Disciplinary Confines Research Articles

Primacy of the real and interdisciplinarity: contradictions in theoretical production

The purpose of this text is to assert the thesis that scientific work, manifested in the production of analyses, theories, and concepts, irrespective of their disciplinary, multidisciplinary, or interdisciplinary origins, only unfolds when rooted in the primacy of the real. The complexity of scientific objects cannot be fully addressed exclusively within disciplinary confines. Discussions centered solely on theoretical, conceptual, or explanatory models, while assisting in transcending disciplinary limitations, do not propel the advancement of scientific knowledge. Contradictions in theoretical-conceptual and analytical production, explicit within disciplinary fields, arise not only from the limitations of disciplines but from how reality is conceptualized as concrete thought. Regardless of the discipline, theory and concept divorced from reality amount to mere speculation.

An Examination of Racial and Ethnic Disparity in Prison Misconduct Punishment

Objectives: To examine whether the likelihood of guilty dispositions and the manner of sanctioning prison misconduct differs across racial/ethnic groups, with emphasis on sanctions other than solitary confinement. Methods: A random sample of men incarcerated in a large Northeastern state prison system is analyzed. Propensity weights are estimated by Black–White and Hispanic/Latino-White prehearing characteristics. Weighted logistic regression is used to examine guilty verdict, weighted multinomial logistic regression is used to examine type of sanction, and weighted ordinary least squares regression is used to examine length of sanction. Results: Findings reveal disproportionality in the likelihood of receiving a misconduct write-up, though reduced likelihood of guilty verdict among Black charges. Minor non-restrictive sanctions are used less among Black individuals and loss of privileges is used more often among Hispanic/Latino individuals, while disciplinary confinement is used more often among White individuals. Black and Hispanic/Latino individuals receive longer sentences for certain sanction types. Some effects are conditional on offense severity. Conclusions: Differential imposition and length of seemingly lenient sanctions may disadvantage Black and Hispanic/Latino groups for rehabilitative resources, while imposition of solitary confinement may disadvantage White groups in terms of restrictive damages. Parity should be sought in the implementation of sanctions for similarly severe misconduct.

Environment and Human Health: Beyond Disciplinary Confinement

The human health results from the interplay of lifestyle, genetic, psychological, and other factors. In addition, humans are exposed to numerous environmental factors that affect their physical and mental health. In the present piece of work, the impact of environmental exposure on mental and physical health is understood in the broadest sense. The environment has direct and indirect effects on mental and physical health. High-rise housing and other constructions are detrimental to the psychological wellbeing of people. Residential overcrowding, these high-density areas, and noisy exterior noise sources increase psychological distress and may contribute to the development of mental and physical disorders. Air pollutants with a pungent odor amplify negative effects, and environmental pollutants have also been linked to behavioral disturbances. Lack of adequate daylight is reliably associated with melancholic dispositions and increased depressive symptoms. Consequently, environmental factors continue to negatively impact both mental and physical health. The environment has the potential to encourage or inhibit human interaction. Along with this, individuals’ personal control, social support, relationships, and restoration from tension and fatigue may all be affected by various aspects and properties of the built environment. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when work from home had become commonplace, environmental factors had a significant impact on the health outcomes of individuals. Hence, this article is trying to shed light on the environmental factors that affect the physical and mental health of its users in more than one way and what can be done to make it less stressful, safer, and better by improving the tangible environment.

Knowledge power or diplomacy? University alliances and the Belt and Road Initiative

The growing importance of China as a major actor in international order has generated tremendous interest among social scientists, but scholarly debates remain in their disciplinary confines. Our study connects existing international relations research on China and the Belt and Road Initiative with two concepts in higher education studies—knowledge power and knowledge diplomacy—to reveal the multi-faceted approach that China applies towards its “outward-oriented” internationalization activities in the knowledge domain. By studying two instances of university alliance-building through the Belt and Road Initiative, an empirically less examined area in both international relations and higher education studies, we demonstrate how China embraces a knowledge diplomacy approach in the case of the University Alliance of the Silk Road and knowledge power in the case of the Asian Universities Alliance. We argue that the co-existence of the two approaches points to the aim of China’s multi-faceted approach to its external relations in the knowledge domain. By combining alternative organizational structures and logics embodied in different university alliances, this approach presents a non-hegemonic attempt to normalize China’s network centrality in an interdependent world. We conclude that China’s Belt and Road Initiative university alliance-building efforts should open up a rich analytical space that encourages further exploration through a world-centered tianxia heuristic.

Socioeconomic Rights, Competition, and Systemic Neutrality: Approaching the Right(s) Contribution to Emancipatory Social Movements

Abstract: Debate over the emancipatory potential of socioeconomic rights and their relevance to broader social movements is long-standing but is now picking up steam and taking on a life well beyond its traditionally legal disciplinary confines. This article contributes to the widening debate by emphasising the need for socioeconomic rights to be re-thought simultaneously outward (through deeper engagement with extant economic and political systems) and inward (by re-assessing various doctrines ingrained in their own construction). I pursue this 'two-track' methodology by first constructing a novel theory regarding the outward engagement of socioeconomic rights with competition law and policy, focusing on the collective agency of rightsholders pressing for social change through democratic means and the specifically neoliberal conception of competition. Crucially, following William Davies (The Limits of Neoliberalism) , I argue that this specific conception of competition is not just another aspect of neoliberalism but is instead the defining characteristic of the neoliberal system. The finding of incompatibility between socioeconomic rights and this conception of competition therefore implies incompatibility also with the neoliberal system, tout court. However, this systemic rejection provokes inward analysis of the surprisingly under-examined legal doctrine of systemic neutrality, positing that socioeconomic rights can be meaningfully realised in any political or economic system. Ultimately, it is argued that to have any real emancipatory relevance to broader social movements socioeconomic rights advocates, in general, must be far more forthright and logically consistent in what these rights both entail and exclude. The emancipatory promise of these rights is inherently bound to a rejection of their neutrality, legal, systemic, or otherwise, and an active, cooperative theoretical, and political engagement with more broadly emancipatory movements in a range of non-legal fields.

Ecological perspectives on water, food, and health security linkages: the Minamata case in Japan.

Extant studies address water, food, and health security issues considerably separately and within narrow disciplinary confines. This study investigates the links among these three issues from an ecological viewpoint with a multidisciplinary approach in a modified Millennium Ecosystem Assessment framework developed by the United Nations. The modified framework includes water, food, and health security considerations as the three constituents of human well-being from an ecological (more specifically, ecosystem services) viewpoint. This study examines the links through published data associated with the Minamata incident, which was a historic and horrific methylmercury-induced water, food, and health poisoning crisis in Japan. The results show that when heavy metal pollution changes one component (marine water) of the provisioning ecosystem services, this change subsequently affects another component (seafood) of the services. This then defines the linkages among water, food, and health security as the three constituents of human well-being within the modified framework. The links can have immediate and far-reaching economic, social, legal, ethical, and justice implications within and across generations. This study provides important evidence for emerging economies that ignore the water-food-health security nexus.

Disciplinary Confinement and Misconduct Patterns: An Examination of Gendered Effects

Reducing misconduct is a critical mechanism to maintaining prison safety. Disciplinary confinement constitutes one tool used by the corrections system to achieve this goal. Only a handful of studies explore how disciplinary confinement works and fewer examine whether this punishment exerts variable impacts on women. This paper will address this research gap by providing a systematic assessment of the effect of exposure to and length of disciplinary confinement on misconduct patterns with a focus on gender, using a longitudinal dataset, and random effects regression analyses. Results find disciplinary confinement has little deterrent effect on misconduct but gender variation exists. Implications for theory, research, and policy related to the relationship between in-prison penalties, misbehavior, and the gendered prison experience are discussed.

Imposing fees for police services in Australia

ABSTRACT This article presents the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the Australian law and practice of imposing fees for unrequested police services. It acts on Lippert and Walby’s recent call for scholarly analysis of user-pays policing ‘to break free of standard disciplinary confines’. One aim of this paper therefore is to start filling this gap in the literature by giving more prominence to substantive legal analyses of user-pays policing. The purpose of this article is both practical and analytical. The practical purpose of this article is to contribute to the literature by providing a detailed examination of the legal framework for imposing fees for unrequested police services in Australia. The analytical purpose of this article is two-fold: to isolate imposing fees for police services as a distinct category of user-pays policing and to critically evaluate the practice of imposing fees for police services in one Australian jurisdiction as a case study.

Freshwater: Towards a Better Understanding of a Wicked Problem

Water begets intricate and profound linkages between multiple systems. Quantitative limits to freshwater availability for human needs, variabilities in the water cycle and environmental water requirements interact with water source pollution. The arising tensions are a great challenge of immense contemporary significance that can best be described as a wicked problem – a problem with multiple dimensions that presents unexpected consequences when engaged. Water challenges make vivid the compromises that must be made between the environment and development. These compromises surface in the conflict between ecocentric and technocentric discourse. Globally, there is evidence of numerous disciplinary and interdisciplinary water-related studies both in the past and ongoing. But there is no meta-mapping of various dimensions of such research to give a clear overview of what has been and what needs to be done. Consequences of this oversight may include unnecessary duplication of research, difficulty in articulating knowledge gaps, and inability to see beyond disciplinary boundaries. The author suggests an outline of how these difficulties can be engaged. This is done through a wide-ranging literature review to identify a range of issues of focus, which issues are then themed into imperatives for water research. These imperatives are subsequently systematised using four normative descriptors: problem, drivers, and mitigation measures. In combination, these descriptors articulate a spectrum of the key issues around water research. The key issues are mapped onto various academic disciplines and societal partners to outline a schema for the positioning of water research. The proposed mapping can facilitate interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (IDTD) research by allowing researchers to benefit from relevant existing bodies of knowledge while also making explicit knowledge gaps and opportunities for collaboration. By locating academic fields within different worldviews, the outlined schema reveals common ground beyond disciplinary confines around which IDTD research can be instigated.

Foucault and the birth of psychopolitics: Towards a genealogy of crisis governance

The article contributes to the genealogy of current tendencies in crisis governance by reconstructing Michel Foucault’s analysis of the application of the notion of crisis in 19th-century psychiatry. This analysis complements and corrects Reinhart Koselleck’s history that viewed crisis as originally a medical, judicial or theological concept that was transferred to the political domain in the 18th century. In contrast, Foucault highlights how the psychiatric application of the concept of crisis was itself political, conditioned by the disciplinary power of the psychiatrist. Unlike the ancient medical concept of crisis that emphasized the doctor’s judgement in observing the event of truth in the course of the disease, psychiatric crisis is explicitly forced by the doctor in order to elicit the desired symptoms in the patient and convert their power of disciplinary confinement into medical diagnosis. The article argues that this notion of crisis resonates with the tendencies observed in contemporary crisis governance in Western societies. While these tendencies are often addressed in terms of ‘psychopolitics’ that presumably succeeds Foucault’s ‘biopolitics’, we suggest that Foucault’s own work on psychiatric power offers a valuable genealogical perspective on the contemporary governance of crises.

Discourse, concepts, ideologies

AbstractTwo branches of discourse studies, critical discourse analysis (CDA) and discourse theory (DT), could benefit through extending their critical focus and incorporating findings and methodologies of neighbouring disciplines. While indebted to the attentiveness of CDA to ordinary language, ideology studies have by contrast developed interpretative, non-judgmental analytical frameworks that explore the many-faceted features of ideology, power, and the political. In turn, the macro-focus of DT on binary distinctions, articulatory equivalences, and the construction of hegemony through empty signifiers, overlooks the complex internal conceptual morphology that produces multiple ideological vocabularies. Through a layered filtering of texts, utterances, and linguistic intensities, ideological micro-morphology reveals processes of semantic decontestation in order to defend, alter or criticize political thought-practices. It illuminates the complex interrelationship between word and concept and accepts fantasies as ineluctable and decodable features of communal life. By reaching out beyond their disciplinary confines, the interplay of these parallel approaches could enrich the scholarly understanding of the political.

A Spectral Genealogy of Performance in Intercultural Communication Studies

ABSTRACT The traces of performance studies that bolster intercultural communication elude strict disciplinary confinement. Despite many convergences between the two disciplines, they have been frequently made to occupy oppositional positions within Communication Studies. While their methods vary, I see the impetus of both areas being oriented towards moving through three major dialectics: 1. Reflection <-> Reflexivity 2. Illumination <-> Emplacement 3. Transcription <-> Translation. This essay considers how intercultural communication and performance studies enter these dialectics together to illuminate paradigms of power. I argue that the “performative turn” has underwritten negotiations of culture, identity, and power in intercultural communication scholarship.

Mapping out Students’ Opportunity to Learn about Sustainability across the Higher Education Curriculum

Decades of policy initiatives, a developing body of literature, and a growing cadre of practitioners are united in suggesting that the preeminent approach to educating students about sustainability is by infusion throughout the higher education curriculum. While there is mounting evidence that sustainability should be taught to students beyond the disciplinary confines of natural science and geography, little is known about the prevalence of this topic throughout an entire higher education curriculum. Therefore the study reported here aimed to capture a bird’s eye view of the presence of sustainability subject matter at one higher education institution through survey research. The findings showed that nearly two-thirds of the student participants reported that they had exposure to sustainability subject matter during the course of one academic semester. Of the students who reported that they did have the opportunity to learn, most of them only learned about sustainability at one point in time. Inadequate time is being devoted to educating students about sustainability, especially given the amount of time and effort needed to promote a transformative learning experience. As a result of these findings, the recommendation is that administrators and policymakers advocate for repetition of sustainability subject matter across the curriculum, instead of the common discourse merely calling for it to be infused throughout the curriculum.

‘Our Marketing is Our Goodness’: Earnest Marketing in Dissenting Organizations

In times of erosion and dissolution of social structures and institutions, described by Bauman (Ethics and Global Politics 5:49–56, 2012) as the interregnum, there arises both a need and a possibility of developing alternative approaches to the most fundamental organizational practices. Marketing, a simultaneously tremendously successful and much criticized sub-discipline and practice, is a prime candidate for such a redefinition. Potential prefigurations of future processes of organizing and institutionalizing can be found within dissenting organizations (Daskalaki in European Urban and Regional Studies 25:155–170, 2018), the alternative organizations built at the fringes of, and in opposition to, the mainstream businesses as reported by Parker et al. (The Routledge companion to alternative organization, Routledge, Oxford, 2014). In this paper, we present an exploration of the alternative yet already enacted practice we call earnest marketing. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a number of dissenting organizations in the United Kingdom and Poland, we focus on the radical reconstitution of marketing evidenced in their practice, defined by an attitude of earnestness and dedication to the dissemination and demonstration of their self-defined goodness: ideas and values. As organizations engage in earnest marketing, they also become receptive to reciprocal messages from their environments. We conclude by reflecting on the possibilities of a dissenting management model developing the principles of earnest marketing beyond disciplinary confines.

Sentidos del cuidado en centros de privación de libertad para adolescentes en Uruguay

El artículo explora sentidos y significados asociados al cuidado por parte de agentes responsables de la custodia de adolescentes en centros de privación de libertad en Uruguay. La investigación cualitativa es un estudio de caso de tipo único, descriptivo y en profundidad que presenta un corpus compuesto por entrevistas, documentos, observaciones y registro en diario de campo. Se describen tres categorías de análisis en las que se reflexiona sobre el cuidado: acerca de la medida socioeducativa, la seguridad como criterio de funcionamiento y el acceso a los derechos a través de la política punitiva. Se concluye que existen visiones plurales asociadas al cuidado y que el tratamiento de los y las adolescentes se basa en el castigo por la vía del encierro disciplinante que legitima el uso de prácticas violentas.

International and Operational Responses to Disease Control

Much has already been written on this most recent EVD outbreak—evaluating and dissecting the contributions and failings of the various role-players involved, and considering what can be done differently in future. This article will contribute to this important and ongoing debate and will specifically focus on the international, operational, and national legal frameworks in terms of which large-scale health crises like that of Ebola play out. It will be argued that the very culture and architecture of this transnational legal and operational framework for public health emergencies is isolated from the national realities in which it operates and merely offers a hierarchical authority of what legally ought to be done, with little regard to what is actually necessary and possible on the ground. In considering the most recent Ebola outbreak, and juxtaposing it with the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (“SARS”) outbreak of 2003, it will be shown that a more nuanced transnational legal understanding of public health emergencies is indeed needed—a holistic approach that goes beyond biomedical/scientific and legalistic confines in dealing with disease outbreak and control. It is again important to emphasise here, for the sake of clarity, that this article is exclusively focused on the transnational legal and operational framework in which public health emergencies play out. International humanitarian responses, general public health considerations, as well as other national systemic considerations—like those relating to health systems—although important, will not be considered here. A brief interlude on the methodology of this article also deserves a place here. As already indicated above, much literature exists on the Ebola outbreak, and with the attention now shifting to the Zika virus, it is important to further distinguish the contribution of this article. This article utilises a primarily transdisciplinary lens in narrating the rise and fall of two notable epidemics of the modern world. A variety of sources, from different disciplines and bases, are used in presenting an easily accessible text that recounts key themes of both epidemics—highlighting similarities and differences, and raising important questions for the future. As with most narrative research methodologies, reliance is also placed on newspaper articles in constructing an account of how the two epidemics played out, each in its own particular time and space. The disease narrative ultimately presented in this article, therefore simultaneously serve as a chronicle of the two epidemics, while also reflecting why a more nuanced transnational legal understanding of public health emergencies is indeed needed. To facilitate this discussion and analysis, the content of this article is divided into four parts. First, in Part II, the lifecycle of two epidemics will be considered, Ebola, and the 2003 SARS outbreak. Considering these two outbreaks and the international legal responses thereto provides a valuable lens through which the multiple layers of disease outbreaks and control from the past to the present can be observed. In Part III, this paper provides an overview of the international legal and operational framework for public health emergencies, confined to references and examples from the two outbreaks selected for and discussed in Part II. Part IV considers the national legal responses of those countries most affected by the recent Ebola outbreak and the 2003 SARS outbreak. Part V discusses the question of whether to quarantine or not. Part VI discusses lessons to be learned, and why knowledge production beyond disciplinary confines is necessary. And finally, Part VII of this article concludes with a critical analysis of two observed failings of the current international legal and operational framework for public health emergencies. In considering the shortcomings of the current framework it will be argued that a more holistic approach to disease control is required that looks beyond disciplinary confines.

Corpus-based study of news translation: challenges and possibilities

Recognizing that disciplinary confines often represent serious hurdles for translation scholars, this article offers a reflection on the boundaries of the subarea of news translation within the discipline of translation studies, focusing on its links with research that employs corpus-aided techniques, in particular critical discourse analysis and corpusassisted discourse studies. Reviewing a number of relevant studies and research projects that use different types of corpora, the discussion explores some of the main difficulties inherent in analysing translated news texts, which are often heavily mediated and edited in various ways; the ensuing key challenges associated with conducting journalistic translation research are examined. The article calls for mutual recognition and cross-fertilization between disciplines that investigate translated news from different, usually complementary, perspectives. In particular, the study of ideology and bias in translated news benefits from composite approaches and multi-faceted research projects that combine methods drawn from different areas: we argue that open and inclusive approaches are vital to uncover new and important insights into news translation.

Past and Present of Latin American Jewry: A Conceptual Pathway

The article aims to analyze the conceptual pathway that the author followed along her research trajectory focused on past and present trends in contemporary Jewish life, as specifically expressed in Latin America. Along a systematic reflection on axioms, theories and findings, diverse conceptual elaborations are presented, as they entail a sustained encounter with previous scientific formulations and changing times and contexts. Thus the author reflects on theory and biography as they nourished her research questions, while simultaneously committed to the stricter canon of scientific conscientiousness. Political science, sociology and contemporary Jewish studies converge in the development of research axes that found their point of departure in the prefix “multiple,” covering the author’s multidisciplinary journey through Latin American multiple modernities; multiple collective identities; and multiple social and communal structures and praxis. Diverse thematic clues are displayed to account for the striking fact that over the course of two generations Latin American Jews have transformed from mostly immigrants and immigrant communities, to rooted communities of locally-born citizens and, simultaneously, of expatriates and emigrants. The richness of Jewish life in the region, its presence and relevance in the Jewish world, as well as in national and communal spheres, and simultaneously, its relocation in new geographies are part of their current reality marked by disjunctures and paradoxes. The research presented crosses disciplinary confines in order to reach a wider epistemic spectrum and become better equipped to deal with the complexity that characterizes Jewish life today, as well as to traverse the national borders where Jewish diasporas dwell, in an effort to understand the globality of the Jewish condition and grasp its current dynamics.

Room for Silence: Ebola Research, Pluralism and the Pragmatic Study of Sociomaterial Practices

The notion of sociomaterial practices speaks to a view of routine work in which people and materials are always already entangled. This implies that the commonsense tendency to treat concrete materials and social activity as separate analytical categories may actually muddy more than illuminate our understanding of practices. Engaging work from science and technology studies, this broad view of materiality refers not only to the physical properties of machines but also to software and algorithms, electrical grids and other infrastructure, buildings, human bodies, ecological systems etc. Despite remarkable enthusiasm, the conversation about sociomaterial practices occasionally has devolved into philosophical turf wars, engendering pleas for pluralism. All too often, such lofty conceptual debates lose sight of pragmatic concerns such as technology design work or humanitarian action. This essay traces both issues to a tension between adopting a grand philosophical Ontology, versus undertaking detailed empirical studies of particular concrete work practices. I argue that studies exploring the practical specifics of particular sociomaterial practices should be granted room for silence with respect to some theoretical commitments, on the grounds that this will afford a more lively pluralism. For ethnomethodologists, this re-orientation to grand theory is a matter of methodological rigor and theoretical sophistication. For pragmatists, room for silence has to do with the dilemma of rigor or practical relevance. This is not to say that key concepts are unnecessary—they can provoke us to look beyond narrow disciplinary confines and standard assumptions about the scope of field studies. Through an account of the 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, I show how these conceptual debates matter for empirical research and for design practice. In this case, complex technical and biosocial processes made a concrete difference in the course of the outbreak and the humanitarian response to it. For practitioners no less than for researchers, this case throws into sharp relief the real human stakes of grasping how the material world gets caught up in workaday human activity.

Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Liberal Cosmopolitan IR: A Response to Burke et al.’s ‘Planet Politics’

This article is a collective response to ‘Planet Politics’ by Anthony Burke et al., which was published in this journal in 2016, and billed as a ‘Manifesto from the End of IR’. We dispute this claim on the basis that rather than breaking from the discipline, the Manifesto provides a problematic global governance agenda which is dangerously authoritarian and deeply depoliticising. We substantiate this analysis in the claim that Burke et al. reproduce an already failed and discredited liberal cosmopolitan framework through the advocacy of managerialism rather than transformation; the top-down coercive approach of international law; and use of abstract modernist political categories. In the closing sections of the article, we discuss the possibility of different approaches, which, taking the Anthropocene as both an epistemological and ontological break with modernist assumptions, could take us beyond IR’s disciplinary confines.