Counter-hegemonic Positions Research Articles

Identity-protective reasoning: an epistemic and political defense

Abstract Identity-protective reasoning – motivated reasoning driven by defending a social identity – is often dismissed as a paradigm of epistemic vice and a key driver of democratic dysfunction. Against this view, I argue that identity-protective reasoning can play a positive epistemic role, both individually and collectively. Collectively, it facilitates an effective division of cognitive labor by enabling groups to test divergent beliefs, serving as an epistemic insurance policy against the possibility that the total evidence is misleading. Individually, it can correct for the distortions that arise from taking ideologically skewed evidence at face value. This is particularly significant for members of marginalized groups, who frequently encounter evidence that diminishes the value of their identities, beliefs, and practices. For them, identity-protective reasoning can counter dominant ideological ignorance and foster resistant standpoint development. While identity-protective reasoning is not without risks, its application from marginalized and counter-hegemonic positions carries epistemic benefits crucial in democracies threatened by elite capture. Against dominant views in contemporary political epistemology and psychology, identity-protective reasoning should be reconceived as a resource to be harnessed and not a problem to be eradicated.

Deconstructing the Discourse of Self-Corrective Intellectual Property Markets

This essay claims that intellectual property markets are not self-corrective. The discourse of self-corrective intellectual property markets is based upon a belief regarding the tendency of the market to automatically eliminate harmful consequences resulting from piracy, fraud, corruption, and conflict of interest among agents buying and selling music, movies, and journal articles. Following the critical-logics approach of discourse theory, this essay argues that intellectual property markets function according to certain logics: their social logics are grounded in the normalization of knowledge production and exchange, and their political logics deploy judicial mechanisms and sanctions against dislocatory moments such as copyright infringement. Meanwhile, their fantasmatic logics conceal the radical contingency of the given intellectual property regime, fueled by the academic desire for recognition via publishing in journals operated by for-profit companies. In exposing the logics of intellectual property markets, the essay suggests a counterhegemonic position supporting the ethics of open access and peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing.

Black lives matter, capital, and ideology: Spiraling out from India.

Piketty's propositions for arresting inequality are discussed through the lens of racism/casteism. We focus on the case of India's George Floyds-the persistence of caste and tribe oppression under economic growth in India-through the insights of our long-term ethnographic research. We show that inequalities are intimately tied to dynamics of capitalist accumulation in which racial/ethnic/caste/tribe and gender difference is crucial. We argue for an analysis that truly integrates ideology and the dynamics of political economy. The wider implications, we argue are political; they lie in the question of what is to be done. Despite his ambitions to decenter economics, Piketty remains trapped in the logic of economics for what he proposes are essentially economic reforms within capitalism. Moreover, ideological change cannot be a matter of choice only, and cannot be challenged solely at the level of ideas around economic inequality. It will also have to be fought as a direct contest of oppressive ideologies such as racism, casteism, and patriarchy, leading to new counter-hegemonic positions. We will argue that this takes us from a global history of ideology to a global anthropology of praxis. A first step is to genuinely center conversations with disciplines like anthropology, sociology, and subaltern history studying people and voices from below and from the margins, and the perspectives of scholars and activists from below and from the margins.

Converging on food sovereignty: transnational peasant activism, pluriversality and counter-hegemony

ABSTRACTThis paper contributes to debates on left-wing convergence by reflecting on the convergence of a diverse transnational peasant movement around a value of and demand for food sovereignty. It reads convergence on food sovereignty through the idea of pluriversality developed by decolonial theorists. In so doing, it argues, first, that a politics of pluriversality has been key in fostering convergence on food sovereignty. Second, it suggests that convergence on food sovereignty highlights possibilities for convergence at a theoretical level across hitherto opposed decolonial and counter-hegemonic positions.

Capturing the Gramscian Project in Critical Pedagogy: Towards a Philosophy of Praxis in Education

As theory and praxis of emancipatory education, critical pedagogy has been profoundly influenced by the ideas of Antonio Gramsci on ‘ideology’, ‘hegemony’, ‘intellectuals’ and ‘human consciousness’. The works of Paulo Freire and his critical pedagogy are found analogous in many ways to Gramsci’s Marxism specifically in terms of the importance given to cultural action of subalterns. The imperative in critical pedagogy is to construct counter-hegemonic positions against the imperatives of the dominant class agenda of limiting subalterns from entering into the making of history. As a praxis it aims at unravelling the potentialities within subalterns through their wisdom, practical knowledge and everyday common sense and thereby transforming educational regimes as spaces of social justice and human liberation. This article attempts to capture the contours of critical pedagogy and explores how Gramsci’s Marxism has influenced the formation of critical pedagogy and its intellectual trajectories.

Rifts in the Hegemony: Swedish News Journalism on Cannabis Legalization

ABSTRACTThis study analyzes the journalistic construction of the ongoing international renegotiation of cannabis, with the aim of contributing to the theorization of how journalism mediates between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic positions at times of crisis of hegemonic values. The study perceives the many ongoing attempts of legalizing and decriminalizing cannabis for recreational use as providing a disequilibrium to the hegemonic view of the substance as a dangerous narcotic that is rightly banned, and as intensifying a hegemonic struggle over the meaning of cannabis. Swedish print news journalism about cannabis legalization in different countries and contexts is studied, using critical discourse analysis. The analysis shows that journalism allows for debate between positive and skeptic discourses about the effects of recreational cannabis consumption and its medical benefits, and that voices that argue for cannabis legalization to combat organized crime are given important framing power. This means that a measure of legitimacy is given to discourses that counter the prohibitionist hegemony in Sweden, which means that mainstream journalism in this specific case serves as an arena for challenging hegemonic values that are in crisis.

The counter hegemonic discourse of human rights in the Bolivarian Revolution

Abstract This article analyses the human rights discourse of the Bolivarian government as a means of establishing a counter-hegemonic position in international politics. It seeks to explain how the politicization of human rights in the Bolivarian Revolution reveals a conflict regarding the moral legitimacy of the manifestation of power and a social model. This discourse adheres to the ideological paradigms of the revolution, which can only be understood through a knowledge of the history of Venezuelan society. On the basis of this analysis it is possible to understand the polarization caused by the Bolivarian political venture: on the one hand, the capitalist neo-liberal democracy; and on the other, the democratic radicalism of Venezuelan socialism. In view of this, the language of human rights has often become an ideological tool, that in each case is representative of two distinct ideological models.

Ideologies Revealed During the Construction of Meaning in an EFL Class

*This article reports on an interpretive qualitative study conducted at a public university in Bogota with 26 pre-service social studies teachers. It is focused on unveiling which ideologies are discovered when they construct the meaning of texts through text-based tasks in an English as a foreign language class. The data were collected by using class video recordings and students’ artifacts. The data analysis pro cedure follows an inductive process based on grounded theory. Results indicated three subsidiary cat egories called Shattering the Establishment, Perspectives From a Counter-Hegemonic Position, and Resisting the Mainstream. Furthermore, there is the core category Habitus, which assembles those sub

A produção social do desenvolvimento e os povos indígenas: observações a partir do caso norueguês

Este artigo descreve a gênese da atuação dos atores implicados na constituição do universo da cooperação internacional norueguesa junto aos povos indígenas, buscando destacar o sentido da participação de antropólogos, missionários, ambientalistas e membros do povo Sami em sua elaboração. Analisa, entre outras questões, a pertinência dos marcos históricos tradicionalmente associados à formação do aparato do desenvolvimento; a relação entre este aparato e a formação de identidades nacionais e étnicas; os valores que sustentam o funcionamento da cooperação norueguesa, localizando as relações entre ideais associados a "fazer o bem", perspectivas tutelares e posições contra-hegemônicas em sua atuação; e as vinculações entre teoria antropológica e práticas voltadas à construção contemporânea de agenciamentos políticos.

Entre bastidores: la “memoria larga” de la universidad pública (México - Colombia)

ResumenEl artículo recupera algunas memorias, discursos e hitos que han incidido en la defensa de la universidad pública, en el ámbito de dos experiencias universitarias nacionales ?México y Colombia?. Ello, con el propósito de pensar hoy la defensa y la reconstrucción del sentido de lo ‘público’ en la universidad colombiana, en diálogo con otras experiencias latinoamericanas. Esta búsqueda reconoce que la universidad sigue siendo un espacio de desarrollo y promoción de las posturas críticas,

Sources of Brazil's Counter-Hegemony

There have been two key initiatives taken in the last two decades in Brazil to create a counter-hegemonic project for the country. One initiative resulted from Brazil's business community and high-level State bureaucracy and aimed at forming a regional economic and political bloc that would guarantee and enlarge a relative independence from the hegemonic powers. The other resulted from the emergence of the new unionist movement in São Paulo and from the formation of Partido dos Trabalhadores and aimed at promoting radical democratization and reducing social exclusion. Both initiatives have created policies and changes that have converged to enhance Brazil's counter-hegemonic position as a regional and emerging power.

Sistema Nacional de Cultura: a tradução do dinâmico e do formal nos municípios da região Sul

A trajetória das políticas públicas da cultura no país, desde a era Vargas até o atual momento de institucionalização do Sistema Nacional de Cultura (SNC), evidencia a disputa entre os agentes sociais que lutam pela preservação da hegemonia de um modelo excludente e aqueles que defendem a cultura como um direito social. A construção e a instauração do Sistema pela sua própria lógica, só podem ser concretizadas a partir da mobilização nacional dos dirigentes estaduais e municipais da cultura e da sociedade civil organizada. O SNC envolve sistemas organizativos e institucionalizados nos três níveis federativos, numa articulação institucional regulada por normativas, instrumentos, aparatos e negociações. Nossa reflexão sobre a construção do SNC considera as informações sobre a dinâmica, o aparato cultural e a institucionalidade da cultura nos municípios brasileiros, recolhidas pelo IBGE. Interpretamos e discutimos os dados da região Sul, a fim de identificar as potencialidades dos municípios e as necessidades que se apresentam para a efetivação de um sistema complexo de gestão e política públicas. Essa discussão nos permite algumas projeções acerca da envergadura da tarefa que deverá mobilizar a imensa maioria dos municípios do país na desconstrução de tradições arraigadas no exercício do governo. Nesse sentido, é a partir da pedagogia do oprimido e da educação como prática da liberdade de Paulo Freire que o planejamento situacional de Matus poderá intervir, tanto como abordagem crítica à realidade social, quanto apropriação do planejamento como ferramenta política de luta no campo social da política da cultura. Consideramos que esta seja uma oportunidade para experimentar um diálogo criativo, que coproduza conhecimento a partir de uma posição contra-hegemônica e para escapar da naturalização dos conceitos tradicionais da área da gestão, inadequados a uma realidade dinâmica, que não precisa repetir os modelos dominantes de empresa e de management.

Structural limits to sustainable development: managers and progressive agency

The 'contradiction' inherent in sustainable development has produced a discursive struggle between two paradigms. The 'business case' for sustainable development frames the concept as a narrative of eco-modernism that fails to contest the structural bases of unsustainability. The competing radical discourse constructs sustainable development as having emancipatory power to produce a more ecologically rational and socially just metanarrative, challenging the dominant model of economic rationality. Investigations in the area of innovation and sustainable development need to take account of this contestation that revolves around institutional and structural limits that have become normalised to the extent that they sometimes escape examination. This has implications for the awareness, education and level of agency of managers in capitalist organisations. A research inquiry conducted in New Zealand revealed that the 'business case' represented the major discursive formation around sustainable development, chiefly promoted by a coalition of government and business interests, although this model and the radical paradigm were both contested by neo-liberal groups. Corporate managers conceived the 'business case' as their chief means of exercising agency to negotiate the meaning of sustainable development in the workplace; although the research discourse opened up a conceptual space where counter-hegemonic positions addressing the structural limits to sustainable development and the limitations to the 'business case' began to emerge.

Now and then: revolutions in higher learning

Now and then: revolutions in higher learning

The Convergence around Local Civil Society and the Dangers of Localism

Development studies and practice have recently undergone a transition that has yielded an unprecedented emphasis on local civil society (Mohan & Stokke, 2000). There is now a high level of agreement regarding the importance of popular participation for social change and empowerment. Behind the apparent consensus on the importance of local civil society in development, there are quite divergent views on the characteristics and functions of civil society. Two main strands of development thinking and intervention can be identified as particularly relevant in this regard. These can be described as revisionist neo-liberalism and post-Marxism. Revisionist neoliberalism sees institutions and actors in civil society as partners for enabling state institutions. Popular participation is seen as a means for making development interventions more cost-effective and efficient and also as a step towards privatisation of state services. PostMarxism, which may be seen as the. main counter-hegemonic position in contemporary development debates, sees civil society as a challenge to the hegemony of global economic liberalism and its associated political institutions. Social movements in civil society hold the potential for bringing about autocentric and socially relevant development in opposition to both the state and the market. Both agree that civil society has a crucial role to play as an alternative to exploitative, parasitic and inefficient states. This article seeks to address two main questions regarding the role of civil society: (1) What are the theoretical roots and main characteristics of these different views on civil society, and (2) What are the shortcomings of these perspectives? It will be argued that development theory has moved away from a polarised debate over