Historical Moment Research Articles

The psychology of sexual and gender diversity in the 21st century: Social technologies and stories of authenticity.

The 21st century has seen shifts in social and scientific understandings of gender and sexuality in the United States. From the legitimization of same-sex marriage to the heightened visibility of transgender identities, nonbinary gender, and forms of intimate diversity such as asexuality, kink, and polyamory, core cultural and scientific assumptions about gender and sexuality have been challenged. This article situates these changes in the historical context of 21st century social technologies, which challenge traditional sources of authority about information and provide enhanced opportunities for individuals to experience authenticity in gender and sexuality. We frame authenticity as a master cultural narrative in the United States characterized by feeling a heightened sense of self-authorship and alignment between inner experience and embodiment of gender and sexuality. Five narratives now circulate in the United States, four of which support sexual and gender diversity: (a) gender as self-constructed; (b) sexuality as plural, playful, flexible, and fluid; (c) sexuality and monogamy as cultural compulsions; and (d) intersectionality as central to the experience of sexuality and gender. A fifth narrative seeking to legitimize hierarchies (e.g., patriarchy) is hostile to sexual and gender diversity but remains anchored in a metanarrative of authenticity and has benefitted equally from the affordances of social technologies. This historical moment provides researchers and practitioners with the opportunity to more intentionally ground their work in lived experience, challenge normative thinking about sexuality and gender, practice affirmation, center the phenomenon of diversity over discrete identity categories in an ever-exclusionary acronym (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and more identities [LGBTQ+]), and embrace fluid and nonlinear narratives of social change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Evolution and statement of the rural studies in Latin America

The structure and evolutionary dynamic of the rural world of Latin America has always been a privileged topic in research and scientific reflection, not only at the level of the continent, but also at the international level. Scientific production has always reflected the problems of this vast rural world, but always under the influence of the social, political, and economic conditions of each historical moment. In this paper, we analyze the current scientific production on the rural world with a historical perspective, to understand the evolution of scientific thought and production. We appeal to a very simple bibliometric method based on the analysis of the most prestigious journals about the rural reality of the continent. The analysis allows us to observe a clear trend towards new topics, linked to the problems of the rural world, such as the new relationship between the countryside and the city, environmental problems, the emergence of new ways of producing, among others.

R2P, the Imperial Critique, and Self-Determination: Recovering the Narrative of the Tlaxcaltecas

Abstract Scholars look to early modern canonical texts to understand the philosophical underpinnings of R2P. Meanwhile, critiques argue these origins couch Western imperial intentions. This article complicates the story by returning to a pivotal historical moment – the Spanish encounter with the Aztecs – to explore protective war from an overlooked angle: that of Spain’s indigenous allies, the Tlaxcaltecas. Despite being oppressed by the imperialistic Aztecs, canonical Western texts related to R2P and post-colonial critiques both elide the Tlaxcaltecas’ precarious agency – the rights and duties moulded by endemic structures of violence before, during, and after protective intervention – by problematically embracing simple binaries of European oppressor and indigenous oppressed. Restoring the Tlaxcaltecas to the story complicates tropes about imperial projections of force and the pervasive assumption in R2P discussions of the ‘innocent oppressed’. Our conclusions provide new perspective from which to view future Pillar 3 dilemmas by recognising that the protected sometimes have a bellicose role to play.

From A Preliminary Question to Any Possible Treatment of Suicidal Ideations

The present work aims to provide therapeutic tools for the treatment of suicidal ideas. However, it is necessary prior to dispensing treatment to be aware of some questions about the mode of enjoyment of the current hyper-moderate era. All possible treatment from the psychoanalysis of Lacanian orientation of subjects with suicidal ideas will be based on this warning. First, a historical reading of suicide is presented, from ancient Greek Roman times to the present day, taking as its axis the conception of suicide along with the associated causes. Second, a development on the differences between suicide and euthanasia. Finally, a reading of the time from the concept of depression. The question that guides the work is how the possible treatment of patients with suicidal ideas is based on the coordinates of the social context and the historical moment? It is obtained as a result that suicide is a consequence not only of the signifiers of an era, but of the primacy of masturbatory enjoyment. In conclusion, the therapeutic tools to moderate enjoyment in patients with suicidal ideas are based on the coordinates of a time, so they fail over time, as the techniques that were once used to treat suicides fail.

Unpacking Single Men’s Constructions of Innocent Men and Culpable Women in a #MeToo Context

The #MeToo movement became an important historical moment around the globe, illuminating the pervasive spectrum of sexual harm. This, however, did not exist without significant backlash, backlash which became one of the defining features of our study with men. We individually interviewed 31 single, heterosexual men about their experiences and understandings of contemporary masculinity, singleness and heterosexuality. During this process, participants talked significantly about the #MeToo movement and women’s accounts of sexual violence, with a focus on the implications this might have for men and dating. Using a critical discursive approach, our analysis of men’s talk was patterned by three interpretive repertoires: I just don’t understand…; You can’t do anything anymore!; and She’s really only got herself to blame… Our analysis suggests that while #MeToo has succeeded in starting a conversation about sexual violence, work still needs to be done in interrupting traditional victim-blaming discourses, as exemplified though our data.

The 1517 Project and World Christianity: Migration and the Uses of Doctrine

This article examines the dynamic relationship between Christian doctrine, migration, and social circumstances, tracing how the uses of Christian doctrines have evolved and interacted with different socio-political conditions from the Protestant Reformation to present-day Christianity in Asia. It delves into pivotal historical moments, such as the Protestant Reformation, symbolized as the “1517 Project,” and the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy in the United States, to show that Christian doctrines have shaped and been shaped by cultural and socio-political landscapes. This work particularly contrasts the uses of doctrine in Anglo-European Christendom contexts with post-Christendom situations relating to Asia. The study emphasizes the significant role of migration in spreading Christianity globally and in the development of doctrine, focusing on the Christian faith of Dalits in India and Taiwanese Americans. It calls for a holistic understanding of how Christian doctrine’s universal character interacts with diverse racial and ethnic formations. The article argues for and imagines a more expansive view of the catholicity and contextual embodiment of the Christian discursive tradition for the twenty-first century.

The Unchanging Representation of the 1956 Revolution in Public Art in Budapest

Hungary, and especially its capital, Budapest, is famous for its vast number of public artworks. Unlike their impressive quantity and diversity, their representation techniques are rather monotonous. Apart from nostalgia apparent in those works that represent emotionally charged narratives about the past, we can also trace the anxiety of new forms and interpretations, manifesting itself in the constant over-repetition of well-known symbols and representations. The article investigates possible reasons behind the unchanging character of these public artworks despite the increasing number and variety of procures. In terms of methodology, this paper follows the author’s work on numerous smaller projects and draws on secondary literature, case studies, and content analysis of policy documents and media coverage of particular events. The article presents the memorials dedicated to the 1956 revolution erected in Budapest between 1989 and 2019, focusing on their symbolic and political dimensions as well as physical context. The investigation points out that the range of procurers of public art in Budapest is still not varied, and the lack of expert assessment also prevents contemporary representations. Moreover, the general public does not and cannot play a role in memorialization processes. The observations made in this paper suggest how this particular public art genre manifests nostalgia about the glorious (but failed) historical moment and anxiety of newforms and interpretations.

Changescapes

Some aesthetic forms ‘dramatise’ change. I call them ‘changescapes’. They help us know mutability by immersing us in it, by letting us be with it. Change is their theme and it is often their matter too, for they are usually of fragile and ephemeral stuff that reacts to altering conditions in the larger world. Transformations happen at their boundaries, at the limits between the inside and the outside of their systems, and then the symptoms of change become manifest in them, palpably available for our contemplation. These aesthetic forms have become plenteous recently because we are ready now to understand them and because we need now to understand mutability with them. Versions of these forms have been in human cultures for ages. For example, in the Chinese shopping district of almost every sizable city in the world, you’ll find a wonderful shop dedicated to ‘live arts’, where you can buy your aquarium, horticultural and water-fountain supplies. But there’s something about the present historical moment that’s calling changescapes forth in greater numbers and greater variety. Assaying these developments, this essay will finish in aesthetics and linguistics. But it starts with a story.

Networked learning and utopia

The corporate infrastructures and policy trajectories of contemporary digital education are rarely seen as utopian. To a significant extent they are extractive, utilitarian, colonising and homogenising. At a historical moment of multiple, intersecting crises, scholarship in networked learning can contribute new methods for imagining and re-building digital education – unpicking its histories, imagining better futures and – ultimately – maintaining hope.This paper uses Levitas’s (2013) ‘Utopia as Method’ as a way to approach this challenge, applying its three-part analytical sequence – archaeology, ontology and architecture – to networked learning and digital education.

Evolution of the national theory of cooperation in the conditions of gradual development of the agrarian sector of Belarus

Evolution of the national theory of cooperation in the conditions of gradual development of the agrarian sector of Belarus

My Journey Through the 1980s and 1990s as an Art Student and Young Artist

I will present my journey through the 1980s and 1990s as an art student and young artist in Portugal. Based on an autoethnographic methodology, meaning an approach to research and writing that seeks to synthesize, describe, and analyze personal experience to understand a broader cultural context, I start to present my work as an artist of mixed media visual installations to later introduce the impact of new media technologies on my visual arts work. Finally, I present and document the Rupture installation (1998). This text aims to contextualize a historical moment that is about to disappear from the collective memory.

Toponymy and its aspects in naming villages as tourism destinations in Madura: An ethnolinguistics perspective

This study is intended to analyze the category of toponyms of tourism destinations in Bangkalan, Madura in particular the four villages where the tourism destinations exist based on the aspect of the naming system. Then, it identifies the relation between the toponym with the cultural values of the names of those tourism destinations. This study used a descriptive qualitative method. The data are names of the villages in Kamal, Socah, and Bangkalan districts in which there are four tourism villages. The data collection was carried out by observing, interviewing the head of the villages, and reviewing the document of villages for tourism destinations. Results of the study show that there are three aspects of toponymy in the four tourism villages. They are toponymy of vegetation, history, and embodiment. There is no regional toponymy. From the aspect of naming the villages, it can provide important cultural and historical moments representing the people's lives, religious, and linguistic creativity. The place name is not merely arbitrary but depends on various factors or aspects and provides linguistic and cultural information toward the name of the four tourism villages in this study.

Similar Narration of the Other: Lârî’s Narration of the Battle of Çaldıran under Ottoman’s Influence (1514)

The Battle of Çaldıran in 1514, which took place between the Ottoman Empire under Sulṭān Selīm (d. 926/1520) and the Safavid Empire under Shāh Ismāʿīl (d. 930/1524), is a key historical moment. Its interpretation, however, differs markedly between Ottoman and Safavid historical accounts. Ottoman narratives herald it as a resounding triumph, while Safavid accounts portray it as Sulṭān Selīm’s failed attempt to completely subjugate their empire. This study examines the instrumental role of Lārī, a Safavid expatriate living in the Ottoman Empire, in the production of his historical treatise ‘Mir’atü’l-advār ve Mirkātü’l-Ahbār’. It argues that Lārī, animated by loyalty to the Ottoman perspective and antipathy towards the Safavids, deliberately endorsed the Ottoman version, despite his intimate acquaintance with Safavid sources. His chronicles portray the Safavids as deviating from Islamic principles, thereby sanctioning Sulṭān Selīm’s military incursion. This study emphasizes that the sixteenth-century rivalry between the Ottomans and the Safavids gave rise to different paradigms of behavior, shaped by different ambitions such as the pursuit of material gain, social status and prestige. In this context, Lārī serves as a prominent case in point.

Research on Communication Simulation of PROFIBUS Multi-master System

As the application background of fieldbus becomes more and more extensive, PROF I BUS contains multiple master stations, and a multi-master system with multiple slave stations emerges at the historic moment. This paper establishes a multi-master communication system model and uses simulation technology to study the relationship between the target token cycle time, token waiting time, and master site address value.

A higher education pedagogy for settler listening with Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

This article focuses on a higher education pedagogy of reading the exemplary novel of Indigenous Australia, Carpentaria (2006) by Waanyi author, Alexis Wright. The multiply awarded and multiply translated novel gives an epic view of contemporary Aboriginal life. Its dramatization of listening relations is profoundly insightful for the current historical moment in Australian Indigenous-settler relations. Our pedagogy of settler listening emerges from the invitation by the Indigenous signatories to The Uluru Statement from the Heart (2017) calling on all Australians to aim for a “better future” for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Our pedagogy has even more relevance since the defeat of the 2023 “Voice” referendum that symbolically and practically aimed to ensure that better future through a permanent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advisory body to parliament. We describe our pedagogy through the scholarship in political listening studies and the “ethics of reading” the combination of which engenders responsiveness and responsibility in a reader that is potentially (trans)formative of relationality. We argue that when higher education curriculum is attentive to pedagogies of listening relations to marginalized voices, the conditions for settler listening are being achieved both within higher education and beyond.

Reacting to the Past Games in the Criminal Justice Classroom

While student engagement and student-centered learning have been demonstrated, at length, to increase academic achievement, how can criminal justice as an academic field continue to effectively engage students in a contemporary society that appears to be ever more based on dogmatic tribes and beliefs? The answer might be reacting to the past (RTTP) games which utilize “elaborately designed role-playing games set in pivotal historical moments of clashing ideas and interests” to increase student engagement and academic performance. When confronted with a controversial topic in criminal justice, one that fits well into the aforementioned dogmatic tribal belief structure, instructors might see the task of student engagement daunting. Utilizing RTTP as part of their pedagogical approach would provide instructors with a tool that places students in similar controversial moments with little to argue as the historical events the RTTP game is based on is well recorded.

Non-Western Agency in Refugee Humanitarianism: Turkey and ‘Operation Provide Comfort’

Abstract The evolution of refugee humanitarianism is commonly studied in terms of critical junctures. One such historical moment is the creation of a ‘safe zone’ for Iraqi Kurdish refugees above the 36th parallel of Northern Iraq through the 1991 United Nations (UN) mission known as ‘Operation Provide Comfort.’ The UN intervention is widely accepted as a critical juncture because it marked the beginning of international humanitarianism's extra-territorial phase. ‘Operation Provide Comfort’ brought a paradigm shift in the management of displaced populations by means of introducing “preventive protection” as a novel approach combining protection with control as the idea is to keep refugees in their own countries and offer them help without the need to cross an international border. The standard narrative underlines Western historical priority by attributing the preventive protection to a single source of ideas and processes stemming from the West. Drawing on postcolonial research, this paper argues for recognizing the agency of the non-West in the formulation and execution of the safe haven concept as a historical milestone. More specifically, it demonstrates the pioneering role that Turkey played through international debates and diplomatic action, which culminated into the new episode of refugee humanitarianism. The findings also invite us to revisit current explanations of the evolution of international humanitarian norms by showing the entanglement of refugee protection on the one hand, and domestic and regional questions of ethnicity and counter-insurgency on the other.

The Role of the Law in Critical Theory: An Engagement with Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth

AbstractThis paper discusses the role of Law and Legal Thinking in Critical Theory with specific reference to the arguments that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri offer in their book Commonwealth. The core idea is that Critical Theory is no less radical, but much more concrete, when it is performing not only an external, but also an internal critique of the Law. It shows that the role of the law in critical theory emerges as a problem when the latter claims that ‘there is no outside’ and that ‘the legal base of the system structures our lives.’ It then discusses optimistic and pessimistic strategies to overcome the problem, and argue for a demanding strategy which consist in articulating the external and the internal critique of the law. To make this point, the paper goes back to the epistemic context in which critical attitudes are deployed (the ‘Conflict of the Faculties’), describes the four theoretical moves constitutive of the historical moment in which, at the end of the 18th Century, modern law as we know it was conceived of and founded; and sketches the key moments of the history of the internal critique of the law. It then illustrates the demanding strategy with examples taken from the field of Intellectual Property, and concludes that the Law is malleable and open enough to allow the thinking and practicing of radical alternatives from within the legal system and also that alternatives spoken in the language of the law are no less radical, but certainly, more concrete than others.

The Public Role of Italian Sociology: Among Institutions, Universities and Social Engagement

AbstractSociology has played an important role in Italy, although its centrality in public debate has fluctuated, and it has been supported or opposed by political power at different historical moments. Contemporary Italian sociology has developed since the 1950s and has been influenced in various ways by European and American sociological theories. Sociology has played an important role in Italian public debate and has offered a critical and scientific perspective on the country’s social reality. However, this role should be understood in the context of the different stages of development that have accompanied the academic growth of the discipline and the presence of sociologists in ‘policy making’ processes. In the latter sense, Italian sociology has played an important role in the formation of public policies, as it offers a scientific analysis of social problems and proposes solutions based on empirical research. Within this framework, the training processes also need to be situated within what has been defined—albeit with conceptual ambiguity—as ‘professional sociology’, which involves important figures such as social workers, psychologists, and health workers. However, sociology has also played an important political role both in supporting the actions of policy makers and in analysing the contradictions of the capitalist system. This article also analyses the emergence of a ‘transformative’ positional sociology alongside the traditional public sociology. The goal of this transformative approach is to counteract the public role of Italian sociology, which seems to have lost its critical-explanatory vocation without ever having truly acquired a propositional function in the social context.

Challenges for Sustainable Urban Planning: A Spatiotemporal Analysis of Complex Landslide Risk in a Latin American Megacity

This paper analyzes the spatiotemporal evolution of a complex landslide risk scenario in a Latin American megacity, underscoring the key challenges it poses for sustainable urban planning in such cities. This research draws upon multiple studies commissioned by the mayor’s office of the megacity of Bogota, Colombia, and utilizes aerial photographs and satellite imagery from diverse sensor types. The methodology used considered six spatiotemporal analysis scenarios: rural/natural, mining, urban, landslide risk, stabilization and environmental park, and informal reoccupation. The findings reveal a complex interplay between the megacity’s peripheral areas, which face constraints for human settlement, and their potential for construction material exploitation. This complex relationship was further compounded by weaknesses in planning and controlling peripheral occupations, coupled with a burgeoning demand for developable land in a landslide risk context (landslide area: 73 ha). The analysis scenarios highlighted the predominant use of a reactive urban planning approach that addressed events, changes, or problems after they had occurred, rather than proactively anticipating and preventing potential risks at the study site. The detected land-use transformations unveiled different historical moments, culminating in a landslide disaster (804 houses destroyed, 3000 families at risk). This catastrophe necessitated a radical and significant intervention, incurring substantial costs for the megacity administration (USD 26.05 million). This landslide was the largest recorded in the megacity and one of the most extensive in urban areas across Latin America.