Disciplinary Project Research Articles

Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL): Fighting Hunger During a Global Pandemic

Today, an increasing number of higher education institutions are recognizing the importance of preparing students to communicate, live, and work effectively with others from different cultural backgrounds (Appiah-Kubi, 2020; Eliyahy-Levi, 2020; Iuspa, 2019). Providing opportunities for students to travel abroad has been an integral part of the higher education experience for many years. However, with the global pandemic resulting in limited travel, universities are developing new and innovative ways to provide international experiences for students. The purpose of this cross disciplinary project was to explore an international virtual student collaboration between two universities, one in the United States and one in Southeast Asia. Twenty students were matched across universities to examine one of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals: #2 Zero Hunger (https://sdgs.un.org/goals). Fighting hunger is not a new problem in our world, but the focus has been greater in the midst of a world-wide pandemic. Many people have lost jobs or had their income severely impacted. Students from both universities worked collaboratively to explore the issues of fighting hunger during a pandemic and focused on finding solutions that can last long after the end of this current pandemic.

What if Black Studies studied fat for real for real?

ABSTRACT Only four years after Black Studies departments began to form in the US, Johnnie Tillmon, then Chairwoman of the National Welfare Rights Organization, proclaimed in her 1972 article in Ms. magazine that her marginalized intersectional identities – woman, Black, poor, fat, middle-aged, and on welfare – gave her little to no value in the American imaginary. How, in the midst of establishing departments for the study of Black life, could Tillmon’s Black fat life not be studied as well? Cathy Cohen (1999) asserts that welfare reform, like women’s rights and HIV/AIDS, are “cross-cutting issues” that complicate “respectable,” singularized notions of group identity. Black Studies departments have long aligned with this “secondary marginalization,” and Black feminists have stepped in and fought to obtain epistemological space for Black women and femmes. However, there was a missed opportunity to connect Tillmon’s embodiment with the social justice work being done to establish Black Studies. Fat Black women, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, had been on the front lines, but their embodied experiences had no seats in the front of the Black liberation bus. Because of this disconnect, I posit that Black Studies’ secondary marginalization of fat Black women leaves a noticeable gap in its disciplinary project. I argue that Black Studies as a field must 1) engage with Fat Studies via a social justice commitment to disrupt Black fat women from being rendered hyper-visible as service-workers and hyper-invisible as decision-makers, and 2) utilize body size as an analytical category to gain more nuanced and deeper understandings of Black life.

Forging New Instruments of Mass Social Control from Traditional Materials: The Disciplinary Role of Catholic Church Personnel in Franco's State Prison System of the 1940s and 1950s

Francoism's repression of its civilian population was based on a massified prison system and parallel system of punitive parole. At their core were religious personnel who fulfilled key disciplinary functions for the new state. By the latter stages of the civil war (1936–1939), church and lay Catholic personnel had already produced the legal justifications to underpin the repression. They blended older quasi-theocratic and anti-egalitarian philosophy to meet the disciplinary needs of the new moment where a politically mobilized society was challenging older forms of traditional order and hierarchy (before and during the war). This church–state symbiosis in Spain was already explicit by the early-twentieth century. After World War Two, as before it, Franco's ‘National-Catholic’ dictatorship deployed religious personnel speaking an antiquated language of ‘re-Christianization’ and ‘religious conversion’ to impose a modern, state disciplinary project – i.e., the sculpting and close surveillance of its population. Given the Church's full participation in this ‘divine totalitarianism’, it was paradoxical that by the time of Cold War ascendancy in the mid-1950s, it would be the same Church providing an alibi for Franco's state – in which judicial and penal systems remained militarized, and the everyday lives of its population closely controlled – to reassure Western interlocutors, who were themselves mostly socially conservative and/or Christian-Democratic, of Francoism's ‘non-totalitarian’ nature.

Interdisciplinary project types in engineering education

ABSTRACT Problem- and project-based learning (PBL) is often highlighted as a valuable approach for addressing the need for interdisciplinarity in engineering education. However, studies indicate that applied projects in engineering education tend to be limited to a single discipline. This article presents a new project typology which can be applied in engineering education. The typology is based on an action research study in a systemic PBL environment. The model presented has two dimensions: a) the complexity of teams, ranging from single team to networks of teams, and b) the complexity of interdisciplinarity, ranging from disciplinary projects to broad interdisciplinary projects. This results in the identification of six different project types. This typology can be used as a conceptual framework for interdisciplinary learning throughout engineering education. The project types embrace both single-team projects and larger projects consisting of multiple teams working together on complex problems.

The archive and the cafezinho: challenging (disembodied) histories by embodied archival experiences at Acervo Bajubá, an LGBT+ community archive in Brazil

ABSTRACT This article examines the challenges faced by Acervo Bajubá, an LGBT+ community archive located in São Paulo, Brazil. Departing from the observation of a disconnect between the recognition of the archive’s importance in terms of the content it holds and its consideration as a community epistemological project, the article argues for a paradigm shift in understanding archives. Contrariwise, the article proposes viewing Acervo Bajubá as an epistemological project that challenges conventional notions of community, history, and memory. It calls for a re-evaluation of the archive’s material conditions, bringing them to the forefront, and operating a recognition of its role as a legitimate knowledge producer – and not only as a repository for disciplinary projects and commitments. The article suggests that by expanding the concept of the archive-as-object and embracing archive-as-community-practice, alternative relationships with the past can be forged. Finally, through the analysis of two art-pieces produced in the context of an inventory process, the article argues for a concept and practice of archive that challenges disembodied notions of history, memory, and community, emphasising community practice and recognising the lives and bodies embedded within archival devices. It concludes by highlighting the importance of grounding the archive in the present time, and fostering creative tactics for envisioning alternative historical imaginaries and political repertoires.

Narratives of Rehabilitation in a South African Prison

Abstract How individuals incarcerated in the Global South engage with the official rehabilitative model remains largely under-documented. Through analysis of the narratives of men and women living in a large, medium-security correctional complex in Gauteng, South Africa, I argue that the grandiloquent official discourse of rehabilitation constitutes an important resource for those incarcerated. Highlighting the importance of local context in debates about carceral rehabilitation, I demonstrate that not only prisoners’ personal circumstances, but also the wider socio-economic context of enduring colonial legacies of structural inequalities shape their interactions with the penal regime. By foregrounding what those subjected to penal power make of their incarceration, I argue that the official rehabilitative discourse helps many to make sense of their predicament, actualise their lives, and sustain hope. I highlight how individual narrative strategies are channeled by and mapped on the official discourse of rehabilitation, free will, and personal responsibility, attesting to the success of the disciplinary project of the post-apartheid prison. I demonstrate how prisoners incorporate engagement with the rehabilitative model into a moral order of carceral cohabitation. I suggest that narrative work in the prison constitutes a nexus of individual needs and private aspirations and structural regimes of inequality, poverty, deprivation, and neglect.

The Reciprocal Power of Equitable, Intergenerational Learning: Exploring Perspectives of Undergraduate Students about Engaging in a University–Community Partnership Program

Our qualitative study is a deep exploration into the underexamined notion of engagement with respect to undergraduate students who took up the role of co-researchers within an afterschool program designed to engage young students about environmental issues and sustainability practices. This research program is based on a community-based literacies framework that addresses all members (program leaders, graduate students, undergraduate students, and young students) as co-learners. This study explores the largely unknown experiences of undergraduate students in informal learning contexts, which broadly center youth experiences. We took a critically framed approach (i.e., mindful of institutionalized inequities–known as a kind of silencing—for traditionally marginalized populations) in our analysis of interview responses from 11 undergraduate students involved in an afterschool environmental program for young students living in a Latinx neighborhood in central California. Our analysis involved a two-phase process that began with a general thematic exploration of transcribed interviews followed by in-depth, microlevel transcription of salient instances regarding community engagement. Responses suggest that the community-based context enabled a deep engagement founded on shared cultural practices, life experiences, and engaging in disciplinary projects (e.g., building and planting an edible garden). This study is a contribution to the long-needed insights into the importance of community engagement and leadership experiences during undergraduate learning, particularly for traditionally marginalized students. Findings may be informative to educators and researchers striving to transform college experiences for diverse student populations.

Political Sociality in the Narrowing of Time: Hibat al-Din al-Shahrastani and the Late Ottoman Najafi Revival

AbstractThis article explores the pre–World War I writings of the Najafi cleric Hibat al-Din al-Shahrastani (1884–1967), situating them within the broader Islamic revival movement, the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, the Arabic Nahda, and the Ottoman Shiʿi shrine cities in the years preceding the British invasion of Basra in 1914. It makes four arguments. First, al-Shahrastani's calls for constitutionalism, Islamic unity, revival, and the cultivation of the self were all attempts to respond to what he saw as the immediate and existential threat to his world posed by European imperial expansion. Second, he attempted in a variety of ways to mobilize what he called the Islamic social practices against this threat. Borrowing from his own theorization of these practices, I employ the concept of political sociality to gather his attempts to foster various social assemblages—of both newer and older provenance—that would cultivate Muslim subjects with the capacity to resist European aggression. Third, his conceptions of sociality and of political temporality, although often resonant with those of the more widely studied Sunni and Christian reformers of the Nahda, had specificities that I relate to his understandings of subject formation, the sense of impending calamity in his writings, and the borderlands context of the shrine cities. These conceptions were not necessarily affiliated with the nationalist and disciplinary project of the modern territorial state and were animated by a temporality of urgency rather than deferral. Finally, I consider how al-Shahrastani's theorizations of sociality and ultimately of revolution (al-thawra) reveal moments in the historical constitution of a reformist and soon-to-be insurgent Shiʿi public in these cities.

Finance, Fiction, and Loss

Finance, Fiction, and Loss

Atomic number and isotopy before nuclear structure: multiple standards and evolving collaboration of chemistry and physics

We provide a detailed history of the concepts of atomic number and isotopy before the discovery of protons and neutrons that draws attention to the role of evolving interplays of multiple aims and criteria in chemical and physical research. Focusing on research by Frederick Soddy and Ernest Rutherford, we show that, in the context of differentiating disciplinary projects, the adoption of a complex and shifting concept of elemental identity and the ordering role of the periodic table led to a relatively coherent notion of atomic number. Subsequent attention to valency, still neglected in the secondary literature, and to nuclear charge led to a decoupling of the concepts of elemental identity and weight and allowed for a coherent concept of isotopy. This concept received motivation from empirical investigations on the decomposition series of radioelements and their unstable chemical identity. A new model of chemical order was the result of an ongoing collaboration between chemical and physical research projects with evolving aims and standards. After key concepts were considered resolved and their territories were clarified, chemistry and physics resumed autonomous projects, yet remained bound by newly accepted explanatory relations. It is an episode of scientific collaboration and partial integration without simple, wholesale gestalt switches or chemical revolutions.

Buranji in Northeast India: A 13th Century History Project of Assam

The writing of Buranji in the geographical area that we now call Northeast India began with the establishment of Ahom kingdom in 1228 CE. The first Ahom king, Sukapha, who came along with soldiers and kinsmen from upper Burma ordered the writing of buranji as a part of documenting the battles they fought, incidents that took place, followers they gained etc. Initially, the buranjis, which were either written under the orders of the king or by noblemen who wanted to record and authenticate their illustrious lineage, were written in Tai Ahom language, but later these chronicles began to be written in Assamese. The Ahom buranjis not only dealt with the royal family and polity but also with the neighbouring kingdoms with whom battles were fought or had diplomatic relations. Thus, Tripura Buranji, Jaintia Buranji, Kachari Buranji etc were written. Unlike modern historiography based on rationalist-positivist model, the buranjis, though they chronicle and narrate facts and events based on state documents and other archival material kept in Gandhiya Bharal, are imbricated with myths, legends and non-linear time. Therefore, buranjis are often coupled with literature, unlike the western disciplinary project of historiography which, nevertheless, has been critiqued by scholars like Hayden White, K. M. Pannikar among others. The article, taking into consideration Suryya Kumar Bhuyan’s model of vernacular history writing, examines how the buranjis constitute a unique form that is indigenous and considerably different from the western paradigm of historiography disseminated by the colonial project.

Led Around by the Nose

Led Around by the Nose

Race, Sex, and God

Race, Sex, and God

ELA as English Language Abolition: Toward a Pedagogy of Communicative Belonging

AbstractRacialized notions of language and literacy are harmful to children in U.S. schools, and English Language Arts is a primary site whereby white supremacist language ideologies are enacted and justified, being most harmful to Black, Indigenous, and other students of Color. The authors—Mariana Souto‐Manning, Danny C. Martinez, and Adam D. Musser—former ELA teachers and current university‐based educators committed to the pursuit of justice, are motivated by the questions What can we do? and What should we do? in response to this harm. This conceptual article briefly traces the history of harm embedded in ELA classrooms before theorizing a debordering of English Language Arts and advancing a healing pedagogy for communicative belonging. Guided by the restorative justice principles of harms, needs, and obligations, it engages quilting as metaphor and process. Through quilting, the authors inquire into the harms of ELA as a disciplinary project rooted in exclusion, anti‐Blackness, and colonialism. Undertaking reparative caring and attending to Black, Indigenous, and other students of Color often unaccounted for in education reforms, Souto‐Manning, Martinez, and Musser advance ELA as English Language Abolition, seeking to abolish tokens of diversity in ELA classrooms and create spaces for true belonging via collaborative, future‐oriented work. Ultimately, while recognizing that the future imaginings of communicative belonging are part of a utopian project that imagines learning ecologies freed from and free of colonial and white logics, this article forwards a healing pedagogy of communicative belonging, offering the potential to abolish the harms long perpetrated in ELA classrooms by dominant conceptualizations of ELA.

The death of urban China

The death of urban China

Fighting economic crime during the pandemic: a Sri Lankan perspective

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand the dual crisis in Sri Lanka during the pandemic. The health crisis was followed by democratic backsliding which directly impacted the fight for economic crime. The pre-pandemic political commitment to fight corruption is assessed with the pandemic environment and the policy decisions by the Government. Sri Lanka was a detailed case study of how politicians exploited the pandemic environment to suppress democracy and move their semi-autocratic agenda forward. However, Sri Lanka was not the only nation that faced such autocratic sentiments losing the democratic values. This paper discusses recommendations for improving the resources and investment to address economic crime in Sri Lanka.Design/methodology/approachSecondary data was used for the analysis introducing a theoretical framework referring to the work of Michel Foucault and Francis Fukuyama. The secondary data was used to develop an argument aligning political science with economic crime.FindingsThe Government disciplinary project launched during the pandemic directly impacted Sri Lankan democracy and structural changes made to the constitution. The heavy militarization was a sign of departure of long-cherished values of democracy in the country. Political clientelism backed by nepotism interfered with judicial independence and the fight against economic crime. Many accused, including those responsible for the largest corruption scandal, were not punished. The trust deficit has widened significantly between authorities and the public on fighting corruption in Sri Lanka.Research limitations/implicationsThere are more factors for democratic backsliding than what is presented in this paper. The economic crime environment in Sri Lanka has many dimensions and the paper only highlights a few areas limiting to the secondary data available.Originality/valueThe paper discusses a unique perspective on how a pandemic could be misused to strengthen the autocratic rule and make structural changes to a nation, including constitution amendments. The pandemic environment was used to commit economic crime and suppress public opinion projecting the health crisis in the lockdown environment.

The Life after Texts, the Life within Them

The Life after Texts, the Life within Them

Controlling Fictions: Methodological Paradoxes and Political Dead Ends of the New Melanesian Ethnography

The paper contributes to the anthropological debate surrounding the methodology of the New Melanesian Ethnography and the model of the dividual personhood it is based on. The author introduces a disciplinary and historical context in which the theory was formulated and proposes an extended explication of the monograph The Gender of the Gift that is generally credited as the seminal work for the theoretical movement. Two points of critique are introduced and foregrounded in the ethnographic material from Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu: the limited heuristic potential of the dividual model and its ideological relativism that is fraught with dangerous political consequences for the disciplinary project of anthropology.

Modern Educational Technology in Teaching of Transport Field

Technical universities that carry out educational activities in the field of transport training and specialization have accumulated rich experience of modern teaching technologies. The final result of specific competence developing can be achieved only on the basis of a number of intermediate results in the learning of several disciplines through the implementation of multi-disciplinary projects. Multi - disciplinary projects implementation allows to develop the graduate qualification work more efficiently and in a short term. Of great importance in preparation of graduates in the field of transport specialization are the connection of education, science and operation. Creation of a practice-oriented educational process ensures the efficiency and attraction of the education for the all involved participants.

Creating and Mobilizing “Syonan” Youth: Youth and the Japanese Occupation of Singapore, 1942-1945

In 1942, The Japanese Occupation of Singapore (1942-1945) interrupted British rule in Singapore and paved the way for the island-city’s independence in 1965. The scholarly literature on this dramatic and traumatic period usually focus on the military aspects of the British capitulation to the Japanese invasion or submerge Japanese military officers and civilian administrators’ efforts to mobilize and discipline children and youth within the broader examination of Japanese social policies. This article examines these different efforts to school and mobilize youth in Singapore during this period. to create new subjects out of Singapore’s children and youth and to discipline their bodies for incorporation into a new pan-Asian Japanese empire. Even though these attempts failed, they paved the way for the subsequent social policies and disciplinary projects of the British colonial and local nationalist governments after the war. Thus, the Occupation heralded the intersection of state-society relations and age relations in Singapore.