Divergent Claims Research Articles

Conceptions of Everyday Life in Information Science

ABSTRACTThis panel examines conceptions of everyday life in Information Science. Several theories about everyday life and its information phenomena will be reviewed and analyzed for their origins, distinctions, and divergent claims. Four expert panelists who have published on these matters will encapsulate their ideas, and there will be a video interlude, as well. By design, the panel Agenda features short opening statements, leaving 40 minutes to discuss: How do existing notions of everyday life within Information Science bring information into focus in different ways? Are informational conceptions of everyday life adequate or wanting of critical re‐examination? In keeping with ASIS&T's multiperspective community, inputs will be sought from students, practitioners, first‐time conference attendees, and other groups, in turn. If, as Marcia J. Bates claims, we are “…always looking for the red thread of information in the social texture of people's lives” (1999, p. 1048) then we need to individually and collectively reflect on the nature of everyday life.

Climate Change-Related Drivers of Migration in East Africa: An Integrative Review of the Literature

Despite the growing academic concern and policy interest in climate change drivers of migration, scientific evidence on the topic remains contested, with divergent claims of positive and negative contributions of climate change on human migration and displacement. This review seeks to assess the climate change-related drivers of migration with a focus on three East African countries: Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda. They are among the most vulnerable countries in Africa, with one of the most mobile populations. The study used the available literature on climate change and migration as the data source. About 22 research articles on climate change and migration were sourced from the Web of Science and Scopus databases and critically reviewed. The review generally indicates that climate change effects such as frequent drought and flood disasters, livestock pests, and crop diseases influence migration and displacement in the region. On the other hand, rising sea levels pose imminent risks that can cause migration if adaptation measures are not taken. The review has also revealed that responses to drought or livestock and crop diseases, be it localized adjustment or out-migration, are determined by households' adaptive capacity. For rapid onset climate events such as floods, the most vulnerable are the less fortunate living in poorly constructed structures in flood-prone zones. This review proposes strengthening the climate policy framework by mainstreaming climate change migration in East African nations’ adaptation plans. It also calls for promoting alternative livelihood activities as an adaptation strategy in areas prone to climate change to lessen human-forced migration and displacement.

Tianxia Qingshi (World Circumstances) in the Political World of Traditional Chinese Scholar Officials: A Case Study of the “Green Sprouts Policy Polemic” in the Early Xining Period of the Northern Song

How to deal with differences is a question that any political body must respond to. The individualist perspective emphasizes that actors will adopt measures to exclude or even eliminate divergent claims in order to gain control over interests power or statutory policy, but the rich experience of traditional Chinese scholar officials offers the possibility of going beyond the limitations of this perspective. The perspective of “tianxia qingshi (world circumstances)” as a new narrative reveals a unique practical logic and dynamic mechanism in Chinese political civilization that have been overlooked by the individualist perspective. The “Green Sprouts policy (qing miao fa) polemic” in the early years of the New Policies era of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) presents a historical situation that has not been given full attention by existing research.

Persistent institutional malfunctioning in the Eurozone

Institutional change in the Eurozone is driven by the need to ensure the immediate survival of the euro rather than confronting the structural weaknesses of the common currency. The failure to deal with underlying weaknesses is demonstrated by the policy of “selective support”, whereby markets and instruments considered vital for the survival of the euro are often adopted under pressure. This type of support is most prominently demonstrated by the TARGET2 clearing system within the Eurosystem of central banks. The system allows the euro to survive but also facilitates the rise of intra-EMU imbalances, as is reflected in divergent claims and liabilities of member states, leading Germany to accumulate intra-EMU claims on others. Instability thus becomes entrenched in the Union, while Germany maintains a hegemonic position.

Indigenous Anti/Deportation: Contesting Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Belonging in Canada and Australia

This article focuses on attempts by settler colonial states to deport Indigenous non-citizens. The concept of “Indigenous anti/deportation” is introduced to capture both the inseparability of deportation from its contestation, as well as the unique stakes involved in contesting the imminent deportation of members of Indigenous communities. Comparing cases in Canada and Australia, Indigenous anti/deportation highlights fundamentally divergent claims of sovereignty, the assertion of Indigenous citizenship orders, and a transformation of how belonging is understood in contexts of settler colonial occupation. This article concludes by considering the implications of cases of Indigenous anti/deportation for future struggles for Indigenous sovereignty and for solidarity-building between migrants and Indigenous peoples.

Successful for whom?: an examination of the general deterrent impact of the targeted killing of terrorist leaders on global terrorist fatalities

ABSTRACT Targeted killings are a prominent strategy for combatting terrorism and are regularly claimed to deter political violence. Employed against terrorist leaders like Osama bin Laden and others who are argued to be prominent terrorist threats, a growing body of evidence suggests that targeted killings do not achieve their desired general deterrent impacts. Yet, this strategy still enjoys great political support and targeted killings continue to be touted as examples of previous counterterrorism success even before their impacts could be observed. Aiming to disentangle whether there is an empirical basis for these divergent claims regarding the impacts of targeted killings, this study examines the impact of the killing of bin Laden on global patterns of terrorist fatalities. Employing group-based and dual trajectory models, our findings indicate that regardless of whether an explicit cut-point is included in the analysis, the killing of bin Laden coincided with a global increase in terrorist fatalities in many but not all countries, some of which had previously declining trajectories of fatalities from terrorism. The potential impacts of future targeted killings and general deterrence are discussed along with the need to consider terrorism consequences beyond national borders.

Absence of other and disruption of self: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of the meaning of loneliness in the context of life in a religious community

Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is an idiographic approach to qualitative research. It is widely used in psychologically-informed studies which aim to understand the meaning and context of specific experiences. In this paper, we provide some background and introduction to the principles and processes underpinning IPA research. We extend this via a practical example, reporting on selected analyses from a study which explores the phenomenology and meaning of loneliness, through interviews conducted with a group of religious women. Through our observations on the complex role of absence for loneliness, we show that IPA can be a powerful tool for exploring and understanding the meaning of salient experiences. We reflect on the significance of the results for advancing theories of loneliness; and on the capacity of the IPA approach to provide researchers with an important and useful phenomenological perspective, through its emphasis on context, and its commitment to integrating convergent and divergent claims.

Afterword: Precarity, Pedagogy, and the Public

AfterwordPrecarity, Pedagogy, and the Public Krista Comer (bio) Anyone close to the academic job market or to humanities graduate students or early career PhDs will feel the urgency that coeditors Surabhi Balachander and Jillian Moore have put at the center of their introduction to this singular special issue. Conceived importantly as a platform for emerging scholars juried by their editor peers, WAL readers find seven essays that range widely in critical topics, in hybrid creative/critical methodologies, and in a sense of audiences for research well beyond university readers. We also find the coeditors’ arguments about new critical turns in the field of western American literary and cultural studies toward, as they say, the personal and the pedagogical. Underlying the case for these turns are serious questions about where, how, and from whom “critical turns” might come when the infrastructures that have supported graduate education, faculty research, and organizational longevity are being dismantled. In the face of humanities crises, defunded university research, far fewer new tenure lines, the collapse of the job market, and imperiled association memberships— including in the Western Literature Association—how will research grow and thrive? As Balachander and Moore note, nearly ten years have gone by since I edited a 2013 special issue for Western American Literature titled “Young Scholars.” The name, incidentally, came to be in the editorial process. My original call for papers was circulated as “Emerging Field Directions from Younger Scholars.” At the time, a set of critical interventions and openings seemed afoot in new research, and the hope was a special issue could provide opportunities for junior scholars and graduate students as well [End Page 193] as a significant occasion for the field. I hoped also to give back as someone who had had quite a time on the market myself; indeed, the year I was WLA President in 2002 I had just moved to assistant professor from a lecturer appointment. If I felt job prospects were urgent in 2002, in 2013 that urgency was different and deeper. The field keywords of that moment included “postwest,” “postregionalism,” and “critical regionalism.” Un-conflating these concepts, which were muddied in one another, allowed me in the introduction to track their divergent claims and politics and to address directly the implications of the concept of the rhizome, especially as they bore on feminist frameworks, settler colonialism, and Indigenous sovereignty—keywords that were then emergent. I remember the number of essays I received, far more than could be accepted for publication. When I look back at the abstracts—as I did in thinking about this special issue—and when I think of very recent conferences and WAL essays, I see in them all various critical turns that have since, in my view, become widespread alongside settler frameworks and Indigenous sovereignty, namely: land ethics, place accountability, climate justice, eco-grief, and climate dread. With this “Emerging Scholars” special issue, the precarity of humanities research itself is rightly registering as a focus for the field of western American literary and cultural studies. In the hands of contributors, the demands of precarious scholarly environments are forcing the issue of research that reaches toward new publics and audiences and speaks in voices that likely skirt the classic conceptual training of graduate seminars. This sea change in who any of us writes for, why we write, where we publish, and the ability to conceive of a public-oriented criticism read by nonspecialists, is extremely important. Unlike western writers or historians, literature and culture scholars of the US West have not been as institutionally well-placed or secure in universities or popular authority. The need to innovate research practice and method and expand our audiences is fundamental in order to survive as knowledge producers who make a difference in consciousness about what “the US West” means or does. In very different ways, both Alison Turner’s work in “Perfectly [End Page 194] Designed for Connections: Zine Making in Denver Shelters” and Mika Kennedy’s creative nonfiction piece, “Peregrination 2036,” point toward research methods that support a western American literary and cultural studies of the future. Turner’s engaged research practice is one of collaborative relation with writers and artists who she...

Not at the table but stuck paying the bill: perceptions of injustice in China’s Xin’anjiang eco-compensation program

ABSTRACT A growing body of research highlights the decisive role that justice claims play in creating sustainable payment for ecosystem services (PES) programs. Employing Sikor et al.’s approach to the study of justice claims in ecosystem governance along three dimensions—distribution, procedure and recognition—we study the negotiation process behind China’s flagship interprovincial PES agreement: the Xin’anjiang River eco-compensation agreement between Huangshan (Anhui province) and Hangzhou (Zhejiang province) prefectures. We find that divergent claims between stakeholders on matters of distributive and procedural justice undercut one party’s commitment to the agreement. Local officials in the upstream locality (Huangshan) see themselves as having been disadvantaged in both procedural and distributive aspects of negotiation. They claim to have been insufficiently included in a bargaining process that involved not only the downstream locality (Hangzhou) but also the central government. Huangshan stakeholders also see themselves as largely excluded from the benefits of cleaner water and bearing too much of the pollution abatement cost. For their part, Hangzhou stakeholders have advanced a ‘polluters pay’ view of distributive justice and found partial support for this claim from Beijing. Our findings suggest that attending to environmental justice considerations should be given top priority in China’s design of PES schemes.

Constraints and divergent assessments of fertility in non-empirical physics in the history of the string theory controversy

This paper examines historic appraisals of string theory to develop a less abstract understanding of the string theory controversy and assessment in non-empirical physics. This historical approach reveals several points of conflict in the controversy, each centring on a constraint. By proceeding stepwise through these constraints, I reveal the role that constraints played in determining divergent assessments of string theory. Rather than disagreement between two competing methods, a level of agreement is found amongst those critical and supportive of string theory as to the commitment to the relevant constraints, but disagreement as to the sufficiency of consistency, the path to background independence and a non-perturbative formulation, and how to interpret the significance of applications. Furthermore, the string theory community itself is shown to be divided in its commitment to the necessity of uniqueness and the legitimacy of anthropic reasoning. These varied assessments, guided by considerations of constraints, have informed divergent claims as to the past and future fertility of string theory. These are claims as to the value of string theory in guiding research in quantum gravity: claims as to whether string theory has and will be valuable as a means rather than an end.

Fault Current of PV Inverters Under Grid-Connected Operation: A Review

As well as many benefits, many conflicts arise with the large-scale connection of distributed generation (DG) in distribution networks. Leading the protection devices to malfunction and increasing the complexity of fault location refer to the main DG impacts under fault condition. These issues are even more challenging by considering a scenario with photovoltaic (PV) distributed generation since there is an expressive number of articles presenting divergent claims about the fault current value reached by PV inverters. The different values reported in the literature increase the uncertainty about the real fault contribution from PV inverters. Under such a scenario, a wide survey and a critical review are presented in this article in order to show such divergence and to present a more intuitive insight into fault currents from PV inverters.

The burdens and the benefits: Socio-economic impacts of mobile phone ownership in Tanzania

Mobile phones figure prominently in discussions about international development and poverty alleviation, but existing research is ambiguous about its ultimate effects. We report on a qualitative investigation of mobile phone impact based on 133 semi-structured interviews with low- to middle-income individuals in Dar es Salaam and Arusha Region, Tanzania. We find that impacts on mobile users are indeed mixed, but that they can be categorized by their phone use habits: Simple Users use phones for socializing and entertainment; Deliberate Users additionally use their phones for work and business purposes; Advanced Users make striking technical use of their phones. Only the latter two – comprising a minority of our participants – appear to be benefiting financially from mobile phone use. We also find evidence that for some, mobile phone use competes with basic needs such as food. Our findings suggest one way to reconcile the divergent claims in that technology has disparate impact on different individuals. We discuss implications for policy and development interventions.

Contested extractivism: impact assessment, public engagement, and environmental knowledge production in Alaska's Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta

For large extractive mineral projects, Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) processes function in part as a procedural tool to adjudicate the legitimacy of divergent environmental truth claims. Successful anti-extraction movements work to litigate divergent knowledge claims in the public arena, but few anti-extraction communities have access to a broad public audience. This article examines the proposed Donlin Gold mine in southwestern Alaska, a locally divisive yet publicly invisible extraction controversy, to understand how communities contest the boundaries of knowledge production and legitimacy set out by EIS procedures without the benefit of broad public awareness. Through a multi-method analysis of the public engagement segment of Donlin's Draft EIS, we find that anti-Donlin activists worked to construct environmental knowledge that drew jointly on claims to local knowledge and scientific expertise through a temporary assemblage of local activists and external consultants. The contested epistemic understandings of residents, expert consultants, and state and federal regulators further reveal the role of regulatory processes in constructing and maintaining boundaries of epistemic legitimacy, while also pointing to emergent possibilities for social action based in locally-situated environmental truth claims.Key Words: Environmental Impact Statement, mining, truth claims, Donlin Gold mine, Alaska

The Bioethics of Translation: Latinos and the Healthcare Challenges of COVID-19

The Bioethics of Translation: Latinos and the Healthcare Challenges of COVID-19 Bryan Pilkington16 and Ana Campoverde17 COVID-19 has changed the way many people go about their daily lives and the manner in which they interact with each other. Many of the bioethical issues raised by the crisis, such as medical resource rationing and the responsibility to protect the vulnerable, have not arisen anew. Rather, they have merely been intensified by the pandemic’s magnitude. In bioethical discussions about the pandemic, a significant focus has been devoted to addressing medical equipment shortages such as the lack of personal protective equipment and ventilators and the ethical responsibility to protect others through mask-wearing. This focus suggests that reflection on two common bioethical themes—respect for justice in distribution and the sharing of full information—whether related to principles of justice and autonomy or located within discussion of human dignity, would be valuable. Recognizing how COVID-19 has disproportionally affected people by race or ethnicity is critical—and taking seriously the aforementioned paths of bioethics reflection, this essay departs from the usual discussions of resource allocation to concentrate on the Latino population and the importance of translation in two senses. It calls attention to the very practical need for translation resources in situations where language barriers exist between healthcare practitioners and patients. COVID-19 has intensified these challenges, as patients who are not proficient in the English language may experience delayed medical care or face other challenges.18 It points to the need to increase health literacy within a polarized cultural context where divergent claims on critical healthcare matters are offered by social and political authorities who lack the relevant scientific and [End Page 11] medical expertise. The dual need for translation resources and for the translation of broad information is felt heavily within the Latino community. The essay will first discuss the impact that COVID-19 has had on the Latino community. Second, given the deep importance of Catholicism within Latino communities, we turn attention to conceptual resources from within bioethics and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition that bear on resource allocation and information dissemination. Third, with sensitivity to Latino cultural practices, we offer grassroots recommendations, focusing on increased church-healthcare community partnerships. These partnerships would allow for greater information exchange, including more accurate information sharing, and the possibility of shifting some of the bioethical conversation from the allocation of resources that benefit a few to the allocation of resources that benefit the many. Impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. Latino Community Healthcare studies have long revealed that minority groups face health inequalities, sometimes with devastating results.19 The infection pattern of COVID-19 was not entirely surprising for health experts who work among the country’s most vulnerable populations. Research collected by the COVID Tracking Project, led by the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, reports that Latinos have been disproportionately affected by the disease, with 58 per 100,000 deaths due to COVID-19 compared to 38 per 100,000 white people.20 This may be due to the fact that members of the Latino community are more likely to have occupations in the service industry and live in multigenerational households, two factors that increase the risk of COVID-19 exposure. Early reports paint a picture of the Latino population being one of the hardest hit communities by COVID-19, aggravating pre-existing disparities in healthcare access and health literacy. In 2015, the National Hispanic Council on Aging found that 41 [End Page 12] percent of Latino adults lack basic health literacy, a challenge further compounded by linguistic and cultural barriers.21 Research has found that across the United States, minority patients who are not proficient in English are left without adequate language resources, potentially reducing their access to quality healthcare and resulting in higher rates of adverse health outcomes compared to English speakers. Of the 67.3 million people in the United States who speak a foreign language at home, 41.5 million speak Spanish and 25.6 million speak English “less than very well.”22 To alleviate language barriers, the Affordable Care Act mandates that healthcare facilities provide qualified interpreters to patients...

Liberalism and the Early American Novel

The early American novel has traditionally not received as much attention as contemporaneous writing in England and Europe. One reason for this relative lack of attention has been the continuing strength of mid-century claims that the models and familiar narrative for novel studies did not function well for an exceptional and purportedly classless America. Two recent studies, Joe Shapiro’s The Illiberal Imagination: Class and the Rise of the U.S. Novel (2017) and Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse’s Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example (2018) challenge this prior common sense by providing new approaches and methods to the long fiction written in the US in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Shapiro argues that early American novels were preoccupied by questions of class differences, and that different generic modes were chosen to cover a spectrum of positions that sought to downplay democratic urges by the labouring class. Armstrong and Tennenhouse use network theory to claim, conversely, that the early American novel’s preferred themes were meant to enable a democracy that could not occur in Great Britain. The divergent claims of these two monographs establish a new debate over how American studies should consider the antebellum novel.

Substitution or Facilitation: Service-Delivery NGOs and Political Engagement in the Peruvian Amazon

Whether nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) undermine or build democratic linkages between citizens and governments in developing contexts is a long-standing debate. This research explores the divergent claims of whether service-delivery NGOs, by doling out goods, decrease demands made of governments or whether they facilitate interactions with governments. Using a mixed-methods approach based on original household data from the Peruvian Amazon and interviews with community leaders, NGOs, and government, the research paints a nuanced picture fleshing out aspects of the NGO debate. The likelihood of pressing for services and interacting with government increases with more NGO interaction, supporting claims about the positive effects of NGOs. However, higher levels of NGO activity in communities can have a deterrence effect on petitioning government for support, a result that likely hinges on the role of information. The research has implications for the role of NGOs in affecting government responsiveness and accountability.

“You can call it a Mufassil Town, but nothing less”: Worlding the new census towns of India

In the census of 2011 in India, more than 2500 new settlements have been classified as urban. Placed under the category of ‘census towns’, not much is known about the urbanization processes unfolding at these sites. This article presents learnings from a qualitative case study of a town in West Bengal, to argue that not only do census towns represent a subaltern urbanization but also that they are produced through a range of parallel and competing projects and practices that do not lend themselves to any easy and formulaic understanding of the urban. Borrowing the idea of “worlding” as a conceptual tool to make sense of these processes, I argue that persistent hierarchies of power in the form of caste relations, form the foundation of this urbanization process even as multiple and divergent claims and discourses seek to mould the making of the town. This calls for renewed attention to the question of social justice when reading Indian urbanization.

Mortality trends for ischemic heart disease in China: an analysis of 102 continuous disease surveillance points from 1991 to 2009

BackgroundIn the past 20 years, the trends of ischemic heart disease (IHD) mortality in China have been described in divergent claims. This research analyzes mortality trends for IHD by using the data from 102 continuous Disease Surveillance Points (DSP) from 1991 to 2009.MethodThe 102 continuous DSP covered 7.3 million people during the period 1991–2000, and then were expanded to a population of 52 million in the same areas for 2004–2009. The data were adjusted by using garbage code redistribution and underreporting rate, mapped from international classification of diseases ICD-9 to ICD-10. The mortality rates for IHD were further adjusted by the crude death proportion multiplied by the total number of deaths in the mortality envelope, which was calculated by using logrt = a + bt. Age-standard death rates (ASDRs) were computed using China’s 2010 census population structure. Trend in IHD was calculated from ASDRs by using a joinpoint regression model.ResultsThe IHD ASDRs increased in total in regions with an average annual percentage change (AAPC) 4.96%, especially for the Southwest (AAPC = 7.97%) and Northeast areas (AAPC = 7.10%), and for male and female subjects (with 5% AAPC) as well. In rural areas, the year 2000 was a cut-off point for mortality rate with annual percentage change increasing from 3.52% in 1991–2000 to 9.02% in 2000–2009, which was much higher than in urban areas (AAPC = 1.05%). And the proportion of deaths increased in older adults, and more male deaths occurred before age 60 compared to female deaths.ConclusionBy observing a wide range of areas across China from 1991 to 2009, this paper concludes that the ASDR trend for IHD increased. These trends reflect changes in the Chinese standard of living and lifestyle with diets higher in fat, higher blood lipids and increased body weight.

Stories of Moral Actorship: European Union and Chinese Narratives Towards Africa

European Union (EU) leaders have recently started internal discussions about the framework to shape relations with sub-Saharan African countries in the post-Cotonou period. The process is set against the background of increasing contestation over the African continent, most prominently with China. This article argues that for the EU to properly address this competition, it needs to conceptualize it as unfolding not only on the material but also on the ideational level. Contrary to common belief, China is not an amoral actor in Africa, but rather the source of a complex and historically-rooted alternative view on the global system and development cooperation, a view that might be appealing to disenchanted African audiences. Building upon the conceptual framework of ‘strategic narrative’, this article systematically deconstructs the EU and Chinese narratives towards Africa into their core components at the system, identity, relationship and issue level. Empirically, the article is based upon a qualitative analysis of core policy documents on Africa covering the period 2000–2015. By contributing to a better understanding and contextualization of the divergent views and claims espoused by the two narratives, this article lays the foundation for a broader research agenda aimed at grasping the normative competition faced by the EU in Africa.

Growth Convergence and Regional Inequality in India (1981–2012)

There has been significant research effort to study the impact of liberalisation on growth and distribution in India. Using per capita income (PCI) data for the period 1981–82 to 2012–13 (28 regions for the entire period and 31 regions for 2001–2 to 2012–13) at the sub-national level in India we examine the claims of divergence and stratification (twin peak formation) as has been claimed in some of the recent literature. We confirm that there is divergence of PCI. We present the first set of tests of multimodality in the Indian convergence debate using Silverman (J R Stat Soc 43:97–99, 1981; Density estimation for statistics and data analysis. Monographs on statistics and applied probability, Chapman & Hall, London, 1986) procedure. Weighted kernel density plots and multi-modal tests reveal that there is emergence of “multi-modes” in the distribution of PCI, not just twin modes. The spatial pattern of growth reflects an area of stagnation in the eastern-central belt—Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Orissa, and in the north eastern part of India—Assam and Manipur and a decline in Mizoram. Sikkim demonstrates fastest growth, whereas Gujarat, Haryana, Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, Tamil Nadu (among the big states) and Himachal Pradesh, and Andaman and Nicobar (small state and Union Territories) maintained their position. Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh (among the southern states), Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland (among the north eastern states) along with Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh, moved up in the growth ladder. The continuation of growth stagnation in most of the BIMARU states poses a challenge to received theories of growth convergence and raises developmental concerns that the increased play of market forces in the Indian economy have not been able to overcome.