Material Inequality Research Articles

Representing disabling experiences: Rethinking quality of life when evaluating public health interventions

AbstractInterventions that promote public health have the potential to transform lives, particularly for those who experience disability, where marked social and material inequalities occur across the life‐course. When evaluating such interventions, health‐related quality‐of‐life is regarded as a primary outcome and used to inform evidence‐based practice. Quality‐of‐life measures, however, are not straightforward heuristic devices but express technologies of epistemic power. By prioritizing methodological certainty over the credibility of personal testimonies, those experiencing disability can find themselves excluded from the evidence base on which public health interventions are based. Our study explores how disability is represented by tools informing evaluative public health research and establishes the possibility of alternate practices, including the potential for more appropriate measures better suited to representing experiences. We conclude by considering how discussions about “flourishing” can create more inclusive and empowering practices able to challenge inequalities and discrimination consistent with a commitment to social justice.Related ArticlesEwert, Benjamin. 2021. “Citizenship as a Form of Anticipatory Obedience? Implications of Preventive Health Policy in Germany.” Politics & Policy 49(4): 891–912. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12421.Grijalva Maza, Luisa. 2012. “Deconstructing the Grand Narrative in Harry Potter: Inclusion/Exclusion and Discriminatory Policies in Fiction and Practice.” Politics & Policy 40(3): 424–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2012.00358.x.Winburn, Jonathan, and Amanda Winburn. 2020. “The Role of Political Ideology in Public Opinion toward Enumerated Antibullying Policies in Public Schools.” Politics & Policy 48(3): 442–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12355.

Defining and negotiating translingual awareness in “monolingual” teacher education

As a challenge to social and material inequities in the opportunities and outcomes of U.S. public schooling for students of color, more teachers are being prepared to teach with culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris, 2012). As teachers in mainstream, English-medium classrooms encounter more linguistic diversity, they must also be prepared to teach with linguistically sustaining pedagogies, such as translanguaging pedagogy (García, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017). The objective of the present study is to explore one example of how translanguaging pedagogy can be integrated into an English-medium teacher education curriculum. This paper analyzes a case study of effective instruction, student learning, and reflective practice in teacher education, examining how undergraduate Education Studies majors in a linguistic justice course define translanguaging as a pedagogical framework and negotiate it in conversation with monolingual orientations. Through thematic analysis of qualitative data, including student work, course artifacts, and reflection surveys, this study demonstrates how a group of future teachers developed translingual awareness through specific course activities. This study ultimately highlights both the challenges and successes of promoting translingual awareness in traditionally “monolingual” teacher education, and provides concrete steps towards preparing all teachers to teach with culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogies.

What comes after fields, capitals, habitus? Suggestions for future cultural consumption research in Australia

This article critically engages with the Australian Cultural Fields project and the book Fields, Capitals, Habitus to make suggestions as to what future research on consumption practices needs to consider, including the place of young people; increased material inequality and its implications for cultural production; the development of consumers participating in cultural production; and the importance of considering emotions and affect in Bourdieusian sociology.

Space, nature and hierarchy: the ecosystemic politics of the Caspian Sea

The Anthropocene has given rise to growing efforts to govern the world’s ecosystems. There is a hitch, however, ecosystems do not respect sovereign borders; hundreds traverse more three states and thus require complex international cooperation. This article critically examines the political and social consequences of the growing but understudied trend towards transboundary ecosystem cooperation. Matchmaking the new hierarchy scholarship in International Relations (IR) and political geography, the article theorises how ecosystem discourse embodies a latent spatially exclusive logic that can bind together and bound from outside unusual bedfellows in otherwise politically awkward spaces. We contend that such ‘ecosystemic politics’ can generate spatialised ‘broad hierarchies’ that cut across both Westphalian renderings of space and the latent post-colonial and/or material inequalities that have hitherto been the focus of most of the new hierarchies scholarship. We illustrate our argument by conducting a multilevel longitudinal analysis of how Caspian Sea environmental cooperation has produced a broad hierarchy demarking and sharpening the boundaries of the region, become symbolic of Caspian in-group competence and neighbourliness, and used as a rationale for future Caspian-shaped cooperation. We reason that if ecosystemic politics can generate new renderings of space amid an otherwise heavily contested space as the Caspian, further research is warranted to explore systemic hierarchical consequences elsewhere.

Behavior Change in Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene: A 100-Year Perspective

Abstract The current methodological paradigm for addressing water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH) inaccessibility in rural sub-Saharan Africa is achieving insufficient progress. This essay evaluates WaSH-related policy, programming, and discourse from 1918 to 2021 to identify how this paradigm evolved and how it may reform. I argue that political–economic environments have strongly influenced existing sectoral praxis, shaping both programmatic methods and means. Colonial occupations generated rural–urban material inequalities, which were maintained and exacerbated during postwar reconstruction (1950–1970) and the proliferation of neoliberalism (1970–1990s). Meanwhile, modernization theory, a fundamental feature of colonial thought, has persisted discursively and practically. That is, rural resource limitations led WaSH practitioners to promote lower-cost appropriate technologies in the 1980s. Then, with challenges regarding technological disuse and misuse, behavior change–oriented methodologies responsively emerged in the 2000s and continue today. Yet, much like colonial predecessors, this latter turn presupposes that its programmatic benefactors must adapt to access WaSH services. Behavior change programs thus fail to critically consider the role of technological inadequacies and associated risk exposures in perpetuating existing inequities. Investigation of utility-style service models, where WaSH services adapt to the lives of its benefactors and behavioral persuasion is substituted for nonuser technological management, is recommended.

TikTok and the translingual practices of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong

Recognizing the immense popularity of TikTok among the over 200,000 Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong, this paper examines the translingual practices of these migrants from the Global South on a social media platform known for its act out memes, dance and lip-synch videos. Drawing on data from interviews and the multimodal discourse analysis of TikTok profiles, videos and captions, it pays particular attention to how recognizing these practices not as exotic or creative transgressions but as ordinary or normative (Agha, 2007) can enable a critical understanding of the lived experiences of these transnationals. Findings show that as they move across social media platforms and make linguistic and semiotic choices involving practical and material considerations, they perform moments of interaction or “small things” (Blommaert, 2019) online that are not unlike their mundane, offline counterparts. Moving across languages online is a way for users to negotiate multiple identities, position others, address diverse audiences, and signal group affiliations. By examining translingual interactions on social media as normative but negotiated across different orders of indexicality, this paper asserts that such reframing can draw attention to historical and material inequalities and modes of exclusion online.

‘I have some trauma responses, but it’s not my identity’: furthering social justice for care experienced and estranged university students

ABSTRACT Care experienced and estranged students encounter profound material inequalities throughout their higher education journeys which demand our attention. However, cultural discriminations also pose problems. Both operate as social injustices which preclude them from being included, valued or seen as ‘ideal’ students, contributing towards inequitable outcomes. Drawing on feminist methodologies, this paper analyses 11 narratives of care experienced and estranged students at a post-1992 English university. This offers confirmatory evidence of material inequalities, including financial precarities and mismatched wellbeing provision. It also adds new insights into how such students are simultaneously subjected to processes of misrecognition. This includes being misinterpreted, disrespected or rendered invisible, excluding them from university lifeworlds and undermining a sense of belonging. Inspired by Nancy Fraser, the paper concludes that we must (continue to) tackle material exclusions alongside processes of misrecognition in order to further a social justice agenda for care experienced and estranged students in higher education.

Taking Political Time: Thinking Past the Emergency Timescapes of the New Climate Movements

This article discusses the contrasting “temporal regimes” of Extinction Rebellion and the concept of a feminist green new deal. The authors discuss the former's emphasis on emergency to stimulate disobedient action, particularly out of concern for one's future children and grandchildren. They argue that, while this emphasis has successfully catalyzed public agency, this agency remains socially narrow, as emergency thinking subordinates the political time central to inclusive movement building, while the personalization of intergenerational concern risks reproducing privilege and asset protection. As a result, actually existing material and symbolic inequalities are characteristically decentered. The authors contrast this with the timescapes of calls for a feminist green new deal, which eschew both crisis narratives and reprocentric futurism. In troubled times, they conclude, it is more productive to reconsider not just when but how to address the demands of climate breakdown.

Facing colonial Canada through pedagogies of equity for First Nations: An advocacy education project

Education systems in “Canada” are increasingly highlighting the structural and material inequities faced by First Nations’ peoples. However, most practices within formal education tend to focus on awareness campaigns and/or examining injustice as a historical event, as opposed to challenging the structural and systemic forces that continue to perpetuate injustice toward First Nations’ peoples. Drawing on a year-long educational project with students in grades 7-9 from various schools Canada-wide, this paper applies a case study approach to explore educating for advocacy through ethical relationality and solidarity with those experiencing injustice. The study highlights a transformation in how educators and students think about advocacy, while also drawing attention to the challenges to carrying out advocacy work within school systems with deep colonial roots.

A 44-y perspective on the influence of cash on Ju/‘hoansi Bushman networks of sharing and gifting

Money has been portrayed by major theorists as an agent of individualism, an instrument of freedom, a currency that removes personal values attached to things, and a generator of avarice. Regardless, the impact of money varies greatly with the cultural turf of the recipient societies. For traditional subsistence economies based on gifting and sharing, surplus perishable resources foraged from the environment carry low costs to the giver compared with the benefits to the receiver. With cash, costs to the giver are usually the same as benefits to the receiver, making sharing expensive and introducing new choices. Using quantitative data on possessions and expenditures collected over a 44-y period from 1974 to 2018 among the Ju/'hoansi (!Kung) in southern Africa, former hunter-gatherers, we look at how individuals spend monetary income, how a partial monetary economy alters traditional norms and institutions (egalitarianism, gifting, and sharing), and how institutions from the past steer change. Results show that gifting declines as cash is spent to increase the well-being of individual families and that gifting and sharing decrease and networks narrow. The sharing of meals and casual gifting hold fast. Substantial material inequalities develop, even between neighbors, but social, gender, and political equalities persist. A strong tradition for individual autonomy combined with monetary income allows individuals to spend their money as they choose, adapt to modern conditions, and pursue new options. However, new challenges are emerging to develop greater community cooperation and build substantial and sustainable economies in the face of such centrifugal forces.

“Hell on Earth”: Single mothers’ experiences of temporary accommodation in London and its impact on their mental health

ABSTRACT Working therapeutically in the United Kingdom, means working with individuals made homeless by a housing crisis created by economics and policy decisions. Negative effects are often experienced by the most vulnerable with subsequent injustices concealed by those at the top; this has been conceptualised as a structural violence. Whilst the mental health of homeless single mothers and their children is disproportionately affected, research on structural inequality is minimal and neglects lived experience. Semi-structured interviews with 12 single mothers living in temporary accommodation in London were analysed using Thematic Analysis. Four main themes emerged: ‘Neglect and abuse within a powerful, unjust system’, ‘Futility, entrapment and cycles of suffering’, ‘Mothering against the odds’, and ‘Surviving and resisting in the face of adversity’. Results highlighted the distress temporary accommodation created for mothers and children. Despite this, love and care were evident within mother-child relationships. Through individual and collective action, mothers strove to resist the sources of their distress, even whilst facing adversity and stigma, providing insight for therapists on the operation of structural violence. Social action psychotherapy provides a collective approach addressing experiences of stigma and material inequalities where professionals can acknowledge the reality of oppression and stand in solidarity to resist it.

Rebuilding Without Papers: Disaster Migration and the Local Reception of Immigrants After Hurricane Katrina

After Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast in 2005, thousands of Latinx immigrants arrived in the region to work in reconstruction, one case of the growing and global phenomenon of disaster migration. Drawing on newspaper content analysis, in-depth interviews with immigrant service providers, and archival materials from Mississippi for the years surrounding Hurricane Katrina (2003-2009), we ask what reception these disaster migrants encountered upon arrival and how that reception changed as they settled permanently in the state. We find that public discourse about immigrants became markedly more positive when disaster migrants arrived en masse, with the media and public characterizing immigrants as valuable, hard workers. Negative characterizations shifted to portray immigrants as drains on public resources. However, these changes were temporary. By 2009, public debate about immigrants reverted to pre-disaster trends with only one exception. Across our study period, we find a steady rise in claims that immigrants faced racism and discrimination. Our findings suggest that disasters may briefly transform the social and cultural bases of material inequalities but are unlikely to produce lasting change.

개발연대와 능력주의

The deepening of inequality has made fairness and competence a hot topic instead of equality. Meritocracy appears in various forms under certain historical conditions. The effects and roles are bound to be different depending on the situation. Nevertheless, if the thickness of the time of meritocracy is measured, it is the largest in modern capitalism or capitalist modernity. The market for freedom, equality, and infinite competition created by the capitalist modern era is the best condition for meritocracy to flourish.BRMeritocracy is not simply limited to abstract ideology. It is a value, a custom, and a series of institutional practices. In other words, meritocracy is systematically structured through education and operates as a principle of corporate management, and it spreads to the dominant value system and common sense through the public debate and permeates into everyday customs. Despite the categorical order of free and equal human beings, the social reproduction process naturally internalizes the hierarchy by ability.BRThe 1960s and 1970s are often referred to as the political and economic origins of modern Korea. This indicates that the width and depth of the change caused by capitalist industrialization were large. If the sense of material goods, equality and inequality, and ability that we are experiencing today is historically composed, it is clear that it cannot be irrelevant to the history of Korean capitalism. The task of asking what meritocracy developed in this era, commonly referred to as the “development era” is the key to understanding contemporary Korean society.

On Honor and Palimpsest Patriarchal Coloniality in Greece, the Western Balkans, and the Caucasus: Anthropological Comparative Accounts from a Post-Ottoman Decolonial Perspective

This study introduces a comparative framework to understand patriarchal genealogies and technologies, with reference to an anthropological commentary concerning the broader forms of coloniality of power between dominant male and dominated female bodies in Greece, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. It argues that the patterns of patrilineality, practices and representations of male honor, and female exclusion from the native family are literally and symbolically feeding on the matrix of patriarchal coloniality in the regions. The analysis is based on representative ethnographic research and historical approaches. Patrilineal kin structures, customs of captivity (i.e., bride kidnapping, sworn virgins, and honor crimes), and generalized practices of young virgin exogamy seem responsible for women’s minor status in the social stratification. Traditional hierarchies and modern social inequalities seem to motivate dispositions and regulate behaviors for female, minor, subordinate, and dispossessed bodies, as well as dominant male protectors and patriarchs. The text adopts a postcolonial and decolonial black feminist critique. It argues that in a longue durée process, a palimpsest pattern of patriarchy emerges, made upon the habitus of gendered ideology. Shaped by patriarchalism, paternalism, and patronage, patriarchy motivates a generalized pattern of coloniality within post-Ottoman geographies, thus regulating multiple material and symbolic inequalities, and even multiplying antagonistic hierarchies among family units, communities, central nation/state, periphery, and borders.

Society and consumption

This article discusses themes identified as aims and objectives of Consumption and Society, reflecting on connections between the journal’s two titular concepts. It contrasts two distinct definitions and understandings of consumption, as purchase via market exchange and as the use of goods and services. It argues that the latter provides a more suitable and comprehensive object for social scientific study. Briefly reviewing the legacy of the cultural turn, the article outlines socio-cultural approaches emphasising symbolic, material and practical culture, and identifies some common failings. It considers the role of consumption in domination and social hierarchy in the context of escalating material inequality. Revisiting the relation between consumption and economic production, it commends some recent advances in the analysis of commodification while proposing a more encompassing ‘modes of provision’ framework. In association with an extended concept of social embeddedness, this offers an avenue for understanding macro-social change and the effects of current and historic inequalities. The concept of ‘controversy’ is introduced to understand normative and institutional contexts of mobilisation for change arising from contestation over consumption. The article concludes with remarks about theory and the difference that definitions make, the value of the concept of social embeddedness, and the analytic space beyond culture and markets.

Contesting Freedom of Information: Capitalism, Development, and the Third World

AbstractThis paper historicizes the current challenges brought about by digitization to the Third World by revisiting a movement launched by the Non-Aligned Movement countries during the 1970s and early 1980s. Also known as the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), the movement contested the dominant liberal notion of freedom of information and spotlighted the critically material inequality and power asymmetry often concealed by the liberal vision of the free flow of information. Not only did NWICO present a counter-model to the liberal notion of freedom of information, it also provides a vital case for understanding the interrelations between information and domination and the role of international law therein. This paper retells the story of NWICO, its normative ambition as well as its internal contentions and practical limitations, and reflects on its legacy for TWAIL scholarship and the current politics of digitization.

Plugging in translanguaging: thinking across theory for methodological innovation in English learner and multilingual education

ABSTRACT A translanguaging lens in educational research focuses on social, cultural, and power dynamics of language and multilingualism in practice. It also represents a potentially transformative pedagogical practice that centers the languaging practice, power, and agency of multilingual learners to transgress classroom language borders. However, translanguaging research that focuses on only the social aspects of classroom languaging can be subject to critique for failing to disrupt material inequities related to language and power in the classroom. This conceptual paper explores how thinking across multiple frameworks can generate innovative methodological approaches to knowledge production for translanguaging inquiry in the context of EL and multilingual education. Exploring how translanguaging can be plugged into Blumer’s Symbolic Interactionism, Foucault’s Discourse, and Barad’s Agential Realism, this paper thinks within and against these frameworks to highlight important analytic provocations for now only how translanguaging relations emerge, but also what methodological territory is claimed in the process. A central concern of this paper is the methodological implications of posthumanist theories to develop material-discursive translanguaging inquiry.

Recognition or Redistribution? How Mainstream Media Frames Charitable Responses to People Experiencing Poverty

Charitable responses to people experiencing poverty are often viewed as valuable community-led initiatives that address the support gaps created by a withdrawing welfare state. This perspective provides important insights into the culturally valorised nature of charity. The role of the mainstream media in cultivating and valorising charity, in contrast, remains relatively underexplored. Drawing on a framing analysis of Australian mainstream news reports published between 2014 and 2020, we analyse how the media frames charity as a response to people experiencing poverty. We demonstrate that the media frames people experiencing poverty as having a devalued identity, for which the remedy is the restoration of dignity through charity. Little attention is paid to the material inequalities that underpin people’s experiences of poverty; nor the role of the media as a body that reifies the interests of the powerful, who benefit from poverty and charitable responses to it.

High‐rise plastic: Socio‐material entanglements in apartments

AbstractPlastic is a persistent problem in westernised cities. Yet it is also a key mediator, affording and assisting the everyday. In small apartments, it supports daily life by assisting with waste management, storage, and provisioning of affordable ornaments and furniture. Plastic, in this context, is a mundane and utilitarian substrate to apartment life, as well as being a problematic potential pollutant. Recognising the diverse contributions to research on high‐density living, this paper draws on vertical urbanism and relational ideas of home. It explores the socio‐material entanglements of plastic in apartments through household interviews across Melbourne, London, Barcelona, and Perth. The research reveals ways in which plastic mediates the material inequalities of high‐rise living, typified by entanglements of space constraint, transience, and waste management. The contribution is twofold. Theoretically, our work suggests a direction for socio‐materialities research in reframing ideas of home as a static, physical site, to one that is more contingent materially and spatially. As various households adapt and make do, their refuges in the sky are being reconfigured physically and symbolically by and through plastic. Relational approaches can help to reveal the mundane but critical entanglements of plastic and everyday life in apartments. Second, empirically, we show that mundane infrastructures matter; they shape the spaces and places of plastic and apartment inequalities. Thus, policy interventions that target household behaviours can only have a marginal impact on plastic consumption where uneven infrastructures remain. Moreover, they may direct attention away from where change might be more promising, such as wider social rules and meanings around plastic, and the materialities of building design/management for waste infrastructures both inside and outside the apartment.

The stigma-vulnerability nexus and the framing of drug problems

This paper proposes a stigma-vulnerability nexus as a critical incursion into understandings of and responses to drug-related social problems. Considering stigma and vulnerability as sites of ostensibly empathetic interventions that aim to mitigate the impact of illicit substances, it proposes that the two concepts are best deployed when located within the political economy of drug harms. Doing so foregrounds the material inequalities resulting from existing socio-economic arrangements and highlights the limitations of them being politically mobilised in purely cultural-interactional ways, which can serve to overlook structural conditions and justify harmful political choices. As a theoretical perspective, the stigma-vulnerability nexus is therefore concerned with the macro-structural factors that shape both concepts and how they intersect. To demonstrate its value as an analytic tool, it is first applied to the framing of ‘County Lines’ dealing, where senior gang members are stigmatised, but the wider drivers of vulnerability among the young people they exploit are overlooked. Secondly, the nexus is applied to the case of new psychoactive substances. Here, the perceived vulnerability of young people is used to justify responses that ultimately lead to amplified harms being displaced onto structurally disadvantaged populations such as the homeless and prison inmates, compounding their economic vulnerability and class stigma.