Hegemonic System Research Articles

Thinking About the Unthought Multiracial Subject: A Response to Adam Rodríguez’s “Disallowing Multiplicity: Internalized Hierarchies, Dissociation, and Unformulated Bits of Self in a Poor, Mixed-Race Kid”

ABSTRACT In responding to Adam Rodríguez’s paper in this issue, I offer three autobiographical vignettes to depict aspects of my subjective experience of living as a multiracial person. Using his discussion of the multiracial subject as a point of departure, I consider how Asibong, Eng and Han, Stephens, and Mura conceptualize the racialized subject as socialized into carrying the harmful effects of racism for a White hegemonic system that is invested in erasing and forgetting its painful and violent history. I join Rodríguez in thinking about how a psychoanalytic treatment that combines an analysis of the racialized transference and countertransference, along with an exploration of the deleterious effects of the day-to-day racism experienced by the multiracial subject, opens possibilities to metabolize anger and guilt and mitigate the dissociation of aspects of the multiracial self.

At the threshold of criminalisation: repression of ‘oppositional’ civil society organisations in the Israeli settler state

ABSTRACT This article discusses the processes of criminalisation of oppositional political activism of Jewish-Israeli citizens. Israel strives to maintain Jewish supremacy, providing a privileged position to Jewish-Israelis while treating Palestinians by default as a threat. The article focuses on the sustained campaign waged against Breaking the Silence, an organisation established by veterans of the Israeli army that attempts to use a moral critique to campaign to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Since 2009, the organisation has become a target of a right-wing campaign of delegitimisation intended to silence it. The article discusses the process through which oppositional civil society groups are transformed from a position of privilege to a threat to be neutralised. Such processes of criminalisation involve multiple informal and formal tools, and actors from ‘civil society’ and ‘the state’. I argue that the distinction between the two spheres is artificial as both are part of the same hegemonic system. I contend that understanding the nature of the threat and those that pose it opens a window into the vulnerability of the system. The states’ coercive side, which was previously geared against Palestinians, turns towards its privileged citizens, thus rendering its vulnerability more visible.

A distinctive global pivotal state? The intra-hierarchical messaging of the ROK Indo-Pacific strategy

ABSTRACT The Republic of Korea’s (ROK) Indo-Pacific strategy is widely interpreted as mimicking the language, tone, and agendas of the US Indo-Pacific strategy. Drawing upon existing theoretical work on hierarchy and international relations, this paper challenges simplistic views of the ROK strategy as a pro-US document by presenting a new model of intra-hierarchical messaging to explain how demonstrations of solidarity with a hegemonic order (compliance narratives) can also contain attempts to reassign responsibilities and privileges within this order (distinction narratives). Applying this framework to the ROK strategy reveals how a strong compliance narrative supporting the US hegemonic system exists alongside a distinction narrative articulating a more profitable role for the ROK that deviates from US expectations. Although this strategy has partly elevated Korean status in the US world order, tensions between these narratives may lead to potential negative outcomes for the ROK, such as empty solidarity or reined in leadership. Nevertheless, the article concludes that it may be in US interests to continue this renegotiation of the hegemonic contract.

Navigating Power Structures: Symbolism, Realism, and Naturalism in The Grapes of Wrath through a Postcolonial Lens

This paper explores the representation and negotiation of power systems in John Steinbeck’s famous book “The Grapes of Wrath” by using a postcolonial framework. This study seeks to identify the manner in which questions of power, oppression, and resistance are depicted in the book by analyzing its themes of symbolism, realism, and naturalism through the lens of postcolonial theory. This study examines the symbolic meaning of people, situations, and events connected to hegemonic systems and colonial legacies through rigorous textual analysis. Additionally, it explores how the novel’s naturalism and realism illuminate the historical, socio-economic and environmental surroundings, emphasizing the connection between systemic inequality and power dynamics. This study clarifies how colonial ideas sustain exploitation and disenfranchisement by examining the experiences of marginalized groups, including tenant farmers, migrant labourers, and indigenous communities. Finally, this study advances our knowledge of how literature can be a platform for opposing and criticizing established power systems. It provides insights into the resilience and resistance strategies used by marginalized people.

Disrupting the gender and development impasse in university teaching and learning spaces

ABSTRACT Gender and development (GAD) is coming under increasing scrutiny for its entanglements with hegemonic systems of governance, policy, and knowledge. This article argues that GAD programs and/or development studies programs with teaching provision on gender have not sufficiently responded to the imperatives of race and intersectionality most recently intensified by COVID-19 and the decolonising of the curriculum and Black Lives Matter movements. The article explores the ways in which GAD frameworks have resisted rather than embraced paradigmatic critiques. We argue that this resistance to the imperatives of intersectionality has resulted in a GAD impasse which is reproduced and perpetuated through pedagogy and teaching, which shapes teaching and learning spaces in the UK. Despite the potentials for teaching to question dominant paradigms and frameworks, the impasse has hindered the field of GAD from adopting an introspective, intersectional, and transformative approach.

ROOTS, ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF RHYTHMIC GYMNASTICS: A HISTORICAL INSIGHT

Rhythmic gymnastics is a sport that was designed to be the more feminine sister discipline of women’s artistic gymnastics. Its roots, however, are embedded in a male hegemonic European history that manipulated elements of dance, physiology and pedagogy. Key role players were François Delsarte, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Isadora Duncan and George Demeny who greatly influenced the development of rhythmic gymnastics. These individuals extended previous work of the earlier gymnastics pioneers – Johan Guts Muths, Ludwig Jahn and Per Ling. Since its inception as a competitive sport in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the 1940s, rhythmic gymnastics expanded greatly until it was officially recognised by the International Federation of Gymnastics (FIG) in 1962. In 1963, the first World Championship competition was held and the sport gained increased international traction. This study aims to investigate social and political factors that contributed to the development of rhythmic gymnastics, from its origins in the European systems up to its recognition as an independent sport in 1973. We conclude our article with the supposition that the sport did not directly challenge male hegemonic systems, but that women in this sport started shifting gender expectations and norms.

Participative assessment of agroecological short food supply chains and proposals for improvement: a case study of Andalusia (Spain)

ABSTRACT This article presents the participative assessment and design of proposals for the development and consolidation of agroecological short food supply chains (SFSCs) in Andalusia (southern Spain). The results show the problems and the possible solutions for agroecological SFSCs according to the agroecological innovation that has strengthened Andalusian agroecological initiatives and networks. The agroecological SFSC initiatives that make up collective networks are recognized as alternatives to the global agri-food systems but they have to scale-up to replace the hegemonic system. However, there are many factors that complicate this scaling-up process and the medium and long-term survival of the agroecological SFCSs. Institutional support is needed to reinforce the collective processes that are ongoing in Andalusia.

Autoethnography as a decolonising tool: bringing identity into the classroom

ABSTRACT The need to include indigenous perspectives in curricula is a challenge facing education internationally. In the context of higher education, decolonising practices and processes are the responsibility not just of institutions but also individual academics. Despite individual aspirations to decolonise teaching, it can be difficult to know where to start. Our aim is to guide others to engage in teaching practices that seek to decolonise. To do this we outline our respective teaching and research experiences that are united by our use of critical autoethnography in workshops we have designed for our respective teaching in different institutions. Our paper describes different ways to bring into focus the lived experience and nuanced views of groups who, through the process of colonisation, have not previously been given space or voice in higher education. Enabling the inclusion of indigenous enquiry within classroom settings provides a valuable decolonisation tool for groups such as the indigenous Māori population in Aotearoa New Zealand. Our practices seek to create space to prioritise storytelling, the sharing of researcher positionality, and personal identity in a way that centralises indigenous perspectives. We argue that these autoethnographic practices help teachers and students to hold hegemonic systems to account, explore strengths-based solutions and express aspirations for the future.

Two routes to degeneration, two routes to utopia: The impure critical performativity of alternative organizing

It sometimes appears that alternative organizations are doomed to perpetuate the systems they aim to transform, as efforts to avoid co-optation entail retreat from the very engagement social change requires. Scholars then face a dilemma: do we reveal these degenerative processes in existing alternative organizations and reinforce disillusionment, or avoid such critique and endorse ineffectual strategies? To address this question I draw on Erik Olin Wright’s identification of two broad strategies of social transformation adopted by alternative organizations. Symbiotic strategies are those that aim to change the existing system via incremental reform, such as trade unions’ collective bargaining. Interstitial strategies, by contrast, are those more radical approaches that seek to prefigure emancipatory alternative systems, such as mutual aid networks. The first contribution this paper proposes is a mapping of these social transformation strategies to distinct forms of degeneration, understood as inadvertent reproduction of the hegemonic system. Organizations adopting the symbiotic strategy are particularly vulnerable to the more well-studied forms of degeneration that result from partial alignment with the hegemonic system—what I call exposure degeneration. Organizations adopting the interstitial strategy are instead vulnerable to less well-studied forms of degeneration resulting from insufficient engagement with the hegemonic system—what I call insulation degeneration. Although this model may appear to place alternative organizations in a catch-22, I draw a more hopeful perspective from theories of performativity that highlight the relationship between socially transformative agency and social reproduction. Unpacking the necessary impurity of performativity leads to the paper’s second contribution: while both practitioners and scholars of alternative organizations can pursue social transformation only via impure critical performativity, awareness of this constraint can foster reflexivity regarding the agential scope that remains.

“It can be very easy to feel uncomfortable”: Socio-spatial constructions of campus safety among university students and administrators

Research about campus safety focuses primarily on identifying problematic student behaviours (i.e., toxic partying, sexual violence) and institutional infrastructure (i.e., lighting, emergency services), to the exclusion of how safety, as an idea and embodied experience, is constructed. Using qualitive interview data from a participatory action research study conducted at Western University, this article uses a critical feminist lens to examine how undergraduate students (n = 23) and administrators (n = 7) spoke about campus safety as well as spatial vulnerability. Study participants shed compelling light on the “uncomfortable” feelings that pervade their movement across and within the university campus. Often presumed to be a spatially distinct place of privilege for all who work and attend classes within its reach, this is not always the case. Participants experienced this space as one of precarious privilege that reflects, reproduces, and sometimes protects hegemonic systems of white, male, cis-gender institutional power. This glimpse into the emotional geography of the campus sheds new light on safety culture and allied feminist research, specifically that which relates to the interplay between contested notions of safety as well as spatial vulnerability for two stakeholder communities in the neoliberal university.

Territorialising Local Food Systems for an Agroecological Transition in Latin America

An agroecological transition can enhance resilience by several means, e.g., managing ecological relationships through agroecosystems, enhancing farmers’ knowledge of natural resources, recycling those resources, maintaining biodiversity, and thus, flexibly adapting to environmental stresses. However, the hegemonic agri-food system has been continuing its capitalist transition, thereby undermining agroecological methods and deterritorialising social bonds. Facing this pervasive threat, an agroecological transition needs a greater convergence between agroecological production and a solidarity economy (economia solidaria or EcoSol in Latin America). Their convergence can be called EcoSol-agroecology, based on short food supply chains (called circuitos cortos there). These efforts develop territorial markets, generate more stable livelihoods, and thus keep producers on the land. In our study, each research team collaborated with an EcoSol-agroecology network to develop Participatory Action Research methods. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted their circuitos cortos, stimulating creative adaptations or alternatives, alongside demands for policy support measures. These networks have regionally territorialised local initiatives, while also confronting obstacles from the hegemonic system. Although socioecological resilience often means a system’s capacity to bounce back, here it has meant bouncing forwards through new opportunities for solidaristic livelihoods and bonds. EcoSol-agroecology networks, agri-extensionists, and researchers have jointly developed such counter-hegemonic strategies, as illustrated by the case studies here.

Critical Race Theory: Confronting, Challenging, and Rethinking White Privilege

The term “White privilege” has been used to denote specific privileges that White groups possess due to their Whiteness and White identity. In this article, firstly, I outline how, as a conceptual tool, White privilege can only be understood in relation to Critical Race Theory, specifically the notion that racism is central and endemic, through Whiteness as property and interest convergence. Secondly, I analyze the development of White privilege and provide ways forward for the use of the term, and thirdly, I use examples from higher education to outline how White privilege works in terms of the construction of knowledge, the prioritization of gender above race, and the fact that policy making is designed to protect White identities to uphold a hegemonic system of White supremacy.

Intersectionality incarnate: A case study of civil society, social capital, and its metamorphosis

ABSTRACT This paper investigates civil society’s metamorphosis through the lens of intersectional risk theory. While numerous studies interrogate civil society’s spatiotemporal evolution, there has yet to be an analysis of how and why the Intersectional Activist has gained such prominence. The interdisciplinary nexus between intersectionality, social capital, and civil society to that of the risk discipline requires a multi-tiered methodology to map the contours of this metamorphosis. Therefore, the choice of a hermeneutically-framed, exploratory case study, supplemented by semi-structured interviews, structures the research. The results support that the Intersectional Activist is a byproduct of capitalistic, multiply-burdening institutions of oppression. However, these overlapping institutions form a pressurized moulding onto the individuals’ tabula rasa, whereby a transversal, paradigm-defiant coalition insurrects against hegemonic systems. Reactivating the five capacities of the self, knowledge, processes, agency, and power to bridge cross-sectorial mobilization, the Intersectional Activist is a direct riposte to the Precarious Risk Society. The collective has now become the connective–manifesting in the intersectional plight against systemic injustice, the Matrix of Power reactivates the capacities through an association of difference, reconstituting the nature of social capital. Within this reconstitution, the transversal activist realizes themselves in a new connective frontier, for they are intersectionality incarnate.

An Analysis on the Influence of the Description of Gender Impression in Classic Western Fairy Tales on Children's Gender Cognition from the Perspective of Feminism

Feminism is a theoretical system that has gradually been flourishing in recent years. In the study of fairy tales, many scholars have analyzed the nature of the representation of some classic fairy tales on the hegemonic system of male discourse from the perspective of feminism. However, there is still a lack of unified explanation of the impact of children's readers on the formation of gender cognition. Therefore, this paper will use the implicit personality theory, summarize the cultural motif of western classic fairy tales, analyze the text of classic fairy tales, and analyze the impact of the description of gender impression in western classic fairy tales on children's gender cognition from the feminist perspective. The research shows that western classic fairy tales present a tendency to "filling in implicit personality", imposing ideal identities on females, and intensifying the formation of male gaze. All of them are not the embodiment of the solidification of the patriarchal system, which not only aggravates the formation of gender stereotypes, but also suppresses children's opportunities to explore their own possibilities. On the whole, they show a tendency to dwarfing and disciplining females.

Dance Education, Decolonization, and the Climate Crisis: Developing Ethical Pedagogies

ABSTRACT To date, there has been minimal analysis of the intersections between dance pedagogy and the climate crisis. Arguing that it is essential to approach the climate crisis via the lens of decolonization and underscoring the indivisible links between modernity, coloniality, and the climate emergency, the author considers what it might mean to develop an ethical dance pedagogy for a student population facing the grim consequences of climate change. After highlighting the academy’s decolonizing failures, the author applies principles from Indigenous scholars Andreotti, Hunt, and others to offer a pedagogical case study of her own deep dive into her position on stolen land. Arguing that it is critical to model such digging to demonstrate our collective complicity in the hegemonic systems of modernity/coloniality, the author concludes by bringing together emerging methods developing both inside and outside of dance education to propose a scaffolding for an ethical dance pedagogy for the twenty-first century.

Sodalism as Open Worldview: Conspiring to Dismantle the White Franchise

Sodalism as Open Worldview: Conspiring to Dismantle the White Franchise

On resistance and pluriversal voices of subversive archaism

On resistance and pluriversal voices of subversive archaism

‘Cycling is good’ but ‘cyclists are reckless’

Urban mobility choices and policies are not a common object of study for linguistics. These policies and choices actually generate forms of discrimination by creating reified identities of ‘drivers’ against ‘cyclists’ against ‘pedestrians’. Through the prism of ‘mobility justice’ this paper shows how detrimental discursive choices contribute to the normalisation of a mobility system which is highly discriminatory and a source of toxicity and danger to humanity. The discriminations imposed by the hegemonic system of automobility reinforce other forms of intersectional discrimination. By looking at journalistic texts that employ road-user identities to fuel narratives of conflict, this study highlights the need for linguists to contribute to language-focused investigations already being carried out from the perspectives of other disciplines such as Geography, Sociology or Transport Studies. It also shows how these investigations can provide answers to broader questions concerning climate inaction.

The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now by Henry Shue

<i>The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now</i> by Henry Shue

Where is the Love, y’all? Punk Pedagogy in High School Choir

Capitalism and its offspring, neoliberalism, are omnipresent in modern and postmodern societies. Illich, Giroux, and McLaren, among others, point to the futility and inequity of current models of education that focus on standardization, vocationalism, and conformity. Running counter to these powerful hegemonic systems, critical pedagogues and educational philosophers such as hooks and Silverman follow philosophers Frankfurt and Wolf in identifying a teaching approach rooted in love. Such an ethic embodies a robust, punk confrontation to potentially damaging, dehumanizing institutional norms perpetrated by current systems of schooling (Hewitt &amp; Smith, 2020). The authors present and discuss vignettes as a duoethnographic study of one teacher’s work with a high school choir in Colorado Springs, USA, through which she works to engage young people as compassionate artistic citizens (Elliott &amp; Silverman, 2015; Hendricks 2018). By teaching with love and by modeling love, she teaches young people to love, embracing what Noddings (2005) identifies as an ethic of care. This choral community demonstrates the messy, anarchist ideal that Wright (2019) highlights as a necessary future for music education, wherein the educator diverts from teaching solely to standardized expectations to address the affiliative needs of her students through a love that desires good for her students (Fromm, 1956; Noddings, 2005)