Global Worlds Research Articles

From here to eternity: The rise and fall of global art worlds and the contemporary private museum

The process of converting a private collection into a public museum is often presented as a means of ensuring a collection’s future by transforming it into an enduring asset for future generations. This case study assesses contemporary collection models as well as entrepreneurial investor-collectors and their respective museum-building strategies by addressing two fundamental questions: (1) What is the role of the contemporary art collector and private museum and (2) How do their interactions with art markets challenge the established protocols and hierarchies of the global art network? It shall be argued that private collection museums often have a limited lifespan. Furthermore, the future of private collections and museums is often determined within the lifetimes of their creators. This can play out in one of four ways: first, collectors may offer artworks at high-profile auction houses; second, they may sell the art collection and close the museum or collector’s exhibition space; third, they may sell the museum or exhibition space. Alternatively, private collectors, along with their museums and art collections, can play an important role on the global stage. However, more rigorous planning is necessary for these collectors to distinguish themselves, expand the cultural landscape, and ensure their collections endure within or beyond their creators’ lifetime.

Hypeful worlds

AbstractContemporary technoscience is rife with hype—inflated claims that rapidly propagate in favor of the next “new thing.” While scholars often strive to debunk and dispel hype, Tanzanian technologists working in health care face a different challenge: navigating hype. As these technologists embark on new projects in machine learning and other forms of AI, contending with hype becomes crucial. These actors operate on the margins of global technoscientific worlds, aiming to create novel African futures that promote technological sovereignty. To do so, they must grapple with hype and its political economy. For anthropologists, merely transforming these technologists’ experiences into an ethnographic object won't teach us much; a much more illuminating task is to examine how their work can provoke us to refine and transform our own knowledge practices. This is especially important because their innovations can seem both inspiring and dispiriting, both entrenched in and opposed to the troublesome technological global order.

Cultural and Psychological Context of the Individual Resistance of Children and Youth in the Global World

The article reveals the cultural and psychological context of the emergence and preservation of the individual uniqueness of childhood as an indicator of the individual’s resistance in the global world. The general cultural and psychological context of the implementation of the rights of children and youth in modern multidisciplinary studies is presented, including three thematic studies of globalization-child labor movements, migration of children and youth, and youth organization around climate change. The most important indicator of the possibility of such an association is the mental health of children and youth. The projection of the resistance of the psychological culture of children and youth is revealed in the dimensions of the educational environment and the ethics of relationships in the process of obtaining an education in preschool institutions. An important place in the formation of a person’s mental culture is reflected in the views of early childhood students. One of the main problems of the psychological development of mankind has been called giving priority to the rights of children and youth for their own ecological future. Three main arguments are presented at the basis of this idea: the responsibility of previous generations, preservation of the fullness of the world, the justice of relations between generations. The idea and justification of the multiplicity of global worlds of different generations of children was introduced into scientific circulation, which consists in the fact that each global childhood has its own psychological era. The individual uniqueness of a person, which has developed since childhood, is declared the value of the future centuries, just as typification and standardization are a reflection of the human development of the successes of the natural and technical sciences of the past 19th and 20th centuries. It is claimed that humanity has reached a certain platform of material well-being for everyone, which to a greater or lesser extent reflects the reached limits of knowledge, beyond which individuals of other individual self-organizations of their own mental, including psychophysiological self are able to penetrate. Instead of conclusions, the article poses questions that need to be resolved knitting in the globalized world of modern and future childhood.

Опыт систематического изложения методологии ментальных исследований

The publication discusses the foundations of the methodological model that was used in the preparation of the monograph “Mental studies of global political worlds” [41]. The text contains three main relatively independent sections. In the first one, the author presents his understanding of the phenomenon of mentality and the methodological model of its political and psychological research. Here we are talking about the content and internal organization of the mental research model, the principles of its construction, functions and methodological resource. The second paragraph reveals the heuristic potential of the dogmatic principle, its methodological and ontological significance. The last part is devoted to identifying the historical foundations of the phenomenon of subjectivity and the concept of the fundamental subjective triad. Summarizing, the author formulates the thesis that the methodological basis for the study of the mentality of political worlds is the trinity of the principle of historicism, the dogmatic principle and the principle of subjectivity.

The Power of the “Knowing Women”

The Power of the “Knowing Women”

Moving from Reading to Dialogue to Action: Teaching Degrowth in Anthropology Courses

Collectively, how can we work towards reducing human impacts on the environment to lessen the process of climate change and develop plans for climate change mitigation and adaptation? Current trends such as extreme climatic events and climate stress, food insecurity, declining natural resources, and inequitable access to food, health care, and education make it clear this is a time to act.  After teaching at a university for a few decades, I find students are overwhelmed with the increasing amount of negativity in their local and global worlds. By introducing the concept of degrowth into several classes, I found ways to empower students to use their own data collection to inform themselves of what they could do differently to lessen their impact on the environment. Degrowth is defined as a philosophy of life or a lifestyle that calls for a conscious effort to reduce, reuse, recycle, and repurpose. Degrowth is also a political and social movement based on ecological economics designed to lessen consumerism and production; in a word, it is anti-capitalism. Degrowth is a re-envisioned way of living that emphasizes quality of life and conviviality that serves as an economic strategy to respond to the limits-to-growth dilemma. This paper discusses an approach used to engage students in degrowth and create an opportunity to help them move from passive reading of assigned articles to taking action to globally heal Earth.&nbsp

The four global worlds of welfare capitalism: Institutional, neoliberal, populist and residual welfare state regimes

What welfare state regimes are observed when the analysis is extended globally, empirically and theoretically? We introduce a novel perspective into the ‘welfare state regimes analyses’ – a perspective that brings developed and developing countries together and, as such, broadens the geographical, empirical and theoretical scope of the ‘welfare modelling business’. The expanding welfare regimes literature has suffered from several drawbacks: (i) it is radically slanted towards organisation for economic co-operation and development (OECD) countries, (ii) the literature on non-OECD countries does not use genuine welfare policy variables and (iii) social assistance and healthcare programmes are not utilized as components of welfare state effort and generosity. To overcome these limitations, we employ advanced data reduction methods, exploit an original dataset ( https://glow.ku.edu.tr/ ) that we assembled from several international and domestic sources covering 52 emerging markets and OECD countries and present a welfare state regime structure as of the mid-2010s. Our analysis is based on genuine welfare policy variables that are theorized to capture welfare generosity and welfare efforts across five major policy domains: old-age pensions, sickness cash benefits, unemployment insurance, social assistance and healthcare. The sample of OECD countries and emerging market economies form four distinct welfare state regime clusters: institutional, neoliberal, populist and residual. We unveil the composition and performance of welfare state components in each welfare state regime family and develop politics-based working hypotheses about the formation of these regimes. Institutional welfare state regimes perform high in social security, healthcare and social assistance, while populist regimes perform moderately in social assistance and healthcare and moderate-to-high in social security. The neoliberal regime performs moderately in social assistance and healthcare, and it performs low in social security, and the residual regime performs low in all components. We then hypothesize that the relative political strengths of formal and informal working classes are key factors that shaped these welfare state regime typologies.

Decolonising Climate Change: A Call for Beyond-Human Imaginaries and Knowledge Generation

This article calls for transdisciplinary, experimental, and decolonial imaginations of climate change and Pacific futures in an age of great planetary undoing. Drawing from our personal and academic knowledge of the Pacific from West Papua to Samoa, we highlight the need for radical forms of imagination that are grounded in an ethos of inclusivity, participation, and humility. Such imaginations must account for the perspectives, interests, and storied existences of both human and beyond-human communities of life across their multiple and situated contexts, along with their co-constitutive relations. We invite respectful cross-pollination across Indigenous epistemologies, secular scientific paradigms, and transdisciplinary methodologies in putting such an imagination into practice. In doing so, we seek to destabilise the prevailing hegemony of secular science over other ways of knowing and being in the world. We draw attention to the consequential agency of beyond-human lifeforms in shaping local and global worlds and to the power of experimental, emplaced storytelling in conveying the lively and lethal becoming-withs that animate an unevenly shared and increasingly vulnerable planet. The wisdom of our kindred plants, animals, elements, mountains, forests, oceans, rivers, skies, and ancestors are part of this story. Finally, we reflect on the structural challenges in decolonising climate change and associated forms of knowledge production in light of past and ongoing thefts of sovereignty over lands, bodies, and ecosystems across the tropics.

COVID-19 Amid Rumors and Conspiracy Theories: The Interplay Between Local and Global Worlds.

Stories and narratives are part of our human sociocultural history, which are always preserved in what I call"societal memory." We construct stories to weave meanings that help us make sense of our lifeworlds. Like stories, rumors and conspiracy theories can offer deep meanings when analyzed in specific contexts. Such narratives become most prominent in times of looming uncertainties, anxieties, and fears. Thus, the challenging coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has become surrounded by plentiful rumors and conspiracy theories. These narratives reveal geopolitics when they code the pandemic as "bioengineered." They also demonstrate local concerns, as in Pakistan, people started drinking "miraculous" tea as a form of prevention, shaving their heads, and/or praying to God to undo his "punishment." Some conceptualized the pandemic as an invented "plot." These narratives seem to empower individuals to make sense of this pandemic and to deal with its multidimensional effects: they allow them to feel confident enough to go outside and earn their livelihood. In this chapter, the author builds on his long-term ethnographic fieldwork on infectious diseases, recent telephone interviews, and content analysis of the media to discuss narratives revolving around COVID-19 in Pakistan. The author argues that these rumors and conspiracy theories are social phenomena pregnant with multiple meanings that deserve to be thoroughly explored, especially by anthropologists. A dearth of understanding about COVID-19 and narratives surrounding it would substantially impede the strategies to deal with this ongoing pandemic.

Political Activist, Citizen’s Helper, and Entertainer: A Study of Professional Role Perception of Journalists in Azerbaijan

ABSTRACT This study seeks to partially fill a gap in knowledge about the practice of journalism in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic. The study proposed here represents the first time Azerbaijan has been studied in a systematic fashion consistent with the literature of comparative journalism as represented by The Global Journalist and Worlds of Journalism, studies well recognized as the standards against which all such efforts should be measured. One of the primary goals of the project is to explore the roles these journalists believe they play in society. Data, collected through an online survey of journalists indicate that several identifiable, perceived professional roles existed along the dimensions of Hanitzsch’s journalistic milieus. In addition, three other dimensions were identified that did not fit the model, but proved to be specific to the Azerbaijani media environment: Political Activist, Citizens’ Helper, and Entertainer.

‘MSM’ as a ‘doing thing’

Drawing upon long-term ethnographic research in Namibia, I examine the label ‘MSM’ through a materialist interpretation of affect, viewing ‘MSM’ as a ‘doing thing’ that unsettles the boundaries between subjects and objects. From this analytic perspective, I reconsider the ‘MSM’ label as an inadequate signifier that overlooks, conceals, or erases social complexity. Instead, this perspective reveals what happens when the MSM label travels, thereby better accounting for the socialities it is instrumental in making up. Its very design and appearance – which portray bodies and behaviours in universalistic ways – allow this ‘doing thing’ to gain entry to diverse spaces where it comes to exist alongside some contentious postcolonial political formations, such as those surrounding LGBT rights. I argue that although the label is designed to be insulated from politics, as a ‘neutral’ behavioural category, when ‘MSM’ travels it is still highly relational, continually entangling itself in contexts, stirring up postcolonial anxieties, and reinforcing global inequalities, while also setting the stage for global health worlds coming into being.

BRICS in a world of regions

ABSTRACTThis article is devoted to the analysis of the role of BRICS in forming the world order of regions. Several researchers have observed that the liberal world order is in crisis, and they describe the emerging new world order as a ‘regiopolar world order’. Today BRICS has become an alliance of co-thinkers who are trying to reform the current liberal world order. However, in terms of the classical theory of international relations, BRICS is regarded as a hopeless and unpromising structure. It has been actively criticized by Western experts as an ineffective, informal platform which has not been able to make any changes in the world order. The idea of a non-Western world order based on pluralism and polycentricism could be realized based on the concept of the ‘regional world’. BRICS as a case of multiple and diverse but cross-cutting cooperation could become a ‘bridge’ between the global and regional worlds: each BRICS member is also the leading economy in its region and can actively develop regional integration. Hence this paper suggests that BRICS could become the basis for a new world order – a polycentric world order in which different types and forms of regions are the key elements.

'A Stranger in the Name of Jesus': Exploring Cosmopolitan Ethics in a Ugandan Christian Care Community

This article uses the author’s ethnographic case study of a Christian youth work community in Uganda to inform a discussion around the theoretical relationship between cosmopolitan ideologies and Christian care ethics. Fieldwork conducted among the youth workers of ‘Moment of Truth Evangelistic Ministries’ (MOTEM), in Kampala, Uganda, between 2012 and 2014 highlighted a moral obligation to care. Two points of similarity are shown between this and what is usually described as a cosmopolitan ethic.The first is the basis of care in an identification with an imagined moral community – a transcendent and global ‘family of believers’ – and the second is a care orientation to a universal recipient. I discuss orientations to strangers, neighbours, village-mates, and family, in order to explore the faith-based youth worker as an embedded moral subject; situated in both local and global moral worlds. The article argues against other authors that have suggested religious fundamentalism is diametrically opposed to a cosmopolitan sensibility, using the case study to elucidate the complex and intersecting ways that cosmopolitan and Christian subjectivities can be experienced in the contemporary religious modernity of Kampala.

Vocational High School Students’ Profile and their English Achievement

Vocational education has been given more attention in Indonesian education in the recent years. There have been many projects for vocational education since Jokowi Widodo took his presidential office in October 2014. In supporting government actions, vocational high school students need to improve their profile. Living in the global worlds requires the ability to interact with people from all over the world. The ability to communicate using English as the lingua franca is important. The purpose of the research reported here is, to prove whether the direct method is effective in improving vocational high school students’ English pronunciation or not. This research design is a true experimental using post-test only. The population is students from one vocational high school in North Sulawesi. Sample of this research was year 11 students consisting of two classes class A (27 students) and class B (27 students). The instrument used in collecting data is tests. The results showed that the mean of the experimental group (36.99) statistically describes the students’ improvement in pronouncing English words in which have been compared by result of the tobserved (2.897) exceed tcritical (1.943) at the level of significance 0.05. It means that there is a significant difference between the mean score of experimental group and control group regarding students’ English pronunciation. This then supports the claim that ‘rejects’ Ho and ‘accept’ Ha. Based on the result, it could be concluded that the direct method is considered effective in improving students’ English pronunciation.

Work-Based Learning and Research for Mid-Career Professionals: Professional Studies in Australia

Aim/Purpose: Work-based learning has been identified in the literature, and is established in academia and in the global worlds of work; however, an examination of work-based research, particularly at the doctoral level, has been less well articulated. Moreover, a paucity of published literature on either work-based research or Professional Studies means little is known about the dynamics and drivers of these domains. This study aims to begin addressing the shortfall in literature on work-based research and Professional Studies programs, using the program at University of Southern Queensland as an example Background: This paper examines work-based research in the context of the Professional Studies program at University of Southern Queensland in Australia, with which the authors are affiliated. Methodology: Analysis of work-based research includes discussion of ‘messy’ research environments and the changing nature of workplaces, along with the opportunities and challenges such environments pose for action researchers. Contribution: In addition to addressing a shortfall in the published literature on work-based research, the paper also contributes insight into the mechanisms used to promote reflective practice and the generation of professional artefacts. Findings: Often driven by altruism, work-based research as implemented in the Professional Studies program results in a so-called ‘triple dividend’, designed to benefit the individual researcher, work environment, and community of practice. Recommendations for Practitioners: To be successful contributors to work-based research, practitioners need to reflect carefully and deeply on experience, planning and outcomes, using what in this paper we call ‘micro-reflective’ (personal) and ‘macro-reflective’ (program) cycles of reflection. Recommendation for Researchers: In addition to generating new knowledge and expanding the frontiers of workplaces, work-based research is often motivated by complicated and wide-reaching imperatives; work-based researchers therefore need to consider the goals, objectives, priorities and vision of their work environments, as well as understand issues related to bias, ethical practice and the nature of insider research. Impact on Society: Work-based learning and research address the complexities, challenges and future demands of Australian workplaces along with the work, mobility and personal development needs of mid- to senior-career professionals. Future Research: In addition to the multitude of action research programs possible in work-places in Australia, more research is needed to understand higher education work-based learning and its relation to, and impact on, work-based research, particularly when applying mixed methods research to work environments.

Longevity and learning from the biographical perspective. Two Case Studies - Locally Rooted and Globally Oriented

In the general imagination, old age and increased longevity do not correspond to learning. The fact that older adults are learning needs to be proven constantly. Longevity is considered to be more than passing time - it has advantages for learning. I agree that longevity is a challenge and I argue that it is also a time of learning. Consequently, my research interest in this paper is longevity and learning. I present two case studies (locally rooted and globally oriented) from a biographical perspective. The paper consists of two parts, a theoretical and an empirical one. In the first, theoretical section, I discuss longevity in the context of the body while considering the local and global worlds as places of living and presenting biography theory as a frame for the research. In the second, empirical section, I present the research background, as well as the research findings from Sweden and Poland.

Inclusion and Exclusion

“ Physician, Heal Thyself ” Luke 4:23 The theme of this sixty-seventh Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA), “Global IR and Regional Worlds: A New Agenda for International Studies,” promises to open the field to a double-headed question that points at its very heart. Here is the question, “Who or what is IR for?” Although too seldom asked in the gleaming ballrooms where the ISA faithful gather, this question is often top of the agenda in the furthest corners of the world, where those skeptical of IR as a way to understand the world gather under the banner that another world is possible. The conceptual (and political) distance between these two understandings of the international suggests why the discipline’s good and great should heed this question and appreciate its full implications. If they do not and are not prepared to rethink IR, the hope for “A New Agenda for International Studies” will fail. This will return the field to business as usual instead. To forge a “New Agenda,” IR needs to recognize the uncomfortable fact that many in the Global South consider it to be a mutant discipline. Of the many tangled threads that are understood to explain IR’s rise as an academic discipline, the least explored is the idea that the underlying purpose was to continue the racialism of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while perpetuating the uneven economic relations between the global periphery and the imperial metropole. The exemplar of this account of the rise of IR is illustrated by the coming of statehood to southern Africa—the region with which I am most familiar. This version of the discipline’s origins involves understanding Britain’s rapacious imperialism and the role of “Great Men of Empire,” like Cecil John Rhodes, who championed it. It questions the importation of the …

Global media and local worlds: The devotees of Madonna of the Arch are using social media – An exploratory case study

This ‘exploratory case study’ focuses on the Web 2.0 practices related to the popular cult of ‘Madonna dell’Arco’. Actually, the devotees share a large number of contents regarding the devotional practices using social networking sites, blogs and video sharing sites. The use of social media by the devotees is striking, as the novelty of technology and practices seems to contrast with the ancestral themes of popular religiosity. In fact, the penitential pilgrimage on foot to the Sanctuary of Madonna dell’Arco in Sant’Anastasía (Province of Naples) has taken place on Easter Mondays every year since the end of the 15th century. It is also rooted in very ancient fertility rites, probably tied to Cybele’s cults. In other words, the use of social media by the devotees seems to reveal for us how the slowly evolving structures and the short-term time-scale events intertwine, in a space and time in which we find the coexistence of forms, practices and power relations, both established and innovative. Therefore, the principal aim of this article is not to consider the use of social media by the devotees in its religious substance. It would rather confront these evidences with the metanarratives which describe how the homogenisation, the mediatisation and the network society are reducing cultural diversities and eroding national identities. At the same time, it aims at confronting them with some widely diffused ideas about the ‘trajectory’ or ‘logic’ of the media and some narratives (and/or mythologies) about information and communications technologies and their social effects. Otherwise, we could consider this article as an attempt towards ‘non-media-centric media studies’ which acknowledges the distinctive characteristics and affordances of the media but also, and fundamentally, puts the social and everyday practices at the centre of the investigation, not necessarily explaining them through media features.

World Literature and Japan: Tokyo, Worlding and Murakami Haruki

AbstractFollowing on from the publication of The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, this essay develops understandings of the worldliness of world literature as part of a more inclusive system of exchange, circulation and multidirectional flows that could create new spaces for multiple world perspectives in literature. Arguing that the world in World Literature should be theorised as a concept as opposed to a marker of scale, Eric Hayot's On Literary Worlds (2012) forms the theoretical and conceptual foundations for analysing the scope and limits of a more sufficiently global view of the nature of worlding in Murakami Haruki's contemporary Japanese fiction. Building on David Damrosch's seminal work What is World Literature (2003a), the aim of this essay is two‐fold: to renew common conceptions of the spatial implications attached to the overarching singularity of the word ‘world’ in world literature; and to expand the categories of ‘world’ and of ‘literature’ as individual ‘whole’ parts that together create new overlapping spaces in the history of worldedness as a cultural phenomenon. Overlaps between anthropologists, sociologists, urban planners, urban rhythm analysis, linguistics and academics are discussed with reference to worlding in Murakami's depiction of Tokyo's multiple world‐passages with particular reference to his 2011 trilogy IQ84. Ultimately, this essay aims to present Japan as a (re)creator of global worlds in which the rebuilding of post‐war Tokyo comprises shifting spatial boundaries pertaining to both our world totality and our capability for (re)reading infinite world spaces. Reading the spatial liminality of Murakami's Tokyo in IQ84 while historicising the building of Tokyo as a world city aims to place transculturation and transliteration at the forefront of developing a multiple worlds perspective for our understandings of the world as a concept.

Reorienting Schmitt's Nomos: Political Theology, and Colonial (and Other) Exceptions in the Creation of Modern and Global Worlds

Author(s): BLANCO, John; Valle, Ivonne del | Abstract: Introduction to special issue of Politica comun on the the work of Carl Schmitt and its importance to the study of colonial frontiers during the early modern period.