Contemporary Social Relations Research Articles

Grime jako muzyka i etnografia kryzysu

This article provides the reader with an overview of selected aspects of cultural significance of grime music and related phenomena. This musical genre creates an explicit background of contemporary social relations existing in multicultural, popular neighbourhoods of British cities. Grime’s relations with the media and the political surrounding partly resemble some features of the 1990’s “cultural boom”. However, grime and its network of relations live in the times of crisis. The overview of grime’s attributes presented hereinafter is an introduction to a wider study, currently in the process of development.

Housing careers, intergenerational support and family relations

The home and family have always been mutually embedded, with the former central to the realization and reproduction of the latter. More recently, this mutuality has taken on a more critical salience as realignments in housing markets, employment and welfare states in many countries have worked together to undermine housing access for new households. In this context, families have become increasingly involved in smoothening the routes of young adults members up the ‘housing ladder’ into home ownership. Intergenerational support appears to have become much more widespread and not just confined to familialistic welfare regimes. The role of intergenerational support for housing remains, however, highly differentiated across countries, cities and regions, as well as uneven between social and income classes. This introduction to the Special Issue explores how the role of housing wealth transfers has impacted the renegotiation of the generational contract. In doing so, it sets the scene for the articles that follow, each of which contribute significantly to advancing understanding of housing as a key driver of contemporary social relations and inequalities.

‘1.5°C to stay alive’: climate change, imperialism and justice for the Caribbean

Treating the threat of climate change in the Caribbean as a case study instructive for responses globally, this article examines the social and political relations of climate change. It argues for an analysis taking into account the ways in which the histories of imperialism and colonialism have shaped contemporary global ‘development’ pathways. The article charts how Caribbean vulnerability to temperature rises of more than 1.5°C of warming comprise an existential threat structured by contemporary social relations that are imperialist in character. Hope can be taken from a politics of climate justice which acknowledges the climate debts owed to the region.

Refusing Refuge at the United States–Mexico Border

Refusing Refuge at the United States–Mexico Border Gilberto Rosas (bio) Contemporary social relations at the United States–Mexico border kill the legal fiction that distinguishes between politically motivated refugees and economically motivated immigrants, a distinction fundamental to liberal governmentalities. The border is where refugee, immigrant, green-card holder, and other legal categories become occupied, become transformed, and are destroyed. Its subjects may become sites for a refusal of liberal governmentalities—rooted in long-standing practices of border life, escaping the law, and normative accounts of resistance in academic circles. They may birth a sense of autonomy or defiance rather than the pursuits of a fundamental change in social relations.1 The United States has traditionally adhered to international laws and conventions for people seeking asylum on grounds that they are being persecuted because of their race, religion, nationality, political beliefs, or other factors. They are presumed to be a problem for the state. But immigrants, refugees, or other incarnations of the dispossessed are not the problem.2 The problem remains the racial state. It has been degraded into a vicious assemblage that monopolizes territory and enacts law-preserving violence.3 It relies on de facto status crimes that evoke race, in which gang members are prosecuted under neutral laws that are racialized in application, while illegal aliens or suspected terrorists are targeted based on national origin.4 Carlos Spector, attorney, activist, and all around maker of case law, reports: We’re getting bombarded by complaints that they’re discouraging people at the bridge to apply. And all, if not most of these are working people so and they’re screaming at people . . . horrible stuff. Or they’re being detained for a year or two, not releasing them. The whole antagonism begins at the bridge in terms of the discouraging . . . The regime begins to discourage them from becoming refugees at the actual bridge . . . People are turned away.5 Yet the charged entanglements of privileged bodies crossing borders occur. It is about 7 p.m. People have left work. Whereas Juarez once was the site for the best food, drink, and fun in the region, many now come across from Juarez to El Paso, and many now live in the latter. Stiletto heels, long tanned legs, short skirts, tight tops, red lipstick, dark eyeliner that accentuates big brown eyes, all commingle with tight t-shirts, khaki shorts, carved arms, and thick wallets. They are clearly here not to try El Paso’s booming restaurant scene. No, these are scenes to be seen. “We make a mean martini sir or do you want to try one of our microbrews?,” the young woman in Daisy Dukes tells me. She wears a low-cut t-shirt that reveals a little too much and explains my drink options over the booming music in the posh outdoor, [End Page 535] open-air fresh sushi establishment. It is not far from the multimillion-dollar minor league baseball stadium, home of the El Paso Chihuahuas, a nod to the promiscuity of contemporary racisms with new capital addictions and an ever-deepening heteronormativity. El Paso has boomed. Its downtown has been revitalized. Its restaurant scene has exploded. Its nightlife seduces. It ranked as the safest large city in the United States as recently as the late 2000s. And it sits opposite to what was then being called the murder capital of the globe, the deadliest city in the world. More than twice as many people were killed in Ciudad Juárez, with a population of 1.3 million, as in New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago combined in 2009, the same year that the mayor of Juárez and many of his functionaries themselves moved to El Paso out of concerns for their safety. Juarez was then the center of Mexico’s horrendous “drug war.” Stories of young men turned into assassins, of the killing of young “available” women, of corpses abandoned in the streets and dumps, and of mass disappearances filled sensationalist accounts by the Mexican news media. Upward of 160,000 people have perished since 2006. Some 40,000 others have been “disappeared.” Graciela fled Juarez to El Paso then, in the midst of the violence...

Towards a strong program in the sociology of war, the military and civil society

In this article we make the case for a strong program of sociological research into war, the military and their symmetry with civil society, pointing to the ways in which sociology has failed to appreciate their relationship as a central feature of modernity. We particularly emphasize the need for a multi-dimensional comprehension of militarization and the relationships between representation, belief and action in conflict and post-conflict environments. We conclude that a strong sociology of the war and the military requires a greater appreciation of the influence of organized state violence on the shaping of contemporary social relations, breaking with weak traditions that only comprehend the significance of military institutions and warfare through analysing capital and other material and political forces.

Critical Realist and Postpositivist Realist Feminisms: Towards a Feminist Dialectical Realism

Current inquiries into the meaning of feminist concepts, such as the third world woman worker, seek to explain contemporary social relations of global capitalism within the context of the legacy of post-colonialist structures. At the same time, these very concepts draw attention to the limitations of language to adequately approximate the world as it is in order to capture some truth about its categorical entities, in particular, about the embodied experiences of the third world women worker. Through a comparative analysis of critical and postpositivist realisms that highlights feminist interventions in the context of standpoint epistemology, and the evolution in both towards dialectics, I argue that feminist dialectical realism offers an alternative to feminist poststructuralist materialisms as well as addresses limitations in prevailing standards for truth in social theory and philosophy.

Capitalist Natures in Five Orientations

ABSTRACTHow do nonhuman individuals and communities come to bear capitalist value or not in contemporary social relations? The “or not” of the question is crucial. This is because our analytical approach, drawing from feminist and postcolonial theorizing, is one that keeps us focused on value’s necessary others, that is, the bodies/communities designated as waste or even superfluous. Our aim is to attend to the role that difference and hierarchies play in the production of value. Accordingly, we present a typology of five orientations – relational, patterned positions – nature can take in relation to capitalist social relations: officially valued, the reserve army, the underground, outcast surplus and threat. What our typology suggests is that to accumulate capital, capitalism needs the diverse materials and creative forces of natures ordered in a variety of positions within society, not just as commodities. No such position is without violence and exploitation. To add some specificity to our initial analysis, we consider how these nonhuman orientations are produced in part through law. We focus on the law because it comprises a prime tool for achieving social order and because the law is a crucial site in which difference is produced and the designations of valued and unvalued are formalized and consolidated.

Migrations of population as a consequence of ecological and environmental security violation

Taking into account the fact that the concept of human security has got to play an important role in the concept of the development of safe society, in terms of preventive action, i.e. anticipations that have considerably affected the position of the man as an individual in contemporary social relations, it should be noted that ecological security as a dimension of human security plays a very important role in this process. In the contemporary world, where globalization and the achieved level of technological progress are synonyms for economic development of a society, a question has been ever more often raised of pollution, environmental degradation, global warming and other forms of ecological security violations affecting the human security. The process of globalization clearly has a strong positive basis of socio-economic development, but to minimize adverse impact on the environment, especially of the poor countries and the developing countries, it is necessary to establish a balance between the benefits and consequences. The ecological security of the population is often affected by the irrational exploitation of natural resources and capacities within a state, which then leads to landslides, floods, and other disruptions of the security of the population. Due to destruction of homes, farmland erosion and negative changes in the natural environment, this process subsequently leads to permanent or temporary migrations of population, usually within the country. In the international literature, these persons have been increasingly referred to as “environmental refugees”. Differences in cultures, customs, and ethnicity of local population and the newcomers often lead to various types of conflicts that in some countries of the world tend to turn into very serious armed conflicts. In terms of ecological security, negative consequences are changes in the quality of air and soil, as well as the condition of biodiversity in the area affected by an environmental disaster. The paper analyzes the impact of May 2014 floods in Serbia on the migration of population and the overall condition of ecological security in the Republic of Serbia, as well as preventive measures at the national level, which need to be taken in order to prevent, or at least decrease, these and similar occurrences in the future.

Between play and the quotidian: inscriptions of monstrous characters on the racialised bodies of children

Despite critiques pointing out that racism has become normalised in early childhood settings, relatively little attention has been paid in such contexts to the everyday practices in which racial inequities are made. In seeking to interrogate the ways in which racism roosts in the routine, this article interrogates quotidian responses to children’s playful activity, drawing on data generated in an ethnographic study in a London-based nursery. The article argues that the imaginative characters players embody become ‘fixed’ on particular children – when these characters coincide with reified assumptions about the raced, classed, and gendered body – whilst serving as mobile resources for others. Such reification, which is a concentration of complex historic and contemporary social relations in the political economy, is not only harmful and unjust but limits understandings of racialisation and inequity.

Responsibility for racism in the everyday talk of secondary students

ABSTRACTThis article examines the attributions of responsibility for racism in the everyday talk of secondary school students. It draws on focus groups with a cross section of students from different ethnic backgrounds in three, very different, secondary schools. In these focus groups, students deploy six different, sometimes contradictory, racialised discourses. Each discourse attributes responsibility for racism in very different ways that testify to the immanence of the past in the present and students’ positioning in specific social and political conditions. In all but one instance, these discourses work to dismiss, deny and/or deflect responsibility for racism by averting responsibility from the self to other individuals, groups or entities. The empirical data, it is argued, show that the individualisation of responsibility for racism has not seeped its way into students’ race-thinking. This testifies to the persistence of race-thinking, the difficult challenge of finding non-racist ways of being in the world, and cautions against assuming that responsibilisation is a universal descriptor of all contemporary social relations.

Model rodziny i wychowania rodzinnego w parafialnej prasie wielkopolskiej w II Rzeczypospolitej na przykładzie „Tygodnika Parafji Zbąszyńskiej”

Local press played a significant role in 2nd Polish Republic both from the perspective if state administration, territorial autonomies, political parties and the expectations of wide social environments and local communities. It fulfilled the need of information on the social, political, educational, cultural and economical life of specific environments. It also worked as a tool in propaganda and political agitation, it familiarized ideologies of political parties and expressed views and idea of local communities. It played an important part in local economy life; it educated and actively took part in popularization of interests in regional issues.Local press was both: amirror of contemporary social relations, political and national divisions and the important agent in initiatives such as cultural events. It registered and pictured life of the town and its area citizens, gave pedagogical impact on the young generation by giving them patterns and forms of positive social actions, popularized specific ideologies, educational concepts, patterns of behavior, it created and influenced the local communities attitudes and actions. Its role was especially visible in Great Poland, where local press helped in creation of socio-cultural life in small towns and education. In the group of magazines that specifically influenced local communities cultural character and had an important educational impact we should (undoubtedly) include the parish press.

Possession, occupation and registration: recombinant ownership in the settler colony

No other aspect of property so infuses our social, psycho-symbolic, cultural and political realms as the idea of possession. Whether considering modern theories of subjectivity, relationships between people (from labour relations to intimate ones of love and affection), or indeed, what it means to own something, possession – as an amalgam of both spirit and fact – structures our thought, emotions and actions. The idea of self-ownership, whether in a Lockean vein or as a dialectical struggle for mastery over one's self in relation to an other, persists across a wide spectrum of philosophical discourses on subjectivity; particularly among those in which propriety and impropriety, appropriation and dispossession, and forms of status are acknowledged as central aspects of contemporary social relations and political subjectivity.

Decolonize or Destroy: New Feminist Poetry in the United States and Canada

This essay points to techniques and strategies in contemporary feminist poetry that primarily seek not to resist or critique frameworks of white supremacy or capitalist imperialism, but to begin from coordinates that, experientially and historically, do not align with the striations of historical time mirrored and institutionalized by these frameworks. The author argues that Marie Annharte Baker's and Dawn Lundy Martin's poems not only orient themselves antagonistically against the very concrete, physical violence of structural domination in the context of histories of slavery and genocide; they also understand that today, as always, ascriptive processes of racialization function to make structural inequality appear inevitable and fair. As such, the author proposes that it is possible to read a lateral solidarity across the work of Annharte and Martin in their joint rejection of the liberal politics of recognition, and through the transformative possibilities of aesthetic experience highlighted by their work, where the material antagonisms structuring contemporary social relations emerge aesthetically too. The author suggests, however, that the object of transformation in Annharte's and Martin's poems is not a ‘thing’, but mediation, given that these works attempt to interrogate and undermine the psycho-affective attachments that, through a contemporary discourse of recognition, actually serve to reproduce colonial structures of domination. In making this claim, the author underlines the ways in which the antagonisms in their work are constitutively and formally different, while in both cases showing how a position of antagonism can be transformative, and potentially revolutionary, in itself.

Contentious Politics in Austere Times

AbstractThe current conjuncture is becoming defined by political austerity, and this paper engages with different forms of contentious politics that are emerging in response. The paper reviews debates on post‐politics arguing that while post‐political perspectives speak to important tensions in relation to contemporary social and political relations, they also risk limiting an engagement with existing forms of political contestation. The paper makes three cuts through crisis geographies by exploring contested place making in relation to the 2011 riots, debates about localism and resilience, and the construction of spaces of antagonism by the Occupy Movement. By considering such diverse forms of resistance alongside each other rather than treating them separately, we emphasize the importance of attending to multiple articulations of contentious politics. We conclude by arguing that it is important to recognize the different means by which actors are seeking to bring crisis and austerity into contestation.

Нравственное и духовное развитие личности в глобальном обществе

In the article the author considers spiritual and moral development of the individual in a global society. It is shown that in the modern world the formation of the specifics of morality is influenced by religious, socio-cultural, moral, and psychological determinants. Each of these spheres has a special influence on the formation of the spiritual world of the individual, but only the integration of all these components makes it possible to develop the wholesome personality.The paper also emphasizes interference of technical means into interpersonal relationships that create a qualitatively different form of public communication and affect the deepest subjective-psychological, spiritual, ethical, and personal spheres of human existence. All this became a characteristic feature of contemporary social relations. Global media, compressing time and creating a single information space on the planet, give a person access to a huge world of information, regardless of their social status, education, intellectual level and material well-being.When solving problems of identity and value orientations of modern man the article defines new moral imperatives, which will become effective regularities of the development of mankind. The author refers to environmental, ethical, social imperatives, as well as the imperative of responsibility.According to the author, the emergence of a global community determines the demand for a fair and equal consideration of political, economic, social and other interests of its members. The ethics of the modern, globalized society is a synthetic, multi-tiered system of knowledge and norms of behavior. It is being complicated and this process is not only expressed by natural growth and accumulation of knowledge, but also by changing morality, as a matter of ethics. Classical, normative ethics is transformed, is expanding by means of its applied branches (for example, business ethics, journalistic ethics, legal and political ethics, and others). The transformation of ethics and morality in a global society is driven by new challenges to man on the part of a civilized society.

Our Broken Genres: Sharon Hayes’s Love Addresses

Kris Cohen frames Sharon Hayes’s performances within the collapse of reciprocity in contemporary social relations — what he calls our broken genres.

Comparative models of American Indian economic development: Capitalist versus cooperative in the United States and Canada

The purpose of this article is to use a comparative case study method to evaluate the different existing economic development practices of American Indian peoples in the United States and Canada. The basis of comparison is the organizational structure of businesses with the comparison being between capitalist and cooperative forms. The goal is to understand how organizational type (or mode of production) is connected to the production of contemporary culture and social relations. The main conclusion is that, while not equivalent to traditional indigenous economies, cooperative structures are closer than capitalist ones to facilitating and reproducing traditionalist forms of sociality and cultural production.

Malicious Whites, Greedy Women, and Virtuous Volunteers

As clinical trial research increasingly permeates sub-Saharan Africa, tales of purposeful HIV infection, blood theft, and other harmful outcomes are widely reported by participants and community members. Examining responses to the Microbicide Development Programme 301-a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled microbicide trial-we investigate the ways in which these accounts embed medical research within postcolonial contexts. We explore three popular narratives circulating around the Johannesburg trial site: malicious whites killing participants and selling their blood, greedy women enrolling in the trial solely for financial gain, and virtuous volunteers attempting to ensure their health and aid others through trial participation. We argue that trial participants and community members transform medical research into a meaningful tool that alternately affirms, debates, and challenges contemporary social relations.

Theodoret’s People: Social Networks and Religious Conflict in Late Roman Syria by Adam M. Schor (review)

Reviewed by: Theodoret’s People: Social Networks and Religious Conflict in Late Roman Syria by Adam M. Schor Nathanael Andrade Theodoret’s People: Social Networks and Religious Conflict in Late Roman Syria. By Adam M. Schor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 360 pp. $49.95 (cloth). In Theodoret’s People, Adam Schor examines the complexities of the doctrinal and social authority of Roman Syria’s bishops amid the Christological controversies of the 420s–450s. These decades of controversy were punctuated by the council of Chalcedon (451), which spawned three separate Middle Eastern churches with distinct theological views on the nature(s) of Christ. But they also represent the floruit (with some hiccups) of Theodoret’s career as bishop of the suffragan see Cyrrhus and as a leading “Antiochene” theologian, historian, and disputant of his day. As such, the book is divided into two interrelated parts. In part 1, Schor harnesses the heuristic advantages of social network theory to explore the consolidation and transformations of the “Antiochene network” and its shifting manifestations as a doctrinal faction during this period, with specific emphasis on bonds among bishops, monks, Roman administrators, and their proxies or gobetweens. In part 2, he shifts focus to bishops’ patronage of clients and the web of horizontal, diagonal, or vertical relationships that bishops mobilized to mediate the exchange of favors. The two parts therefore cohere to provide a multidimensional perspective on the social and religious authority that bishops exercised in late Roman Syria. At the center of Schor’s analysis is of course Theodoret, a key player in the Antiochene network. Records and letters from the ecumenical councils of the 420s–450s illuminate contemporary social relations, but Theodoret in addition produced a copious collection of surviving letters to various peers and clients that both illustrate his efforts to build social networks and constitute some of the instruments through which he did so. Along with such vital documents, Theodoret also produced an ecclesiastical history, a history of Syrian monasticism, and defenses of proper Christian doctrine and practice. These too reflect Theodoret’s mental mapping of an Antiochene network and his efforts to persuade peers to recognize and affiliate with it. Accordingly, Schor provides a vision of Syria’s social landscape as perceived, experienced, and even shaped by Theodoret, whose works he qualifies and measures against the rich documentation of the period. In his introduction and the chapters of part 1, Schor vaunts the virtues of embracing network theory to analyze the consolidation of doctrinal factions during the period of Christological debates. His approach resolves an impasse in the preceding scholarly tradition, as Schor himself observes (p. 9). Some scholars have viewed the debates [End Page 182] from a purely theological or intellectual angle. They have therefore treated the fissures between doctrinal factions of the 420s–450s as the product of ineffable differences in beliefs regarding the single or dual nature of Christ. Others, by contrast, have examined the controversies from a social or cultural perspective and have therefore linked doctrinal factionalism to the efforts of bishops to consolidate regional authority, maintain clients, define Christian identities, and otherwise wield social power over discrete groups. In response to these distinct trends, Schor analyzes such formations within the framework of network theory, which “pictures society as a web of relationships” whose participants exchange “cultural cues” (p. 10). These relationships in fact “give context to people’s performances,” inform metaphorical reasoning, and stabilize narratives that enable communities to cohere (p. 13). In regard to network type, Schor explores the utility of modeling episcopal relations on the modular scale-free network, the survival or destruction of whose hubs, or core nodes with multiple and substantial connections to other core members and outliers, determine the survival or disintegration of the network as it expands. In this light, Schor stresses that networks foremost represent a cognitive configuration; diverse forms of interaction permeate social landscapes, but their recognition as meaningful social relationships and the basis for collective activity or identification constitute a mental mapping (of both ancient players and modern scholars). All told, the strength of Schor’s approach is multiform. It dovetails with current theories of religion as a symbolic system or discourse generating social...

Book review: Marx et l’invention historique, by Isabelle Garo

Isabelle Garo Marx et I'invention historique, Syllepse: Paris, 2012, 188 pp: 9782849503300, 10 (pbk) The thirst for 'post-' theories with a Parisian twist seems unquenchable, and Anglophone readers are faced by a continuous flow of books by Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere and the likes. Meanwhile, less remarked and less translated into English but equally interesting, is a new generation of Marx scholars emerging in the French-speaking world. Amongst them, the works of Isabelle Garo--a philosopher and the editor of the Grande edition Marx-Engels (GEME), a new French translation of Marx and Engels' works--are some of the most important and original. In her previous works, Garo demonstrated a marked interest in the question of 'representation' and its underappreciated importance in the study of Marx's thought. Marx, une critique de la philosophie (Garo 2000) is probably one of the best book-length introductions to Marx published in French, especially as it touches upon the critique of value. It is located within a broader trend of Marxist scholarship dealing with the question of fetishism (see Collin 1996; Tran Hai Hac 2003; Artous 2006; and, earlier, Vincent 1976). In a later work, Lideologie ou la pensee embarquee, Garo (2009) offered an astute discussion of the notion of ideology and its relevance for understanding forms of representation in contemporary capitalist social relations. In particular, she underlined its importance in articulating political struggles. Her more recent book (2011) Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser et Marx can be read as Garo's critical engagement with 'post-modern' philosophies and their relations to Marx. It is a work of great importance, as it analyses in fine-grained detail the work of three major 'French' theorists, their importance and their limits, in their explicit, implicit or even denied relation to Marx. The book under review draws on these strands of theoretical and political elaboration. The first chapter of Marx et l'invention historique can be read as a discussion, and refutation, of Cornelius Castoriadis's critique of Marx (on which, more below). But the book is about much more than that. 'Open Marxists' (see, for example, Bonefeld et al., 1992) will not be surprised by its claims that Marx's categories are essentially open, that Marx did not use a teleological philosophy of history, or that he did not adhere to an economic determinism (in that, Gero is close to Derek Sayer's perspective--see Sayer 1987). However, the real strength of Garo's book lies with its analysis (and defence) of the political nature of Marx's perspectives and methods, especially with regard to history. She is most interested in the forms of thought, representations and mediations associated with capitalist social relations. Representations are one moment of the social relations of production, and can be seized by emancipatory movements in a dialectical relation with social transformations. Her short but powerful assessment of Castoriadis's L'institution imaginaire de la societe (Castoriadis 1975) is a welcome corrective to recent reappraisals of his work. She has no sympathy for Castoriadis's claim that in order to remain a revolutionary, one has to reject Marxism. She argues instead that as Castoriadis refused to ground his analysis of modern society within the social contradictions and conflicts arising out of the capitalist mode of production, his understanding of politics became purely ontological. He was thus led to depoliticise politics and marginally repoliticise philosophy, discursively displacing struggles from politics to philosophy. Furthermore, Garo corrects Castoriadis's account of the notion of the imaginary and of representations in Marx's work. The second chapter seeks to demonstrate that Marx's understanding of emancipation dialectically relates individual and collective processes and identities. In this account, communism should not be understood as the completion of a 'proletarian identity'. …