Mainstream Narratives Research Articles

Beyond the state as the ‘cold monster’: the importance of Russian alternative media in reconfiguring the hegemonic state discourse

ABSTRACT The article brings Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory into the empirical context of contemporary Russia to analyse the complex relationships between the state and alternative media. In contrast to the mainstream narrative that paints the picture of a strong authoritarian state with a grip over democratic liberties and civil society, we suggest a more nuanced perspective on the subject that focuses on the struggle over the articulation of the identity of the state. Through an ethnography (combined with interviews and textual analysis) of three Russian alternative media outlets – Avtonom, Discours and DOXA – this article demonstrates how they critique the hegemonic state discourse, how they evade it through their practices, and how they perform counter-hegemonic alternatives. Even if their resistance is severely countered by the state, their practices are seen to de-naturalise the nodal points of centrality and unity which constitute the hegemonic state discourse. As these practices contain alternative articulations of the state discourse, the importance of alternative media for rethinking the state (and resisting it) should not be underestimated.

Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping

Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping

Family Communication: Examining the Differing Perceptions of Parents and Teens Regarding Online Safety Communication

The opportunity for online engagement increases possible exposure to potentially risky behaviors for teens, which may have significant negative consequences. Effective family communication about online safety can help reduce the risky adolescent behavior and limit the consequences after it occurs. Our paper contributes a theory of communication factors that positively influence teen and parent perception of communication about online safety and provides design implications based on those findings. While previous work identified gaps in family communication regarding online safety, our study quantitatively identified the factors that significantly contribute to parents' and teens' differing perceptions. We analyzed data from a survey of 215 teen-parent pairs through a cross-sectional design and examined the factors that contribute to increased family communication about online safety. For parents, active mediation, technical monitoring, and a perceived positive affect of the teen were associated with higher levels of family communication. Our results were similar for teens, except that the teen's online safety concern and parental monitoring were also positively associated with increased family communication, while restrictive mediation was associated with lower levels of family communication. Many existing designs for online safety support a restrictive approach, despite teens not wanting technical restrictions. A key implication of our findings is that teens view active mediation and monitoring positively in respect to family communication. Contrary to mainstream narratives, this finding suggests that teens value parental involvement and do not desire complete independence online. By examining specific mechanisms which can hinder or improve family communication between parents and teens regarding online safety, we recommend solutions that give teens an active role in their online safety and facilitate effective family communication through cooperation between both parties, rather than technologies that promote parental restriction.

Religious Dimensions in Transhumanist and Posthumanist Philosophies of Science

The article discusses transhumanism and posthumanism as marginal trajectories of the modern philosophy of science, which, however, distinctly influence the mainstream narrative of science and societal relations. Among the decisive determinants of this impact is trans/posthumanism’s para-religious content that replenishes a conceptualised process of cutting-edge scientific practices and ideals. In particular, transhumanism and posthumanism evolve as ideological exploiters of seemingly obsolete forms of religiosity, for they simultaneously exploit and reinvent the entire apparatus of the scientific, political, and moral activity in Western societies. Avant-garde secular worldviews tend to be religious in the sense that their ultimate quest is the transformation of humans into certain historical entities, which are capable of rearranging their own systems of order.

Beyond Transitional Justice: Learning from Indigenous Maya Mam Resistance in Guatemala

Abstract The international transitional justice movement – while making great strides in achieving justice and uncovering the truth of what happened during the decades-long internal armed conflict – ultimately constructs a narrow understanding of the conflict and postconflict in Guatemala. Domestic and international human rights trials and truth commission reports focus, sometimes necessarily, on stories of suffering and the costs of war, and often leave out stories of resilience and triumph. Drawing on Indigenous scholarship about concepts of desire-centered work, refusal, survivance and thrivance, I argue for the need to shift fundamental assumptions and move beyond traditional approaches to transitional justice, identifying important lessons learned. A collaborative research project with a small Maya Mam Indigenous town in western Guatemala brings to the fore voices often missing from mainstream narratives about conflict by centering the community’s grassroots development, and self-governance projects through which genocide survivors are building new, vibrant futures for themselves and their children.

‘A brother is more than a neighbour’: Symbolic boundary work in Czech pro-migration discourse

ABSTRACT Since 2015, the latest so-called migration crisis has become a major discursive topic in the EU, even in countries like Czechia, which have not received many migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers. While researchers have looked at anti-migration discourses in the country, highlighting the ways in which symbolic boundaries around migrants are brightened, there exists a gap in looking at the other side, namely, how migrant rights advocates legitimate the potential acceptance of migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers. In this article, we adopt a cultural sociological approach to explore how two Czech initiatives to accept refugees, including Syrian orphans, variously blur and solidify symbolic boundaries. Our findings show that the migrant rights advocates involved in these two initiatives, who gained the attention of decision makers, follow mainstream discursive narratives, legitimating the acceptance of refugees based on similar arguments and symbols (both religious and security based) as those instrumentalised by the opponents of migration.

The Political Economy of Heteronormativity

This paper investigates the relationship between heteronormativity, queerness, and neoliberal capitalism. By reinterpreting the 1997 Recognition-Redistribution debate between Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler through a social reproduction lens, I show that Butler’s position is broadly consistent with a social reproduction analysis of heteronormativity. Through stabilizing the gender division of labor, promoting the normative heterosexual family, and contributing to the internal stratification within the working class, heteronormativity fulfills critical social-reproductive roles. Queer emancipation, therefore, cannot be realized without an overhaul of the political economic structure. As relations of reproduction change under neoliberal capitalism, what is constituted as queer is also altered in ways that incorporate queerness into capitalist value production. Mainstream narratives of LGBT progress obscure the emerging division between queers with capital and queers without, a division undergirded by familiar contradictions of racialized, heteronormative, reproductive capitalism. JEL Classification: B51, B54, P16

Over Forty Years of Resisting Compulsory Veiling

Abstract While text-based and cyberspace campaigns against compulsory veiling in Iran have received much attention, Iranian diasporic creative writers have also engaged in this resistance through their writings, but they have remained almost unacknowledged. This article argues that diasporic literary narratives have functioned as part of what has led to today’s online platforms and cyberactivism. The article approaches these literary narratives as forms of counterdiscourse, rearticulating alternative narratives about women’s movements against compulsory veiling. Produced in diaspora, these transnational feminist works raise questions of authenticity and legitimacy. However, these authors emerge as activists from their position abroad, pushing back against the limits placed by the state on women’s bodies; in posing these challenges, they contribute to dissent from the mainstream narrative and to a rearticulation of the movement even as their works are viewed as marginal.

Climate of Conformism: Social Media Users’ Opinion on Homosexuality in Nigeria

Social media has emerged as a robust medium for discourses on sexuality given its capacity to challenge mainstream narratives and empower personal views on self-expression. In Nigeria, the growing interest in homosexual expressions through online platforms is yet to receive significant research attention, although scholars are hinting at the influences of social media. The present study examines social media as a relatively novel platform for discourses on homosexuality in Nigeria. It attempts to ascertain users’ willingness to express opinion, directions of opinion, and factors affecting opinion formation. Within the purview of social integration paradigms, the study reviews current perspectives in global homosexuality narratives. Using descriptive and hermeneutic analysis, it examines data from 323 Facebook users selected through snowball sampling technique as well as 300 comments purposively selected from “verified” Instagram accounts. The study finds significant willingness to express opinions, propelled by “rising interest in the topic.” Within a persisting climate of negative opinion, the study locates subsisting influences of socio-cultural institutions on opinion formation. It discusses the implications of the influences of the institutions and political propaganda, which nourish heterosexism and negative bias against homosexuality.

Teaching (Cooperative) Business: The “Bluefield Experiment” and the Future of Black Business Schools

Teaching (Cooperative) Business: The “Bluefield Experiment” and the Future of Black Business Schools

Contesting the Mainstream Narrative? A Conceptual Discussion on the Politics of Science, Technology, and Innovation from the Periphery

Contesting the Mainstream Narrative? A Conceptual Discussion on the Politics of Science, Technology, and Innovation from the Periphery

Temporal comparisons, historical semantics of interaction and ‘post-war consensus’ in British Parliament: Studying time references in a deliberative environment

This article aims to demonstrate that the transition from the mainstream narrative to the interactional history of concepts promises tangible benefits for scholars of social time in general and temporal comparisons in particular. It is shown that the traditionally close alignment of narration with the production of historical consciousness at various levels hinders the study of time as a semantic variable perpetually contested, amended and upheld across society. Alternatively, the references to time made in public settings, allowing for more or less instant reactions (turn-taking) as well as expression of dissenting opinions (stance-taking), offer a much more representative palette of temporal semantics and pragmatics in a given sociopolitical environment. In a particularly intriguing case, the essentially deliberative venue where contestation is supported by both institutional arrangements and political reasons (British House of Commons) is put to test under circumstances commonly known as ‘the post-war consensus’ – the unspoken convention directing opposing political parties to suspend stance-taking regarding the past actions of the government during WWII, its immediate aftermath and its future prospects. As a reliable indicator of this arrangement, the contestation of temporal comparisons between relevant pasts and futures is tested in oppositions reflecting party allegiances (Conservatives vs. Labour vs. Liberals) and executive functions (government vs. opposition) between 1946 and 1952. It is shown that, notwithstanding the prevalence of non-contested statements aimed at preserving interactional coherence and pragmatic functionality of the setting, the moderately active contestation of the adversary’s temporal comparisons in the House of Commons at that time helped all parties, albeit to a different degree, to shape their own political and institutional roles as well as to delegitimize their respective adversaries.

Narratives of vulnerability and resilience: An investigation of the climate action plans of New York City and Copenhagen

This paper argues that the rise of a global mainstream resilience narrative is advancing a strategically simplified concept of vulnerability that is being exploited to open up lucrative new opportunities for profit. In particular, it presents three ways in which mainstream narratives are currently masking--if not exacerbating--the vulnerability of residents in New York City and Copenhagen. First, it explores how a technocratic orientation to community engagement is affecting local perceptions of participatory processes such as planning consultations and visioning exercises. Next, it investigates how the pursuit of an ‘infrastructure-first’ approach to interventions and a reputation for eco-innovation is creating tensions between institutional and local experiences of resilience. Lastly, it discusses some of the ways in which simplistic understandings of vulnerability are leading to adverse outcomes--such as eco-gentrification and displacement--that are making local communities more, not less, vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. It concludes by arguing that the meaningful integration of diverse perspectives and values is integral to the process of giving rise to more critical and expansive narratives of resilience.

Decolonial feminist theory: Embracing the gendered colonial difference in management and organisation studies

AbstractFeminist theories in management and organization studies, each with their own ontological and epistemological assumptions, offer critical perspectives of the status quo to challenge our idea of progress in the discipline, yet there is limited engagement with ideas, theories, or practices from the lived experiences of Global South women. Decolonial feminism engages with debates pertaining to coloniality/modernity and indigenous identity and gender in Latin America, while providing a space for the voices and lived experiences of marginalized, non‐Western(ised) women. Positioned in the context of Guatemalan Maya women and deploying critical insights from decolonial feminists, I unpack how the discourse about Global South women silences their voices and agency. Integrating decolonial feminist theory allows us to rethink management and organizationorganization studies as a Western gendered system. Interrupting mainstream narratives to bring a new geopolitics of knowledge and knowing from the perspective of the gendered colonial difference.

Remediating AIDS Archives

Abstract In response to mainstream narratives of AIDS history, which too often highlight only experiences of white, cisgender gay men, this article argues that an analysis of recent AIDS activist media is crucial to complicate mainstream representations. It looks to recent video work as an important site of a diversified AIDS history and analyzes three videos made by Thomas Allen Harris, Shanti Avirgan, and Nguyen Tan Hoang for the Visual AIDS Alternate Endings series. Instead of presenting AIDS history as firmly embedded in the past, much of this newer work intertwines past and present to show the ongoing nature of the crisis. Many videos use archival footage to highlight the persistent nature of racism, poverty, drug use stigma, and health care barriers in the epidemic. Through temporal contrast, the videos powerfully show that progress is not always linear, and the past has much to teach us about the present.

Hope and anxiety: The study of female embodied experience with assisted reproductive technology

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) is hailed as “the holy grail” for infertile patients in the mainstream narrative. The existing studies have clearly demonstrated how external social factors shape how ART is to be used, but they ignore the recipients of the technologies, and especially the experiences of women. Based on an investigation conducted in Z hospital’s reproductive center, this article regards embodiment as the methodological orientation for integrating socio-cultural context with female embodied experience in order to show their bio-social entanglement. As fieldwork evidence indicates, ART in practice is far from simple “hope technology”; instead, it throws women into a paradoxical world in which hope and anxiety coexist. Embodied experience, hope, and anxiety are transmitted through the bodies of women, which reveals the inscription of social-cultural context and technical uncertainty on the female body and, meanwhile, women actively learn strategies by which to cope with the technical uncertainty and moral pressures from local culture (including healing the body, folk religion, etc.), so as to hold onto infertility treatment with hope.

The networked refugee: The role of transnational networks in the journeys across the Mediterranean

AbstractThe experience of migrants crossing the Mediterranean has been represented as that of passive components of large‐scale human flows driven by conflicts, migration policies and smuggling. This article proposes a reflection on the advantages of using a social network lens to better understand these experiences at a micro‐ and meso‐level, bringing to the fore the personal and relational dimensions. By examining the narratives of people who reached the coasts of Sicily (Italy) via the Libyan route, the article highlights the key role of local and transnational ties at every single juncture of these very long, often serendipitous journeys. The concept of ‘journey’ is used to frame this analysis, but also to debunk some of the deterministic, static and Euro‐centred assumptions, which have characterized mainstream narratives and some scholarly debates. Thus, the refugee journey emerges as a fluid process characterized by the continuous deconstruction and reconstruction of social networks.

The Anti-Jewish Narrative

According to the mainstream narrative about race, all groups have the same innate dispositions and potential, and all disparities—at least those favoring whites—are due to past or present racism. Some people who reject this narrative gravitate toward an alternative, anti-Jewish narrative, which sees recent history in terms of a Jewish/gentile conflict. The most sophisticated promoter of the anti-Jewish narrative is the evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald. MacDonald argues that Jews have a suite of genetic adaptations—including high intelligence and ethnocentrism—and cultural practices that lead them to undermine gentile society to advance their own evolutionary interests. He says that Jewish-designed intellectual movements have weakened gentile identity and culture while preserving Jewish identity and separatism. Cofnas recently argued that MacDonald’s theory is based on “systematically misrepresented sources and cherry-picked facts.” However, Cofnas gave short shrift to at least three key claims: (a) Jews are highly ethnocentric, (b) liberal Jews hypocritically advocate liberal multiculturalism for gentiles/gentile countries but racial purity and separatism for Jews/Israel, and (c) Jews are responsible for liberalism and mass immigration to the United States. The present paper examines these claims and concludes that MacDonald’s views are not supported.

‘The World of Female Fighters and Female Wanderers’: Pro-independence Women’s Groups in the Fight for Suffrage and National Independence in Poland

ABSTRACT This article revisits the discussion about Polish women’s contribution to the fight for national independence, and women’s enfranchisement, considering the absence of First World War female activists in the mainstream narratives about the inception of the Polish state. The exploration of biographies of the female activists in the pro-independence female organizations, e.g. the Polish Women’s League for War Alert (LKPW, Liga Kobiet Polskich Pogotowia Wojennego, est. 1913), shows the intersection of feminist and nationalist goals, thus challenging the prevailing view that nationalists and feminists belonged to separate camps. The approaching war, but also the increasingly negative press about feminism, forced the leaders of the pro-independence groups to disguise their emancipationist ambitions under patriotic slogans. Given the country’s negative predisposition towards both socialism and feminism, the article proposes that it is precisely the feminist agenda, as well as the ties of the pro-independence activists to the Polish socialist movement, which have prevented their stories from becoming a legitimate part of historical discourse about Poland’s road to independence.

Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature ed. by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera

Reviewed by: Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature ed. by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera Angel Daniel Matos (bio) Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature, edited by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera. UP of Mississippi, 2020. In the forum on Latinx Young Adult Literature published in volume 47 of Children's Literature, Marilisa Jiménez García introduces the compilation of essays by highlighting how Latinx literature pushes scholars to question what people and experiences are often excluded from academic discourse. In particular, Jiménez García highlights the potential that Latinx literature possesses to reframe and recontextualize our critical and pedagogical relationship with youth literatures and cultures: "Latinx literature is a liminal space daring us to transcend disciplines and borders, asking us to go beyond our neat definitions" (7). In addition to underscoring the critical potentialities of Latinx youth literatures, Jiménez García urges scholars to resist the homogenizing pressures of perpetuating a single story through our research and to move beyond mainstream narratives that frame Latinxs as "light-skinned [End Page 277] Spanish speakers" (6). In more ways than one, Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera's Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature (henceforth Nerds) not only celebrates people, experiences, and texts that push us to rethink normative understandings of young Latinx life, but further complies with Jiménez García's call for critical interventions that push us to acknowledge the complexity, richness, and paradoxes present in multiple representations of Latinx experience. This exemplifies a crucial intervention within the field of young adult literature, especially within the intersection of Latinx literature, youth cultures, and existing conversations on marginalization and liminality in teen cultural productions. The essays in Nerds scrutinize representations of teen Latinx life that contest or pressure mainstream narratives that associate these teens with "cool" and "hip" practices and beliefs. Most of the essays focus on teens who would commonly be described as "uncool," or that challenge the stereotypical representation of Latinx adolescents in literature and media. Additionally, the essays push readers to interrogate the ways in which "uncool" and ostracized teens must negotiate their outsider status given their positionality as members of marginalized Latinx communities. Although Nerds could have implemented a more robust introductory framework that would assist readers in further understanding the tensions that exist between Latinx contexts and "uncool" experiences and identities—which are often aligned with frameworks pertaining to ideological whiteness—this collection excels at highlighting new, unprecedented, and academically rigorous ways of thinking about Chicanx and Latinx young adult literature. The volume succeeds in its mission to challenge normative and monolithic notions of what teen Latinx life looks and feels like—and in the process, it pushes readers to engage in necessary, albeit difficult conversations on topics such as cultural authenticity and the limits of mainstream representations. Nerds is organized into four overarching sections, and each of these is focused on Latinx teen characters who embody different types of marginalized or "outsider" identities: artists and creators, superheroes and nonhuman beings, nerds and academically driven teens, and "non-cholo" characters who contest norms of gender and sexuality. The first section, "Artists and Punks," more specifically focuses on characters who are outsiders given their creative interests—with a particular attention in young Latinx women who engage with writing and zine crafting as a way of negotiating their liminal positionalities. The section opens with Amanda Ellis's "Chicana Teens, Zines, and Poetry [End Page 278] Scenes: Gabi, A Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero," which traces how Quintero's book offers a gripping representation of a geeky Chicana feminist by highlighting the transformative and political potential of creative writing and journaling. Lettycia Terrones's standout essay, "Praxis of Refusal: Self-Fashioning Identity and Throwing Attitude in Pérez's The First Rule of Punk," examines the social challenges that bicultural and mix-raced girls often experience, focusing particularly on how the protagonist of Celia C. Pérez's middle-grade novel invokes a punk-rock sensibility in order to develop an activist-oriented identity that resists assimilative pressures. Terrones's essay rigorously grapples...