Contradictory Locations Research Articles

Hydrogeochemical characteristics of groundwater uses for agricultural and drinking and groundwater quality of pollution index in the western part of Telangana, South India.

A total of fifty groundwater samples were collected in the western part of Nizamabad district, Telangana State, India. The results obtained were compared with the IS 10500 standard, which shows more than 80% of the samples are unfit for drinking purposes. The results were also analyzed to know the irrigation suitability, where about 80% of the samples are fit for agricultural use. For the major ions in groundwater quality for irrigation and drinking, contradictory locations exist which are majorly caused by geogenic (silicate weathering minerals) and anthropogenic (fertilizers, manure, and industrial effluents) sources. The hydrochemical facies of CaCl and mixed CaMgCl and NaCl water types were dominant in pre- and post-monsoon seasons. The spatial distribution diagrams of the major ions were high concentration in northern areas followed by western and south-western portions. As per the groundwater quality of pollution index (GQPI), most of the study region (62%) comes under the low contamination zone and the rest (38%) under the moderate to unacceptable zone. Factor analysis reveals that the study region is predominant of weathering, ion exchange, and anthropogenic inputs of major contamination of groundwater quality.

A Global De-colonial Praxis of Sustainability — Undoing Epistemic Violences between Indigenous peoples and those no longer Indigenous to Place

Addressing our growing planetary crisis and attendant symptoms of human and human-ecological disconnect, requires a profound epistemological reorientation regarding how societal structures are conceived and articulated; named here as the collective work of decolonisation. While global dynamics are giving rise to vital transnational solidarities between Indigenous peoples, these same processes have also resulted in complex and often contradictory locations and histories of peoples at local levels which unsettle the Indigenous–non-Indigenous binary, providing new and necessary possibilities for the development of epistemological and relational solidarities aimed at increasing social–ecological resilience. The International Resilience Network is an emerging community of practice comprised of Indigenous and settler–migrant peoples aimed at increasing social–ecological resilience. This article narrates the story of the Network's inaugural summit, and provides an overview of contextual issues and analysis of particular pedagogical aspects of our approach; foregrounding ruptures between ontology and epistemology that inevitably occur when culturally and generationally diverse groups who are grounded in different daily realities and related agency imperatives come to share overlapping worldviews through learning ‘in place’ together. Developing pedagogical practices for naming and negotiating associated tensions within the collective work of decolonisation is, we argue, a critical step in enabling practices conducive towards the shared goal of increased human–ecological resilience.

The "Idle No More" Movement: Paradoxes of First Nations Inclusion in the Canadian Context

Idle No More, a recent protest movement initiated to draw attention to concerns by Indigenous people and allies about changes in Canada's environment and economic policies, has also raised awareness about social and economic conditions experienced by much of Canada's Indigenous population. While discourses and policies oriented to social inclusion are not as prominent in Canada as in Europe and several other contexts, these conditions and the strategies adopted by governments to address them are consistent with narrowly-framed inclusion policies. We provide an overview of what these conditions represent and how they have come to be framed in the context of the Idle No More movement. However, we extend our analysis to understand how the Idle No More movement and discourses of inclusion and exclusion alike have often been framed in ways that further limit solutions to the problems that they are oriented to resolve by stigmatizing and distancing Indigenous people, especially when they ignore or undermine distinct Indigenous rights and the foundations of formal Aboriginal status. We draw upon Indigenous concepts of justice and critical analyses of power relations in order to explore the contradictory locations and experiences associated with Indigenous inclusion in the Canadian context. We conclude by exploring the movement's contributions to broadened conceptions of inclusion that build upon alternative conceptions of socioeconomic participation and success.

A Class Analysis of Benefits Distribution in a Chinese High-Technology Development Zone

Most studies of income determination in post-Mao China reduce nonwage forms of compensation (benefits) to their monetary equivalent and are only concerned with their contribution to total incomes. I suggest instead that the nature, function and combination of benefits are as important as their monetary value. Building upon Wright's neo-Marxist class analysis, I argue that benefits should be conceptualized as mechanisms of social control over labour. Since mechanisms of social control are not homogeneous across class locations, the processes governing the distribution of different forms of benefits can be expected to vary according to the class location of individuals. In this study, the neo-Marxist class model proposed by Wright in 'Class Counts' (1997) was used to allocate employees to a class location according to their degrees of authority and expertise. A series of probit models was then estimated to investigate how class location and individual-level attributes affected the distribution of different categories of benefits. The results of the study were largely consistent with Wright's predictions. In particular, benefits related to long-term career prospects and to temporal class trajectories were strongly associated with middle class locations -- locations defined, in Wright's terminology, as 'contradictory locations within capitalist class relations.' The paper includes an Appendix on the operationalization of class variables.

Similarities and Differences between Rebels with and without a Cause

Both our articles accept the construct that white officials in black unions were in a contradictory location. In an earlier article I wrote reflecting on the role of white intellectuals in black unions (Maree, 1989a) I also employed Eric Olin Wright’s ‘contradictory locations within class relations’ as a way of understanding the role of white intellectuals. Buhlungu innovatively extends the concept to include class and race relations, which strengthens its analytic power in the South African context. Buhlungu and I agree that white officials played a positive role in the black unions that emerged in the 1970s. Although Buhlungu fairly frequently mentions negative attributes of some white officials, he concludes that, ‘In short, the legacy of white officials in the black union movement was generally a positive one’. He attributes their positive role to the intellectual, strategic and administrative skills they brought to the unions as well as their access to financial resources. I attribute the positive role of white officials to the important role they played in helping to create democratic structures and practices in the black unions as well as helping to build the unions into powerful organizations. We both accept that white officials’ role in the black unions diminished during the 1980s, but for different reasons: Buhlungu attributes it to an increase in the number of young black assertive organic intellectuals who challenged white officials who then ‘retreated’ from the unions. I maintain that it was the objective of most white intellectuals right from the outset to train and develop black workers to take over the running of the unions. Rather than retreat from the unions, white officials could leave the unions

Transnational processes, development studies and changing social hierarchies in the world system: A Central American case study

Globalisation is bringing about changes in social hierarchies in the world capitalist system which traditional categories and frameworks in development studies and macro-sociologies are unable to capture. Under globalisation processes of uneven accumulation are unfolding in accordance with a social and not a national logic. The increasing subordination of the logic of geography to that of production and the rising disjuncture between the fortunes of social groups and of nation-states, among other processes, demand that we rethink development. The social configuration of space can no longer be conceived in the nation-state terms that development theories posit but rather as processes of uneven development denoted primarily by social group rather than territorial differentiation. Social polarisation, the fragmentation of national economies, and the select integration of social groups into transnational networks, suggest that development may be reconceived not as a national process, in which what 'develops' is a nation, but in terms of developed, underdeveloped and intermediate population groups occupying contradictory or unstable locations in a transnational environment. The shift to flexible accumulation worldwide and from an international to a global division of labour result in an increasing heterogeneity of labour markets in each locale. Labour market participation becomes a key determinant of new social hierarchies and of development conceived in social groups terms. Local and national labour markets are themselves increasingly transnationalised, part of a global labour market, in which differentiated participation determines social development. This article applies these propositions to a case study of Central America, examining the changing fortunes of one particular region under global capitalism and the lessons it offers for changing social hierarchies in the world capitalist system and for a renewal of the sociology of development.

A cloned DNA segment from the telomeric region of human chromosome 4p is not detectably rearranged in Huntington disease patients.

Genetic linkage studies have mapped the Huntington disease (HD) mutation to the distal region of the short arm of human chromosome 4. Analysis of recombination events in this region has produced contradictory locations for HD. One possible location is in the region distal to the D4S90 marker, which is located within 300 kilobases of the telomere. Other crossover events predict a more centromeric position for HD. Here we analyze the telomeric region of 4p in detail. Cloned DNA segments were derived from this region by utilizing a radiation-induced somatic cell hybrid as a source of DNA combined with preparative pulsed-field gel electrophoresis to enrich for the telomeric fraction. Additional DNA was obtained by using the cloned segments as multiple start points for cosmid walks. This strategy proved to be an effective method for cloning 250 kilobases of DNA in the region telomeric to D4S90. Hybridization analysis with the cloned DNA did not provide any evidence for the presence of rearrangements of 100 base pairs or greater in the DNA of individuals affected with HD. We also found no change in the size or structure of the 4p telomere in these samples.