Everyday Manifestations Research Articles

Climate change injustice and school attendance and absenteeism: proximal and distal ecological links

Climate change has been linked to a myriad of problems related to human functioning, with a particular scientific emphasis on economic, physical damage, and health sectors. Less attention, however, has been given to the links between climate change and problems in the educational sector, such as school attendance problems, which represent practical and everyday manifestations of the effects of climate change. This is unfortunate given that children, and particularly those in Black and Brown communities and in the majority world, are expected to bear the greatest burden from climate change now and in the future. One fundamental right of children is the right to an education and to attend school, and this right is threatened particularly for vulnerable populations in different ways by climate change. Narrative synthesis of key terms (e.g., climate change, school absenteeism) for literature review was conducted to identify key patterns that produced the primary themes represented in this article: physical health, mental health, violence, school environment, school displacement and migration, and economic challenges. These themes were organized along a general proximal-to-distal spectrum. The descriptions of each theme also illustrate mechanisms connecting these issues that may help inform future mitigation efforts.

From Police Power to Police Practice

Understanding the everyday manifestations of systemic racism, cisheteropatriarchy, and unequal justice for oppressed women and femmes necessitates meaningful engagement with critical law enforcement studies—the study of why and how policing and punishment takes place in carceral societies. Anne Gray Fischer’s The Streets Belong to Us spells out why sexual policing matters for the history of political development, capitalist growth, and socioeconomic inequality in U.S. cities, like Boston, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Ultimately, as Fischer’s work affirms, urban law enforcement forces have routinely greased the wheels of punitive governance and state violence under the auspices of maintaining control over a contested and shifting social order.

Arendt’s conception of love and anti-fascist education

Recent scholarship on anti-fascist education has stressed the role of everyday manifestations of power and oppression as the locus of molecular or microfascism, a term coined by Deleuze and Guattari. While identifying the ways in which power structures operate at the quotidian level is undoubtedly an important educational task, this paper argues that an anti-fascist educational approach must also account for the ways in which such structures are connected to concrete political manifestations of fascism. To this end, it explores the potential contributions and challenges of an Arendtian conception of love in the context of anti-fascist education. Drawing on Arendt’s polemical interactions about love with Israeli scholar Gershom Scholem, this paper suggests that Arendt’s conception of love as belonging outside the realm of the political, and her rejection of a love for the nation and for collectivities in general, can serve as important pedagogical tools in uncovering and critiquing specific affective appeals characteristic of fascist and neo-fascist rhetoric. While in Arendt’s own work love is not explicitly associated with an analysis of fascism, her thinking about love brings us back to questions about the very meaning of politics, questions that are foundational to any meaningful attempt to establish an anti-fascist pedagogy.[AQ]

Latinxs in the house? Latinx migration and culture in Madrid

This commentary explores some of the cultural practices among people of Latin American origin living in Madrid. By establishing a link between Latinx migration and the process of racialization, the author describes how contemporary archives are being created and the ways that “migrant culture” is expressed and perceived in modern-day Spain, using the term “Latinx” as a critical category that refers to Latin American “Xs” living in the diaspora. This preliminary inquiry keys into the following question: What is the cultural history of Latinx communities in Madrid and how was this history constructed? In this way, the piece contextualizes the conflicts and misunderstandings experienced by Latinx migrants upon arrival in the host society from the standpoint of taking ownership of spaces of signification to generate a sense of belonging through cultural practices and creative projects. For these communities, such spaces are tangible and symbolic places of action, meaning making, and resistance. Culture—both its everyday manifestations and specifically artistic practices—is a critical space of expression, creativity, and thought. This makes it a suitable way to incorporate the migrant population into a new perception of Spanish national identity, thus generating enough of a sense of belonging.

Transnational media production from the margins of “Cultural China”: the case of Singapore’s media producers

Transnational media production from the margins of “Cultural China”: the case of Singapore’s media producers

The ‘Good’ Neoliberalism: E-Commerce Entrepreneurship and the Search for a Good Life in China

Neoliberalism has been widely criticised in the anthropological literature. While acknowledging its negative impacts, this study argues that the adoption of neoliberal mechanisms and ethos may contribute to the betterment of individual wellbeing in certain circumstances. Drawing from a group of Chinese rural migrant e-commerce traders’ entrepreneurial experiences, this study finds that they have acquired material benefits, techno-cultural capital, and a certain degree of political independence by taking advantage of the growing neoliberal e-commerce market and by practising a neoliberal ethos. The acquired resources enable these traders, formerly considered lower-class, to assert their status and dignity in Chinese society, and ultimately help them achieve a good life. In exploring how neoliberal elements may work to improve ordinary people's life conditions, this study offers a more balanced assessment of neoliberalism in its everyday manifestations.

Economic crisis and trauma journalism: Assessing the emotional toll of reporting in crisis-ridden countries

AbstractThis article discusses the relationship between the post-2008 global economic crisis and trauma journalism through a quantitative study of reporters covering austerity’s everyday manifestations and examines the effects on the media professionals involved. The findings indicate that journalists who cover economic crisis-related incidents suffer specific symptoms of trauma. As such, the study re-conceptualizes the economic crisis as primarily affective for media workers, it establishes a direct correlation between the economic crisis and emotional trauma, and provides an insight into the kind of trauma that stems from covering austerity and its impact on society. A regression analysis of symptoms indicates trauma journalism as an emerging field of research into the economic crisis.

Remittances, development and financialisation beyond the Global North.

In the context of the global financial crisis and the crunch in development financing, remittances have become linked to the financial inclusion agenda in what has been termed as ‘financialization of remittances’ (FOR). This special issue brings together seven articles that analyze the socioculturally specific histories and the everyday manifestations of the FOR in the Caribbean, Central America, Colombia, Ghana, Mexico, Nepal and Senegal. The contributors engage in a transdisciplinary conversation, mobilizing insights from feminist, postcolonial, poststructural and political geography theories. They propose two majors shifts for financialisation analysis: towards an investigation beyond the global North and towards taking seriously failures, contradictions and contestations of financialisation processes. By doing so, the special issue contributes to financialization research in five major ways: to expose colonial legacies of remittances and their financialization; to challenge the supposedly neutral character of the FOR by revealing the caste, gendered and racialized power relations in financialization processes; to destabilizes the notion of the universal individual financial subject and show how multiple financial subjectivities are constituted in constellations; to document the complexities, ambiguities, contradictions and failures of financialization processes and the (everyday) contestations they face; and to show how remittances and their financialization are implicated in reconfiguring authorities, citizenship and social dynamics. The contributions propose relational understandings of financialization that conceptualize the co-constitution of economic, political and sociocultural dimensions of financialization across and beyond the North-South divide.

И.С. Тургенев — читатель Вальтера Скотта (по материалам библиотеки писателя). Статья первая

The article covers the issue of Turgenev’s perception of Walter Scott’s literary works, using a hitherto understudied materials from I.S. Turgenev’s personal library. Research attention is focused on the analysis of Turgenev’s multiple notes left on the pages of multivolume collected works of the English novelist. The traces of his attentive reading are connected with the desire to comprehend the peculiarities of the English writer’s artistic method, to understand the essence of his objective manner of storytelling, determined by historicism and manifested in the development line of the protagonists. Reading the novels of Scott, Turgenev was drawing his special interest to the image of the common people as well as a carrier of the national element. The personal touch of Turgenev’s perception of folk characters created by the English author is that the Russian writer paid attention to the synthesis of comic and tragic features in the characters and their behavior. At the same time, the life-affirming nature of this synthesis was fundamentally important. Turgenev’s aesthetic position during the reading of Scott’s novels was manifested in the assimilation of the educational concept of the personality, declared by the English writer. A large number of notes are associated with a description of the fate and nature of the characters, which represent common national life in Scott’s works, in its daily everyday manifestations. This interest in the position of the author and the image of the national element coincided with the development of Turgenev himself in the 1840-s.

Making sense of the new: Progress of modernity in colonial Odisha (part II)

AbstractThe first part of the article examined the cross‐cultural semantics of the term modernity in the vernacular writing of the English‐educated Odia intellectuals. It also threw light on the way the Odia elite, in the process of conceptualizing the new discourse and experience of modernity, came up with new terms such as adhunik/adhunikata as vernacular equivalents of modern/modernity. In this second part, the emphasis is on empirical and everyday manifestations of modernity in Odisha. It examines how the adhunik/modern came to be understood and internalized in vernacular idioms and the way it took a somewhat different trajectory than that in the rest of the Bengal Presidency of which some territories of Odisha were then a significant part. The article argues that the English‐educated Odias periodically questioned aspects of the new, highlighting older values, and deploying the lessons of value modernity/adhunikata in its abstraction primarily to promote Odia language and literature, and to press demands for welfare measures in the Odia speaking tracts.

THE VALUE OF DECORATIVE COMPOSITION IN APPLIED ARTS

Decorative composition as a special form of applied art can become for each of us one of the universal methods of communicating with life in its most concrete and even everyday manifestations. At the same time, never a drying out source of aesthetic joy, the source of the most interesting philosophical reflections, as an understanding of the structure of the image, the ability to trace the process of its formation.

Writing against “Mask Culture”: Orientalism and COVID-19 Responses in the West

Since the first coronavirus outbreak hit China in January 2020, how different countries respond to the crisis has sparked interesting discussions regarding to their respective history, political systems and culture. In the West, many people attribute the acceptance of universal mask-wearing among Asian populations to a so-called 'mask culture.' This paper argues that 'mask culture' emerges during the pandemic as an Orientalist concept in Western public discourses to define the East and to freeze differences between ‘self’ and ‘other.’ Orientalism in its everyday manifestation has not only contributed to the initial underestimation of the pandemic in the West; but has also provided a culturalist foundation for essentialist representations of Asian cultures. Self-other binary has greatly shaped Western responses to and narratives of the pandemic in two prominent ways: first, mask-wearing has been considered as an ‘Asian’ practice associated with other Asian cultural stereotypes such as submissiveness to state power; and second, the threat of the coronavirus was initially viewed as minimal because outbreaks in Asia were far and distanced, and thereafter, the suffering of the Other was not considered urgent in the West.

Герой-трикстер в романе М. Фриша «Назову себя Гантенбайн»

The article offers an interpretation and analysis of the novel My Name Be Gantenbein, allowing to find an explanation to the genre uncertainty of the work of the Swiss writer M. Frisch. Due to the non-linear stylistics of the narrative, the image of Gantenbein eludes an unambiguous classification in terms of moral and ethical problematics lying on the surface. The hero of the novel turns into a methodological principle that clarifies the fundamental existences of life. In classical tradition, these included the concepts of freedom and law, truth and lies, truth and deception, game and life. The complicated plot makes Gantenbein a functional representative of both freedom and blind law. They create semantic space of self-organizing life. As a result, the character is endowed with properties of a trickster, because he accepts the complexity of such a life at the level of his existence. The investigation reveals that the game, roles and masks create the ideological basis of the story. This framework directs the reader to perceive life in its everyday manifestations, contributing to the development of an antidote to escapism.

Герой-трикстер в романе М. Фриша «Назову себя Гантенбайн»

The article offers an interpretation and analysis of the novel My Name Be Gantenbein, allowing to find an explanation to the genre uncertainty of the work of the Swiss writer M. Frisch. Due to the non-linear stylistics of the narrative, the image of Gantenbein eludes an unambiguous classification in terms of moral and ethical problematics lying on the surface. The hero of the novel turns into a methodological principle that clarifies the fundamental existences of life. In classical tradition, these included the concepts of freedom and law, truth and lies, truth and deception, game and life. The complicated plot makes Gantenbein a functional representative of both freedom and blind law. They create semantic space of self-organizing life. As a result, the character is endowed with properties of a trickster, because he accepts the complexity of such a life at the level of his existence. The investigation reveals that the game, roles and masks create the ideological basis of the story. This framework directs the reader to perceive life in its everyday manifestations, contributing to the development of an antidote to escapism.

Post-Trump Intersections and “Post-Racial” Reflections: A Black Feminist Analysis of Black Women and Navigating Structured Inequality in the U.S., 2012-2017

Barely a decade ago, the 2008 and 2012 elections of President Barack Obama to the U.S. Executive Office propelled questions about whether the U.S. had overcome its racially oppressive history, through the presidency of a political centrist of African descent. The premature celebrations of racial transcendence in were countered shortly thereafter by the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency in 2016. The latter was accomplished partly by using “dog-whistle politics” to covertly (and overtly) bolster a tide of racialized political backlash to the prior administration. Ultimately, just after post-racialism dominated discussions on U.S. racial attitudes, an openly white supremacist, misogynistic national affect presently coincides with anti-woman, anti-poor, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and anti-Black legislation. Further, under an inflammatory and oppressive administration, everyday incarnations of inequity expand as concerns for marginalized groups. This is particularly true for those subject to multiple and simultaneous forms of structured inequality – of interest to this project are Black women. In this project, I employ twenty-one semi-structured interviews with Black American women aged 22-50 drawn between 2011/2012 and in 2017. Building on earlier Black feminist theory, this article captures Black women’s lived experiences navigating racism, classism, and sexism during the aforementioned political transition. Like many other Black feminist theorists, I argue that Black women are subject to, and still contend with these intersecting structures. Further, in line with other Black feminist approaches, the project elucidates ways shared lived experiences provide windows into everyday manifestations of structured inequality.

Восприятие бизнесменами Нижегородского региона уровня своей антикоррупционной безопасности

Objective: to identify and disclose the characteristics of corruption crime and its impact on the business community of theNizhny Novgorod region based on the data of an empirical sociological study.Methods: the study is based on the questionnaire survey “Perception of anti-corruption security by businesspeople of the Nizhniy Novgorod region” (N = 408), conducted using scales developed by the authors. The system of indirect questions (projection method) allows revealing the attitude of entrepreneurs (small and middle business) to corruption situations and causes that generate them.Results: the perception of corruption by representatives of small and middle businesses working in the Nizhny Novgorod region was analyzed. The overall level of tolerance for everyday manifestations of corruption in this group of respondents was determined, and correlations of gender, age, education, size of the enterprise and field of activity of respondents with their attitude to corruption were revealed. The authors formulated a number of recommendations for law enforcers engaged in implementing preventive measures against corruption crime (providing socially significant state and municipal services through multifunctional centers (MFC), excluding or minimizing direct contact between an entrepreneur and an official who makes a decision on a particular issue, developing civil society institutions to protect the rights of entrepreneurs, etc.). Scientific novelty: the results obtained are of both theoretical and practical significance and can be used to improve the work of police regional divisions engaged in the field of anti-corruption. In addition, the scales developed by the authors (with a minimal variable part) have already been used in surveys of Nizhny Novgorod residents and police officers, allowing a comparative analysis of attitudes to corruption among different groups of the population.Practical significance: based on the study, methodological recommendations were developed to improve the work of territorial bodies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in order to optimize the prevention of corruption crime in various groups and segments of the population.

Practical engagements in legal geography: Collaborative feminist approaches to immigration advocacy in Denmark

AbstractIn this paper, I examine how collaboration can yield new insights into inquiries of legal geography and transform the ways that legal work is carried out. Drawing on feminist methodologies, I put forward feminist legal collaboration – a method and praxis – through which legal geographers can address the everyday manifestations and contestations of power in relation to law and space, while at the same time build alliances with people whose (legal) rights are currently contested. I reflect on my experiences of doing everyday collaborative work with legal practitioners, activists, and forced migrants at community centres in Denmark. Through two empirical examples of legal collaboration, I show how collaboration offers insights into migration law and legal procedures that are impossible to gain from just reading the law. The process of collaborating can teach us about the politics in law and reveal political possibilities within these socio‐legal spaces. We might think of feminist legal collaboration as a method and praxis that takes place through direct engagement with the law and legal practices in order to co‐produce knowledge and radically reconfigure existing approaches to legal counselling. The feminist legal collaborative approach, which I put forward here, is not limited to research on the legal geographies of (forced) migration. Rather, I imagine that feminist legal collaboration can be used in relation to different legal issues, grounded in the local empirical context(s) and attending to the needs and injustices on the ground.

Chekhov’s Discourse of World Culture (To the 160th Anniversary of A.P. Chekhov’s Birth)

The purpose of this article is to prove that world culture, whether it is a picture of the world in its generalized quality or specific artistic practices in different types of art, still remains under the unabated influence of A.P. Chekhov’s personality and creativity. This applies not only to his characters, life conflicts, or individual artistic and aesthetic techniques, but also to the meaning-setting, qualitatively changed by A.P. Chekhov, which we define as “Chekhov’s discourse”. It is understood as a frame of reference in which intercultural communication takes place, and designated by a cultural matrix with its inherent codes and sometimes unexpected meanings, born of decades of Chekhov’s attention and understanding.The author believes that the main features of Chekhov’s discourse of world culture are: the creator’s penetration, unique by its depth and paradoxical nature, into the social and moral world of man (a kind of “diagnosis”); the conceptual integration of the intertext and context of individual creativity and world cultural experience; and the formation of aesthetic foundations for the art of absurdity as a characteristic cultural phenomenon of the Chekhov and post-Chekhov eras.The “diagnosis” was a product of Chekhov’s unique intellectual insight and intuitive talent. The property of Chekhov’s diagnosis, and the explanation that there were no recipes, is the presence of Chekhov’s figure and his picture of the world in the cultural continuum. The continuation of Chekhov’s thoughts and imaginative systems, with all their details and models, are several layers of creative “products” created in different types of art and in different periods that have passed in the life of mankind after Chekhov.Chekhov’s intertext is a dialogue between a Russian person and other epochs and authors; this dialogue is not without irony in relation to the “interlocutors”, to the subject of discussion, to life itself, a source of unexpected associations and ideas about the paradoxical connections of life and being. The author believes that Chekhov’s context as a semantic facet of Chekhov’s discourse has been manifested primarily in those connections and influences that were and continue to be of a personalistic nature: researchers from different countries, followers in his creativity.In the space of eternity, against the background of paradoxical cultural trends, a phenomenon has been formed that we previously designated as the concept of “Russian absurdity” first introduced into scientific circulation. On the one hand, Chekhov’s discourse of world culture, had unobtrusively introduced into artistic practice the principles of alogism, mutual misunderstanding, alienation, ironic discrepancies of everyday manifestations and details, on the other hand, it had marked the existence of ordinary people in the space of eternity, in an empty and dangerous, alien and incomprehensible world.

Suburban ethnicities: Home as the site of interethnic conviviality and racism.

This article explores the ways in which the white working‐class residents of a suburban English town reflect on their relationships with their British Asian Pakistani Muslim neighbors. Its focus is on how everyday constructions of home become sites for the intermingling of discourses of intercultural conviviality and racism. My contention is that the idea of home has not yet been given the detailed critical attention that it deserves in the sociological literature on everyday manifestations of multiculturalism, conviviality, and racism. My supposition is that a special focus on the idea of home as the site of conviviality offers a productive avenue to analyze how intercultural relationships are formed and how the norms of neighborliness are thought to break down, opening a space for commonplace racialized and racist stereotypes to take hold. The idea of home is central to the rhythm and landscape of the English suburbs. It conjures up the idea of a uniform and aspirational white space. Drawing on this imaginary of home, I shall trace how “white working class” “English,” “Scottish,” and “Anglo‐Italian” residents’ everyday constructions of home become embroiled with their relationships with their British Asian Pakistani Muslim neighbors.

"ПАНОПТИЧЕСКАЯ ВИДИМОСТЬ": КУЛЬТУРА НАДЗОРА XXI ВЕКА

The paper discusses an emergence of the value system associated with the distribution of informational methods for controlling and surveillance in person’s everyday and social life nowadays. Accessibility of the informational technologies “democratized” practices of controlling and surveillance, destroying traditional hierarchical mode of these phenomenona. Situation of the post-industrial civilization is characterized by the ability for the state, corporations and independent agents to collect and process personal data to achieve sometimes obscure goals. It is argued that situation of “infocentrism” is not a unique feature of present era. Through analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s panoptic project, as being the most notably developed theoretical model, it is postulated that the key features of surveillance as such are “visibility” and “participation”. Despite the fact that in social imagination, through the works of fiction, surveillance is viewed as a violent intervention in private life of a person, the main form of it for the most members of society is self-surveillance. Still, technological progress couldn’t but influence the practices of controlling and, as a consequence, the ways of the people social interaction, that are constantly present in the digital space. In a society, where the culture of surveillance became reality, the person, state and corporations have a possibility to create homogeneous informational space, excluding people with the different ideas and values out of it. “Power to exclude” is considered to be a result of a tendency to objectify another person, as fundamentally valuable “Other”, in the digital dimension. The alike and other processes justify why surveillance, in its everyday manifestations, should not be neglected by researchers.