Ideological Tensions Research Articles

Ideologies, Conspiracy Beliefs, and the Chinese Public’s Politicized Attitudes to Climate Change

While ideologies consistently influence public opinions on climate change in Western democracies, whether they affect the Chinese public’s climate attitudes is unknown. By applying a well-established measure of Chinese ideology, this study conducted a nationwide survey (n = 1469) on the relationships between climate attitudes and ideologies, conspiracy beliefs, and science literacy. It is the first study to empirically investigate the impact of ideological tendencies, conspiracy beliefs, and conspiratorial thinking in shaping people’s climate attitudes. Among a series of novel findings, ideology was found to be a crucial factor in Chinese attitudes toward climate change, and economic ideology, in particular, was most strongly related to climate attitude. Moreover, somewhat counterintuitively, we found a positive link between respondents’ conspiratorial thinking and their climate awareness, as well as the failure of the moderation role of science literacy on ideological factors that influence climate attitude. All these findings suggest a mechanism behind the Chinese public’s perception of climate change, primarily working on the individual–state relationship.

Conceptual Metaphor of COVID-19 in New York Times

Conceptual metaphor is an important theory of cognitive metaphor. Its nature is recognized as a rhetoric within the scope of traditional metaphor research. It is a deliberate deviation of literal meaning and an optional discourse modifier. Cognitive metaphor holds that metaphor mechanism is the projection from the source domain to the target domain. In this process, the establishment of similarity is fundamental, and the similarity relationship can be divided into physical similarity and psychological similarity. Things can enter both ends of metaphor by virtue of these two similarity relationships to produce rich and complex conceptual metaphor, which makes metaphor everywhere in our life. As one of the important ways of information dissemination, news discourse has a strong ideological tendency and political motivation, which has a subtle impact on the psychology of readers. Therefore, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, this paper uses conceptual metaphor theory to analyze the characteristics, types and cognitive mechanisms of conceptual metaphors in COVID-19 coverage in The New York Times. It provides ideas for discourse analysis of epidemic situation in the future.

Settled and unsettled listening: café culture, colonialism, and multisensory politics in Tunisian-Andalusī music

ABSTRACT This article examines French colonial and early Tunisian nationalist initiatives concerning public music listening practices in 1930s Protectorate Tunisia. Drawing on historical documents from the colonial archive, period travel logs, and Tunisian authors, I offer a history of café listening in Tunis focused on audition of ma’lūf, Tunisian Arab-Andalusī music. Specifically, I analyse a 1935 government-issued mandate directing café owners across the country to play pre-approved recordings of ma’lūf for their clientele. I consider this mandate alongside a co-occurrent policy of the nascent Rashidiyya organisation that prohibited live performance of ma’lūf in cafés. While these approaches appear contradictory – one encouraging ma’lūf listening and the other discouraging it – I demonstrate that French and elite Tunisian actors in fact sought similar goals: rescuing traditional music from neglect and debasement. I explore the way these policies reflected pre-existing ideological tensions among Tunisians around the respectability of music listening in public – especially with regard to class and gender – and how acts of colonial control sought to ‘settle’ ma’lūf listening, challenging Tunisian ‘sensate sovereignty’ (Robinson [2020]. Hungry Listening, Resonant Theory for Indigenous Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) and shaping emerging politics of multisensory and embodied listening. This account aims to situate ma’lūf listening within its dense sensory, cultural, and historical contexts, taking into account the social-sonic milieu of the café, colonial anxieties around public radio listening, and the use of music broadcasting to combat threats to colonial control. Finally, I identify examples of present-day approaches to ‘unsettling’ Tunisian listening and reclamation of multisensory musical experience from my ethnographic research.

Militarization as Personal Cultivation: Student Military Training in Guomindang China, 1928–1937

By examining the Guomindang’s (GMD’s) on-the-ground implementation of its student military training program, this article addresses the ideological tensions and diplomatic predicaments underlying the party-state’s youth mobilization strategies. While fetishizing a regimented society, the program incorporated a heterogeneous set of tactics to both inspire and control youth martial activism. The peculiar mix of military discipline, Confucian modes of education, and liberal ideals of voluntarism and competition gave rise to multifarious experiences and sentiments that muddied the main objective of the state—to convert military training into a form of personal cultivation. This study sheds light on the gap between Chiang Kai-shek’s conception of militarization as the practice of everyday discipline and Chinese students’ embrace of military training as patriotic resistance against Japanese invasion. Ultimately, the program’s mobilizational potential was undercut by its obsession with managing the trivialities of everyday life and Nanjing’s appeasement policy toward Japan.

De la fragmentation à l’unité, de l’unité à la fragmentation. Imaginaire et idéologie du corps viril dans “Gilles” de Drieu la Rochelle

The crisis of the virile body that fuels Pierre Drieu la Rochelle’s literary and political imagination resonates in Gilles in a particularly articulated way: on the one hand, the conflicts of the decadent society shift onto the character’s body; on the other hand, Interwar France becomes a body agitated by contrasting tensions. As a figure in which several conflicting tensions coexist, the body is the ideal starting point for highlighting Gilles’ semantic and semiotic autonomy from any excessively monological interpretation. All this without underestimating - or even denying - the presence of an ideological tension: the atomisation of identity makes the body an evanescent simulacrum which, far from coinciding with a series of somatic coordinates, can only become an object of interest insofar as it is subjected to a process of ideologisation. Such a view problematizes the strictly propagandistic configuration of fascist discourse, generally proceeding through a system of clear-cut oppositions. In Gilles, these fundamental antinomies are inscribed in a plot, that is to say, in an axiologically mobile network based on the coexistence of opposites. The issue of the virile body is thus linked to a conflicting tension, which, throughout the text, takes on both individual and collective value: the one between nostalgia for the aristocratic model and acceptance of petty bourgeois mediocrity.

China in and out of World Anthropologies: Epistemic Politics Amidst Historical Ironies and Contemporary Realities

Since the early 2000s, scholars have proposed the notion of “world anthropologies” to expose the pluralistic nature of anthropology, and to counter the colonial legacy embedded in knowledge production. This paper discusses how anthropological knowledge in and of China contributes to, is distant from, and challenges, such intellectual movement at both intellectual and institutional levels. First, unlike Western anthropology which shifts from colonialism to liberalism and then to postcolonialism, anthropology in China began with a progressive agenda of anti-colonialism, and then leaned toward liberalism. In the context of China’s rise, “China” has been further embroiled in a puzzle of imperialism. This reversed ideological tendency contributes to the disorientation of the critical energy in anthropology focused on China. Second, just as China has taken an active role in the competition for education and research in a globalized, yet uneven academia through discipline construction, anthropology in the West, particularly the United States, has become provincialized in terms of its intellectual agendas. Many of the younger generation of Chinese anthropologists have become stuck in the disjuncture, struggling to channel their critical energy through engaged scholarship, both within and beyond academic institutions. The epistemic politics in and of China, at both the intellectual and institutional levels, reveals that the post-socialist condition deserves to be reference points in world anthropologies. If decolonization posits treating plural standpoints as equal, then being counted in the decolonizing efforts necessitates subscribing to the dominant framework. Thus, more attention to the post-socialist condition, and ultimately the pluralization of the reference points of political potency, should truly pluralize, and ultimately decolonize, anthropology.

Anticomunism, the Early American Conservative Movement and the Liberal Consensus (1955-1964)

This article re-examines the role that anticommunism played during the emergence of the early American conservative movement. Through a detailed re-assessment of published and archival material it challenges the two main assumptions consistently reproduced by the literature, and according to which evangelical anticommunist played a doubly crucial role. According to the established view, anticommunism set apart conservative intellectuals and activists from their liberal counterparts and, secondly, acted as the element holding together different ideological strands within the conservative community. These pages demonstrate that anticommunism itself was, in fact, never as dividing an issue as both conservatives and liberal activists claimed. Instead, relatively marginal differences of opinion about the Cold War were blown out of all proportion and employed by both conservatives and progressives as a tool in the midst of intensely sectarian partisan struggles. Similarly, anticommunism was never an element of consensus within a wider conservative community that at this point included traditionalist intellectuals, libertarians and adherents to the populist radical right. In fact, anticommunism often acted as an element furthering already existing ideological tensions.

MICHAEL CHEKHOV, SPIRITUALITY AND SOVIET THEATRE

The present article discusses the work of Michael Chekhov, director of the Second Moscow Art Theatre from 1922 to 1928. After the October revolution Chekhov sought to withstand the threat from those ideological tendencies which led away from the ideals and spiritual values of his teacher Konstantin Stanislavsky. The reasons for Chekhov’s emigration were connected both with his opposition to Soviet cultural policy and the repression of religious groups in Russia. Chekhov was the most famous follower in the Russian theatre of the anthroposophist, Rudolf Steiner. In his production of “Hamlet” Chekhov also followed the spiritual ideas of the Russian symbolists while applying new methods of acting.

소득수준과 이념성향 관계에서 성장 및 분배의 가치선호가 미치는 영향

This study empirically examined the impact value preference for growth and distribution may have on ideological tendency, using the “Korea Social Integration Survey” as base-line data. Specifically, this study assessed the distribution of ideological tendencies by household income levels and empirically analysed the possible link between the preferred-value system of growth and distribution and ideological tendencies(i.e., progressive or conservative tendencies) using a process SPSS macro. The results are as follows. First, people in lower income classes reveals the stronger tendency for conservatism. Second, regarding the relationship between value preference and income levels, the moderating effect was not immediate in the entire period, but in the period of 2021 lower income classes tended to be skewed to a more conservative continuum. In particular, it was found that the positive relationship between value for growth and conservatives was reinforced especially in the low income classes. It helps to interpret the class treachery vote, revealed in the 20th presidential election, in which people in the low-income class supported the conservative party. Korean economy is running out the efficiency of endogenous growth engine, mainly due to the transition to an aging society and economic polarization, coupled with repeated external economic shocks. Under such growth constraints, political parties should come up with a pragmatic policy that satisfies the expectations of voters by integrating growth and distribution perspective into economic policies.

Portrayal of China in Online News Headlines: A Framing and Syntactic Analysis

ABSTRACT Arguably the first thing that a reader notices of a news item, the headline serves the semantic function of providing pertinent information and the pragmatic function of appealing to target addressees. Moreover, it often embodies the stance of the news writer or the news agency on a particular issue and could program the reader’s perception and interpretation of the ensuing news story in a pre-determined direction. In view of the distinctive significance of headlines in news discourse, in this paper, we analyze how the headlines of The Economist, an elite newsmagazine, frame China in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample of headlines was examined for their structural components, syntactic features, as well as linguistic characteristics, and compared with a selection of the outlet’s headlines on COVID responses of certain other countries. Through identifying the framing patterns adopted in the headlines and unpacking the ideological overtones encoded therein, this systematic analysis has illuminated the role and effects of the tactful employment of language in constructing country image and striking a balance between purported impartiality and ideological dispositions. Its findings and implications are expected to contribute to scholarship on media framing and inform the practice of journalistic writing.

Access or collaboration? A typology of sharing economy

Being an emergent concept, sharing economy (SE) lacks granularity in its conceptualization. This study offers a typology to delineate the boundaries of this phenomenon and thereby helps in achieving conceptual clarity. Using the lens of social exchange theory, a typology of SE is developed to trace the boundaries and crystalize its contour. The logical delineation attempts to resolve the extant ideological tensions within SE. A two-level analysis employing nine defining characteristics of exchange derived from the theoretical framework of the anatomy of exchange is used for this purpose. Two distinct styles of sharing – collaborative consumption (CC) and access-based consumption (ABC) are identified. It is further sub-classified into eight discrete modes of sharing types: six of CC and two of ABC. The proposed framework identifies a neglected but relevant SE practice - hybrid access.

Feminidad y neoliberalismo en las series televisivas españolas de éxito durante la crisis económica (2008-2015)

Este artículo evalúa los modelos de subjetividad femenina en las series españolas más vistas en el periodo de crisis económica, como relatos interpretativos de las tensiones ideológicas subyacentes a un contexto donde se replantea el rol de la mujer. El análisis cualitativo, aplicado a diez coprotagonistas de estas ficciones, muestra personajes femeninos carentes de liderazgo y proactividad en la esfera pública, cuyas competencias naturales se circunscriben a la resiliencia para adaptarse a la austeridad sobrevenida, y que actúan como contraposición moral del emprendedor masculino, reactualizando estereotipos de género en el imaginario neoliberal.

Becoming teachers of emergent bilinguals: Navigating ideological and identity tensions

Teacher candidates (TCs) go through intense identity negotiations and tensions at the intersection of personal, professional, and political dimensions of education. This iterative and complex process brings about ideological tensions. In this article, following a qualitative research design, we analysed the interviews of 48 (majority white monolingual) TCs during a semester-long practice teaching experience with emergent bilingual students (EBs) in grades 6–8 classrooms. The constant comparative method and critical discourse analysis informed our data analysis. The findings demonstrated that TCs experienced tensions related to their identities, ideologies, and future student populations. These tensions were revealed in their discourses, language choices, and the metaphors they adopted. One prevalent metaphor used was ‘language barrier’, depicting TCs’ limited agency and helplessness in their teaching if they did not speak the first language of their EBs. Another recurrent theme was the need to better understand the who, what, where, when, and why questions of teaching as TCs reflected on their professional decision-making at the intersection of personal, professional, and political discourses of teaching EBs. The study suggests that these ideological tensions should be unpacked in teacher education programs to build identity-focused critical teacher learning practices. Such practices can help TCs understand and navigate discourses that are introduced during teacher preparation in an effort to develop ideological clarity and claim ownership of their transformation into becoming social justice-oriented teachers of EBs.

The Locarno Film Festival under the Influence? Programming Eastern European Movies in Anti-communist Switzerland (1946–1962)

The Locarno Film Festival (LFF), founded in 1946 by film industry professionals and local tourism promoters, is reputed as an international hub for emerging cinema. Built apart from, or in opposition to, traditional commercial cinema, the Swiss event gave particular attention to Eastern European movies, to the point that the LFF has frequently been presented as the place where ‘Westerners discovered the talents of Eastern Europe’. However, the presence of these films in Locarno, whose characteristic was the absence of official support from the state, exacerbated Switzerland's anti-communism and led to the creation of a ‘national’ selection committee in 1962 to limit the programming of movies coming from the other side of the Iron Curtain. This article analyses how Swiss politics and ideological tensions conditioned the construction of the Locarno Festival's identity through the prism of the (non-)interventions of the federal state.

CONSERVATIVE THEMES IN TURKISH HORROR CINEMA

Bu çalışmanın çıkış noktası, filmlerin de tıpkı diğer sanatsal ürünler gibi yer aldığı toplumsal yapıdan ayrı değerlendirilemeyeceği, hatta tarihsel açıdan siyasal eğilimlere dair bir anlamda eleştirel metinler olarak görülebileceğidir. Bu doğrultuda Türkiye’de 2000 sonrası muhafazakâr anlayışın ve bu ideolojinin işaretlerinin, aynı dönemde niceliksel olarak artan korku filmlerinde izi sürülmüş ve bu filmlerde muhafazakârlığın nasıl kurulduğu incelenmiştir. Bu çerçevede çözümlenecek filmler Orhan Oğuz’a ait Büyü (2004), Hasan Karacadağ’a ait Semum (2008), Ümit Ünal’a ait Ses (2010), Özgür Bakar’a ait Azazil: Düğüm (2014) ve Murat Toktamışoğlu’na ait Üç Harfliler 2: Hablis (2015) filmleridir. Muhafazakâr temaları desteklediği veya muhalif yönlerden inşa ettiği için seçilen bu filmlerde muhafazakârlığın nasıl kurulduğu eleştirel Marksist bir bakış açısıyla, Türkiye’de 2000 sonrası dinsel ve hegemonik yönü öne çıkan muhafazakâr ideolojinin özgül konumunu imleyen motif ve izleklerin niteliği doğrultusunda araştırılmıştır. Analiz sonucunda, patriarkal aile, gelenek, otorite, din gibi muhafazakâr motiflerin, seçilen filmlerde “din-inanç-bilim karşıtlığı”, “insan doğasının kusurluluğu ve kötücüllüğü”, “insan aklına güvensizlik” ile “gelenek ve otoritenin kaynağı olarak din” başlıkları altında toplanabilecek izlekler eşliğinde hegemonik ve karşı-hegemonik söylemleri kuracak şekilde inşa edildiği gözlemlenmiştir. Çalışmanın anlamlı bulgularından biri, dinsel tonun bu filmlerde değişerek, yenilenerek ve sınanarak, söylemlerin yoğunluğu ile niteliğini farklılaştıracak ve hegemonik mücadele zemininin dinamikliğini imleyecek biçimde anlatıya eklemlenmiş olmasıdır.

The Moral Discourse of Free Speech: A Virtual Ethnographic Study

Freedom of speech has long been considered an essential value in democracies. However, its boundaries concerning hate speech continue to be contested across many social and political spheres, including governments, social media websites, and university campuses. Despite the recent growth of so-called free speech communities online and offline, little empirical research has examined how individuals embedded in these communities make moral sense of free speech and its limits. Examining these perspectives is important for understanding the growing involvement and polarization around this issue. Using a digital ethnographic approach, I address this gap by analyzing discussions in a rapidly growing online forum dedicated to free speech (r/FreeSpeech subreddit). I find that most users on the forum understand free speech in an absolutist sense (i.e., it should be free from legal, institutional, material, and even social censorship or consequences), but that users differ in their arguments and justifications concerning hate speech. Some downplay the harms of hate speech, while others acknowledge its harms but either focus on its epistemic subjectivity or on the moral threats of censorship and authoritarianism. Further, the forum appears to have become more polarized and right-wing-dominated over time, rife with ideological tensions between members and between moderators and members. Overall, this study highlights the variation in free speech discourse within online spaces and calls for further research on free speech that focuses on first-hand perspectives.

Ideological Contestation on Twitter Over Diversity: Constructions of Diversity as Clashing Projects

The problematic of diversity today circulates a discourse on human differences and similarities which is also taken up by actors with controversial political agendas, notably right‐wing populist and neoconservative movements. Focusing on contestation over the meaning of “diversity” by lay actors in social media, we suggest here that different constructions of diversity may be seen as clashing projects largely shaping each other through their emphasis on differences or similarities among people. In a qualitative analysis on the tweets mentioning diversity in Greek over a year, constructions of diversity were mirror images of each other across two independent ideological tensions, with distinct social stakes. Individualist constructions of diversity praising individuals' differences clashed over the legitimation of power with majoritarianist constructions emphasizing social homogeneity, and universalist constructions of diversity advocating the fundamental similarities of individuals clashed over the legitimation of social identities with particularist constructions praising cultural differences. Those constructions converse with basic social psychological models of diversity, suggesting that the emphasis on difference or similarity across people may stem from a dynamic context of political confrontation. The findings also suggest that right‐wing populist representations may be channeled by the content of contestation and the positions held by the other side.

The dynamics of federal (in)stability and negotiated cooperation under single-party dominance: insights from Modi’s India

ABSTRACT Many studies have demonstrated a trend towards greater centralization of the federal system in India since 2014. However, the causal mechanisms that underpin this centralization remain underexplored. This article systematically explores the processes involved in tipping the delicate federal balance in favour of greater central control, and in doing so pays particular attention to the role of the party system therein. Our analytical narrative is structured around the assertion that ‘negotiated cooperation’ is contingent upon: (a) the interaction between constitutional structure and federal politics; (b) the capacity and willingness of subnational incumbents to safeguard their policy space and (c) the nature of party organization and the ideological disposition of the polity-wide parties towards territorial power-sharing. Drawing from India’s experience since 1952, we demonstrate that a dominant party system does not necessarily entail encroachment on subnational authority. At the most, it is a necessary but insufficient condition for federal imbalance. However, the problem of federal encroachment arises only when the dominant party is internally centralized and personalized, advocates unitarism and operates in a context of weak constitutional, political, procedural and judicial safeguards for self-and shared-rule. India under the leadership of Indira Gandhi, but more recently of Narendra Modi, comes close to meeting these conditions.

Migração venezuelana e sua construção na agenda pública nas conversas do Twitter na América do Sul, 2014-2019

Objective/Context: This study seeks to explore the relationship between the conversation that has taken place on the social network Twitter about Venezuelan migration and its influence on the public agenda in South American countries. Methodology: For data collection, the Crimson Hexagon (CH) platform was used, which allows for analyzing the social network Twitter and identifying publications related to the Venezuelan migration conversation. The algorithm randomly selects a compendium of tweets from a specific period (from January 2, 2014, to August 31, 2019), identifying a set of keywords related to each country’s linguistic references to Venezuelan migrants, the language (Spanish and Portuguese), and the geographical origin of the tweet, in this case, nine countries in South America, to carry out a quantitative descriptive analysis of the findings. Conclusions: Based on the outset, a neutral-negative feeling can be identified. In countries governed by right-wing politicians, there is a greater volume of conversation, and the topic occupies a more relevant space within the public agenda, suggesting that this issue can be used politically and electorally by these ideological tendencies. Originality: This research starts with a reflection on one of the most important events that has impacted South America from the political sphere to public order: the Venezuelan migratory wave. However, this event is used by current governments to influence their public agenda and strengthen their political positions.

Training Female Bodies for New India: Women’s Physical Education between Global Trends and Local Politics in Colonial South Asia, c. 1900–1939

This paper explores the emergence of modern female physical education in late colonial India in the period between the beginning of the twentieth century and the late 1930s. Focusing mostly on physical training schemes directed at middle-class, upper-caste Hindu girls and women, the study provides detail about the role played by a variety of Indian and non-Indian historical actors that were committed to the spread of female physical fitness. It demonstrates that, despite different ideological tendencies, political agendas and methods, the extent to which these actors shared beliefs and assumptions about the fit female body is striking. The paper also makes it clear that it is necessary to move away from national or imperial lenses that have hitherto occluded the global interconnections and border-crossing trajectories at play when analyzing discourses and practices of female physical education in South Asia in the period under purview.