Changing Contours Research Articles

Demography's Changing Intellectual Landscape: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Leading Anglophone Journals, 1950–2020

Much of what we know about the intellectual landscape of anglophone demography comes from two sources: subjective narratives authored by leaders in the field, whose reviews and observations are derived from their research experience and field-specific knowledge; and professional histories covering the field's foundational controversies, which tend to focus on individuals, institutions, and influence. Here we use bibliographic information from all articles published in the three leading journals of anglophone demography—Demography, Population Studies, and Population and Development Review—to survey the changing contours of anglophone demography's key research areas over the past 70 years. We characterize the field of demography by applying a two-pronged, data-grounded approach from the sociology of science. The first uses natural language processing that lets the substance of the field emerge from the contents of publication records and applies social network analyses to identify groups of papers that talk about the same thing. The second uses bibliometric tools to capture the “conversations” of demography with other disciplines. Our goals are to (1) identify the primary topics of demography since the discipline first gained prominence as an organized field; (2) assess changes in the field's intellectual cohesion and the topical areas that have grown or shrunk; and (3) examine how demographers place their work in relationship to other disciplines, the visibility and influence of demographic research in the broader scientific literature, and the cross-disciplinary translational reach of demographic research. Results provide a dynamic view of the field's scientific development in the second half of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Data prophesies and soothsaying: Gatekeeping in the era of platform media

Data is often read as an algorithmic object, a bot and a tool for interpreting media markets. While speculative box-office figures have been conventionally used to make sense of industry trends, data analytics has emerged as a new tool. Films are increasingly seen as value-accruing enterprises and neoliberal markets define them from the singular logic of content. As a result, much like any other neoliberal product, a film has to be further divisible into other monetizable traits and entities that add to the long chain of value, helping in prolonging its shelf life. Moreover, the audience has increasingly migrated towards individual device-based screenings as opposed to theatrical viewing, making it possible to monetize their viewing activities and trace them as dividuals. Storytelling becomes about beats, as data becomes a tool for reifying the speculative financial framework for the film industry. This article attempts to map the changing contours of Hindi film industry by examining how data is appropriated to make projections about the future and interpret trends and preferences.

Red or Expert: Reforming Geographers in Communist China, 1949–1953

This article investigates the Sovietization of Chinese geographers during the early People’s Republic of China (PRC) using primary sources and published biographies to examine three career paths: red, expert, and red and expert. The red geographers, led by the veteran Communist Sun Jingzhi, who monopolized the field of economic geography, shifted the orientation of geography from the Western model to the model followed in the Soviet Union. The pre-Communist geographers, under the leadership of Harvard-trained Zhu Kezhen, controlled the field of physical geography, relying on their professional training and technical expertise. These two cliques competed for control of the Chinese Geographical Society, its journal, and the Institute of Geography, whereas the Liverpool-trained Hou Renzhi used both redness and expertise to gain prominence in the field of historical geography. This article contends that the reformation of geographers in Communist China continued beyond the political purge of 1949. The twists and turns in career paths derive from the contested nature of the discipline, the changing contours of the science, and connections with institutional structures, all of which illuminate the imbrication of political allegiance, professional expertise, and personal relationships as the geographical tradition persisted in new forms after reformation. In this sense, this article diversifies a history of geography that is too often centered on Anglo-American experiences, and it furthers our understanding of the professionalization of geography as one that has taken a nonlinear course. Key Words: Cold War, Communist China, geographer, history of geography, Sovietization.

In Memoriam: Mats Morell

In Memoriam: Mats Morell

Nones, No Religious Preference, No Religion and the Misclassification of Latino Religious Identity

This article challenges the conventional wisdom about the reported decline of Christianity and Protestantism in the U.S. and the rise of the “nones” among Latinos. It does so by cross-examining the growth of the “nones” (those respondents reportedly having no religion and/or no religious preference) in the U.S. Latino community, which is slated to make up almost 28 percent of the U.S. population by 2060. In 2000, we stumbled, quite by accident, upon a remarkable discovery in the Latino community: that many of the so-called “nones” were, in fact, under cross examination against other religious identity questions, religious, spiritual, and/or believed in God or a higher power. In some cases they were born-again Christians who rejected the label “religion” (and thus reported having “no religion”) as a descriptor of their faith. Many self-identified as and/or attended independent and non-denominational Evangelical and/or Pentecostal/Charismatic churches. To test these initial findings and to try to secure a more accurate reading of the “nones” respondents, our research team added a follow-up question for the “no religion” respondents to the screening questions section so they could explain what they actually meant in the Latino Religions and Politics (LRAP) national surveys in 2012 and 2020. We also cross-analyzed the “no religion” and “no religious preference” respondents against other religious identity questions, such as being born-again and church attendance, and was surprised to find that more than 60% of them reported believing in God or a higher power and/or being Christian, Catholic, or Protestant, religious, spiritual, or something other than having no religion. More surprising and counterintuitively, we found that more than 40% of those reporting “no religious preference” and 17% of those who reported having “no religion” also self-reported being born-again Christians. All of this problematizes the conventional wisdom about the identity and growth of the “nones” in the Latino community and could (though we do not claim or explore this here) problematize our understanding of the “nones” and the changing contours of religion and secularization in American society.

Clinical legal education in India through disruptive technology: the changing contours

Clinical legal education in India through disruptive technology: the changing contours

MuradIsmayilov, The Dialectics of Post‐Soviet Modernity and the Changing Contours of Islamic Discourse in Azerbaijan: Toward a Resacralization of Public Space. London: Lexington Books, 2018. 194 pp, £77 (hbk)

Nations and NationalismVolume 29, Issue 1 p. 385-386 BOOK REVIEW Murad Ismayilov, The Dialectics of Post-Soviet Modernity and the Changing Contours of Islamic Discourse in Azerbaijan: Toward a Resacralization of Public Space. London: Lexington Books, 2018. 194 pp, £77 (hbk) Osman Ercan, Osman Ercan ercanos@yahoo.com Ardahan University, TurkeySearch for more papers by this author Osman Ercan, Osman Ercan ercanos@yahoo.com Ardahan University, TurkeySearch for more papers by this author First published: 26 January 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12914 2. Murad Ismayilov, The Dialectics of Post-Soviet Modernity and the Changing Contours of Islamic Discourse in Azerbaijan: Toward a Resacralization of Public Space. London: Lexington Books, 2018. 194 pp, £77 (hbk). Reviewed by Osman Ercan (ercanos@yahoo.com), Ardahan University, Turkey. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume29, Issue1January 2023Pages 385-386 RelatedInformation

Exploring the Changing Contours of “Enchantment”

By the phrase “disenchantment of the world” (Entzauberung der Welt), Max Weber meant: i) an understanding of the world increasingly by reference to natural forces, physical laws, and mechanical principles than to magical and supernatural powers; and ii) a development within religion from magic to rationalized paths to salvation devoid of magic. However, restricting exploration on enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment to scholarly and historically specific meanings would exclude a large terrain of ordinary, non-religious human experience. The semantic flexibility of the terms enables one to explore a spectrum of so-called substitutive sources of re-enchantment: psyche, death, love, art, history, nature, and so on. To designate secular sources of enchantment exclusively as re-enchantments would restrict them to being substitutes to the religious. Further, not all religious imagination is enchanting; the nature of enchantment varies across the ideational spectrum of religious world views, and this article briefly examines the internal gradations. Based on its exploratory expansiveness vis-à-vis such diverse phenomena, the article argues that every object, entity, and experience is a potential source of enchantment, that enchantment and disenchantment in a larger sense have to do with the perspective one might bring to an otherwise inert world, and that enchantment occurs at the conjunction of the subject and the object.

Lesbian longings and the question of a queer repertoire in The “Other” Love Story

In recent years, there has been an emerging critical discourse in South Asia that examines the changing contours of representational politics that could, in turn, be strategically mobilized to introduce an alternative idiom of same-sex love within a standard template of heterosexual storytelling. This has been complemented by an evaluation of alternative modes of sexual politics that need not necessarily conform to Western labels or paradigms of queer identities. Taking its cue from such discursive readings, this article demonstrates how Roopa Rao’s web series, The “Other” Love Story (2016), revisits some of the dominant tropes, practices, and narrative conventions of the Hindi films, released in the 1990s, to create a counter-archive for the lesbian subject who, for the most part, was conspicuous by her very absence in the popular figurations of that period in South Asia. There is a perceptible strand of lingering nostalgia and artistic homage that undergirds such an experimental project that nevertheless also becomes a disruptive site for articulating an oppositional esthetics of romance. The subtlety and restraint of such a nuanced portrayal of dissident desires and queer intimacies thus not only resist the easy appropriations that women in the subcontinent are routinely subjected to (as veritable repositories of tradition and national identity) but also retrospectively reclaim a voice for an otherwise historically silenced discourse of sexuality for the masses.

The changing contours of global value chains post-COVID: Evidence from the Commonwealth

The COVID-19 pandemic emphasised the global value chains (GVCs) debate by focussing on whether gains from GVC participation outweigh firms associated risks of demand and supply shocks amid rising protectionism. This paper bridges the gap between the international trade and management literature by examining the impact of COVID-19 on Commonwealth countries, an area that has received scant attention in academic literature. Using the Eora database, we simulate scenarios to examine Commonwealth countries’ participation in GVCs post-COVID. We draw on the transaction cost economics (TCE) theory to develop a framework that investigates whether growing protectionism, associated with reshoring, decoupling and nearshoring, could potentially affect the constellation and participation of Commonwealth countries in GVCs post-COVID. Results show that trade protectionism is likely to impact the supply chains and lead to GVC reconfiguration, which could offer opportunities for the Commonwealth countries and firms to potentially gain following the geographical redistribution of suppliers.

Liberal Articulation of Islamophobia

This article seeks to examine academic scholarship on Islamophobia in the West that attributes anti-Muslim racism to a crisis of multiculturalism and proposes the recuperation of the liberal multicultural ethos as a countermeasure to redress Islamophobia without investigating its complicity with racism. Through an analysis of Pearl Abraham’s novel American Taliban (2010), I probe an ambivalence at the heart of the liberal multicultural project of recognition (for the other) and argue that despite its claims of libertarian principles of justice and equality, multicultural recognition becomes the ideological backdrop against which changing contours of Islamophobia are articulated. This is unpacked through a fissure in Abraham’s narrative which, on the surface, draws upon the Hegelian principle of intersubjective recognition in order to critique the illiberal paradigm of Islamophobia and its concomitant framework of the clash of civilizations. Yet, it remains complicit with anti-Muslim racism through the generation of another Manichean frame that shifts reductive constructs of dangerous alterity to the Muslims who follow the normative tradition of Islam. At the same time, it offers positive recognition to Sufi Muslims who are aligned with secular liberalism. With a critical focus on Abraham’s novel, this paper deploys G.W. F. Hegel’s concept of ‘becoming’ with Gregory Lipton’s ‘critique of the secular reconstruction of Sufism in order to explore the complicity of multicultural recognition with Islamophobia, and, thus, it nuances the existing Western scholarship.

Book Review: A Military History of India Since 1972: Full Spectrum Operations and the Changing Contours of Modern Conflict by Arjun Subramaniam

Book Review: <i>A Military History of India Since 1972: Full Spectrum Operations and the Changing Contours of Modern Conflict</i> by Arjun Subramaniam

Law’s Dark Clarity: Hugo and the ‘Misery’ of Legal Categorizations

Abstract Laws punish delinquents after having made them such, and yet this is not inevitable. At work in this phenomenon is a melding of ‘ought’ and ‘is’ in which the law renders criminal behavior perpetually determinative by recognizing only a duty to abide by statutes while simultaneously losing site of the magma of meanings and behaviors that constitute human lives. Using the core of Hugo’s epic Les Misérables as a kind of mirroring illustration, this paper will explore how categorical rigidity and blindness to the changing contours of identity and subjectivity constitute one dark side of the law. Hugo’s work demonstrates the importance of literature as a parallel narrative that can illuminate law’s limitations, specifically, its tendency to conceal through certainty, ignoring the actual possibilities of becoming for the subjects it is charged to rule and protect. I will argue that in Les Misérables we can see an inversion in the order of priority between narrative commitment and social criticism, specifically a meta-legal criticism that has specific insights regarding how law obfuscates the ought/is divide and, in so doing, loses legitimacy and collapses in on itself. Issues of human dignity, social responsibility and the very purpose and legitimacy of law can be constructively addressed through parallel analysis of Hugo’s world of ‘the wretched’ and those the law renders wretched even today.

Contours of Structural Change in Growth and Employment in Bihar

Contours of Structural Change in Growth and Employment in Bihar

Inter-sectoral Linkages and Structural Change in Assam Economy

Because of a renewed interest in studying the intensity, pattern and contours of structural change among the producing sectors of Assam, this study analysed inter-sectoral linkages using a time series value-added data on agricultural, industrial and service sectors during 1994-95 to 2018-19 and also employed Vector autoregressive model and conducted Granger causality test. The study found that the structural change in Assam had gone down since 2015-16. Further, it was found that uni-directional causality existed between the industrial sector and GSDP running from the industrial sector to GSDP. The study also confirmed the presence of positive spill-over from agricultural and industry to the services sector.

Vanguard to Periphery: The CPC’s Changing Narrative on the Labour Question

With the ideological undergirding of Marxism–Leninism, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has claimed representation of peasants and workers in its vanguard role in actualising the socialist revolution. However, as China has developed economically over the past four decades, there has been an erosion in the status of workers and peasants as legitimate stakeholders in governance and ruling practices. This article attempts to map how labour, once a critical component of the CPC’s political–ideological invocation, has become peripheral as China transitioned to a market economy with an emphasis on economic rationale for growth and reforms. It examines the changing contours of the CPC’s discourse and practice over the past 100 years on the labour question, sandwiched as it is between the need for continued economic growth as a legitimating tool and the continued reiteration of being representative of the working class.

Editorial

In this issue, we have the pleasure of presenting ten articles that problematise important empirical, theoretical,andepistemological questionsfor the scholarship of teaching and learning. The first five articles, part of a special issueon ‘Methodological insights from research on teaching and learning: COVID 19 and beyond’have a strong methodological focus, while the remaining articles tackle important questions relating to the higher education project, from conceptual to disciplinary to thepedagogical; in the process, the authors raise criticalquestions around the role and purpose of universities, although this is sometimesimplicit ratherthan explicit. An overarching theme in this edition is the focus on the changing contours of the forces that shape higher education research and practice, specifically in the era of pandemicsand deepening socio-economic divisions. There is an overriding focus, moreover, on educationaljustice (cognitiveand epistemic), withthe contribution by McGarry introducing a related perspective,through the notion of “justness”. In addition to the focus on marginalised students’ academicexperiences, there is a concern over gender bracketing, issues of inclusivity and reimagining/expanding the theoretical and philosophical dimensions of academia.

Cunning as... a Wolf Multispecies Relations Between Humans and Wolves in Eastern Siberia

Recent anthropological reasoning fostered by the ontological turn debate, has tackled the issue of multispecies ethnography: it deals with the lives and deaths of all the creatures that for decades have stayed on the margins of anthropology. According to this approach, animals, insects, plants and other organisms have started to appear alongside humans with legibly biographical and political lives. Focused on the changing contours of the ‘nature’ wriggling within whatever ‘human nature’ might mean, multispecies ethnography recalls that “human nature is an interspecies relationship”, as Anna Tsing would put it (Tsing 1995, 94). This last statement may also refer to the connections between humans and animals. In my paper I will take into account relations and connections between wolves and humans among hunters in Sakha-Yakutia, Eastern Siberia.

Globalization, Diasporas, and Transnationalism: Jews in the Americas

This paper analyzes the structures and trends of the establishment, growth, and transformation of the Jewish presence in the Americas. After outlining several fundamental characteristics of the general continental societal environment and its internal differentiation, we critically discuss several theoretical approaches to a comparative assessment of the Jewish experience. Conceptual formulations include globalization, diaspora studies, and transnationalism, aiming to highlight their achievements and drawbacks. Selected sociohistorical aspects relevant to the development of Jewish immigration, settlement, and community formation are analyzed. This is followed by the exploration of more recent patterns, outlining emerging configurations and challenges. The article focuses on the differences and commonalities between the North (United States and Canada) and the diverse Latin American experiences. The conceptual referents imply rethinking the relationship between societies, communities, individuals, territories, and sociopolitical spaces along the changing contours of dispersion. Lessons from the past may help outline future paths.

Crisis of Secularism and Changing Contours of Minority Politics in India

This paper examines the changing nature of Muslim political mobilization in contemporary India in the context of Hindu nationalism’s ascendancy into power and the consequent crisis of traditional Muslim politics. Through an ethnographic case study of the Popular Front of India, we argue that a qualitatively new form of political mobilization is taking place among Indian Muslims centered on an articulation of “self-defense” against a “Hindu nationalist threat.” This politics of self-defense is constructed on the reconciliation of two contradictory processes: use of extensive legal pragmatism, and defensive ethnicization based on Islamic identity. The paper also examines the consequences of the emerging politics of competing ethnicization for even a normative and minimal idea of secularism and how it contributes to the process of decoupling of secularism and democracy in contemporary India.