Contemporary Negotiations Research Articles

The State of the Union: A History of the Labor Movement at Vanderbilt University

This article will document the historical context of the labor movement at Vanderbilt University in order to explain the nature and interaction of the labor union with central administration over the past forty years. Recognizing the lack of scholarly attention to the labor movement in Paul Conkin’s Gone with the Ivy (1985) and Peabody College (2002) and Dale Johnson’s Vanderbilt Divinity School (2001), the author contributes to the academic literature by providing a broad overview of the historical background and current state of the labor movement. As the largest employer in Davidson County and a major contributor to the state of Tennessee’s economic development, the relationship of University administrators and labor representatives has a large impact on the condition of surrounding labor movements, particularly in the city of Nashville’s low-wage service workers sector. In providing a brief chronological synopsis of the labor movement and the role of female involvement in the union, the author concludes by providing a context for contemporary labor negotiations.

Ideologies and identity performance in users’ discourses about Romani-based special languages (‘Sondersprachen’)

ABSTRACT Drawing on users’ testimonials we discuss how peripatetic populations forge ideologies around their use of group-internal special vocabulary. We identify three recurring themes: The discourse of loss that purports to account for a language history marked by deprivation and anomaly and intertwined with a notion of incompleteness of one’s own identity; contemporary negotiation of identity that draws on external reference points to set boundaries towards others; and explications of language function, which reconstruct contexts of use. Our case studies involve the use of use of special vocabulary derived partly or mainly from Romani among English Gypsies, Norwegian Travellers, and the travelling Showpeople of northern Italy. We approach these Romani-based ‘special languages’ (‘Sondersprachen’) as acts of identity performance and revisit the hypothesis that they emerged through convergence between Romani speakers and indigenous peripatetic populations.

Die vielen Hände des Émile Gallé: Produktionsszenarien der Glaskunst um 1900 zwischen Hand, Kopf und Maschine

Abstract This essay examines the display of artistic labour embedded in Émile Gallé's glass objects. As a starting point, it takes the telling discrepancy between Gallé's representation as an artist working in the solitude of his studio in the well-known portrait painted by Victor Prouvé in 1892 and the actual involvement of many hands organized under a strict division of labour in his glass manufactory. His glass objects thus exist somewhere between the logic of the singular work of art and that of serial production. The essay looks closely at Gallé's exhibition practice at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars as well as at his public statements about the making of his glass works in order to trace contemporary negotiations of the relationship between art and industry and, more broadly, notions of what constituted an adequate modern art around 1900.

Price Negotiating Chatbot on E-Commerce Website Using NPL

This proposes the development of a price negotiating chatbot on e-commerce websites using Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology. The chatbot aims to assist customers in negotiating prices with the sellers, enhancing their shopping experience. The proposed chatbot will be built using the Python programming language and the TensorFlow library for Natural Language Processing. The chatbot's architecture consists of several components, including a user interface, an NLP module, a price prediction module, and a negotiation module. The NLP module will enable the chatbot to understand and interpret the customer's messages, while the price prediction module will predict the minimum price that the seller is willing to accept. The negotiation module will use reinforcement learning algorithms to negotiate with the seller and come up with the best possible price for the customer. The proposed chatbot will provide customers with a convenient way to negotiate prices with sellers, enhancing their shopping experience. The chatbot's architecture, which includes a user interface, an NLP module, a price prediction module, and a negotiation module, will enable the chatbot to understand and interpret customer messages and negotiate prices with sellers on behalf of the customer. The chatbot will be trained and assessed on a substantial dataset of negotiation conversations, and its performance will be compared to other contemporary negotiation models. The results will demonstrate that the proposed chatbot significantly improves the shopping experience of customers, attaining higher success rates, shorter negotiation times, and increased customer.

Celebrating Imperial Education: The 2001 Thomasite Centennial in the Philippines

This essay examines the 2001 Thomasite Centennial in the Philippines, marking the arrival of American teachers who came to the colony aboard the US Army Transport Thomas in 1901 as a site of contemporary negotiations of US colonial history for the needs of the present. As representatives of colonial love, the Thomasites were both admired and criticized by Filipinos and used by the US as exemplifications of American benevolence. Although the centennial, billed as a commemoration of the Thomasites by American diplomats, was demonstrably an instance of soft power led by the US embassy, the Filipinos recruited for the event were multiply positioned subjects, constrained as well as empowered by the situated yet mutable sites they occupied. Analyzing the centennial through its circulation in different discursive registers—journalistic, promotional, historical, diplomatic, and literary—the essay reveals the contested nature of present-day memory-making of US sentimental colonialism in the Philippines, with different state and nonstate actors struggling to claim historical record. Tony Perez's play "A Hundred Songs of Mary Helen Fee," written for the occasion, simultaneously memorializes Fee and instantiates a critique of the centennial by putting the Thomasite memoir on which it was based in conversation with the colonial archive. The essay illustrates the complexities of postcolonial commemoration and shows how the centennial functioned as a contested site of American and Filipino diplomacy, critical interrogation, and a strategic rerouting of Thomasite history by Filipinos.

On Spiritual Subjects

This paper applies reading strategies adapted from feminist philosophy to the discursive construction of women as spiritual subjects in a Sufi narrative. The aim of this reading is first, to show the challenge women’s spiritual excellence presents to normative representations which privilege male spirituality, and then to illustrate the ways in which women’s spiritual excellence is negotiated in the text, at times challenging but generally reaffirming patriarchal distinctions between masculinity and femininity. To do this, the paper offers a deep reading of Farīd al-Dīn ‘Aṭṭār’s textualization of Rabī’a al-’Adawiyya using the cosmological gender of Sufi thought and reading methods drawn from feminist philosophy. It reads the male/female duality of ‘Aṭṭār’s text for the assumptions, the imaginaries and metaphoric networks, and the silences that inform the representations of Muslim female spirituality. In ‘Aṭṭār’s construction of a metaphoric spiritual masculinity, we are made to see Rabī’a’s spirituality as an illustration of gender performance. Even though he does not go as far as we might want, ‘Aṭṭār shows us how it is possible to be in the way that men “naturally” are while being embodied as women “naturally” are. In casting a woman as a man Aṭṭār appeals to the subtext of a Sufi cosmology of genders, to metaphors of masculinity and femininity and to ideas of affect and receptivity in order to construct a body such as Rabī’a’s in masculine ways. Thus, he pays homage to Rabī’a’s spiritual agency, and that of other women like her, but does so without relinquishing the spiritual superiority that he associates with the male body. The effect of the analysis is to illustrate the complex and contested representation of female spirituality in Islamic thought, and in doing so to also locate contemporary negotiations of female spiritual agency along an historical trajectory of negotiation.

"Negotiation Strategies and Techniques for Coordination of Interests (A Study in Contemporary Negotiation Methodologies) "

Negotiations are one of the most important options that decision-makers rely on in order to resolve or settle disputes surrounding their countries, in addition to being one of the most important approaches that diplomats deal with in the world to achieve their own format in international negotiations, which is later attributed to them with the methodology they dealt with. As a method that has been adopted in managing international dilemmas and crises in which their countries are a party. This can be clearly observed in many negotiating experiences led by diplomats who later became professionals in negotiating work in addressing issues affecting the strategic interests of their countries. Or they may be used as advisors and experts in complex and tangled negotiating situations.

A Queer and Foreign State

Since the year 2000, twenty Icelandic films have been produced which could be aptly grouped as LGBTQ+ or queer Icelandic cinema. This “queer turn” in Icelandic cinema emerges as the nation makes strides in advancing LGBTQ+ rights and as its demographics markedly shift, first-generation immigrants now comprising 12.6 per cent of the population. These changes have not occurred in a vacuum, and the films discussed in this article complicate the boundary between native and foreign, Icelandic and non-Icelandic, alongside their centering of queer characters and stories. In addition to narrative focus on coming-out and sexuality, many of the films within “Icelandic queer cinema” thematize race and ethnicity, often through the inclusion of foreign characters living and traveling in Iceland.This collection of films is thus well suited to exploring the interlocking national and sexual regulations which produce the Icelandic nation state. This article explores conceptions of the Icelandic nation state in two films that span Icelandic cinema’s “queer turn,” Baltasar Kormákur’s 101 Reykjavík (2000) and Ísold Uggadóttir’s Andið eðlilega (And Breathe Normally, 2018). In tracing representations of racialized otherness within these films and taking theoretical cues from critical race theory and queer of color critique, this article considers the ways in which race and ethnicity co-constitute categories of sex, gender, and sexual orientation. Ultimately, this article poses “Icelandic queer cinema” as a key site for the contemporary negotiation of the meaning of national and sexual belonging in Iceland.

Considering Narcissism and Collective Identification via Places of Memory

Set against the background of the persistent success at the ballots of the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and recently attempted assassinations based on racist and anti-Semitic ideologies this paper addresses two aspects of Theodor W. Adornos work: the social causes of fascism as well as Germany’s accounting for its national socialist past. Taking Adorno’s theory of the constitution of the subject in capitalist societies into consideration, the text will focus on the question in what way social causes of Germany’s national socialist past are also part of contemporary negotiation processes of places of memory for its victims as part of the collective identification connected to the place-making. By establishing a perspective of social psychology this should demonstrate how capitalist relations of production are indirectly connected with places of memory, via subjective reasoning.

Morrison and the Transnation: Toni Morrison, God Help the Child and Zadie Smith, Swing Time

Abstract I read Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child (2015) and Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016) as interjections into discourses of the “postracial” and “post-black.” I further consider those conceptualizations of the transnation which have their beginnings in patterns of migration that were, post-Cold War, no longer solely the consequence of colonialism, empire, or slavery; and I examine the process of “othering” that Morrison outlines in The Origin of Others (2017) as a productive context for reading both novels. Both God Help the Child and Swing Time reveal women working, within the cosmetic and entertainment industries respectively, to enable the corporate world, while reflecting on their childhoods and racial heritage; their protagonists thus embody contemporary negotiations of identity, gender, and race as configured under globalization.

Negotiating Contemporary Hindu Beliefs and Practices in the United States

Major religions maintain adherence to the guiding force of a literary canon in shaping morality and ethical behaviour in the believer. Hinduism's various strains of orthodoxy and orthopraxy create a pluralistic confusion for the casual onlooker attempting to systematize a code of conduct for practising Hindus. Doctrinal beliefs such as samsara, karma, reincarnation, moksha, and practices of various meditations, yogas, or dietary restrictions, are recognizable features of Hinduism in popular culture. However, the variation in religious ideology among believing individuals should be assessed in light of contemporary philosophy and social science. The purpose of this article is to investigate, through qualitative interviews, the contemporary negotiation of religious beliefs and practices in two Hindu communities in order to provide a context to a dialogue of what it means to be Hindu in the United States.

The curious case of ecological farm interns: on the populism and political economy of agro-ecological farm work

ABSTRACTThis article examines how farm interns, as a new group of non-waged agricultural workers, have come to support marginally or non-profitable agro-ecological farms in Ontario, Canada. Are farm interns potential agents of social change alongside farmers or are they being recruited onto farms because of the precarious economic situation of their agro-ecological farm hosts? I engage with this question through drawing on debates in agrarian studies arguing that farm interns should be understood as a contemporary manifestation and negotiation of the agrarian question that re-works a number of historical agrarian trends.

Mining the Box: Adaptation, Nostalgia and Generation X

This article identifies the television to film phenomenon by cataloguing contemporary films adapted from popular television shows of the 1960s and 1970s. This trend is located within the context of Generation X and considered within the framework of nostalgia and Linda Hutcheon’s (2006) conception of adaptation. The history of re-visiting existing texts in screen culture is explored, and the distinction between remakes and adaptation is determined. The specificity of the television format is discussed, as are aspects of audience engagement with television in terms of identity and identification. Acknowledging television as the collective experience that binds Generation X, the broader trend for nostalgic engagement with the past is shown to be an impetus for the trend in contemporary films and further shown to provide an opportunity for active audience reflexivity. Get Smart (2008) and The Avengers (1998) are discussed in terms of such reflexivity; and issues of gender are highlighted to demonstrate the role of filmic adaptations in contemporary negotiations of past and present ideals. In doing so, this article confirms the socio-cultural significance of the television to film phenomenon beyond industrial considerations, and posits the critical appeal of mining the box.

Omförhandling i gruvan?

This article aims to discuss the complexity of stability and change in terms of the relation of gender and work in traditionally male-dominated workplaces, and more specifically in the Swedish mining industry. Mining has for a long time had a close relationship to men and masculinity. From the 1980s until 2005, the proportion of women miners increased from three to six per cent, but during the last ten years the proportion of women miners has increased more rapidly and today the number of women is 15 per cent. What made and makes this change possible? In this article, we merge previous studies concerning mining, gender and organization with new empirical material. Interviews with 20 miners, both men and women, were carried out to present a framework for understanding the contemporary negotiations of gender and work. Our conclusion is that the change in gender patterns can be understood through the following three interlinked processes of stability and change concerning: 1) mining work 2) the relationship between professional identity and masculinity and 3) the companies’ work towards gender equality. Together, these processes create a different outcome than before. Although much is changing in the mining industry, the stability characterizing its gendered relations is at the same time both notably durable and persistent. There is a remaining theoretical challenge to better understand these processes of change, stability and negotiation concerning the relationship of gender and work.

West Bank Settlement and the Transformation of Zionist Housing Ethos from Shelter to Act of Violence

This paper identifies a transformation in Israel's housing ethos from civilian shelter to national and neoliberal violence. Housing, once materializing the State of Israel’s raison d’etre as shelter from Jewish persecution has transformed to offense and retaliation in struggle over the West Bank, as declared by Prime Minister Netanyahu's noted 'they kill- we build' statement. Conducting close analysis of housing and settlement history since 1967 I challenge accepted historiography of the settlement movement and identify the pivotal moment of change by which the settlement project transformed its housing ethos from civilian shelter to 'civilian occupation' to Kudumim outpost in the early 1990s. This transformation parallels the neoliberalization of the housing market in Israel-proper since the 1990s, protested as neoliberal violence by the 2011 housing protest movement. This paper contributes to our understanding of spatial violence by identifying housing as the object of agonistic violence, invoking Chantalle Mouffe's concept of the object of agonism and pointing to housing as the object of contemporary negotiations over the very terms and values of the Israeli polity.

Not your parents' trade politics: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations

ABSTRACTThe Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations aspire to create the world's most ambitious trade agreement between the world's two largest economies. The politics associated with TTIP are different from those associated with previous trade negotiations. Moreover, they diverge from the prevailing International Political Economy (IPE) account of trade policy. The politics of TTIP diverge from the conventional IPE account of trade politics in two particularly noteworthy ways. First, rather than being rivals, American and European business interests are allies, adopting common positions on what they want the agreement to look like. Second, opposition within both the USA and the EU comes not primarily from firms and workers fearing increased economic competition, but from less traditional trade actors – consumer and environmental groups and citizens – concerned about the erosion of valued regulations. I argue that the unusual politics is the product of two distinct, but related factors. The first is the extraordinary level of cross-investment between the two economies. The second concerns the unique emphasis on addressing non-tariff barriers, particularly regulatory differences, and the significance of the negotiating partner. I test the plausibility of these arguments through within-case variation and by preliminary comparison to other contemporary negotiations of ‘deep’ preferential trade agreements.

Financing War or Facilitating Peace? The Impact of Rebel Drug Trafficking on Peace Negotiations in Colombia and Myanmar

ABSTRACTRebel involvement in drug trafficking is broadly found to prolong and intensify civil wars. Being an illicit good with strong demand, high profit margins, limited barriers to entry, and few interdiction opportunities, narcotic drugs disproportionately benefit rebel groups as a source of funding in civil wars. Furthermore, drug trafficking is believed to prolong civil wars by creating war economies that benefit rebel groups, making them reluctant to engage in peace negotiations. However, recent peace agreements suggest that drug trafficking can in some cases be used to “buy off” rebel leaders, whereas other insurgents willingly relinquish this source of funding. This article compares attempts at conflict resolution in Colombia and Myanmar, focusing on the impact drug trafficking by Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and United Wa State Army has on contemporary peace negotiations.

Proposing a culture-centered approach to career scholarship: The example of subsistence careers in the US Arctic

In this article, I draw from the culture-centered approach to explore contemporary negotiations of career and work, positing career as a form of cultural practice. Rooted in postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, the culture-centered approach examines the active accomplishment of culture through everyday communicative practices, amidst the structural conditions that frame lived experiences, and focusing specifically on marginalized groups. I first trace how culture is conceptualized in extant career studies, in the psychological, sociological and communicative streams. Identifying both key gaps and paradoxes in the literature, I outline the culture-centered approach, suggesting four key principles to reconceive career as cultural practice. Specifically: career draws on both structure and action; career agency is hybridized across individuals/collectives; career agency is layered and contested; and career is both discursive and material. The framework is illustrated using an example from an ongoing study on the negotiation of subsistence careers by Native Alaskans in the US Arctic.

The 3rd May, a photograph: identities of and beyond displacement

This article proceeds from a photograph. It does so to begin an investigation of the diverse sites within and beyond it, and the reflections of several enactments of nation, culture, belonging and non-belonging. The image in question depicts a group of children waving flags. It is an old photograph, possibly removed from our ‘present’, though it holds within it multi-temporal spaces into which we might enter. The aim of this article is to do just that – to enter the image, armed with all the things a researcher gathers in terms of background data, narratives and contexts, and examine the complex negotiations enacted within and beyond it. How does this group of flag-waving children impact on us today? This article explores the extent to which an understanding of a temporal enactment of nation in displacement might reflect on contemporary negotiations of citizenship, culture and representation.

Schröder versus Schwarzer?

This article attempts to map the discursive terrain that marks contemporary engagements with feminism in Germany. In particular, the article explores a 2010 interview with Germany's family minister, Kristina Schröder, and its coverage in the media. Based on a discourse analysis, the article traces four discursive themes that characterise contemporary negotiations of feminism: a repudiation of the figure of the “feminist-as-lesbian”; a postfeminist sensibility; an individualist and neoliberal outlook; and a limited engagement with differences amongst women. By theorising these discursive strands, the article places the German context into wider debates. More specifically, it makes contributions to existing research by demonstrating how particular stereotypes—e.g., feminists are against heterosexual sex—attach to feminism through reiteration. In addition, it intervenes in current debates about gender politics by demonstrating how statements about “western” women's emancipation work in tandem with problematic discourses about “other,” allegedly oppressed women, to construct the western, autonomous, feminine subject.