Interdisciplinary Scholarship Research Articles

Afterword of ‘Financial frontiers': towards conceptualizing finance that engages both power and contingency

ABSTRACT The critical and interdisciplinary scholarship analyzing finance, and specifically the relationship between financialization and inequality, has ballooned over the past twenty years. The increasing power and influence of financial and investment values, practices, policies, and networks have worked to leverage existing inequalities and construct novel regimes of accumulation that have increased socioeconomic precarity and dismantled socioeconomic protections for most. This fraught and unequal landscape has reinvigorated scholarly research and discussion on the role of finance in capitalism and on finance's relationship to other historical processes of inequality. Not surprisingly, much of this work on finance has faced similar questions and pitfalls as the critical scholarship on capitalism, namely, how to represent, analyze, and account for finance's power and influence without over-empowering, totalizing, presuming, or rendering inevitable finance's ability to remake the world in its own image. This Afterword engages this quandary, arguing that a dual approach is necessary – one that simultaneously shows finance's local contingencies, historical specificities, and unexpected trajectories alongside an approach that demonstrates finance's catalyzation of longstanding unequal structures produced through racial capitalism and colonialism to intensify contemporary inequality.

Editorial preface to special issue: Cenozoic tectonics and paleoclimate in Inner Asia: From case studies to climatic modelling

The far-field effects of the India-Eurasia collision led to tectonic deformation, mountain uplift and climate change in Inner Asia during the Cenozoic Era. In order to improve our understanding of the interplay between tectonics and climate, we present this new Special Issue. It comprises sixteen papers that can be categorized into three broad themes: (1) Cenozoic tectonics and surface processes in Inner Asia; (2) regional paleoenvironment and paleoclimate changes; and (3) numerical modelling of the environmental effects of tectonic uplift and changing ocean gateways. These contributions provide new insights into Cenozoic tectonism, climate changes and their possible inter-relationships in Inner Asia and improve our understanding of the coupling between lithosphere and surface (atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere) processes. The articles will be of broad interest to interdisciplinary scholars in geosciences.

The Asia Pacific Disaster Mental Health Network: Collaborative Research to Advance Mental Health and Community Resilience

Introduction:The mental health consequences of health emergencies and disasters have the potential to be sustained and severe. In recognition, the 2018 Kobe Expert Meeting on Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management (Health EDRM), prioritized mental health as one of the key research areas of Health EDRM, to be addressed in a multi-country research project supported by WHO (Kayano et.al., 2019). As climate change, growing urbanization, population density and viral transmission generate increasingly severe hazards, attention to mental health will be critical.Method:The Asia Pacific Disaster Mental Health Network was established in 2020 to foster advancements in mental health research and policy in the region. Building connections between researchers, practitioners and policy makers, the Network includes broad representation from interdisciplinary scholars and organizations across eight Asian and Pacific nations. A research agenda was designed in early meetings, and collaborative research projects were established.Results:The Network has supported the development of innovative disaster mental health research investigating community engagement in recovery, psychosocial interventions, and evaluation frameworks. A recent multilingual systematic review of more than 200 longitudinal studies identified the long-term trajectories of post-traumatic stress symptoms, depression and anxiety following disasters and pandemics (Newnham et al., 2022). Synthesized evidence of risks related to age, gender and disaster type were determined to inform intervention targets.Conclusion:The Asia Pacific Disaster Mental Health Network established a platform for scholarly connection, intervention planning and knowledge dissemination. This presentation will provide an overview of the Network’s activities, and research highlights that have identified targeted points for policy and practice.

Writing for ‘Brexiternity’? Reflections on Legal Scholarship on a Moving Target

The United Kingdom’s relationship with the European Union was supposed to be definitively settled several times during the past decade – yet it was not. The 2016 referendum brought about a surge in interest in legal questions, especially of EU law and international economic law. This presented scholars with a questionable gift: on the one hand, countless new opportunities for research, publications, and public visibility; on the other, the curse of chasing a rapidly and at times erratically moving target. Therefore, this essay reflects on the continued relevance of Brexit scholarship and different strategies for extending its shelf-life. It argues that the relevance of this scholarship may indeed extend into the future when foresighted and innovative approaches are being put forward. Looking ahead, the essay observes that the Windsor Framework to overhaul the Northern Ireland Protocol likely marks the end point of the frenzied and fraught EU-UK relationship between 2016 and 2023. The essay concludes that, while disagreements will continue, the EU-UK relationship as a topic is entering a period of normalization. Rigorous legal and innovative interdisciplinary scholarship will remain necessary both to develop EU-UK relations as a sub-topic of its own and to embed it into wider discourses of EU and international law. Brexit, EU–UK Relations, Legal Scholarship, Northern Ireland, Trade and Cooperation Agreement, Withdrawal Agreement

Toward an immunological turn in nineteenth‐century studies

AbstractThis essay surveys the evolution of scholarship that embodies what (Anderson and Mackay [2014], Intolerant bodies: A short history of autoimmunity. Johns Hopkins University Press) have called the “immunological turn,” an interdisciplinary critical movement that takes immunity and vaccination as its primary critical objects. While interest in the relationship between immunology as a field in the life sciences and immunity as a cultural discourse has existed since the 1980s and 1990s, this piece traces the development of this thinking over time across the fields of political theory, anthropology, sociology, the history and philosophy of science, science and technology studies, as well as literary and rhetoric studies, that together articulate and critique the centrality of immunity to Western society. This article considers how the immunological turn models an approach to the nineteenth century that draws together the humanities and the sciences in both carefully historicized and deeply theoretical ways. This survey of the field concludes with speculations on new directions for the immunological turn that interdisciplinary scholars in the nineteenth century might take up to intervene in ongoing debates over vaccine hesitancy and refusal.

Leah Tether, Laura Chuhan Campbell and Benjamin Pohl (eds and trans). The Bristol Merlin: Revealing the Secrets of a Medieval Fragment

Few recent manuscript discoveries have aroused as much excitement and curiosity, both within academia and among the general public, as the Bristol Merlin fragments (identified for the first time in 2019). Tether, Chuhan-Campbell, and Pohl’s edition presents the seven fragments in a format that is accessible and easy to navigate, introducing the reader both to the fragments themselves and the principles that underlie processes of editing and translation. Through exploring the possible, as well as the probable, Tether, Chuhan-Campbell, and Pohl provide a vivid and compelling narrative that illustrates the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship while remaining aware of its limitations. The approach taken, which draws upon palaeographic, codicological, historical, and linguistic analysis, in combination with the extensive visual apparatus provided, offers a robust introduction to the Bristol Merlin fragments that is suitable for a diverse readership. Chapter one, ‘Codicological and Palaeographic Analysis’, sets the Bristol Merlin fragments in the context of other contemporary manuscripts of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin. Having identified two distinct hands at work, the editors use palaeographical evidence to substantiate their suggested date for the manuscript (1250–1275). The editors describe the differences between the two hands, alongside a comparative table of letters, and images of the junctures between hands. The chapter subsequently explores the fragments’ use first as pastedowns (evidenced by extant glue residue on the manuscript leaves) and then as flyleaves for a four-volume edition of Jean Gerson’s complete works (88-91/SR39). This analysis is supported with diagrams that show the order, orientation, and movement of the fragments, and images of the book clasps. The section closes with one of the chapter’s central ideas, that ‘it is just possible – if unprovable – that the manuscript from which the fragments derive had been intended, or at least was used, as an exemplar for the production of further copies’ (16).

Contributors

Other| April 01 2023 Contributors Pedagogy (2023) 23 (2): 417–421. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-10693136 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. Pedagogy 1 April 2023; 23 (2): 417–421. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-10693136 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search Ryan Baxter graduated from the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts in 2017 with a BA in English language and literature. Following this, he completed a master of letters on the Gothic imagination at the University of Stirling in 2019. He is currently a master's student in English at Central Michigan University on the lookout for opportunities to gain teaching experience. His research interests include the Gothic from the late eighteenth century to the present, cinema and broadcast cultures in Britain and Ireland, theories of haunting and spectrality, epistemology, landscape studies, and spatial theory.Kelly L. Bezio is associate professor of English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where her research and teaching intersect with and inform the fields of cultural studies, biopolitical theory, American literature before 1900, critical race studies, literature and science, and health humanities. Her interdisciplinary scholarship foregrounds how insights from the past help... You do not currently have access to this content.

Multispecies, More-Than-Human, Nonhuman, Other-Than-Human

Life on Earth is sustained by interconnected more-than-human entanglements. In the era of the Anthropocene, many of these webs are unravelling due to climate change, biodiversity loss, toxicity and pollution, natural resource extraction, and water and soil depletion. In order to help address these challenges, The Anthropocene and More-Than-Human Writing Workshop Series, funded by the British Academy, brought together early career researchers from different disciplines to share ideas and knowledges. As part of The Anthropocene and More-Than-Human World Writing Workshop Series, Sophie Chao, presented her collaborative research project, The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Following this presentation, Catherine Price and Sophie Chao took the opportunity to discuss the terms multispecies, non-human, and more-than-human, amongst others. These terms are increasingly appearing in interdisciplinary scholarship in the space of multispecies studies, posthumanism, the environmental humanities and others. The epistemological assumptions and ethical stakes involved in using these terms are also considered. The conversation illustrates that in trying to define terms such as multispecies or the more-than-human, complexities are not explained away. Instead, these terms reveal how incredibly – and generatively – messy beyond-human worlds really are. The terms discussed are also fundamental to understanding and addressing the Anthropocene as an epoch of planetary unmaking.

The Moral Imagination of the Mahabharata. By Nikhil Govind

The Moral Imagination of the Mahabharata is an important contribution to the study of Indic epics. Since the Mahabharata’s conception, commentaries and performative retellings, vernacular formulations, modern and contemporary dramatizations, cultural histories, philological and religious scholarship, and popular visual media like children’s books, films, and television have explored how and why this epic continues to capture the Indic world’s imagination. Nikhil Govind’s work stands out. He offers a fundamental methodological contribution to a crowded academic table where historians, literary critics, philosophers, and interdisciplinary scholars of pre-modern South Asia have been seated. Today, if you are ready to pay keen attention to how the Mahabharata imagines itself and its moral ethos, you are welcome to the table. The organisation of this book into four neat, seemingly thematic, chapters—dharma, artha, kama, and moksha—is undone as the main thesis develops. Through a detailed analysis of the affect-laden and rarely discussed narrative intricacies of the Mahabharata, Govind argues that neither one of the four themes can be said to over-determine the conceptual schema of the epic. The overarching plot of the Pandava–Kaurava war throws open many ethical questions: What does dharma mean in the face of great violence? Does the martial ethic preclude reflections on peace? What is divinity? And does the divine play a necessary role in human life and social organisation, to name a few? Govind suggests that straight-forwardly didactic answers offered by the many human and divine voices of the Mahabharata are best understood as invitations to conduct ‘a detailed enquiry of the value arrived at through varied narrative situations’ (p. 112) because of what he observes to be the ‘unpredictable worldliness of events, the messy twining of emotion and politics’ (p. 15) throughout the epic. Affect moves, carrying these contingent values, and thereby giving the Mahabharata an inter-relational texture. As the first two chapters demonstrate, concerns of moksha do not always trump those of artha and kama, concerns of artha do not always trump those of moksha and dharma, and most importantly, the rhetoric of destiny complicates any superficial reading of dharma as the sole determining force of human action and its moral legitimacy.

Agenda setting and selective resonance – Black Lives Matter and media debates on racism in Germany

ABSTRACT In this article, we explore how the 2020 wave of BLM mobilisations has impacted the media debates on racism in Germany. We analyse overall shifts in the salience of racism and the resonance of key frames articulated by BLM protesters. Drawing from a mix of quantitative content analysis and semi-structured interviews, we find evidence that the BLM protests have changed the public debate on racism in Germany through agenda setting and reframing. Firstly, our data documents that the salience of racism in public debates increased after the protests. Secondly, specific movement frames, especially the distinction of anti-Black racism as one particular form of racism, became increasingly visible. Yet, resonance of frames has remained selective with some being hardly picked up in media debates. The article bridges insights from social movements, media, race and ethnicity studies to advance interdisciplinary scholarship on social and cultural change induced by collective action.

Perspectives on the Afghanistan War: Commentaries on a Misadventure

This article introduces the Symposium on the Afghanistan War. During and after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, emotions ran high. This special issue responds to public calls for further in-depth study of the Afghanistan War. We assembled an international array of interdisciplinary scholars who address reasons the mission became a misadventure. Additional papers focus on the consequences borne by the people who served and the institutions that fought America’s longest war.

Personhood, Masculinity, and Male-Perpetrated Intimate Partner Violence

Most international violence research that are firmly rooted in the ontology and cultural background of individualism make rash generalisations about violence and human nature by taking the examples of self and gender concepts in Western settings as the only reference point for their claims. Based on the understanding of self in Western cultures, many social psychological studies have over the years blamed interpersonal violence, including intimate partner violence (IPV), on perpetrators’ self-image. For example, while some studies indicate that people with low self-esteem are more likely to turn violent in order to gain esteem, others have theorised that individuals with inflated (high) self-esteem are more susceptible to use violence, particularly when the inflated self is threatened in interpersonal relationships. A growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship also traces the aetiology of IPV and the propensity for men to commit violence against women to the internalisation, endorsement and enactment of culturally defined male gender role. Despite the valuable contributions of these studies, there are significant challenges inherent in research that make broad universal claims about self and violence at the expense of culture and context. One of the most important phenomena that seems underexplored, overlooked or neglected in the context of violence research is how culture-specific notions of personhood and masculinity shapes male-perpetrated IPV. In this article, I explore the centrality of context and culture-specificities of personhood and masculinity in understanding male-perpetrated IPV. I discuss how the dialogical relationship between men’s psychological sense of who they are (personhood) and cultural notions of masculinity provides new insights for understanding violence research in context. I argue that, rather than a threat to a person’s dispositional self, the social pain of unfavourable third-party communal evaluations of masculine inadequacy threatens a man’s relational sense of personhood, and consequently provoke the use of violence towards the source of the threat in intimate relationships in Ghana.

NGOs, international courts, and state backlash against human rights accountability: Evidence from NGO mobilization against Tanzania at the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights

AbstractWhen nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) encounter state resistance to human rights accountability, how do NGOs use international courts for their human rights advocacy strategies? Considering the overlapping phenomena of shrinking civic space within authoritarian, hybrid, and democratically backsliding regimes, and state backlash against international courts, NGOs navigate two potential levels of state backlash against human rights accountability. Building on the interdisciplinary scholarship on legal mobilization, we develop an integrated framework for explaining how states' two-level (domestic and international) backlash tactics can both promote and deter NGOs' strategic litigation at international human rights courts (IHRCs). States' backlash tactics can influence NGOs' opportunities, capacities, and goals for their human rights advocacy, and thus affect whether and how they pursue strategic litigation at IHRCs. We elucidate the value of this framework through case studies of NGOs' litigation against Tanzania at the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, an understudied IHRC. Drawing on an original data set, interviews, and documentation, we process-trace how Tanzania's various backlash tactics influenced whether and how NGOs litigated at the Court. Our framework and analysis show how state backlash against human rights accountability affects NGOs' mobilization at IHRCs and, relatedly, IHRCs' opportunities for influence.

Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned

Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned

Conceptualizations of Race: Essentialism and Constructivism

Demonstrating how race is socially constructed has been a core sociological objective, yet many individuals continue to hold essentialist and other concepts of what races are and how to account for group differences. These conceptualizations have crucial consequences for intergroup attitudes, support for social policies, and structures of inequality, all of which are key sociological concerns; yet much of the research in this area has emerged outside of sociology. Our review of this interdisciplinary scholarship describes the range of views people hold, the attitudes and behaviors associated with them, and what factors contribute to these views. We focus primarily on essentialism and constructivism, although we describe the greater variety of beliefs beyond this dichotomy, as well as fluidity in how people use these concepts. We conclude by presenting research on strategies for reducing essentialist belief systems and identifying key areas for future research.

Review: Occult Roots of Religious Studies: On the Influence of Non-Hegemonic Currents on Academia around 1900, edited by Yves Mühlematter and Helmut Zander

Review: <i>Occult Roots of Religious Studies: On the Influence of Non-Hegemonic Currents on Academia around 1900</i>, edited by Yves Mühlematter and Helmut Zander

Beyond Visualization: Remote Sensing Applications in Prehispanic Settlements to Understand Ancient Anthropogenic Land Use and Occupation in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia

AbstractArchaeology is increasingly employing remote sensing techniques such as airborne lidar (light detection and ranging), terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), and photogrammetry in tropical environments where dense vegetation hinders to a great extent the ability to understand the scope of ancient landscape modification. These technologies have enabled archaeologists to develop sophisticated analyses that overturn traditional misconceptions of tropical ecologies and the human groups that have inhabited them in the long term. This article presents new data on the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia that reveals the extent to which its ancient societies transformed this landscape, which is frequently thought of as pristine. By recursively integrating remote sensing and archaeology, this study contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship examining ancient land use and occupation in densely forested contexts.

The Power of Coordination and Deliberation

Abstract I provide comments and replies to the seven insightful contributions that discussed “The Democratic Challenge of Central Bank Credit Policies” and the proposal for a European Credit Council. I review how interdisciplinary scholarship on the political economy of central banking have shown the limits of simple principal-agent framework applied to central bank power and legitimacy. I emphasize why a change to central bank independence is not necessary for a fundamental change in the financial system and credit policies. I also argue that deliberations can have strong effects on decision-making and that the power of the people is not restricted to the legislative power.

The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson: Searching for Sustainability. By Robert Jensen

How will we live well in a future shaped by climate change? This question animates Robert Jensen’s The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson: Searching for Sustainability. As a primer for understanding Jackson’s life, career, and philosophies, this immensely readable book introduces Jackson’s humble yet visionary ideas and practices to a new generation of scholars and engaged citizens. This work will inspire interdisciplinary scholars, environmental educators, secondary school teachers, community leaders, elected officials, farmers, and anyone invested in thinking about how to live well in a future increasingly marked by environmental and sociopolitical precarity. The Restless and Relentless Mind of Wes Jackson deserves a place on your bookshelf. Wes Jackson, the founder and long-time leader of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, is a free-thinker. Jackson approaches problems with a unique blend of intellectual training and practical know-how. From thinking about modern humans as a “species out of context” to encouraging a shift from an industrial to a “creaturely” worldview, Jackson’s approach to living well centers on alternatives to corporate-capitalist, industrial culture (pp. 31, 106–118). With little faith in large-scale economic or technological fixes to the environmental crisis, Jackson urges us to “celebrate the discoveries that make possible low-energy living in stable, decent human communities” (pp. 81, 86).

Of writing and freedom in Sony Labou Tansi’s novel Life and a Half

This essay offers a critical re-reading of Sony Labou Tansi’s début novel Life and a Half that was both formally innovative and conceptually challenging. As a point of departure, I consider Tansi’s statements about his vocation as a writer and the interpretive questions they raise. One such question is why the novel’s critical reception has tended to focus on its representation of dictatorship, while not engaging as productively with its existential dimensions. To get at these issues, this essay explores the integral relationship between writing and freedom. I structure the argument around an interpretation of three aliases for the writer, Martial, Chaïdana, and Layisho, who are fictional projections of the author in the novel. My critical approach to the text is informed by the published archive of Tansi’s extra-literary writing, my own fieldwork in Congo-Brazzaville, and interdisciplinary scholarship on the Kongo people and their culture from art history to political anthropology. My re-reading of this classic novel argues that the archive and Kongo culture are valuable resources for understanding the writer’s creative repertoire, which allows us to expand our interpretive framework for explicating aesthetic choices and their meanings in the text. Freedom as a concept broadens our critical parameters and brings a range of interrelated experiences into focus in the same interpretive frame, helping us to elucidate distinctions between them. By showing how Sony Labou Tansi elevates writing as a weapon of resistance with a spiritual dimension drawing on Kongo ritual and culture, we are better able to appreciate the extent of his capacious longing for freedom at home.