should be selected for inclusion in OU P’s “Women in Antiquity” series, and the title says it all. Theodora began as a mime actress, which led to a career first as Justinian’s secret agent, and then his wife and empress. The sainthood came after her death, and never reached the Roman Catholic church. To Cardinal Baronius, she was another Delilah, who betrayed Samson to the Philistines; without her at his side, Justinian might have emerged as a Chalcedonian strongman. The publication in 1623 of Procopius’ Secret History filled out the caricature: Justinian’s seducer had begun her career as a burlesque queen! In the 1884 stage production of Victorien Sardou’s Théodora, she became a romantic heroine. Théodora was more fiction than history, but it was a vehicle for the great Sarah Bernhardt’s talent, and inspired Charles Diehl to write his Théodora, impératrice de Byzance (Paris, 1904), which was a chivalrous effort to vindicate her place in history. Yet she remained in the realm of historical fiction until the present generation, keeping step with the reputation of her detractor, Procopius of Caesarea who also received scant attention, until the present. My own Procopius (New York, 1972) was the first book-length study to appear in English. Procopian studies have now become a crowded field. Potter’s first two chapters are an illuminating overview of the Constantinople that Theodora knew. It was where Theodora was born. Potter dismisses the traditions of the Miaphysite churches of a birthplace in Syria by pointing out that her father, who died while she was still a toddler, was bear keeper for the Green faction in Constantinople, which required him to be a permanent resident. She could read and—probably—write, in an age when most women could do neither, and she evidently commanded Syriac as well as Greek, and, very likely, her husband’s native language, Latin, as well. Actresses were below the bottom rung of the social ladder, and practiced the sex trade, but Theodora was herself no run-of-the-mill prostitute. As empress she tried to end prostitution, and she understood the lives of the peasant girls whose impoverished fathers sold them to whoremongers. She tried to rid Constantinople of these pimps by paying them off, and established a hospice for reformed prostitutes. She could become the concubine—but never the wife—of Hecebolus, the dux of Pentapolis, where she must have lived comfortably enough until Hecebolus dismissed her. At some point she gave birth to a daughter by an unknown father, and she married her into the noble house of the emperor Anastasius. From Pentapolis, she made her way to Antioch,supporting herself somehow [End Page 542] or other—Potter does not accept Procopius’s “nasty story” that she resorted to the oldest profession—and there she met Macedonia, a Blue faction danseuse, and one of Justinian’s network of informants. Theodora was herself a Blue, and the Blues looked after their own. She was probably already known for her anti-Chalcedonian religious views. Potter points out that the prevalent doctrine in Pentapolis was anti-Chalcedonian, but we have no evidence of a conversion during her stay there. Potter makes some sense of the chronology of the years between Vitalian’s murder and Justinian’s appointment as Caesar. Justin’s law clearing the way for Theodora’s marriage to Justinian must date to 522 or more probably 523, after the empress Euphemia’s death. 523 was also when street violence in Constantinople peaked, and Potter believes that Justinian’s succession was in doubt. But it was also the year of the Christian massacre in Najran, where Potter sees the influence of Theodora and Justinian behind...

Toward Epistemic Decolonial Turn in Missio-Formation in African Christianity

Abstract This article is framed with the World Council of Churches' (WCC) mission statement Together towards Life: and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes, which seems to be reviving academic interests in missio-formation as an interdisciplinary field study. The mission statement, which is framed in a postcolonial missional discourse, seems to show interest in how missio-formation as academic discipline can expose the intersectionality of questions of power, politics, and culture in Africa. The matters of agency, subjectivity, pedagogy, and rhetoric are perceived as central to the envisaged public missio-formation discourse. Hence, this article argues that the nature of the mission statement must also be comprehended as means for decolonizing missio-formation paradigm in Africa within a decolonial framework which gives critical attention to how missions have functioned as a colonialist mechanism for colonialifing African Christian minds and subjectivity. Introduction The World Council of Churches' (WCC) mission statement Together Towards Life: and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes (TTL), unanimously approved by the central committee as official position statement on mission on 5 September 2012 and officially launched at the 2013 WCC Busan assembly, represents a watershed in mapping the changing landscape in world Christianity. Rather than being conceived as a static force, mission theory is perceived as mutating and is subjected to ongoing changes and interpretations in different epochs and cultural contexts. TTL acknowledges that since the last WCC mission statement, Mission and Evangelism: An Ecumenical Affirmation, was approved in 1982, the fast pace of social, economic, political, technological, and military changes over the past 30 years has resulted in Christianity experiencing a profound paradigm shift in the understanding of the church's missional identity, vocation, and witness in the world. TTL takes seriously the issue of marginality experienced as a central component in developing a theory of missio-formation. (1) It interrogates the misuse of power and use of the wrong kind of power in mission and in the church (2) and argues for a new missional order that empowers the powerless and challenges the powerful. The TTL missional model proposes mission as struggle and resistance in the quest for justice and inclusivity, healing and wholeness. (3) By doing so, TTL raises critical awareness of the devastating effects of the colonialist and imperialist legacies and the contemporary global technocratic forces on mission theory, seeing such awareness as indispensable for theorizing mission paradigms in today's world. It raises explicitly the issues of coloniality's matrix of power, as expressed in the following statement: [O]ur faithfulness to God and God's free gift of Life compels us to confront idolatrous assumptions, unjust systems, politics of domination and exploitation in our current world of economic order. (4) It advocates a united effort on a cooperative journey to articulate meaning as historically and socially constructed. This paper postulated that mission understanding and praxis have been produced and reproduced, written and rewritten within imperialist and colonialist ideological and material legacies. Therefore, coloniality is proposed as the appropriate lens through which to theorize modern missio-formation with its use of hierarchical dichotomies and categorical logic. In this logic, African thought--relations, values, ecological, economic, and spiritual practices--was reduced, ridiculed, and dismissed to pre-modern margins of irrelevance. According to Alison Hodge, who engaged in research work on missionary discourse in Africa, Eurocentric thought relegated Africans to the bottom rung on a metamorphic ladder of human development. (5) Chammah Kaunda has summarized three different standpoints on the aim of missionary work in Africa. (6) The first was assimilation, which meant to transform African people and their culture into sub-Europeans. …

Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil by Marc A. Hertzman (review)

Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil. By Marc A. Hertzman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. [xvii, 364 p. ISBN 9780822354154 (hardcover), $76; ISBN 9780822354307 (paperback), $22; (e-book), various.] Illustrations, map, bibliography, index. Historian Marc A. Hertzman has made a significant contribution to social and economic history of popular in Brazil, specifically samba in Rio de Janeiro during first half of twentieth century. This book, however, does not explain of samba. Hertzman argues that samba, Brazil's quintessential popular genre, codeveloped in first half of twentieth century with Brazilian national identity, professionalism, recording industry, legal rights and protections for composers and musicians, and a new yet tenuous status for middle-class Afro-Brazilians. Furthermore, contestations over musical authorship in twentieth century have been linked with debates about ownership of, and place of African descendants in, Brazil's emerging national identity. The protagonists in Hertzman's detailed prose are musicians, journalists, music-industry entrepreneurs, police, and occasional politician, who quarrel, boast, sleuth, strategize, and collaborate in both predictable and surprising ways. Journalists and musicians, for example, co-composed hit songs in 1910s, while journalists acted as arbiters of racially-charged morality just as much as tastemakers of music. Starting in interwar period, police helped musicians secure and enforce their intellectual property, while unionized musicians helped police enforce censorship rules that reinforced federal government's centralizing policies. The author calls attention to musicians and journalists of color in interwar period--an understudied topic, the missing middle (p. 6). We learn a great deal about samba musicians of color, nicknamed Joao da Baiana, Eduardo das Neves, Donga, Pixinguinha, Sinho, Wilson Batista, and about a few women. We also learn about journalists of various ethnicities: Mauro de Almeida, Vagalume, and Joao do Rio. He explains how these key figures in samba's evolution came to glow in spotlights of popular culture, yet, due to racial stereotypes and structural hierarchies, often remained at bottom rung in industry and received scrutiny from critics. While this predicament may sound typical of experiences in African diaspora, Hertzman foregrounds nuances and uniqueness of these individuals and their relationships with others in order to emphasize range of ways that Afro-Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro encountered and sometimes influenced popular presumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality. The first three chapters explain turn-of-the-century changes in Rio's society during industrialization that followed abolition of slavery (1888) with respect to music, musicians, and African descendants. The first chapter summarizes situation of governance, race relations, and musical activities in nineteenth-century Brazil. Drawing evidence from secondary literature, Hertzman stresses that slaves and free persons of color may have been valued for their musicianship, but were not considered professional musicians. The second chapter builds on this point as author presents anti-vagrancy police cases and musicians' anecdotes from Rio de Janeiro during early 1900s. He shows that musicians who played popular were not considered professionals, while he simultaneously debunks a myth that police systematically harassed and arrested musicians for playing music, so-called punishment paradigm. Instead, police rarely noted that arrestees were musicians before radio boom of late 1920s, when musicians increasingly self-identified as such (p. 46); until then, music occupied a vague area between worker and vagrant poles (p. 47). Chapter 3 will be of great use to students of early record industry, as Hertzman introduces to English-language scholarship entrepreneur Fred Frigner, who created pioneering Brazilian record company, Casa Edison, in 1902. …

The Constitutionality of DAPA Part II: Faithfully Executing the Law

Article II imposes a duty on the President unlike any other in the Constitution: he “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” More precisely, it imposes four distinct but interconnected duties. First, the imperative “shall” commands the president to execute the laws. Second, in doing so the President must act with “care.” Third, the object of that duty is “the Laws” enacted by Congress. Fourth, in executing the laws with care, the President must act in good “faith.” A careful examination of the four elements of the “Take Care” clause provides a comprehensive framework to determine whether the Executive has complied with his constitutional duty. This article assesses the constitutionality of President Obama's “Deferred Action for Parental Accountability” (DAPA) on immigration through this lens of the “Take Care” clause.First, DAPA is an extremely “broad policy” that was “consciously and expressly adopted” not as a means to enforce the laws of Congress, but to exempt nearly 40% of undocumented aliens in the United States-even those who were not previously subject to any previous enforcement action-from the threat of removal, and to provide them with work authorization. Second, DAPA was implemented without “care” for the immigration laws as it displaced officer discretion, both procedurally and substantively, with the Secretary's blanket policy to turn meaningful review into a “rubber stamp.” Third, DAPA finds refuge in none of the three tiers identified in Justice Jackson's opinion Youngstown. Congress has and continues to oppose the scope of this executive action. Further, DAPA is not consonant with long-standing congressional policy towards deferred action. Previous uses were typically ancillary to statutory grants of lawful status or responsive to extraordinary equities on a very limited scale. In this bottom rung of authority, presidential power is at its “lowest ebb,” unentitled to a presumption of constitutionality. Fourth DAPA was not a good faith mistake of law, but a bad faith deliberate deviation. Implementing executive action to achieve several of the key statutory goals of laws Congress voted against reflects a deliberate attempt to circumnavigate around an uncooperative legislature. Exacerbating this conclusion is the fact that prior to the defeats of DACA and DAPA, the “sole organ” of the Executive Branch consistently stated that he lacked the power to defer the deportations of millions by himself.This pattern of behavior amounts to a deliberate effort to act not in good faith, but in an effort to undermine the Laws of Congress. The duty under Article II has been violated.Part I of this series addresses whether Congress has acquiesced to deferred action. Josh Blackman, The Constitutionality of DAPA Part I: Congressional Acquiescence to Deferred Action, 103 Georgetown Law Journal Online (Forthcoming 2015), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract= 2545544.

Feeding Roma families: From hunger to inequalities

Feeding work is complex, laborious and highly gendered in some Roma families compared to the majority population. Specifically, Roma families living in poverty are frequently large and live in substandard housing that makes feeding work more complicated. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in five different Roma settlements throughout Croatia, this paper explores how Roma households that experience severe material deprivation feed their families and their everyday experiences of food in/security and hunger. This study relies on self-reported food in/security as a better measure of directly capturing how the Roma feel about their immediate situation. Likewise, it attempts to draw attention to Roma expressions of deprivation, uncertainty, or concern over access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food. Based on in-depth interviews rather than just observations, this analysis provides a different perspective on meaning of feeding in the light of unprecedented financial insecurity that is experienced by many Roma families and the ensuing inequalities are analysed. Some of the ways that feeding Roma families relates to gender and the (in)equalities that surface are also discussed. Findings show that a lack of access to healthy and nutritious food aggravates health, social, educational, economic and gender inequalities that squarely places Roma at the bottom rung of the social ladder and generates social suffering.

Disconnected Democracy? A Survey of Scottish Community Councils' Online Presences

Community Councils are the bottom rung of Scotland's democracy ladder, having few – but highly significant – statutory consultative duties (especially with regard to planning) and no service-delivery duties. Generally they have failed to live up to expectations in terms of activity and impact, and have struggled to gain legitimacy. Despite this, they are often highlighted in policy debates around community involvement, and have been on the agenda again recently with the release of two significant reports calling for increased powers, and the publication of a Scottish Government working group report examining ways to build their resilience and capacity. The Internet potentially offers Community Councils potentially useful capabilities. However, survey data shows that only 22% of Community Councils maintain up-to-date online public presences and only 4% have easily-accessible content relating to planning. Worse, only 14% of up-to-date presences support digital dialogue. Such poor communication is a digital symptom of a disease of poverty, namely CCs' lack of duties and relevance. This article examines these digital symptoms and suggests appropriate treatment. Without such treatment, the CC system may well just die. The article provides detailed data and analysis to inform the ongoing debate. It updates a study carried out in 2004 to 2006, investigating how technology could be developed to help regenerate democracy at the local community level. Although the 2012 survey reveals some good examples of active online presences and support by local authorities, in general there is no sense of improvement in information provision online.