Early Articulation Research Articles

The Environmental Land Management Scheme: Public goods and levels of ambition

The Environmental Land Management Scheme is now established as the central plank of financial assistance for farmers in England post-Brexit. Early articulations of policy directed the focus of the Scheme to the delivery of public goods, with a high level of ambition. More recently, however, greater weight is being accorded to food production and food security, with particular reference to the Sustainable Farming Incentive component, which is achieving broad coverage and accounting for the majority of the Scheme budget, but the environmental actions which it requires to unlock payment would not seem materially to be raising the bar. By contrast, the Landscape Recovery component remains ambitious in terms of scheme design, collaborative approach, emphasis on outcomes, duration and implementation at landscape scale, with the consequence that good reasons may be presented for its expansion within the policy mix.

Managing sustainable transition through farmer-owned enterprises: the case of Ram Rahim Pragati Producer Company

PurposeFood systems research is typically focused on productivity and efficiency. But in the face of impending challenges of climate, investment, markets, and incomes small holders may do well to shift to diversity and sufficiency. The transition requires institutions such as Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) to play the role of intermediaries. This paper aims to understand this challenging phenomenon using a case from India.Design/methodology/approachIn this article, drawing from the emerging literature of PO as a sustainability transition intermediary, this paper uses the case study of a women-owned FPO and explores its role in contributing to sustainable food systems through practices of non-pesticide management of agriculture. This paper explores, through non-participant observer methods, focus group discussions and interviews with multiple stakeholders how an FPO embeds sustainability in its purpose and the challenges faced in transforming producer and consumers towards sustainable food systems.FindingsThe study argues for early articulation of the “sustainability transition intermediary” role in the FPO’s vision and mission. Second, FPOs’ role of being a transition intermediary is impacted by the key stakeholders and the durability of relationship with them.Originality/valueBy studying FPOs in India, from the framework of sustainability transitions, this article adds to the limited literature that looks as POs as sustainability transition intermediaries.

Original Nothingness and Wu - Compounds: Re-interpreting the Daodejing 's Discourse on Nothingness

Abstract: Daoist thought often takes nothingness as a foundational source of generation that can also be harnessed to good government. This study re-interprets the Daodejing' s original discourse on nothingness in terms of an original condition, which it connects to the variety of philosophically significant wu -compounds found throughout the text. It examines two early articulations of this discourse by drawing a contrast between the thought of Laozi and the thought of Heshang Gong.

Finding Agency in Reciprocity: A Story of Learning

This essay considers the relationship between ethnography, reciprocity, and agency in teaching and learning. Starting with the early articulation of reciprocal ethnography defined by Dr. Elaine Lawless and following the trajectory of her scholarship of reciprocity, the author focuses particularly on the social justice promise of creating dialogical spaces through reciprocity and begins to explore what this may mean for creating new critical understandings about extant cultural social narratives. This is further considered in light of the enactment of reciprocal pedagogy, which, when extended with an aim toward progressive educational goals, centers inquiry which can disrupt normative authority through diverse perspectives. Engaging the powerful assertion that folk arts education can produce a Freirian ([1970] 2005) space of conscientização, or critical consciousness, the examples illustrate the potential for the sharing of analytical and interpretative power in order to create a fissure in the hierarchical world that chronically ascribes discursive power and agency to a limited cohort. Recognizing the relationship between reciprocal ethnography and agency proves liberatory in both classrooms and communities.

Review: To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America, by Felicia Angeja Viator

Review: <i>To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America</i>, by Felicia Angeja Viator

HeathcliffWalks

Heathcliff<i>Walks</i>

Old Prejudices and New Prejudices: State Surveillance and Harassment of Irish and Jewish Communities in London – 1800-1930

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between the ‘othering’ of Irish and Jewish communities in London up to the end of the 1920s, and punitive action and harassment against these minorities on the part of the British state. Beginning by looking at early articulations of antisemitic and anti-Irish prejudice, it will consider how the associations of both groups with radical politics and transgressive behaviour led to the negative involvement of the Metropolitan Police in the lives of Jewish and Irish Londoners on a day-to-day level at the end of the Victorian era and into the Edwardian period. The situation was then exacerbated through the experience of war, and the revolutionary events in Dublin in 1916 and Petrograd in 1917. Irish and Jewish communities, as transnational diasporas, were associated with international subversion, and militant action in London itself. The article will discuss the campaign waged by the state in its various manifestations between 1918 and 1922, including arrest and imprisonment without trial and deportation to Ireland and Eastern Europe. It will conclude by identifying how the actions of the state against Irish and Jewish communities anticipated action against other minorities over the course of the twentieth century.

Original Sin and the Fall: Five Views

Original Sin and the Fall: Five Views

Deconstruction and Epistemic Violence

AbstractWhile theorists of epistemic injustice often refer to Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak” as an early articulation of the field’s concerns, they have stopped short of engaging deeply with Spivak’s deconstructive take on epistemic violence and her suggestion that this consists in an attribution of subjectivity to historically marginalized speakers. In redressing this oversight, this article makes a case for adopting a broader conception of epistemic harm and exclusion than has been acknowledged in the literature: I argue that the presumption that speakers are subjects can precipitate silencing. For in determining the other who speaks as a subject, one forecloses hospitality to an alterity not already understood according to the subject/object distinction central to Western metaphysics. This deconstructive intervention thus challenges one of the field’s key assumptions, namely, that epistemic harm consists in a failure to treat speakers as subjects, and consequently that generating a more inclusive dialogical climate depends on restoring marginalized individuals to subject status. Folding Spivak’s deconstructive insight into the remedial project of epistemic justice is therefore far from straightforward; nonetheless, I argue that it is consistent with the literature’s demand for a heightened sensitivity vis‐à‐vis the ways marginalized others are routinely harmed in epistemic practices.

"So that the Errors of Magicians and Witches Might be Made Evident to Ignorant People": An Early European Witchcraft Treatise from the 1430s

This article contains the first complete English translation of Claude Tholosan's treatise on the crime of witchcraft, usually known by its opening sentence, "So that the Errors of Magicians and Witches Might be Made Evident to Ignorant People." Written in the 1430s, a crucial decade in the growth of the idea of diabolical, conspiratorial witchcraft in Western Europe, Tholosan's treatise provides important insight into early articulations of secular authority over the crime of witchcraft. The English here is based on the Latin edition by Pierette Paravy.

Introduction: Neighbors, Neighborhoods, Neighboring

This special issue, “Neighbors, Neighborhoods, Neighboring,” engages some of the ways the ethical concept of the neighbor — in both its early articulations and contemporary theorizations — is curre...

Radical Islamic Democracy

Can democracy be at once radical and Islamic? In this paper I argue that it can. My argument is based on a comparison and contrast of certain aspects in the social-political thought of two contemporary authors: Axel Honneth who defends a particular conception of radical democracy, and Rached al-Ghannouchi who defends a particular conception of the Islamic state. I begin with Honneth’s early articulation of his model of radical democracy as reflexive cooperation, which he presents as an alternative that reconciles Arendtian republicanism and Habermasian proceduralism while avoiding their weaknesses. I also refer to his more mature conception of democracy by way of highlighting his understanding of democracy as a process of constituting civil society. This is significant for the purposes of this paper since it forms the most important link between Honneth’s radical democracy and Ghannouchi’s Islamic model of political rule. I then introduce Ghannouchi’s theoretical account of the Islamic state with a focus on his conception of shura (consultation) in order to bring to the fore both the similarities and dissimilarities with Honneth’s theory of democracy. By this point I will have identified Islamic resources for a conception of democracy that, like Honneth’s democracy as reflexive cooperation, shares with proceduralism an instrumental view of democratic procedures, and with republicanism a strong connection between the pre-political social level and politics. Next, I ask whether this conception of radical Islamic democracy can square its dual commitment to pluralism and Islamic unity. Again, I draw on Ghannouchi’s thought to respond to the challenge, doing so in a way that brings out the agonistic dimension in radical Islamic democracy. I conclude by making explicit how radical Islamic democracy carves out a conceptual space in which proceduralist, republican and agonistic features are combined.

Positive Peace, Paradox, and Contested Liberalisms

Particular conceptions of peace can be associated with logics of dominance and imposition, but also human flourishing and emancipation. These dynamics have been amply explored in debates about liberal peacebuilding over the past two decades. Despite a recent renaissance of attention, however, the concept of positive peace has only rarely been problematized to the same extent. That is unfortunate because it has the potential to operate at both ends of this imposition-emancipation spectrum. This paper revisits Galtung’s early (1960s) articulation of positive peace in order to resurface its fundamental radicalism, together with some of its inherent tensions, paradoxes and politics, particularly insofar as one might try to operationalize the theory. It then explores the linkages between the concept of positive peace and the prevailing peacebuilding paradigm of our day: liberal peacebuilding. I argue that our understanding of both positive peace and liberal peacebuilding can be clarified when viewed through the lens of contested liberalisms and conflicting liberal values. Advancing peace theory and praxis at this stage would benefit from an increasing willingness to openly confront some of these conflicts and a greater degree of transparency about our liberal commitments, including in the hard, “real world” cases where tensions seem irreconcilable.

A Translation of Pedro de Alvarado’s 1526 Contract with the Spanish Crown: Pacific Exploration and Territoriality

Following the return to Spain of the remnant from the Magellan-Elcano voyage around the world (1519–22), various other Spanish voyages attempted to find the elusive return route eastward across the Pacific. Among those who proposed to search for that route was Pedro de Alvarado, a veteran of the conquests of Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. In 1526, Alvarado visited the court of the young king of Spain, Charles I, then residing in Granada, and obtained a contract with the crown to build a fleet of ships in Guatemala to explore both westward into the Pacific, and northward along the coast of North America. The full text of the contract included benefits to Alvarado for the preparation of the voyage and rewards that he would receive if he was successful, but it left no doubt that the crown and its delegated overseers would remain in control of the enterprise. Nearly half of the text dealt with the proper treatment of peoples whom Alvarado’s expedition might encounter, in an attempt to atone for the abuses committed by earlier expeditions. The contract with Alvarado was an early articulation of the principle of territoriality, by which states claimed and defended rights of ownership and jurisdiction over lands, peoples, and resources, whether or not they had already been discovered.

‘Think of Him as The President’: Tabloid Trump and the Political Imaginary, 1980–1999

Abstract Years before Twitter, Fox News, or reality TV, Donald Trump became a public figure through his presence in tabloid media. Much of that focused on sex and spectacle, but early tabloid coverage of Trump was also surprisingly political, with speculation about a possible presidential campaign beginning as early as 1987. Although that coverage has been largely overlooked, this study reveals that tabloid media played a central role in building the foundations of Trump’s political identity. It tracks the early articulation of the Trump character and its simultaneous politicization within a media space outside the ostensibly legitimate arena of institutional public-affairs journalism. In so doing, it reveals the deeper contours of an imagined political world in which a Trump presidency could be conceivable in the first instance—a political imaginary adjacent to the deep assumptions of liberal Democracy, and therefore long invisible to most serious observers of presidential politics.

Drivers of support: The case of species reintroductions with an ill-informed public

ABSTRACTSuccessful rewilding of large carnivores depends on public acceptance, but the public frequently has little awareness about wildlife and specific reintroduction proposals. This article evaluated the determinants of public support for grizzly bear reintroduction in California to understand how value orientations, political ideology, and demographics predict attitudes when the public has little species-specific knowledge. We surveyed 980 Californians, showing that value orientations, awareness, and perceptions of costs and benefits shaped attitudes toward grizzly reintroduction, even when only one-quarter of the respondents knew that grizzly bears were extirpated from California. Almost two-thirds of respondents were supportive of reintroduction, rationalizing their support with assessments of societal and ecological costs and benefits. Lack of public awareness, perceptions of personal threats, and willingness to rationalize stated preferences provide cautionary notes to managers. Our results suggest that managers should offer early articulation of costs, benefits, and threats before reintroductions become politicized and opposition becomes entrenched.

Finding Ada: Socially Situated Historical Methods and Nineteenth Century Feminist Activism

Ada Metcalf’s 1876 memoir, Lunatic Asylums and How I Became an Inmate of One, is an early feminist articulation of embodied experience and agency. In this article, I develop a socially situated understanding of this memoir’s historical significance through the layering of four types of data onto the archival material: bureaucratic records, genealogical tracing, intertextual tracing, and field observations. I describe each of these forms of data and their contributions to understanding the significance of Ada’s taking back agency over her body through her public argument for women’s control over their own bodies.

경쟁적 현대성: 경제, 인식론 그리고 포스트모던 문화

This paper argues that postmodernism is not the end of something, as many theorists would have it, a cultural formation that follows something called modernism; rather, postmodernism is the early articulation of a new era of contested modernity. The paper seeks to advance this argument by analyzing the intertextual relation between Edward Hopper’s “The Nighthawks” (1942) and Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982). Furthermore, this intertextual relationship is reflected epistemologically in a discussion of Lukacs’s notion of realism and Ricoeur’s notion of utopia. The era of multiple or contested modernity is a consequence of the rapid economic modernization of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, and other countries in the region. It signals a new era, in which being advanced or modern is not the monopoly of the West. The paper outlines a three-level model of cultural analysis, where an economic development (contested modernity) is reflected in epistemology (realism and utopia), which informs the cultural domain (postmodern culture). The relationships between the three levels are fluid, dynamic, and multidirectional.

Visual Methods in Event Studies

Following the early articulation of event studies and the recent calls for philosophical and conceptual broadening of this emerging field, it is timely to engage with, and promote, a range of methodological approaches. Visual methods not only enable a richer and deeper understanding of events phenomena, the visuals collected or created as a part of a research project can facilitate the dissemination of findings to wider audiences. Whereas the overall aim of the special issue is to provide an overview of visual methods and inspire thinking in this area, this introductory article focuses mainly on wider conceptual and theoretical matters. It offers critical concepts and probing questions aimed at stimulating visual inquiry, along with a framework designed to capture the complexity and scope of visual inquiry in events.

Postgraduate supervision and the early stages of the doctoral journey

This article looks at two previous study reports on postgraduate supervision, views, and experiential as well as academic advice from other scholars. It presents the various perspectives on the central phenomenon relationship between the supervisor and the doctoral student at the initial stages of the PhD programme, arguments, suggestions and insights into the nature and substance of PhD supervision, early articulation of expectations and clarifying them; commitment to establishment of clear goals; and developing a study plan and time-table that are consistent with work. It also explores knowledge and a warm, supportive relationship; planning from the beginning, including research mapping and concept charting; proper time-management; and internalising the criteria for examination of a PhD thesis, capacity to relate the research topic to the discipline; encouraging the use of writing as a voyage of discovery. It argues that all these are vital to sustaining the momentum and completion of a PhD by research. It concludes that postgraduate supervision requires that supervisors and doctoral students by research clarify and discuss their expectations at the beginning and on a continuous and regular basis; that differences in perception or procedure can present the supervisor and the student with debilitating challenges that can impede progress and eventually fail to get the coveted PhD.