Emergent Scholarship Research Articles

Uneven and divergent spatial figurations: A five-pronged typology of urban and peri-urban formations in Romania

This paper introduces a five-pronged typology to conceptualize the variegated and dynamic spatial figurations of urban and peri-urban areas in Romania, addressing a gap in the current literature on planetary urbanization by elucidating the differentiation between and within peri-urban spaces. Through analyses incorporating principal components, cluster analyses, association and analysis of variance this study delineates the distinctive patterns of demographic, economic, and spatial transformations across Romania's urban landscape. The typology not only highlights the complexities of peri-urban development, but also provides a critical framework for examining the socio-economic forces shaping these areas. We show that peri-urban spaces exhibit considerable heterogeneity; their processes of formation, dynamics, relationships with core cities, and trajectories vary significantly and are contingent upon specific contexts. This is what we synthetically call uneven and divergent spatial figurations that peri-urban development produces. We enlarge the “spatial figuration” framework that springs from the Lefebvrian trialectic of spatial production to challenge the urban-rural dichotomies and highlight the inter-scalar dynamics of change in the discontinuous and historically rooted peri-urban areas. The text contributes to emergent scholarship in the field that has shifted focus from examining the emergence of peri-urban spaces to addressing the diverse typologies of these spatial formations and their internal variation.

Following the yellowcake road: exploring the colonial roots and routes of Australian radioactive minerals, 1900s–1950s

ABSTRACT Over the past 40 years, environmental justice activists and scholars have drawn greater attention to the disproportionate environmental burdens borne by marginalised communities. This includes the consequences of ‘nuclear colonialism’, a phenomenon defined as constituting ‘a system of domination through which governments and corporations target indigenous peoples and their lands to maintain the nuclear production process’. In this article, I seek to complicate this definition of nuclear colonialism by exploring the role of uranium mining in consolidating both British and Australian settler colonial power during the first half of the twentieth century. I will do so through an examination of Australian uranium’s roots and routes as both a manifestation and facilitator of settler colonialism in Australia between 1900 and 1955. Combining sources from both British and Australian archives, this article seeks to contribute to emergent scholarship on the colonial dimensions of mineral extraction in two ways. Firstly, by explicating the role uranium played in fuelling the extractive mentalities of settler colonial Australia. And secondly, by exploring uranium extraction’s contribution to the consolidation of the British Empire’s waning power in the mid-twentieth century.

From news disengagement to fake news engagement: Examining the role of news-finds-me perceptions in vulnerability to fake news through third-person perception

Despite the wealth of literature vested in the association between social media use and vulnerability to fake news, it remains underexplored how and what kinds of social media usage contribute to fake news susceptibility. To fill this research gap, we draw upon the emergent scholarship of News-Finds-Me and propose a new conceptual model to examine fake news vulnerability and engagement in digital worlds. Drawing upon an online national sample in the US (N = 1014), results corroborated the prevalence of the News-Finds-Me perception, a social media-derived news attainment pattern that propels users to misconceive knowledgeability, over-depend on intimate peers and algorithms, and disengage from active news learning. Furthermore, evidence showed that News-Finds-Me perceptions make individuals more likely to believe and share fake news by creating a biased mentality that one is fake-news-proof while others are fake-news-impressionable. Such an asymmetric cognitive fallacy is called Third-Person Perception in literature. Our findings elucidate that the widely noted social media empowerment hypothesis might be double-sided. While social media can facilitate the dissemination and diversification of knowledge, they may also foster a sense of illusioned knowledgeability and overconfidence. This, in turn, could impede users from being adequately informed.

What is translanguaging and raciolinguistics doing in the field of curriculum studies?

This article critically examines the intersections of translanguaging, raciolinguistics, and curriculum studies within the context of Latin America. It interrogates how dominant discourses and practices perpetuate coloniality and linguistic hierarchies in the region. Through an analysis of a special issue of the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, the paper explores how emergent scholarship challenges the hegemony of Global English and disrupts colonial narratives embedded in national educational policies. By theorizing curriculum at the intersection of translanguaging, raciolinguistics, and sociopolitical contexts, this article advocates for a counter-curriculum that prioritizes the epistemic agency of historically excluded communities. Translanguaging practices emerge as a form of resistance, underscoring the role pedagogy plays in subverting dominant language ideologies. They challenge Eurocentric ways of knowing by advancing inclusive pedagogies rooted in local knowledges and linguistic diversity. Ultimately, the article advocates for a decolonial curriculum that prioritizes linguistic autonomy, cultural pluralism, and epistemic justice in Latin America and beyond.

Whose Security? Conflict and (Critical) Security Studies in the Middle East and North Africa

Security Studies (SS) is a subfield of International Relations (IR) concerned with the ways that conflict and violence contribute to shaping the world. The subfield’s concern with the conditions of war and peace has situated the state as the referent object of security and produced a state-centrism in scholarship, academic journals, and teaching that overemphasizes security as a policy problem. Beginning in the early 1990s challenges to state-centrism emerged through Human Security (HS) and Critical Security Studies (CSS) approaches that sought to challenge and rethink the referent objects of security while introducing more critical theoretical traditions from which to research, publish, and teach about what constitutes threat and security. These new approaches expanded inquiry into security and oriented scholars around different ways of approaching questions of what security is and for whom (or what) it is produced. Despite the expansion of the different subfields of inquiry into security, a common criticism levelled at these approaches concerned how regions of the Global South were incorporated into scholarship. In this reflective essay, I draw inspiration from these criticisms to ask how the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has been studied, taught, and theorized from in the fields of Security Studies and Critical Security Studies. The principal question guiding this essay is What do different traditions in Security Studies have to tell us about conflict in the Middle East and North Africa? I seek to reflect on how the region, its peoples, and their experiences are incorporated into these fields and how this has shaped scholarly and popular understandings of conflict and peace in the MENA. I wish to reflect on how tensions between the MENA’s incorporation into SS and CSS produce patterns of visibility and invisibility. I then shift attention to a discussion of how the emergent scholarship on non-Western IR and other approaches from within the MENA region itself may contribute to different ways of researching and teaching conflict and security in the MENA. The essay concludes with some observations about the future of conflict and security studies in the MENA with an emphasis on key questions that are raised in the context of the region’s contemporary overlapping crises.

Urban political economy of elite education: international programs in Chinese elite public high schools

ABSTRACT This ethnographic data-driven article investigates the urban political economy of a new form of elite schooling, which is represented by the fee-charging international programs recently established by ‘key’ public high schools in metro China. Grounding the analysis in Harvey’s work on urbanization and neoliberalism, the literature on China’s development model, and Bourdieu’s theory of capital conversion, this article reveals that the construction of an international program is deeply implicated in the school’s social relationships with the state, real estate developers, and urban middle classes. While the program provides wealthy Chinese families with access to international higher education for accumulating desirable capitals at ‘world-class’ universities, the Chinese elite school generates its own capital. Through theorizing how the creation of the fee-charging international program draws together multiple forms of neoliberal profit-making and multi-scalar capital accumulation, this study adds novel conceptual and empirical insights to the emergent scholarship of elite and international education.

Rethinking Mutual Aid Through the Lens of Social Reproduction: How Platform Drivers Ride Out Work and Life in Bengaluru, India

This paper presents an ethnographic account of the support and mutual aid mechanisms evolved by members of an app-based cab drivers union in Karnataka during the recurrent ‘waves’ of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also describes the app-based-driver-led infrastructures of support that were in place during ‘normal’ times, even before the pandemic. The paper deploys ethnographic methods and a feminist political economy lens to analyse the workings of platform capital and its processes of value extraction. While previous scholarship has presented platform workers’ everyday acts of mutual support as ‘resilience’ or as indicative of the ‘embeddedness’ of labour, this paper adopts an analytical lens drawing from Marxist and socialist feminist scholarship on social reproduction. I draw attention to the ‘productive’ work that everyday practices of support and mutual aid do for ‘technology platforms’ like Uber and Ola, and illustrate the mutual dependence and relation between the (capitalistically) ‘productive’ sphere and the reproductive sphere of life-making, and the heightened crisis of the latter engendered by newer modes of production. This paper reveals the gamut of unpaid and invisible labours which workers expend on an everyday basis and from which platform businesses extract value. It contributes to emergent scholarship on platform work and social reproduction feminism by pointing to spaces outside the home and institutions other than the family in providing reproductive labour that is generative of value for (platform) capital.

Geographies of gender and sexuality I: Engaging the shift towards Southern urbanism

Geographers working on sexuality - and specifically of relevance to this report, scholars working on non-heternormative sexualities - have come to understand the need to engage with the urban South, culminating in acknowledgement of the benefits of engagements with Southern urbanism literature. I summarise how very recent sexualities scholarship is starting to signal direct connections with some of the broader interests of Southern urbanism. Such scholarship, I argue, has more in common with some of the empirical and theoretical interests of Southern urbanism than existing interests of the geographies of sexualities literature. I also consider how such emergent scholarship can potentially enrich interests of the geographies of sexualities literature in new and exciting ways.

Later‐Life Learning Among Latin Americans in Canada: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Place

This article examines interconnections between place‐based education and the Latin American Canadian migratory life course. It presents findings of a grounded theory study that utilized in‐depth interviews of 15 Latin American Canadian immigrant older adults (55 years and older) who participate in a mobile adult day support programme in northwest Toronto. The study explored the experiences of service‐users of place‐based education aimed at developing or strengthening their livelihood strategies. Findings revealed that many ageing immigrants view place‐based education as a vital resource that supports their ability to access culturally specific and mainstream services, expands their social networks, and can boost their life chances at successive life course stages. However, findings also indicated that immigrants also view place‐based education as inadequate and ill‐timed and would have preferred greater access to education when they first settled in Canada. The article contributes to emergent scholarship on ageing, transnational migration, and localized education for settlement and integration. Conceptually, it advances a life course justice approach to racialized immigrants’ later‐life learning by underscoring the utility of integrating a critical pedagogy of place into community education.

The three pointers of research and development (R&D) for growth-boosting sustainable innovation system

Research and development (R&D) is frequently touted and labelled as the fundamental engine for creating sustainable innovations and achieving climate transitions. Yet, recent R&D efforts have struggled to live up to the widespread life-altering results they delivered in the 1960s when the term R&D was coined. In our attempt to address this concern, we propose a sustainability pathway model to achieving an economically viable innovation system that is anchored in three important pointers of R&D which have long been viewed as mutually distinct components in R&D budgets—investment, talent, and learning institutions. Directing attention to the pervasive need to align R&D investments with talents and learning institutions, we delineate how these pointers of R&D coming together to constitute a trivalent force may drive a growth-boosting sustainable innovation system. While there is no simple recipe which suggests an optimal combination of new scientific understanding, technologies, and process that could help produce the much-needed innovations and technological change, we present a set of propositions that highlights opportunities for reflection on existing R&D investment strategies and serves as a bridge to connect the emergent scholarship on sustainability with the intellectual traditions of R&D in innovation management.

Testing the cognitive involvement hypothesis on social media: 'News finds me' perceptions, partisanship, and fake news credibility

Social media has been implicated in the proliferation of fabricated news narratives posing as professional journalism. In response, scholars have prioritized the study of the antecedents and outcomes of citizen's ability to detect so-called ‘fake news’. Growing evidence supports the cognitive involvement hypothesis, which states that deeper reflection and elaboration on news content increases one's tendency to correctly identify fake news. This study adds to this literature by exploring connections between reliance on social media for news and emergent scholarship on the News Finds Me Perception (NFMP). We argue that the NFMP represents a low-effort cognitive style of attention to news and therefore, high NFMP respondents are more likely to evaluate fake news as credible. Furthermore, we examine whether this association holds despite partisan affiliation. Panel survey data from the United States provide robust evidence that the NFMP is associated with inaccurate assessments of both apolitical and pro-conservative fake news stories. Moderation analyses show that NFMP is a boundary condition for media effects; reliance on social media for news only leads to fake news acceptance when people hold the NFMP, and this effect exacerbates partisan motivated reasoning. Implications for theory building are discussed.

Canaries in the climate coal mine: Climate change and COVID-19 as meta-crisis

For many Brazilians and Americans, the year 2020 was marked by unprecedented environmental catastrophes alongside the COVID-19 pandemic. In Brazil and the United States, the impact of these existential threats was particularly acute in the third quarter of the year with both countries experiencing record-breaking environmental disasters and high mortality rates from the virus. The research examines a media flashpoint on the eve of the 2020 U.S. presidential election: a transnational discussion between Brazilians and Americans hosted by three flagship papers in Brazil and the U.S.: O Estado de São Paolo, Folha de São Paulo, and the New York Times. Engaging with one another across the three digital discourse fora, Brazilian and American contributors discuss the double onslaught of the pandemic and climate change. For them, the simultaneous threats of extreme climate events and viral contamination amplify each other, generating a traumatic sense of meta-crisis. This sense of meta-crisis encompasses a collective acknowledgment of the breakdown of two key societal institutions in both Brazil and the United States meant to combat these existential crises: science and the media. The perception of these institutions as dysfunctional further exacerbates the collective cultural trauma among Brazilians and Americans. In making these connections, this article puts theories of cultural trauma into dialogue with emergent scholarship on the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change from a cross-national perspective.

Industrial Infrastructure: Translocal Planning for Global Production in Ethiopia and Argentina

Current development and re-development of industrial areas cannot be adequately understood without taking into account the organisational structures and logistics of commodity production on a planetary scale. Global production networks contribute not only to the reconfiguration of urban spatial and economic structures in many places, but they also give rise to novel transnational actor constellations, thus reconfiguring planning processes. This article explores such constellations and their urban outcomes by investigating two current cases of industrial development linked with multilateral transport-infrastructure provisioning in Ethiopia and Argentina. In both cases, international partners are involved, in particular with stakeholders based in China playing significant roles. In Mekelle, Ethiopia, we focus on the establishment of a commodity hub through the implementation of new industry parks for global garment production and road and rail connections to international seaports. In the Rosario metropolitan area in Argentina, major cargo rail and port facilities are under development to expand the country’s most important ports for soybean export. By mapping the physical architectures of the industrial and infrastructure complexes and their urban contexts and tracing the translocal actor constellations involved in infrastructure provisioning and operation, we analyse the spatial impacts of the projects as well as the related implications for planning governance. The article contributes to emergent scholarship and theorisations of urban infrastructure and global production networks, as well as policy mobility and the transnational constitution of planning knowledge and practices.

Ethical veganism as nonreligion in Mr J Casamitjana Costa v the League Against Cruel Sports

In January 2020, an employment tribunal in the United Kingdom decided that ethical veganism qualified for protection from discrimination as a philosophical belief under the UK’s Equality Act 2010. This article explores the reasoning behind this judgement, as presented in the preliminary hearing decision for Mr J Casamitjana Costa v The League Against Cruel Sports, to argue that ethical veganism in this context can be conceptualized as a form of nonreligion. This article uses a relational theory of nonreligion to demonstrate how ethical veganism in this case is constructed to be distinct from religious belief while also being conceptually entangled with religion. It contributes to emergent scholarship on nonreligion, and veganism and (non)religion, by demonstrating how a relational framework allows connections among these phenomena to be articulated and explored with greater depth. In addition, this article considers the diversity of ethical veganism as an identity and practice in relation to its legal construction as a philosophical belief. Attention is paid to the ways in which veganism as lived can intersect with religion, nonreligion and areligion.

Patterns of inequality in global forest science conferences: An analysis of actors involved in IUFRO World Congresses with a focus on gender and geography

Inequality has become a core topic of forest-related research: Forest scholars have investigated how socio-economic and gender inequalities impact on forest use, how power asymmetries shape forest politics and governance, and how gendered professional norms contribute to the marginalization of women in forest industry and education. However, to what extent the forest science community is itself structured by inequality and what effect this may have has so far not been explored.We address this gap by analysing the diversity of actors involved global forest science conferences, which we deem a crucial space of research communication and knowledge circulation. Our study covers the past three World Congresses of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) that took place in 2010, 2014 and 2019. We examine the social structure of these events with a focus on the dimensions of gender and geography, based on scholars' sex and affiliation, and disaggregated by different conference roles (members of congress scientific committees, keynote/plenum speakers, session chairs and presenters).Our results show that the actor composition notably diversified over the past decade, with more women and scholars from Southern world regions performing active roles in the congresses. However, male forest scientists based in the Global North continue to dominate the events in numerical terms. Significant gender and geography-related inequalities persist, and they remain particularly pronounced in actor groups with high agenda-setting and gate-keeping power.Our analysis points at social patterns within the forest science community that are likely to impact on the knowledge it generates.To make global forest science conferences a more inclusive space of scholarly exchange, we suggest two sorts of ‘affirmative action’ in the context of conference organisation: The first is to tackle ‘backstage’ inequalities by involving more scientists from under-represented groups as members of congress scientific committees and session chairs. The second is to make conscious choices about place, as our analysis corroborates the finding that for some groups of scholars, the congress location immensely impacts on their chances to take part.Our study contributes to the emergent scholarship on conferences which we conceptualise as constituting spaces of scientific fields. Revealing inequalities in IUFRO World Congresses, we aim at stimulating a critical-constructive reflection among members of the forest research community.

What lies beneath? Spectrality as a focal phenomenon and a focal theory for strengthening engagement with philanthropic foundations

AbstractFoundations are frequently referred to as a donor's dead hand, as a way to exert social, political, economic and cultural influence from beyond the grave. Building on this, our paper argues for a greater focus on and consideration of the significance of the spectral in philanthropy research and practice, particularly in relation to foundations. We argue that spectrality offers a focal phenomenon in philanthropy and a focal theory for moving foundation inquiry forward. Based on our systematic review of the social sciences literature on the spectral, we identify and offer four thematic clusters to frame insights about foundations in relation to relationality and decentring, narratives and representations, ethics and politics, continuity and change. Connecting foundation scholarship with existing debates about the spectral and vice versa, our work offers a basis for reflection and future research on the part of those immersed in the foundation world, and contributes to emergent scholarship about the spectral in organization and management studies.

Achieving Justice for Disabled Parents and Their Children: An Abolitionist Approach

The social uprisings following the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and many other people of color, elevated the concept of abolition to the forefront of people’s consciousness. Concurrently, there has been a burgeoning body of legal scholarship calling for the abolition of the carceral regime. Emergent scholarship is also beginning to recognize that abolition efforts must include the child welfare system, noting the interdependent relationship between the child welfare system and other parts of the carceral regime. Yet, despite the nascent legal scholarship concerning child welfare system abolition, parents with disabilities and their children have been mostly disregarded. This Article responds to that scholarly void. In this Article, I theorize and reimagine the role of the child welfare system in the contemporary struggle for the abolition of punitive systems of legal control and exploitation. My overarching argument is that the child welfare system functions as an unjust social institution for disabled parents and their children, and as such, we must work toward abolishing it and reimagining non-punitive supports and resources for families. To do so, first, the Article describes the child welfare system and its legal obligations, including those related to parents with disabilities and their children. Drawing on legal scholarship and social science research, it then elucidates the scope of the problem. Next, it limns the tenets of both abolition and disability justice and the ways in which these interconnecting movements, theories, and praxes advance justice for parents with disabilities through the abolition of the child welfare system. Finally, it proposes a novel anti-ableist legal and policy agenda for achieving justice for parents with disabilities and their children.

Retirement Time and the Temporalities of the Migratory Life Course

Research has shown that forms of inequality are increasing in Canada. However, one often-overlooked form has been the inequality of retirement time, which is the period between labour market exit and the end of the life course. Divergences that persist in retirement time present opportunities for scrutiny given that they often mirror other forms of inequality across the life course. While racialized immigrants are reported to be less successful in the Canadian labour market, very little is known about their lived experiences navigating retirement time after they exit the labour market. This paper utilizes data from 20 Jamaican Canadian retirees (aged 60 and older) that follows their retirement time experiences after long-term labour market participation in Canada, in order to provide the first qualitative study focused on this significant life transition. Underscoring both precarity and agency as important facets of Jamaican Canadians’ retirement time and later life, the paper highlights the interconnections of earlier life course trajectories, livelihood strategies, and their fears of perceived improvidence. It contributes to emergent scholarship on Jamaica’s ageing diaspora, who are among growing cohorts of ageing Caribbean immigrants in Canada. Importantly, it foregrounds their strategic responses to the risks and opportunities that contour this lesser-researched phase of the migratory life course.

Insecurity, Dispossession, Depletion: Women\u2019s Experiences of Post-War Development in Myanmar

This article explores the gendered dynamics of Myanmar’s post-war economic reforms through an analysis of women’s experiences of development in Kayah (Karenni) state. In Myanmar, ceasefires and a reduction of armed violence combined with state-driven economic liberalization reforms are conditioned by, but also contribute to remake, gendered relations of power, privilege and marginalization. While new land legislation and development projects have contributed to loss of land and livelihoods among rural populations in general, our study demonstrates that women living in conflict-affected border areas are disproportionally affected. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, we show how this is directly related to an overarching gendered political economy defined by legacies of conflict, discrimination and uneven processes of development, which positions women as particularly vulnerable to new forms of insecurity, dispossession and depletion generated by post-war economic transformations. We argue that the political and economic legacies of war in the state has produced a gendered division of labor that positions women as responsible for unpaid and underpaid informal and social reproductive labor, weakens women’s access to land, and results in physical, material, and emotional depletion. Through this focus, our study adds to research on development and economic restructuring in post-war contexts in general, and to emergent scholarship on Myanmar’s economic reforms in particular.

Scooty girls are safe girls: risk, respectability and brand assemblages in urban India

ABSTRACT Advancing an emergent scholarship on brands as having spatial and scalar effects, this paper examines the brand as an assemblage. In doing so, it focuses on youth engagement with the brandedness of motorbikes in the South Indian city of Chennai to examine in particular how brand assemblages shape gendered engagements with risk in Indian cities. Scooters and Motorbikes are important markers of ‘youth’ and middle classness in urban South Asia, representing freedom, mobility and fun. The Scooter has further been celebrated for putting women – literally and otherwise – in the driver’s seat: creating the possibility for transgression and rebellion. This article complicates this narrative, by positioning scooters and motorbikes instead as sites upon which ‘respectable’ femininities are calibrated and articulated through young women’s engagement with brands. In doing so, it unpacks the ways in which brand assemblages enliven the agency of commodities and participate in the disciplinary processes that shape gendered urban geographies of risk and respectability.