Independent Voices Research Articles

다중언어적 공간을 향하여

This paper endeavors to undertake a critical examination of Franco Moretti’s theory of world literature, elucidating its limitations, and subsequently proposing an alternative approach. Specifically, it proposes the establishment of a multilingual world literary framework as a counterpoint to the monolingualism emphasized within Moretti’s conception of a world literary ‘space.’
 While Moretti’s pioneering “distant reading” method once sparked controversy and marked a transformative juncture in the field of world literature studies in the United States, it has since evolved into one among several critical methodologies in the discipline. In Korea, conversely, Moretti’s theory has attained mainstream recognition within academic research. This prevalence, coinciding with the ascent of digital humanities, quantitative research, and interdisciplinary approaches, may inadvertently lead to an uncritical acceptance of the inherent limitations within Moretti’s theory of world literature. For Moretti, who draws inspiration from Immanuel Wallerstein’s world system theory to conceptualize the world literary space, the paramount objective is to ‘explain’ the complexities of ‘one and unequal’ global literary landscape. However, world literature theory should not only seek to ‘explain’ the unevenness within the world literature space but also engage in a critical analysis of the mechanisms perpetuating these inequalities, ultimately striving to effect change.
 In this regard, Gayatri Spivak’s notion of ‘planetarity’ and Emily Aptor’s concept of ‘untranslatability’ offer valuable insights, enabling us to envision a multilingual world distinct from the homogeneity often associated with globalization. While their focus centers on exploring the presence of the ‘world in literature,’ Francesca Orsini’s alternative perspective offers a critique of the inherent monolingualism within Moretti’s theory while advocating for the adoption of the concepts of ‘multilingual local’ and ‘significant geographies’ to unravel and elucidate the interrelationship between ‘literature in the world’ and the ‘world in literature.’ Orsini’s argument may provide a reference point for critically engaging with hierarchical center-periphery dynamics by empowering numerous independent local voices. This approach can enable us to reposition Moretti’s theory of world literature as one of the available methodologies, paving the way for a more nuanced and enriched understanding of world literature.

The Role of the Child in a War Zone: 10-year-old Students' Responses to a Cognitively Challenging Picturebook on War – An Interview Study

Abstract: This article explores how a shared reading of a challenging picturebook about war, Når kaniner blir redde [When Rabbits Get Scared] (Svingen and Slocinska), may foster students' critical and emotional literacy. The research question is: How may a shared reading of this challenging picturebook about war promote critical and emotional literacy in 10-year-old students? According to Martha Nussbaum, developing students' narrative imaginations through stories is a prerequisite for educating responsible citizens (Nussbaum Cultivating Humanity ; Nussbaum Not for Profit ). Picturebooks can be a tool for such education. The data were collected in an intervention project and the authors present the findings from student group interviews by identifying characteristics of critical and emotional literacy. The analysis demonstrates that a shared picturebook reading of this book may foster the students as responsible actors by promoting their ability to see the world from other people's perspectives and ignite critical, independent voices in them.

Choral Writing in Iannis Xenakis’ Late Compositions

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of choral writing in the compositions of the outstanding representative of the postwar avant-garde Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) created during his final creative decade. Examination is made of the questions of the correlation between the music and the words, the use of techniques of “phonemic composition” (Konstantin Floros) in the composer’s works Nekuia, Serment-Orkos, Knephas, Pour la paix, and Sea Nymphs. Special attention is given to a unique case of encoding of Arthur Rimbaud’s literary text in Xenakis’ composition Pu wijnuej we fyp. The vocal-orchestral work Nekuia, a central composition in the evolution of the composer’s choral writing, signified, along with the theme of Greek Antiquity, the existential problem range connected with the images of death, war and violence against personality. The present subject matter becomes determinative in Xenakis’ late choral compositions. As part of textural analysis of the work the following parameters are disclosed as the main textural varieties: the newest techniques of “artificial reverberation” (Iannis Xenakis), elements of “diagonal texture” (Valentina Kholopova), types of exposition which are characteristic for the romanticist composers, the classical techniques of juxtaposition of soli — tutti. The main resources of the parameter of timbre include changes of the vocalization of the tone by means of a continuous transition from one vowel to another, sounded out successions of inhalations and exhalations, juxtapositions of ordinary and laryngeal singing, glissando, both in alternation with tremolo and carried out by means of overlapping. At the same time, starting with the composition Pour la paix, certain elements of Xenakis’ early writing return — “sound clouds” (Iannis Xenakis), the image of which is created by non-standardized cries, complementary contrapuntal texture characterized by thematic and rhythmic resemblance of independent voices. In total, all of this stipulates the bright individuality of Xenakis’ artistic method.

Do dialogismo à estética polifônica nas didascálias do teatro ritual de Werewere-Liking Gnepo

ABSTRACT In theater, stage directions function as a particular genre in which the author’s voice is inscribed in the text to indicate the paths of representation. In Werewere-Liking Gnepo’s La veuve diyilèm (2003), they play a broader role. There is a narrative function, sometimes author’s, sometimes character’s that, in a dialogic movement of reception/understanding, triggers multiple independent and polyphonic voices and consciences. To verify this statement, we will discuss the Bakhtinian reflections that will be essential for this study.

Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold: A Critical Reading According to Mikhail Bakhtin’s Concept of “Polyphony”

This paper aims at reading Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of voice, especially the concept of “Polyphony”. The main argument is that polyphony is an important key concept to take into consideration to better comprehend the interrelationships of voices between the narrator and the other characters in this novel. In order to prove this argument, the researchers emphasize language and speech diversity in order to shed light on “Heteroglossia”, which is another related concept coined by Bakhtin. The researchers will also examine the characteristics of the double-voicedness and the manifestations of polyphony in the novel. The results show that Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold can be described as a polyphonic novel because of the variety of consciousnesses and independent voices of its various characters. Eventually, the paper shows how the novel demonstrates heteroglot features because of the different characters who are coming from different social groups, which will help the reader to better realize the different layers of social voices.

MCMA: A Symbolic Multitrack Contrapuntal Music Archive

We present Multitrack Contrapuntal Music Archive (MCMA, available at https://mcma.readthedocs.io), a symbolic dataset of pieces specifically curated to comprise, for any given polyphonic work, independent voices. So far, MCMA consists only of pieces from the Baroque repertoire but we aim to extend it to other contrapuntal music. MCMA is FAIR-compliant and it is geared towards musicological tasks such as (computational) analysis or education, as it brings to the fore contrapuntal interactions by explicit and independent representation. Furthermore, it affords for a more apt usage of recent advances in the field of natural language processing (e.g., neural machine translation). For example, MCMA can be particularly useful in the context of language-based machine learning models for music generation. Despite its current modest size, we believe MCMA to be an important addition to online contrapuntal music databases, and we thus open it to contributions from the wider community, in the hope that MCMA can continue to grow beyond our efforts. In this article, we provide the rationale for this corpus, suggest possible use cases, offer an overview of the compiling process (data sourcing and processing), and present a brief statistical analysis of the corpus at the time of writing. Finally, future work that we endeavor to undertake is discussed.

Offline: The real meaning of decolonisation

The most dangerous threat to health and health equity today is anti-globalism—a denial of evidence pointing to the intrinsic interdependence of human beings; a refusal to accept the transnational nature of risks to our wellbeing; and an antipathy to institutions and individuals promoting cosmopolitan values. Anti-globalism lies behind the failure of governments to accelerate actions to address the climate crisis, is responsible for the failure of nations to coordinate their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and underlies the savage xenophobia directed towards those fleeing conflict and repression. But why is anti-globalism a subject for the decolonisation of medicine and global health? Because anti-globalism is nothing less than a project of recolonisation. Anti-globalism is the ideology of ultranationalist political movements that aim to embed inequalities between peoples, solidify asymmetries of power between nations, and expand the privileges of international elites. Anti-globalists seek to maintain the dominance of the rich over the poor and the powerful over the weak. The objective of anti-globalists is to perpetuate one country's control over another, to permit one people's exploitation by another. If anti-globalists succeed in their strategy of recolonisation, hopes for progress towards a more equitable distribution of health will flounder. The territory on which global health practitioners and activists must fight can be clearly mapped out. We can see the contours of ultranationalism in the regimes of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán, and Boris Johnson. The language used by these political leaders and the support they have inspired foster ethnic and religious division, fear of immigration, and panic about losing what is seen as the traditionally dominant culture of their nation. The pattern is a familiar one. Nationalist leaders celebrate a vision of their country's history and identity that evolves from glory to decline. They blame an insidious “globalism”. Those same leaders undermine the rule of law by attacking independent judiciaries. They target institutions, such as universities and the media, which are independent voices of dissent. They manipulate school curricula to indoctrinate new generations into these national myths. They lie frequently. They show contempt for compromise. They approve of natural hierarchies within society. They foster a sense of victimhood. They attack cosmopolitan elites and the internationalism they advocate. They encourage fear of immigration, giving oxygen to Renaud Camus's racist theory of The Great Replacement. They promote competition as the means to judge not only success but also worth. They preside over the gradual corruption of the state, from undermining bulwarks of integrity and accountability to breaking international law. They try to evade scrutiny. They feed off polarisation, a divided opposition, and growing insecurities and resentments. Some even endorse political violence. Unquestioning patriotism takes priority over universal values and individual rights. As Robert O Paxton concluded in The Anatomy of Fascism (2004), fascist movements exist in all democratic societies. Whether they take root or achieve power depends on our ability to detect their presence and to ensure they do not become an attractive “lure of untried possibility”. “There remains”, wrote Paxton, “the element of human choice”. It is a moment now for those working in medicine and global health to exercise that choice. Decolonisation is not merely about reconstructing the knowledge that underpins global health. It is not another domain of a culture war. And it cannot be reduced to the simplistic call for “revolution”. In Neo-colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), Kwame Nkrumah wrote about the need “to secure a world realignment so that those who are at the moment the helpless victims of a system will be able in the future to exert a counter pressure”. Anti-globalists fear nothing more than such a “world realignment”. They seek to cement existing hierarchies within societies and among nations to preserve their own power and influence. To decolonise global health means to challenge and to erase these hierarchies, to redistribute power and influence at all levels of global governance, from the P5 of the UN Security Council to the leadership of global health institutions. Decolonisation means a commitment to ending systemic racism. Decolonisation, above all, means turning a reimagining of the world into a forward looking political project.

Under the spotlight: understanding the role of the Chief Medical Officer in a pandemic

As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in 2020, Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) entered the public spotlight like never before. Amidst this increased visibility, the role is deeply contested. Much of...

Run Me to Earth by Paul Yoon (review)

Reviewed by: Run Me to Earth by Paul Yoon Erin Roberts Paul Yoon. Run Me to Earth. Simon & Schuster, 2020. 254p. Run Me to Earth is set during the chaos of the Vietnam War but tells the story of the often-forgotten country of Laos. Laos lies between Thailand and Vietnam and shares the entirety of its eastern border with Vietnam. During the Vietnam War, Laos became a transportation route for the Viet Cong and Northern Vietnamese Army to reach southern Vietnam while avoiding major roadblocks and confrontations. Consequently, the United States initiated a series of 580,000 aerial bombing missions lasting from 1964-1973 in an attempt to prevent the Viet Cong’s movement. During this time, “over two million tons of ordnance were dropped on Laos,” which is more than the combined amount of bombs dropped on Germany and Japan by the United States during World War II (viii). Over thirty percent of these bombs did not explode on impact. It is in the chaos of these bombings that readers are first introduced to three orphaned teenagers whose stories drive the narrative. This narrative begins in 1969, when we are introduced to Alisak, Prany, and Noi, who have grown up in Laos and know nothing but war. After years of nomadic lifestyles and taking any odd job that would put food in their mouths, the orphans have found work at a United States field hospital as make-shift medical assistants, janitorial staff, night watch, and, most importantly, motorcycle runners. Using sticks to mark safe routes, these teenagers are sent on daring missions to pick up wounded civilians trapped in the Plain of Jars amongst unexploded bombs and bring them back to “the farmhouse” field hospital for medical care. It’s dangerous work, but comes with high pay, educational opportunities, and the chance to leave Laos with the Americans. While working at “the farmhouse,” a Vientiane doctor called Vang befriends the orphans and teaches them English and French. Their connection with the doctor grows as he begins to fill a quasi-parental/teacher role long absent in their lives. As the North Vietnamese Army expands its control and evacuation becomes imminent, the orphans start to daydream about where they will go [End Page 143] after the war: France, Spain, the United States. During the actual evacuation, the three are separated, each one’s journey representing a different experience of the Laos people during the remainder of the war and the Communist reconstruction afterwards. These journeys are supplemented with the experiences of Auntie, a smuggler and human trafficker working to help refugees cross into Thailand, and Khit, a child orphan in the employ of Auntie who desperately wants to leave Laos, but cannot afford the trafficking fee. While connected into one cohesive narrative, it becomes clear early on that each chapter is really a complex short story with its own plot arc. The chapters are not numbered; instead, they are titled only with the narrator’s name and dated by year. Yoon switches character views deftly, creating independent voices for each, while also maintaining a simplicity of language. This simplicity and understatement allows the shock of the characters’ experiences to reverberate through the text and becomes one of the connecting features that ties all the narratives together. Through these individual narratives, Yoon creates a comprehensive and sympathetic view of Laos as a victim country. Through the orphans’ perspective, we experience devastating civilian injuries and death, the complexities of immigration, the brutality of “reeducation camps,” and the redefining of family after loss. Additionally, we are exposed to the world of human trafficking and smuggling through the characters of Auntie and Khit. By including each of these narratives as stand-alone stories within a larger narrative, Yoon gives voice and recognition to the many unseen victims of war. In this sense, each of the orphans and their journeys begin to represent the larger civilian experiences of Laos. This experience recognition sets Run Me to Earth apart from other novels. Yoon has the uncanny ability to recognize a character’s experience, create a deep emotional attachment between reader and character, and present a character’s journey in a way that allows for understanding...

The Symbiosis of Leigh Hunt and Benjamin Haydon: Focusing on an Argument about Blacks

This essay examines the symbiotic relationship between Leigh Hunt and Benjamin Haydon within the context of the aesthetic cultural phenomenon in the early nineteenth century. By paying special attention to the Examiner used as their debate table, this essay investigates how these Cockneys’ independent voices about blacks were against, but also nurtured and advanced, each other. First, this essay explores how Hunt and Haydon constructed a friendship based on their passion for the arts. Afterward, it examines how Hunt argued against Haydon’s anatomical sketch method based on the racial hierarchy in accordance with Hunt’s humanitarian interests in blacks. Subsequently, the essay goes on to look at how Haydon defended himself against Hunt’s attack by asserting his artistic point of view about blacks. Although re-examining the very private story of friendship between Hunt and Haydon can be viewed as narrow, this essay certainly shows us a picture of the most sociable and aesthetic cultural view of the period through their friendship.

Элементы и каналы обратной связи в современной политической системе КНР

The Year 2021 is significant because of the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China (CCP). This is a plausible opportunity to review the accomplishments of the ruling party in the last decades, especially in the period of the current leadership headed by Xi Jinping. As China under Xi is edging closer to its ultimate aim of “the Great Renaissance of the Chinese Nation”, its relations with the US, the current hegemon of the world order have experienced a severe downturn. Seen against the backdrop of Сhina’s deteriorating relations with the US and the West in general in recent years, the public opinion in the country has generally shifted towards anti-western and patriotic sentiments. There is in the international media, as well as in academia, a widely accepted image of China under Xi Jinping as a country where there is significantly less space for pluralistic discussions, different opinions and independent voices. Critical opinions arguably have been effectively muted, and the realm of liberal freedoms has shrunk probably to the levels of the start of the reforms’ era or even earlier times. An ongoing debate on the issue of interaction between the government policies and public opinion is important to a better understanding of the evolution of the Chinese polity. Does the system block all the critical voices from below and allow the information flow only top-down? Or should we probably pay more attention to the concrete efforts by the governments at different levels to stimulate and legitimize the grass-roots reactions to government policies? In this article we take a look at whether there are still vibrant channels through which common people can voice their opinions, and whether the state keeps those channels of feedback working. The overall impression is that the above-mentioned image of the resurgent totalitarianism in China’s political system seriously underestimates the complexities of contemporary PRC, the country that is searching for its own China-centered methods and channels of activating citizens’ political participation.

The Singer's Needle: An Undisciplined History of Panama by Ezer Vierba

Reviewed by: The Singer's Needle: An Undisciplined History of Panama by Ezer Vierba Marcos Pérez Cañizares The Singer's Needle: An Undisciplined History of Panama. Ezer Vierba. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. xxxii+323, black & white illustration, footnotes. $95.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-2263-4231-3. $30.00, paperback, ISBN 978-0-2263-4245-0. $29.99, PDF, ISBN 978-0-2263-4259-7. Ezer Vierba has written what is to be one of the most unusual books (an "adventurous experiment in historical writing") to come out of the North American Historian's GuildTM in the last decade or so (xxv). It is challenging to distill what The Singer's Needle is about. At a certain level, it is a retelling of Panama's twentieth-century history through three events that highlight the forms power took in shaping subject creation. Yet it is also a bold attempt to theorize on historical writing by employing narrative form as method. Vierba employs a palimpsest of fiction and nonfiction writing to create a "polyphonic history." Characters are presented in "a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of valid voices . . . [who are] not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse" (xxvii). The goal of such history is to shed light on the past by juxtaposing various interpretations of the past, which Vierba does by—for the most part—skewing an omniscient narrator and employing fictional characters with their own social worlds and voices. If this sounds too postmodern (especially to those—like yours truly—who are more inclined toward "history-as-social-science"), the book remains grounded by using more conventional research methods and scholarly debate through the footnotes. At its best the narrative achieves a verisimilitude of voices and contrasting interpretations that are the markers of lived historical discourse. But at times it exposes Vierba as a puppeteer caught in an act of ventriloquy most foul. The book is best understood as a series of interwoven theoretical interventions that are stacked within themselves. We are introduced to our first character, the editor K. B. W., in what serves as the introduction to the book through an "editor's preface" where the editor employs historians' "confessional style" (xii–xxiv) to speak and theorize on the difficulties of assembling and composing the book. In regard to creating fleshed-out characters with their own voices, Vierba managed to dupe me; it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that [End Page 138] K. B. W. is not (wholly) a real person. Here K. B. W. provides a brief sketch of Panama's twentieth-century history and opens up the first level of theoretical intervention through two venues: (1) a Foucauldian analysis of discipline and punishment that highlights the importance of form or aesthetic in the exercise of power, and (2) the importance of experimenting and innovating with historical writing, starting by disaggregating the unity of authorial voice. Part I of the book is composed of the first three chapters and employs the history of the Coiba penal colony as a lens to understand the programs of Panama's liberal regime in the first half of the twentieth century with a particular focus on the years 1912–1935. Vierba posits that the colony functioned as a pilot project that included the latest developments from American and European penology but also served the state's ideological program of modernizing Panama, and by "civilizing" the interior areas and convicts. Vierba also tests out his theory of "polyphonic history" by including conversations or interviews between various ex-Coiba prisoners as collected by Tali del Valle, an ethnographer, graduate student, and daughter of a prominent ex-convict, the ingeniero del Valle. Tali's notes, various documents, and reports are also presented as organized by K. W. B. (if that is not sufficiently meta then just wait until key character and ex-Coiba prisoner Carpintero discusses implied author theory and works of Gérard Genette [104]). And it actually works. The intricate weaving of voices, theoretical debates, and archival evidence forms a dazzling experience that immerses the reader in multiple interpretations...

Gaming the Publishing Industry: Exploring Diverse Open Scholarship Models in Digital Games Studies

The emergent field of digital game scholarship has developed along unique communicative lines, illuminating alternative models and diversified potentials for scholarly communication. Following the decline of print-based magazine journalism, the rise of moderated aggregator sites, such as Kotaku, Polygon, and Rock Paper Shotgun has exposed many independent voices to larger audiences. Much of the scholarship cited in current academic work can be found online at sites like Critical Distance (which uses “roundups, roundtables, podcasts, and critical compilations” to encourage dialogue between “developers, critics, educators and enthusiasts”), First Person Scholar, a middle-state publication that combines “the timeliness and succinctness of a blog, while retaining the rigor and context of a conventional journal article” (Hawreliak), highly polished and curated online zines such as Heterotopias, and from quality video bloggers such as Noah Caldwell Gervais and short-form documentary creators such as Gvmers. These heterogeneous alternatives collectively model a publishing plasticity and adaptiveness, establishing a culture of open scholarship practices, inclusive and diverse voices, and a rapid deployment of ideas and perspectives. This paper argues that emergent models of scholarly communication explored by the game studies community include but also moderate the reactive energies of social media and the toxicity of “gamer” culture.

Recovered Media in Argentina: An Inclusive Digital Movement

The basis for this paper is the recovered factories movement, which began in Argentina in 2001, and which has grown over the past decade to include media companies, transcending digital inequalities and turning them into opportunities for journalists and media outlets. Just like elsewhere, the situation for journalists in Argentina is precarious, with technological barriers increasing digital inequalities and a lack of respect for workers’ rights, particularly when political processes such as changes in government lead to new economic plans and market instability. This situation of great uncertainty for the press has given rise to a movement on the increase in recent years, known as “recuperated or recovered media” or “workers’ co-ops”. Between 2016 and 2017, at least six media outlets were recuperated by their workers after being closed down or abandoned by their owners, including La Nueva Mañana, in Córdoba; El Ciudadano of Rosario; La Portada, of Esquel; and the Tiempo Argentino newspaper and online news site Infonews, both based in Buenos Aires. Tiempo Argentino is the only national newspaper supported by its readership, contributing 70% of revenue, which has made it one of the few independent voices of dissent in Argentina at a time of high media concentration and domination. The Tiempo Argentino newspaper was one of the winners of the first Latin American Google News Initiative (GNI), illustrating how this movement has transcended politico-social difficulties and transformed digital inequalities into digital inclusion/opportunities. The GNI is an initiative that fosters innovation aiming to improve the sustainability of journalism in a digital era by developing open source software, so as to improve user experience on the Web and optimize internal management procedures for members. Once the software is finalized, the co-op will develop a prototype to be made available to other self-managed media outlets in order to strengthen their membership model. Hence, this exploratory study seeks to analyze the phenomenon of the recovered media in Argentina, focusing on the experience of Tiempo Argentino as the newspaper and its workers face a new digital challenge. At the end of 2001, Argentina’s political and economic crisis was the main theme in world news coverage. At this period and in response to the economic crisis, workers seized control of many abandoned factories. The rise of these “recuperated/recovered businesses”

Cone's Consistency: Reflections from a Teaching Assistant

Beyond his academic contribution of Black Liberation Theology to the church and academy at large, James Cone should be remembered on a personal level as one who prioritized the task of teaching his students, placed the student perspective and the development of independent student voices at the center of his pedagogy, pushed his students to take classroom learning out into the world, maintained exemplary standards of consistency in his theological work and moral character, and contributed to the legacy of his home institution Union Theological Seminary in immeasurable ways. This is one of several short essays presented by recent students at a public forum at Union Theological Seminary after his death in 2018.

Dissenting colleagues; power, alienation, vulnerability

In this article I explore conscious and unconscious dynamics in relation to questions of power and vulnerability which frequently permeate relationships between psychoanalytic colleagues. Such dynamics have frequently led to splits in psychoanalytic training institutions. I focus particularly on the anxieties, rivalries, and alliances emergent in relationships between psychoanalytic colleagues in the UK between 1934 and 1945. I highlight how the transgenerational transmission of these dynamics has continued to affect the development of psychoanalytic organisations in the UK contemporaneously. I argue that attention to our own and to our colleagues’ vulnerabilities is generative of productive, creative and mutually enhancing professional relationships which allow for critical questioning and differences. Such attention is crucial for psychoanalytic practices if we are to enable our patients to discover the power of their own independent voices. It is also vital for the development and survival of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the current political climate.

식민지 자본주의의 전개와 3·1운동에 대한 시론적 검토

This article is an introductory study of the correlation between the colonial capitalism implanted by the Japanese Empire and the March 1st Movement. The body of this article approaches the foregoing correlation from three aspects: the structure of colonial capitalism, changes in daily life due to colonial capitalism, and people’s perception of capitalism. Through the hierarchical structure formed between the empire and colonial capitalism, the colony was indirectly linked to world capitalism through the colonial power, and the colonial economy was unilaterally reorganized according to the interests of the colonial power and capital. The Japanese Empire enforced policies that ignored the practices that had been passed down from ancestors and the profits of farmers, and Korean farms were incorporated into the circulation system of Japanese capitalism by force. As a result, the rural community, which was a reproduction unit of farmers and directly connected to survival, was being dismantled. Whereas Koreans had to seek only survival as isolated individuals before the March 1st Movement, they showed united power through the movement rather than being isolated. After the 1920s, Koreans began to make independent voices based on solidarity as a collective subject.

Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds

When will a large group provide an accurate answer to a question involving quantity estimation? We empirically examine this question on a crowd-based corporate earnings forecast platform (Estimize.com). By tracking user activities, we monitor the amount of public information a user views before making an earnings forecast. We find that the more public information users view, the less weight they put on their own private information. Although this improves the accuracy of individual forecasts, it reduces the accuracy of the group consensus forecast because useful private information is prevented from entering the consensus. To address endogeneity concerns related to a user’s information acquisition choice, we collaborate with Estimize.com to run experiments that restrict the information available to randomly selected stocks and users. The experiments confirm that “independent” forecasts result in a more accurate consensus. Estimize.com was convinced to switch to a “blind” platform from November 2015 on. The findings suggest that the wisdom of crowds can be better harnessed by encouraging independent voices from among group members and that more public information disclosure may not always improve group decision making. This paper was accepted by Renee Adams, finance.

The Diet Prada effect: ‘Call-out culture’ in the contemporary fashionscape

Fashion criticism has found a new democratic platform in this technetronic age that has been impacted by the emergence of online ‘call-out culture’, a cultural phenomenon born of this digital age. Independent voices are finding traction within the famously hermetic fashion industry who are holding fashion designers, marketers, editors and all those gatekeepers in between, accountable not only for copycat fashion products but also for racist and bigoted appropriations that appear in campaigns and editorials. In examining ‘call-out culture’ in the fashion industry this article will extrapolate on how and why these cultural phenomena have gained traction in relation to the contemporary fashion industry and what this means for the future of the industry. I do so through the wider contextualization of looking at ideas of authenticity and transparency, effects of social media, and the role of cultural criticism in fashion. The methodology utilized in this article is in the form of the close analysis of two case studies, the independent fashion critic sites Diet Prada and The Fashion Law, which have both gained traction in the past two years for their unbiased and unrelenting agenda to call out fashion’s indiscretions.

Evidence for Hope? Assessing the Role of the UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteurs on the Course of the Palestinian Question

The Palestinian Question has been at the heart of the United Nations (UN) since its establishment. Yet, the “intergovernmental” mechanisms of the world organization have proven to be largely ineffective in finding a just and sustainable solution to one of the most important and intractable issues of the UN-era. In between political and diplomatic struggles, the UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteurs on Palestine are increasingly regarded as the only truly independent and expert voices as well as valuable sources of information regarding the issue. However, the special rapporteurs are one of the least studied aspects of the UN regarding the Palestinian question. Drawing highly on the social constructivist premise on the role of ideas and norms in constructing/deconstructing the legitimacy discourse in international politics, this study attempts to theoretically question and empirically analyse how the “actorness” of the special rapporteurs have the potential to affect the course of the Palestinian question. The article concludes that the mobilization of normative arguments on the Palestinian Question at the transnational level and framing the issue for collective debate supported by technical and knowledge-based legal expertise of UN Special Rapporteurs may confer a renewed legitimizing role for the United Nations.