Mainstream Understanding Research Articles

Spatial Construction and Grassroots Willingness to Participate in Democracy: Analytical Framework and Empirical Tests

In China, political participation exists as a mainstream understanding of democratic politics. There are many factors that influence citizens' willingness to participate, often pointing to some form of "space"， but few studies have explored the relevance of different forms of space to the willingness to participate in democracy. This study focuses on the grassroots space of NPC deputies' contact stations in China and utilizes data collected from 185 contact stations for empirical analysis. The study adopts the physical, interactional and digital spaces identified in established research and operationalizes their variable indicators, on the basis of which an analytical framework is constructed and hypotheses are formulated. The empirical results show that there is a significant positive correlation between the improvement of the three types of spatial conditions and the willingness to participate in grassroots democracy. It has been proved that promoting grassroots democratic participation willingness through spatial constructs has a positive performance. This study aims to make an empirical test to support the spatial examination of democratic participation and provide an understanding of the spatial construction of grassroots democracy in China.

Everyday informality and governance dynamics in crisis situations and beyond

The current article serves as a prelude to this collection entitled ‘The Informality of Crisis Situations: Survival Strategies and Modes of Governance’. It introduces the concept of crisis from an everyday perspective. Crises have historically brought significant change to human conditions. However, these matters become visible only years, if not decades, following the crisis in question, whilst the process is an everyday occurrence. As time elapses during crisis situations, the seemingly imperceptible change, simmering in the folds of a crisis, becomes eventually visible in the long run. Intrigued by this concept, this introductory article explores crises as phenomena that incubate new modes of survival among human societies. These crises foster new structures, practices, and behaviours that nurture novel patterns of governance. Mainstream understandings view informality as an exception to the rule or an unnatural phenomenon that should wither away with the passage of time. Here, the research shows that it is only through a comprehension of these new patterns of governance during crises that we can come closer to shaping more informed understandings of post-­crisis scenarios.

Poverty, Development and Hunger in a Global Age

This paper opines that the issues of poverty, development, and hunger have become increasingly prominent since the end of World War II. It stresses that in the early phase, this occurred as decolonization failed to bring about economic and social progress in what was then portrayed as the Third World, at the same time that industrially advanced Western countries were experiencing historically unprecedented levels of economic growth. As global economic disparities widened, some argued that colonialism had given way to ‘neocolonialism’, political domination having been replaced by more subtle but no less effective economic domination. Others heralded the emergence of a ‘North–South divide’. This paper emphasizes that in this context, bodies as different as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), on the one hand, and a host of development Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and activist groups on the other, came to view the task of reducing the gap between rich countries and poor countries as amoral imperative. However, the paper stresses that poverty, development, and hunger are complex and deeply controversial issues. It examines the orthodox mainstream understanding of poverty, development, and hunger, and contrasts this with a critical alternative approach. Consideration is given to how successful the development orthodoxy has been in incorporating and thereby neutralizing the concerns of the critical alternative. The paper then closes with an assessment of the likelihood of a globalization with a human face in the twenty-first century.

Music gonna teach: Decolonising IR through a musical exploration of knowledge

Abstract There is a growing body of literature calling for the decolonisation of International Relations (IR) theory. This literature, which includes perspectives from the Global South, Indigenous, and feminist approaches, has explained how the colonial thought and White supremacy of early IR scholars like Wilson, Reinsch, and Schmitt shaped the contemporary field and is still reflected in mainstream understandings of core concepts like peace, sovereignty, and security. The need to decolonise IR is well established, but the way to do so is not always clear. This paper explores how engaging with the global politics of Afro-Caribbean Rebel Music serves the decolonisation effort. We can understand Rebel Music as a form of knowledge that emerged in dialogue with, and continues to reproduce ideas embedded in, global and anti-colonial Black approaches to IR theory. Textually and sonically, Rebel Music critiques the nation-state as the primary agent of peace, security, and identity, imagines a transnational Black identity, and is one of the primary forms in which we can hear the voice of the marginalised communicate their understanding of world politics. Engaging with Rebel Music is thus one avenue to decolonising contemporary IR.

‘Proud of our families’: single-parent activism in the 1990s1

ABSTRACT This article explores the history of the Bristol-based organisation Single-Parent Action Network (SPAN), and its challenge to mainstream understandings of single parenthood. A sharp increase in single parent-led households since the 1970s had been met by a political and social narrative that single-parent families (c. 90% of them headed by women) were both a drain on the public purse and a root cause of social breakdown. Both the Conservatives and New Labour supported policies that aimed to decrease welfare dependency by increasing child support payments from absent fathers and getting single mothers into paid work. These policies—which reconceptualised single mothers as workers rather than carers—were opposed by SPAN, a multi-racial and women-led national and international network, which sought to challenge the stigmatisation of single parents. SPAN’s work and organisational self-understanding were underpinned by ideas and practices that had their origins in the 1970s and 1980s Black, women’s and community activism: anti-racism, a feminist understanding of care as work, and the importance of lived experience in the political process. Although SPAN often seemed out of step with modernised and professional NGOs, the values it espoused were to prove remarkably persistent and re-emerge in the new millennium in unexpected ways.

Managing impressions: performance and identity in police leadership in the pandemic

ABSTRACT Critical leadership scholars have long recognised leadership as performative and reveal the symbolic, presentational and ritual aspects of leadership practice as meaning-making. This perspective, however, is neglected in mainstream understanding of police leadership. Drawing on Goffman’s dramaturgical framework and a qualitative study of policing leaders in the UK, this paper explores performativity and police leadership in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Removed from occupational symbols of the police station and performing leadership work exclusively in the home environment, the findings show that police leaders used the uniform as part of a strategy of impression management to construct front and back stage regions in the domestic sphere. In frontstage settings, the uniform was used to represent occupational authority and reinforce a sense of shared, professional identity and purpose, despite the physical separation between leaders and their staff. Alongside this, police leaders constructed and maintained backstage spaces for preparatory and reparative work, even within the home-working setting. The findings challenge traditional conceptualisations of the backstage as physical, boundaried space of the police station and instead reveal backstage space as fluid, dynamic and imagined. As police constabularies consider the impact of remote-working practices on the police workplace, the preservation of backstage spaces for police leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic reveals the value and necessity this backstage work in police leadership.

‘Familiness’ diversification and recognition: intergenerational changes in mobile ‘ndrangheta families in Australia

AbstractMafia-type families, envisioned as intergenerational (criminal) dynasties or family-based criminal groups, are shaped by recognition in the ‘underworld’ and affected by changes in their familiness. In Australia, mafia-type families or dynasties connected to the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta have been successful at exploiting licit and illicit opportunities across generations and places also thanks to their recognition as well as reputation. In this article we explore how mafia-type families or dynasties experience familiness diversification, including intergenerational changes, transculturation, and external factors, and how this relates to their recognition in the underworld, by other criminal groups or by law enforcement. Based on document analysis and interviews, and building on a new analytical framework, we present four ideal-types mafia-type families in Australia: gatekeepers, holdovers, newcomers, and vanishers. This is the first study that considers how mafia organisations evolve in their most fundamental forms abroad, and some implications of such evolution go against mainstream understandings of mafia mobility studies.

Neoliberalizing Design and the State: The Political Origins of Australian Design Policy and Design Education Reform, 1987–1991

Abstract This article draws attention to the state involvement in national design agendas through the example of Australia’s Hawke Government, focusing on 1987 to 1991. It unearths the origins of Australian design policy and reforms to design education within an emerging neoliberal political economy in the 1980s. Drawing on gray literature, the article reveals how this was a period of intensive political rhetoric regarding design and design education, during which the government—led by the Australian Labor Party—specifically promoted the role of design in industry policy. Better design, it was hoped, could enhance the international competitiveness of Australian-made exports, thereby addressing trade imbalances and boosting manufacturing. This increasing emphasis on design occurred in a highly politicized environment and in tandem with the restructuring of Australian tertiary education (known as the “Dawkins revolution”), alongside the discursive notion of Australia as a “clever country.” In essence, this government-led politicization of design meant that Australian design was understood as operating exclusively to “meet the needs of industry,” with industrial design prioritized. While hindsight indicates that this strategy was unsuccessful in enhancing manufacturing, the legacy of this neoliberal framing of design continues to reverberate, particularly in mainstream understandings of design.

The Global Institutionalization of Human Rights Discourse: A Cross-national Analysis of the Language used in the International Labour Conference during the Cold War

ABSTRACT Although human rights discourse has become a central element of international political rhetoric, the process through which it came to reach its contemporary importance is disputed. In this article, that process is examined by conducting a cross-national analysis of the language used at sessions of the International Labour Conference during the Cold War. Although the mainstream understanding is that human rights discourse diffused ‘from the West to the rest’, here it is argued that the global proliferation of human rights discourse can best be explained by the existence of world culture in which actors engage in ‘epistemic governance’. In other words, to advance their own aspirations actors try to shape the way in which others perceive reality by utilizing well-respected values in their argumentation. The values invoked become increasingly institutionalized and thus more useful for epistemic governance, leading to a synchronization of those discourses in international politics. Although actors from different ideological, cultural, and political backgrounds have emphasized different rights and topics when invoking human rights, these invocations almost exclusively drew from the same globally shared understanding of human rights’ importance and essence.

Exploring Chinese higher vocational college teachers’ perceptions of reading and teaching reading in English

The current article presents the findings of a qualitative study which focused on six Chinese higher vocational college teachers’ evolving understandings of reading and teaching reading in English through a three-month teacher professional learning programme. Methods of data collection included questionnaire, professional learning conversation, classroom observation and reflective practice. Results showed that a skill-based view was the mainstream understanding of reading and teaching reading in English. Through the teacher professional learning programme, however, there was a shift in the participants’ perception from a skill-based to a social-practice perspective of reading and teaching reading in English. Accordingly, the focus of teaching shifted from language to language and content integrated instruction with criticality development as a key component. The findings indicated that higher vocational college teachers were capable of weaving between a skill-based and a social-practice perspective of language and literacy practices while highlighting the need for cultivating a social-practice perspective in order to develop higher vocational college students as whole persons as locally grounded and globally minded citizens with critical minds. A more significant implication was that it was possible to empower higher vocational college students by enlightening teachers through a systematic teacher professional learning programme.

The Australian Constitution as a Framework for Securing Economic Justice

We contend that, contrary to mainstream understanding, the Australian Constitution provides a meaningful framework for ensuring economic justice, by virtue of its conferral upon the Commonwealth Parliament of particular legislative powers, namely the income justice and taxation powers. We draw on Rawlsian political theory, together with constitutional theory including recent work on constitutional directive principles, to explain how a constitution, and specifically the Australian Constitution, can impose requirements upon the political order independently of its operation as a legal instrument whose legal meaning is interpreted and applied by the courts. We use this novel account of the relationship between political and legal constitutionalism to establish the consequences, for each branch of government, of this constitutional requirement to secure economic justice. This includes a defence, from the perspective of political as well as legal constitutionalism, of the constitutionality of laws imposing retrospective taxation.

Misrecognition and Missed Opportunities

The six episode Netflix series, Stateless, represents a missed opportunity to engage in vital public framing of statelessness. Rather than focusing on the lack of legal nationality, the series falsely equates statelessness with other rights issues central to migration detention. In this collaborative work between a stateless activist and an academic researcher, the authors use Stateless as a starting point for a broader conversation about words, definitions and representation. First, statelessness has partially emerged on the international human rights agenda, yet film and television attention could further foster mainstream understanding of this oft-ignored issue. Second, a critical assessment of the Stateless series highlights how it does (and mostly does not) engage with the issue of statelessness. Third, reflections and recommendations relate to why the series’ title is so problematic, what the media can learn from stateless people and what this conversation means for advocacy.

Gestalt theory: A revolution put on pause? Prospects for a paradigm shift in the psychological sciences

This paper will discuss whether there are chances for a paradigm shift, i.e., a shift away from the (almost without much thought) taken-for-granted sequential, from piece-to-whole mainstream understanding of a cognitivist, now almost 70-year old information processing perspective to a perspective that takes as its starting point the whole, and hence meaning. The whole may stand for an object as embedded in its immediately salient as well as inconspicuous environment, where parts cannot be made sense of without knowing and understanding their roles in the larger configurations. It may stand for an organism or an organismic collectivity as embedded in its environment, a person or a collectivity of people in their embedded immediate and phenomenal field, which we will also not understand unless we understand their larger environmental, societal and cultural embeddedness. In today's scientific climate where the mainstream information-processing perspective is serving as an unchallenged, often hidden assumption within neuroscience and computer science, I will look for recent, promising developments which might nonetheless be paving the road to a perspective so long ago proposed by the Gestaltists yet somehow “lost in translation”. In that sense, Gestalt theory, which till today has been widely distorted as a theory that talks about ‘a bunch of grouping principles in (static) vision’, is the very first dynamical theory within the psychological sciences that meticulously proposed this with a firm philosophical grounding, something that is ever more missing within theory building in psychology.

Scarring effects for young people in challenging economic times: a conceptual synthesis and future policy and research agenda

ABSTRACT A renewed conceptual framework of labour market scarring is developed. Due to economic shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, labour market scarring presents an important policy problem. The paper first outlines the theoretical mainstream view on scarring and argues that existing theoretical frame works on labour market scarring are not sufficient to understand the post-COVID labour market for graduates. We identify three areas in which mainstream understanding overlooks and discusses their explanatory value in understanding contextual mediatory factors and non-economic effects of initial scarring. A case is made for qualitative research and career development approaches to understand the processes of scarring as these provide further insight into its socio-psychological manifestations and consequences.

Linguistic minorities and strategic mobilisation in eastern India: Bengali-Biharis during the era of linguistic territorialism (1935–57)

This article analyses how linguistic minorities in the province of Bihar navigated the era of linguistic territorialism, when mainstream political organisations and figures within India largely agreed that specific linguistic communities ‘belonged’ in particular regions. Indian scholarship has tended to focus on the mechanisms that brought about the linguistic reorganisation of states in India, therefore, concentrating largely on the ways in which territory and language became intrinsically connected. This article will examine the link of language and belonging with regard to a ‘community’, which demanded that states remain linguistically and culturally heterogenous. It focuses on the section of Biharis that identified Bengali as their ‘mother-tongue’ and tracks the transformation of Bengali politics within the province/state during the transition from colonial rule to independence. It explores the ways in which narratives of historical Bengali settlement were deployed for different reasons across this period, and argues that Bengalis in Bihar conceptualised the ordering of the Indian nation in a way that was inherently different from mainstream understandings of how the country should be ordered during this period. Bengali-Bihari figures and publications deployed rhetoric that attached much greater value to territorial belonging than to linguistic or cultural belonging. This article demonstrates that contrary to common assumptions, there were large groups of people who conceptualised India not just as a linguistically heterogenous nation, but one that consisted of linguistically heterogenous states that protected minority linguistic communities.

Fungi Fabrics and Living Colors: Toward Ecocentric Biodesign?

Abstract This article argues for a shift toward more ecocentric, rather anthropocentric, biodesign processes for clothing and textile design. It discusses mainstream understandings of biomimicry and biodesign, rethinking these approaches in a more-than-human and ecocentric direction. The article analyzes the cases of mycelium-based garments and bacterial textile dyes to, on the one hand, show how current biodesigners are already successfully working with natural resources by growing, collaborating with, regenerating, and restoring nature. On the other hand, these two cases are used to show the potential for biodesign practices to move even further beyond a human-centered understanding of designing with nature.

International Law for a Time of Monsters: ‘White Genocide’, The Limits of Liberal Legalism, and the Reclamation of Utopia

For critical legal scholars, the ongoing far-right assault upon the liberal status quo poses a distinct dilemma. On the one hand, the desire to condemn the far-right is overwhelming. On the other hand, such condemnations are susceptible to being appropriated as a validation of the very liberalism that critical theorists have long questioned. In seeking to transcend this dilemma, my focus is on the discourse of ‘white genocide’ — a commonplace belief amongst the far-right/white nationalists that ‘whites’, as a discrete group, are facing demographic destruction as a result of deliberate policy choices. Such a belief has motivated acts of extreme violence. While libel to dismissal by experts on mainstream understandings of genocide, namely international criminal lawyers, I argue that this ‘white genocide’ discourse deserves careful scrutiny as a jurisprudential and socio-legal phenomenon that reveals key weaknesses in present modalities of liberal justification. Drawing upon an array of recent critical theories, I show how a liberalism unable to face its own decline enables the very far-right assertions it purports to oppose. Thus, given liberalism’s failure to act as a neutral arbiter, an alternative approach for those opposing the far-right is to develop a vision of politics and society that confront believers in ‘white genocide’ on a more substantive level. This, I argue, forces the far-right’s opponents to disavow liberal scepticism towards utopian transformation as well as the juridical understandings and institutions that allow this scepticism to durably persist.

Corruption or Culture? Evaluating Elite Definitions of “Wasta” in Jordan

Combatting corruption has been a long-standing commitment for Jordan, which had particularly heightened in light of the Arab Spring in 2011, with increasing demand for stricter measures and more transparency being voiced by Jordanian political movements. However, despite strong will for change, Jordan had done less to curb informal practices in public administration such as “Wasta,” which relies on its deeply-embedded notion of cultural legitimacy in circumventing laws and regulations. This article investigates perceptions of “Wasta” through a sociocultural lens that places emphasis on how culture and informal interactions can challenge mainstream understandings of corruption. Drawing on elite interviews with senior public officials and politicians in Jordan, it argues that conventional understandings of corruption that are typically grounded in western literature may be less useful for Jordan in tackling deeply-embedded societal practices such as Wasta. The study finds that corruption and Wasta cannot be conceptualized as one and the same due to intrinsic differences between their subjective goals. The study concludes by suggesting that new approaches in defining unethical use of social capital in public administration need to be developed in order for Jordan to improve its capacity for tackling the negative impacts of Wasta.

Revisiting key debates in the study of nationalism

The purpose of this article is to lay out the debates and arguments around three key broader issues that dominate nationalism studies: (a) the meaning of a nation and nationalism and the relationship between political and cultural nationalism; (b) the origins and character of nations and nationalism; and (c) the civic-ethnic dichotomy and the relationship between nationalism and liberalism. It does not aim to provide definitive answers to the complex problems associated with nations and nationalism but rather to provide an overview of these debates by examining the existing literature on nations and nationalism. The final section discusses the position of new approaches to nations and nationalism and how they have problematised the key assumptions of the mainstream understanding of nationalism. The article, in light of an overview of the literature, draws four important conclusions. First, the academic journey of nationalism has reached a stage where the current consensus is that nations are socially constructed and historically contingent phenomena, and the current focus of the scholarship is on looking at the intersection between the cultural and political aspects of nationalism. Second, nations and nationalism possess a multifaceted character with particularity, subjectivity, and relativity as their defining features, representing that a single, universal explanation of nationalism is neither feasible nor morally desirable. Third, to understand the multiplicity and diversity of nations and nationalism and the ways in which elements of this multidimensionality intersect, it is necessary to treat them as open-ended, unstable, dispersed, protean, particular, and contingent phenomena. Finally, deep contestation constitutes a source of power and strength for nations and nationalism.

Mindful methodologies: Some limitations and concerns

AbstractThis paper will offer reflections on the ways in which mindfulness has been presented as a potential research methodology in geography. I pick up from previous work that explored the utility of mindfulness to non‐representational research methodologies, particularly regarding the ways in which mindfulness might allow us to attend to affect and more‐than‐rational knowledges. However, in this paper, I trouble the use of mindfulness as a methodology in non‐representational work. I argue that geographers need to be careful about the use of mindfulness as a methodology and would prefer to think of the ways that mindfulness might inflect our research practice. This point is developed through three main concerns. The first is the ways that mindfulness is narrated as a perceived ‘fix’ to the rationality of Western academic thought. This reinforces dualisms between Anglo‐European academic knowledge as modern, disenchanted and rational, and traditional ‘non‐Western’ or indigenous vernacular or spiritual knowledge as non‐rational and enchanted. The second concern is in regard to the universalisation of a mindful sensibility in mainstream understandings of mindfulness. I attend to the ways that processes of universalisation signal the whiteness of the movement and the ways the practice has been transmitted across contexts, cultures and institutions—a possible reason for the burgeoning methodological interest in mindfulness. Finally, this paper attends to ethics of care when using mindfulness as a methodology. Here, I focus on the ways that the pedagogical tenets of mindfulness could potentially open up participants to experiences of trauma and vulnerability. As a way forward, I advocate for a trauma‐sensitive approach to mindful methodologies.