Visibility Of Issues Research Articles

Reforming masculinity: the politics of gender, race, militarism, and security sector reform in the Democratic Republic of Congo

ABSTRACT Conflict-related sexual violence has become an increasingly visible issue for feminists as well as various international actors. One of the ways in which global policymakers have tried to tackle this violence is through addressing the violent masculinity of security sector forces. While such efforts have their roots in feminist analyses of militarized masculinity, this article seeks to contribute to the critical discourse on gender-sensitive security sector reform (GSSR). There are three dimensions to my critical reading of GSSR. First, I ask what gendered and racialized power relations are reproduced through effort to educate male security agents about the wrongs of sexual violence. Second, I offer a critique of how GSSR normalizes military solutions to addressing sexual violence and strengthens the global standing of military actors. Finally, I bring these themes together in an analysis of the United States-led military training mission Operation Olympic Chase in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Here, I reveal the limitations of attempting to address sexual violence within the security sector without more radically confronting how gender, race, and militarism often work together to form the conditions for this violence. I conclude with some reflections on feminist complicity in upholding military power and the possibilities for developing global solidarity.

Discovered, made visible, constructed, and left out: LGBT+ parenting in the Italian sociological debate

ABSTRACT When, how, and which disciplines started to deal with which forms and aspects of LGBT+ parenthood is not a coincidence but is linked to occasions of discussion as well as to visibility, acceptance, and recognition in the wider social and political contexts. This particularly applies to sociological contributions which look at families and parenting involving relations to social institutions and their impact and shaping of forms, challenges, and meanings of parenting and family life. In Italy, issues about LGBT+ parenting began to appear in the sociological literature some thirty years ago. Since then, the debate has seen different waves and shifts, which show both how external movements, occasions, and discussions influenced the sociological debate and how the latter has, in turn, contributed to the construction and recognition of the phenomenon. Against this background, using a data mining approach, the article presents an analysis of the most recent sociological literature on LGBT+ parenting, highlighting the main dimensions of the debate and outlining expressions, concepts, and words most used on this topic. Using Italian sociology as an example, the critical analysis of these findings shows how issues of topicality and (in)visibility are both reflected and reiterated by contextual sociological discourses and debates.

PUBLICATION ACTIVITY OF UKRAINIAN HEI ACADEMIC STAFF: A CASE STUDY

In the Ukrainian education and science systems globalization and European integration processes have raised the issue of visibility for Ukrainian scientists. Having the articles in Scopus and Web of Science indexed journals is becoming of particular significance for scientists' authority rise and universities` prestige. Despite the appropriate state of the educational policy, the publishing activity of the majority of Ukrainian Higher Education Institutions’ academic staff still remains insufficient, and to date, a very few empirical research has been carried out to determine reasons for that. The aim of this study was therefore, to investigate how such factors as corporate culture of Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University, academic career, research and language skills, personal development, financial support etc. contribute to and prevent successful publication activity of University`s academic staff. Two groups of academicians were interviewed. The results showed that it is necessary to create the conditions for the research culture development, develop the research competence, provide systemic monitoring of publication activity, and improve the mechanisms of financial rewards.

The mouth of the internet, the eyes of the public: sexual violence survivorship in an economy of visibility

ABSTRACT Sexual violence reporting is a site where issues of visibility, publicity, privacy, algorithms, and intelligibility all converge, and where the language of digital “space” is married to metaphors of “going public.” Using Google search results of Emma Sulkowicz and Chanel Miller’s stories of sexual violence as a springboard, this theoretical paper explores how all of these metaphors—public spaces, going public, being seen—are both prevalent and entirely inadequate for describing the realities of being covered by journalists in today’s contemporary technoculture. Stories of sexual violence in the media operate within a capitalist system of visibility in which they are repackaged, distributed, and made profitable for both news outlets and digital platforms. Rather than a neutral “public space,” stories of sexual violence and survivorship travel in what I call a public stage, or the eternal, infinite, and (often) intensely misogynist space of the internet. I conclude that the visibility economy of digital space, in which everything is treated as public and visible forever, has only intensified rather than abated the skepticism with which survivors are treated.

(In)visible fathers in social work with the child and family

This text explores the issues of (in)visibility of fathers in the process of helping and supporting the family, little recognized in the Polish reality of social work with children and families. Despite the ongoing discourse about the engaged fatherhood, fathers in social work are still seen from the perspective of absence, danger and exclusion. They are much less involved in the family support process than mothers. The reason why so few men are actively involved in these activities is not only because of their physical absence in their families, but also because of the difficulty in involving them in the interventions experienced by social workers. There are few studies on this issue in the Polish literature. More data on the reasons for the situation is provided by research conducted by scientists from other countries - they show the reasons why cooperation with men is difficult. These studies are the subject of the analysis of the presented considerations. The analysis was carried out taking into account three perspectives: social workers, fathers and mothers. The whole inquiry is complemented by reflections on the change in the organization of the helping process so that fathers become visible subjects in social work with the family.

Digital Twins Driven Supply Chain Visibility within Logistics: A New Paradigm for Future Logistics

The supply chains shaping their distribution networks become more diverse as companies respond to global markets’ stringent criteria. This is also counterproductive to the visibility of the supply chain within the company and can adversely affect the organization’s core business. This paper attempts to evaluate how organizations can benefit from introducing Digital Twins to enhance their logistics supply network visibility. Additionally, deployment issues and technologies supporting Digital Twins were reviewed. This study used ATLAS.ti 9 software tools to save, classify, and evaluate the data for this analysis to systematically review the literature. We reviewed, compiled, and sorted papers from 227 publications for this article and then recognized 104 as critical to the work scope; this analysis’ quest date was set from 2002 to 2021. This article represents the first attempt at dealing with the issue of supply chain visibility through the Digital Twins in the logistics field. The research outcomes found that Digital Twins would help companies develop predictive metrics, diagnostics, projections, and physical asset descriptions for their logistics. This study also suggested some steps to overcome the challenges in implementing a Digital Twins in the logistics industry. For researchers, this review offers the possibility to unify and expand existing solutions and to identify links and interfaces that are still needed. As for managerial implications, this study can be used to identify future strategies and technologies to fulfil certain logistics tasks and develop new technological solutions for current and future demands.

Sandstorm animations on rural expressways: The impact of variable message sign strategies on driver behavior in low visibility conditions

Problem: Evolving sandstorms on rural expressways in desert countries impair drivers' contrast vision and increase the risk of serious crashes due to delayed speed adjustments. Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) such as Variable Message Signs (VMS) conveying warnings can be activated to address drivers’ speed adaptation before entering a low visibility zone. To improve drivers’ understanding of the hazard, a sandstorm animation visualizing turbulent sand and its consequences was designed and compared with a general warning pictogram, which is applied if no specific weather pictogram is available. Moreover, minimum warning distances of the VMS to the low visibility zone were tested (e.g., 300 m or 500 m). MethodSixty-three participants from the State of Qatar drove in a driving simulator through clear, transition, and low visibility conditions on a rural expressway. A repeated analysis of variances was conducted to examine the impact of the two on-road warning displays on driving behavior. ResultsThe results showed that the sandstorm animation was similarly effective as a generic warning pictogram in reducing driving speeds before entering the transition and low visibility zone, irrespective of being displayed 500 m or 300 m away. However, the sandstorm animation resulted in consistent similar speed reductions within the low visibility zone, whereas the generic warning pictogram did either perform better or worse after several encounters with a sandstorm. Drivers did strongly agree that the animation is clearly referring to the issue of low visibility, which can be beneficial for recurring low visibility conditions.Practical applications: 1.) Displaying a sandstorm animation is beneficial for rural expressway sections with recurring degrading visibility and low traffic densities, whereas a warning pictogram can be more effective in speed reductions if drivers expect additional traffic hazards. 2.) Roadway authorities have the flexibility to activate a VMS sandstorm warning even for minimum warning distances.

Viability of Visibility of Translator: Looking back and beyond Venuti

In translation and cultural studies, the issue of (in) visibility of translator has taken its firm grounds especially after the publication of Venuti’s (1995) The Invisibility of Translator and its subsequent row of arguments and counter-arguments for and against the theoretical perspective as given in the book. The current research paper is an attempt to have an overview of Venuti’s and his critics’ arguments and add to the existing discussion of (in) visibility of translator, foreignization, and domestication of translation and projection and preservation of source culture during the act of translation by resisting the linguistic and cultural hegemony of English. This paper has, broadly, three main divisions of ideas: a firstly brief overview of Venuti’s arguments; secondly, a brief overview of Venuti’s most recent critics’ arguments like Pym, Tymoczko, Baker, Cronin, and Shamma; and thirdly the researchers own arguments about the issue based on the detailed analysis of previous literature. Conducting a close reading, as a popular method of analysis in qualitative research methodology, of the literature related to the issue of visibility of translator, the researcher has tried to suggest that the act of translation, during the voluntary act of foreignization, adds a concocted essence to the real spirit of the literary piece of work which neither remains beneficial for the assertion of the individuality of the source culture nor it helps very much in the resistance of the dominating language and culture. At the cost of aesthetic pleasure, the foreignization method also entails the sacrifice of literary meanings and effects.

‘It’s just absolutely everywhere’: understanding LGBTQ experiences of queerbaiting

ABSTRACT Queer media plays a significant role in the education and validation of emerging LGBTQ individuals. Although the volume of such media has increased, there are still ways in which it is misrepresentative. One such example is the practice of queerbaiting, which has been defined as media appearing but failing to provide allegiance to issues of queer visibility. Utilising phenomenological inquiry through application of semi-structured interviews, five university undergraduates who self-identified as LGBTQ described their experiences, thoughts, and feelings of queerbaiting. Consistent with prior research, participants felt that queerbaiting was an exploitative practice, which may have implications on identity development and acceptance. Opinions differed on what constitutes queerbaiting and the intentions of those who contribute to queerbaiting practice, suggesting that queerbaiting is a multi-dimensional phenomenon best understood as an umbrella term for diverse practices. From this we developed a new taxonomy of queerbaiting with three major forms: consumer queerbaiting; cultural queerbaiting; and social queerbaiting. Recognition of these three forms of queerbaiting may improve understanding of queerbaiting and its effects in future research and the diverse settings in which queerbaiting occurs.

I hope, one day, I will have the right to speak

Situated at the intersection of digital migration studies, social movement studies and critical citizenship studies, this article explores how people on the move (migrants, refugees) in Libya use digital media to raise rights violations and to challenge European Union (EU) policies and UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) practices. To examine how digital media provide a ‘space of appearance’ for people on the move in Libya, the study presents a qualitative thematic analysis of 49 posts and 986 comments published on the official Facebook page of UNHCR Libya between January 2018 and January 2019. Major themes include criticisms of UNHCR services and EU policies as well as the raising of human rights issues surrounding detention and evacuation. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how digital media enable people on the move to raise rights claims, contest official narratives and become active narrators of their individual struggles with the system of control and exclusion that is so deeply embedded in the discourse of securitized humanitarian care at Europe’s border. At the same time, it highlights how issues of digital access and communicative capacity influence visibility and self-expression in the digital space of appearances.

SEÑORAS DE LA TRADICIÓN. MUJERES FOLKLORISTAS EN CUBA.

In the history of Cuban anthropology, little attention has been paid to several women who have, nevertheless, obtained professional recognition from the international academic community. Calixta Guiteras Holmes is one such case, with her unique characters. Another less known but equally relevant woman was Carolina Poncet de Cárdenas, who formed a generation of highly active female pedagogues and folklorists. A different place is required to situate the life and work of a person who could be considered the modern founder of studies on Afro-Cuban religions, the writer and anthropologist Lydia Cabrera, who has only recently begun to be acknowledged by intellectual circles in official Cuban culture. An examination of these three figures is undertaken, and their contributions to anthropology are analyzed, opposing the hegemonic account of the history of science where the role of founders has generally been attributed to men. Likewise, the issues of institutional visibility and continuity and the lines of research in the Cuban academic world dedicated to anthropology and folklore are discussed, with the ultimate goal of bringing the contributions of these women researchers to the fore.

African Nova Scotian Grit: A Scholarly Personal Narrative About Nursing Leadership

As an African Nova Scotian (ANS) woman, registered nurse, full-time doctoral candidate and activist, I have decided to share key moments from my experience navigating academia. I discuss how being an ANS woman is significant to this journey as well as the ways in which anti-Black racism reinforces the underrepresentation of Black folks in nursing. The purpose of this scholarly personal narrative (SPN) is to generate meaning from my journey to becoming a nurse leader. The guiding question for this work is: What is the experience of an ANS woman in becoming a nurse leader? Guided by Narrative Inquiry and Black feminist theory, my SPN uses the Ten Tentative Guidelines for Writing SPNs offered by Nash (2004). This unconventional approach to research situates stories as the fundamental unit of measurement which emphasizes the significance and meaning of our lives. The iterative approach to this reflective exercise produced two key overarching themes, namely: Developing Personal and Professional Identity, and Potential vs. Power. Each theme contains additional subthemes that capture salient elements of my journey to nursing leadership. This SPN has implications for both education and the nursing profession. For education, this work offers insight to address institutional barriers that perpetuate anti-Black racism. Improving program access for Black students, providing adequate resources to facilitate success and ensuring the representation of Black students, staff and faculty throughout institutions are vital. Likewise, similar insights apply to nursing in the areas of practice, education, research and policy. Specifically, addressing issues of representation and visibility, to foster inclusivity, within the profession is essential.

Scholar Spotlight

Scholar Spotlight Samantha N. Sheppard and Jennifer McClearen Feminist media scholar Jennifer McClearen examines the cultural production of difference in contemporary society with an emphasis on the mediation of gender, race, and sexuality in sports media. An assistant professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, she is currently completing her first book, Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC. McClearen's interest in the intersection of sports and media compelled her to help establish the newly formed Sports Media Scholarly Interest Group for SCMS. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Jennifer McClearen, Assistant Professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin (Marc Speir, 2020). Samantha N. Sheppard: What does it mean for you to study, write, and teach sports in this current cultural moment? Jennifer McClearen: It is a thrilling time to be a media scholar who examines the cultural politics of sports because of the ways sports media can spur national conversations about issues that impact our culture more broadly. Sports media is one gathering space where people of vastly different backgrounds, tastes, and interests come together. It is a space where live TV is still thriving, and time-shifting is far less [End Page 1] common than other forms of media. Sports media is a cultural space where democratic debate still circulates, so athlete activists have the capacity to become particularly meaningful agents of change. Sheppard: How has your research helped you address issues of visibility, representation, industrial practice, and social identity in women's sports? McClearen: My forthcoming book with the University of Illinois Press, Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC, is a cautionary tale about our scholarly and activist fascination with making female athletes more visible. I examine a specific sporting context in depth: mixed martial arts (MMA), or more specifically, the world's largest MMA promotion, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Women have been and continue to be largely underrepresented or represented in trivialized ways within sports media. Fighting Visibility argues that the UFC has made women in combat sports more visible than ever before. Yet they do so by exploiting a vulnerable labor force of athletes and brokering unfulfilled promises of women's empowerment and the American Dream. The book urges those invested in women's sports to avoid a categorical assumption that visibility is good for all women in all contexts and instead asks us to consider who benefits and who is harmed when the image of the powerful female athlete becomes marketable in sports media brands. Sheppard: How did you come to your area of research? McClearen: If you had told me ten years ago that I would become an expert in sports media, I would have laughed. Yet hindsight is indeed twenty-twenty when considering my intellectual path here. I started graduate school planning to study the action genre with a specific focus on the representation of female action heroes, which is what my master's thesis focused on. I had been practicing martial arts for several years and always thought of mediated fighting in terms of cinema and television rather than as actual sports. Shortly after completing my master's degree, some Brazilian jujitsu training partners and friends convinced me to watch UFC fights. I skeptically began watching the sport that I had always considered violent, hypermasculine, and sexist. As I watched, I slowly began realizing that despite there being some truth to MMA's stereotype, the UFC was far more compelling than I had ever given it credit. When Ronda Rousey burst onto the scene as the first female UFC fighter, I thought, "This could be an interesting way to explore my interests in women, physical power, feminism, cultural politics, and the body." To my utter joy, I began reading literature in feminist and cultural studies of sports and realized those were the intellectual genealogies that allowed me to engage my most burning research questions. I read Cheryl L. Cole's "Resisting the Canon: Feminist Cultural Studies, Sport, and Technologies of the Body" and sensed that my budding academic research agenda suddenly became legitimate...

Visible Choices: Black and Gay In/visibility in Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby (1995)

Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby (1995) is a coming-out narrative and a graphic memoir about the civil rights movement in a fictional town in Alabama. It engages with the regime of visuality that renders some minorities invisible, as well as with the need for visibility that comes with political engagement. This essay examines the intersection of race and gender by focusing on the issues of visibility and invisibility. Cruse’s graphic novel provides an intersectional picture of what being denied representation and recognition implies. Having been made aware of what being invisible as a subaltern means, the reader realizes the importance of looks of acceptance and recognition given across the lines of race and gender.

The Knowledge Nexus in Teacher Qualification

Research in teacher education institutions has undergone a rapid dual process of expansion and differentiation over the past decades. A major effort in this article is to register and discuss key institutional and intellectual changes in education research linked to the case of Norway. This overview gives a background for discussion of the impacts from the growing research in teacher education units regarding the knowledge dynamics in general teacher education. In the wake of the less segmented research policies of the last quarter of a century, emphasis on direct contributions of research to the qualification of teachers has become a highly visible issue. I will argue that with the concurrent expansion and diversification of education research, it has become vital to understand how the internal hybrid knowledge dynamics can support the quest for greater coherence in the qualification and professional repertoire of new teachers. Simultaneously, awareness of how research-driven knowledge specialisation can increase academic drift, fragmentation and professional disorientation in teacher education programmes is needed. In the mapping of research trajectories in the field of general teacher education, the contrasts between epistemic patterns in the didactic phase of secondary disciplinarisation are compared to the educational phase. Awareness across teacher education faculty of such research-driven changes can support receptivity towards disciplinary as well as cross-disciplinary challenges and of scholarly care for a more thorough and balanced professional knowledge base. Such common professional orientations can also support the cultivation of interchanges between research, teaching and innovation, and within and across arenas and disciplines contributing to the qualification of good teachers.

A Portrait of a ‘Selfie’ in the Making

This paper focuses on an iconological analysis of Roberto Schmidt’s photograph of Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt taking a selfie with U.S. President Barack Obama and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron during late President Nelson Mandela’s memorial service on December 10th, 2013, at the First National Bank Stadium in Soweto. This analysis shows the compositional strength of the photograph and argues that part of its power rests in the way it contains, albeit unintentionally, a sort of lexicon of portraiture, iconically juxtaposing new forms (selfie-posture) with others that evoke cultural archives, such as the Renaissance female profile portrait or the front-faced memorial portrait.Schmidt’s photograph also offers an image that captures the complex nature of the public and private images of public figures, and the issues of visibility in relation to power or fame. This leads to comments on Obama’s use of selfies in his communication strategy during his time at the White House.Finally, the multiplicity of gaze directions in Roberto Schmidt’s photograph as well as its meta-photographical dimension opens up a discussion on the more general issue on the nature of the selfie per se, with its transformation of the connection between sitters, photographer and viewer, in terms of distance, focus and exchange of gazes. Current technological developments of front-faced cameras, allowing an unprecedented increase in reproducibility and exposure levels, have spread conventionality in selfie photography, not only making for a normative, standardized or formulaic arrangement of the body posture, but also for a transformation of both the photographed’s and the viewer’s gaze, arguably weakening the potential experience of an aura for the viewer, and leading to a type of image (selfies) and skewed gaze which, as argued by Bertrand Naivin, breaks away from the traditions of (self-) portraits.

Visible, Unrecognisable – Recognisable, Silenced? Representations of Evangelism in Permanent Museum Exhibits in Masuria

The article addresses representations of the Evangelical denomination at contemporary permanent museum exhibits in the region of Masuria, inhabited between 1525–1945 by a Protestant majority. Applying semiotic analysis, the author presents the outcomes of field studies in the local museums in Olsztyn, Mikołajki, Mrągowo, Ogródek, Szczytno, and in the open-air museum in Olsztynek. The principal research question is the issue of visibility and recognisability of Evangelism-related items at permanent exhibits. The author concludes that there are three types of omissions in the presentation of the history of Masurian Evangelicals. The silencing of the Protestant past of Masuria results from the cultural colonisation that took place after 1945 and from identifying Evangelicalism with Germanness in the common consciousness of the currently dominant Polish Roman Catholic community.

Designing and implementing gender budgeting – a path to action

Gender inequality is an important and visible issue for OECD countries and the costs are borne at both social and economic levels. In line with the 2015 OECD Recommendation on Gender Equality in Public Life, gender budgeting ensures that gender equality considerations are taken systematically into account in tax and spending decisions. Effective implementation of gender budgeting has the potential to improve gender equality, ensure a sense of fairness and contribute to inclusive economic growth. This paper draws on the experiences of OECD countries and aims to provide insights into how the budget process can develop as a tool to support gender equality goals; the different ways in which gender budgeting can be implemented; and the factors that help provide an enabling environment for gender budgeting. Arising from this analysis, this paper proposes initial guidelines for designing and implementing gender budgeting to assist countries in putting in place an effective and sustainable approach. It also presents a first pass at a composite index for gender budgeting which assesses the extent to which OECD countries gender budgeting efforts are characterised by a strong strategic framework, effective tools of implementation and an enabling environment.

Read Before Archiving

Rhetoric is archival and archives are rhetorical. But this seemingly simple chiasmus warrants further exploration. The ten texts below – a mix of edited books, articles, and special issues representing multiple disciplines – invite us to think more deeply about the role of archives in the writing of rhetorical history. They reflect on the role of archives from multiple perspectives: users of archives, makers of archives, archivists (professional and amateur), and scholars of archival studies. The authors collectively explore issues of ethics, activism, ownership, positionality, race, sexuality, disability, gender, identity, class, nationalism, (in)visibility, and power. They tell stories, define terms, share experiences, chronicle projects, outline methods, demand recognition, and in a few cases directly engage one another. In doing so, they challenge us to rethink what counts as evidence, question how we source our claims, commit to new ways of working, talk to each other, and embrace imagination and play. Above all, they make a convincing case that, to paraphrase composer Richard Rodgers from the musical Oklahoma!, the rhetorician and the archivist should be friends.

Measuring quality of life: an integrative approach

The article analyzes the indicators of the quality of life and substantiates the need for their rethinking. Global changes in the economy and society, scientific achievements keep current the issue of improving the indicators of the well-being of the population and methods of calculating them with an emphasis on identifying the final result. In particular, there is a need to reassess the consolidated indicators, namely the place of gross domestic product and other economic indicators in assessing the quality of life as the basis of people’s well-being. It is concluded that the methods of assessing the quality of life mainly take into account the material side of well-being, which can be quantified, but the subjective side of the state of people - expectations, emotional state, experiences, spiritual state, etc., completely fall out of sight. Such a predominance of the material and visible issues, materialized in measuring and assessing the standard of living does not give a complete picture of the quality of life of the population, which does not contribute to the development of adequate goals, means, methods and mechanisms for the improvement thereof.