Moments Of Disruption Research Articles

Shifting more‐than‐human relationships amidst social–ecological disturbance

Abstract Social–ecological disruptions, such as changing climate, extreme weather‐related events and the COVID‐19 pandemic, can have cascading and long‐term consequences for people, ecosystems and multispecies relationships. As the early COVID‐19 pandemic disrupted people's lives through isolation and restricted human contact, more‐than‐human relationships played a heightened role in individuals' day‐to‐day lives with potential long‐term impacts on multispecies justice. We analysed 72 interviews conducted during the early (May–June 2020) COVID‐19 lockdown in the United States to investigate how social–ecological disruptions and spatial re‐orderings, exemplified by the pandemic, reassemble more‐than‐human relationships. We consider new relational values through a transformative multispecies justice framing, which contends that times of uncertainty can inspire meaningful connections with the more‐than‐human world, facilitating care and reciprocal relationships during times of disruption. Among interviewee accounts, we find that disorderings of daily life during the pandemic interweave with past and ongoing experiences of inequity to form mosaics of disruption. These mosaics of disruption created circumstances in which interviewees formed new connections with the more‐than‐human world. The more‐than‐human connections of interviewees sat along a spectrum and did not universally represent the same strength of relational values. The more‐than‐human connections were defined by individual's positionality and restricted geographies of the circumstances. However, the newly formed relationships seemed to be ephemeral, indicating that they would not necessarily endure outside of an early‐pandemic context. Thus, while individuals reported rearranged relationships out of pandemic precarity, their transitory qualities do not directly promise long‐term transformational multispecies connections. Our findings suggest that moments of disruption alone do not necessarily produce durable change and there is a need to go beyond merely recognizing relationality. Policy implications: Transformative multispecies justice requires long‐term, routine commitment to deepening relationships with the more‐than‐human world. While future social–ecological and spatial disturbances can be a window of opportunity to initiate multispecies relationships, future initiatives and policies must actively support and foster these relationships and strong relational values beyond the disturbances—recognizing the long‐term, non‐linear processes of transformation needed to address our future challenges. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Learning to Share the World: Reckoning With the Logistics of Whiteness in Public Galleries and Museums

This article explores moments of pedagogical disruption as children from an urban school encountered an exhibition titled “We Change the World” at the National Gallery of Victoria. In conversation with radical traditions of anti-colonial scholarship, we elaborate children’s disruptions of the gallery as a space of didactic transfer and common ownership of cultural artifacts and knowledges. We then analyze artworks created by children in the wake of their experiences at the gallery, offering alternative propositions for learning to share the world in ways that break with dominant conceptions of museum education, national collections, and the commons.

Sustaining journalistic continuity in the face of change: Announcing a new editor at the New York Times

An ample body of journalism studies research examines moments of disruption when a particular critical incident sparks widespread reflection about news and journalism. But we should not neglect how moments of orchestrated non-disruption perpetuate journalistic ideologies while stifling potential alternatives or deeper calls for change. This was the case when on April 19, 2022, the New York Times announced that managing editor Joseph Kahn would be taking over as executive editor from the retiring Dean Baquet. As an amiable and expected event, the Times promoted both a discourse of continuity surrounding journalistic norms and practices with a discourse of change focused on digital innovation and global audience growth. These discourses were challenged by critics who used the opportunity to lambaste the Times for insufficient news coverage of antidemocratic forces and a resistance to foundational introspection. This incident reveals how the Times sought to maintain its cultural authority and status as an elite journalistic institution while shaping normative expectations about journalism. It underscores the importance of attending to the interpretive power that privileged news organizations possess to speak about journalism at a time when many voices are contesting what news ought to look like.

Streaming and India's film-centred video culture: Linguistic and formal diversity

In this article, I foreground the importance of the ‘cinematic’ as the most important vector of video cultures in India. The article identifies how the timeline of video culture disruption in India deviates from countries with stronger television-based cultures. The availability of videocassettes and their ability to make movies more widely available was consequently of greater consequence in India than in other places, and a development that was still adjusting the video culture as digital distribution arrived. Internet distribution and digital production technologies have also brought significant changes to India's viewing culture, though again, the peculiarities of the Indian market make these changes distinctive. Where many countries have encountered greater access to foreign-produced content and services, key digital changes in India tie into access to and interest in a broader range of domestic cinema. The following analysis flags key moments of disruption and explores discussion of the emergence of pan-Indian film that coincided with streaming platform adoption in India.

“Something has to change”

“Something has to change”

COVID-19 and racial inequalities in housing: Pre-pandemic and pandemic pathways to housing insecurity

ABSTRACT Drawing on the nationally representative Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey (N = 443,375), this study examined how pre-pandemic and pandemic-induced vulnerabilities shaped racial inequalities in housing insecurity from August to December 2020. Theorizing the pandemic as a “systemic shock,” this article helps explain how racial inequalities are reproduced both as legacies of long-standing disparities and through widespread, societal moments of disruption. Our results indicated that Black, Hispanic, and Asian households were all significantly more likely to fall behind on housing payments than white households. We found that preexisting racial inequities, including in educational attainment, household income, and homeownership rates, largely explained racial disparities in housing insecurity during COVID-19. However, the pandemic also induced new pathways to racial inequalities. Black and Hispanic households were more likely to lose income and when they lost income, they faced a greater likelihood of experiencing housing insecurity. We conclude by highlighting the importance of theorizing disruptive systemic shocks to understand racial inequalities and discuss findings of both disparities faced by Black and Hispanic households, as well as underrecognized housing insecurity among Asian Americans.

Antiracist Interventive Interviewing: Subverting Colonial Interventions with Public Sector Workers

What does it mean to intervene in antiracist interviews with public sector workers? What do interventions look like in research seeking to name complicity in settler colonial violence and imagine otherwise relationships between non-Indigenous and Indigenous people? How might we methodologically define interventions and their pedagogical purpose(s)? In this paper, we share our experience of adopting a dual-pedagogical antiracist interventive research methodology in our qualitative research with public sector workers on settler colonial socialization. Building on antiracist interventive interviewing method, we map out our conceptualization of interventions as multidirectional and multiscalar. We narrate how we see interventions as dual pedagogical moments of disruption and possibility occurring at three scales, where we intervene to support our participants’ learning and they intervene to support ours. Our approach is illuminated through illustrations from our transcribed data of virtual interviews with 32 public sector workers in BC ( n = 23) and Alberta ( n = 9), and through our reflections on our research process. Our analysis demonstrates that interventions have three key effects. First, they are generatively disruptive in that they offer better access to understanding processes of settler colonial socialization. Second, interventions create junctures for antiracist and anticolonial learning. Third, interventions with participants open up opportunities to imagine otherwise beyond the strictures of settler colonialism, and orient towards anticolonial praxis rooted in recognition of Indigenous sovereignties. We conclude with a vocabulary of interventions meant to offer other qualitative researchers possibilities for how to intervene to better access and disrupt sites of deep colonizing.

Addressing the baby and atypical maternal behaviour in psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy

ABSTRACT This paper aims to further our understanding of the process of therapy in psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy (PPIP). Using a single-case study methodology, it examines the emergence of atypical maternal behaviours in the sessions and considers direct therapeutic work with the baby. The research material for this study consists of video tapes and verbatim transcripts of two sessions from different time points in one good outcome PPIP treatment. The Atypical Maternal Behaviour Instrument for Assessment and Classification (AMBIANCE) coding system is used as a basis for identifying atypical maternal behaviours, as they manifest in the sessions. In addition, the therapist’s intervention in moments of interactive disruption are analysed discursively, with a focus on the utterances that directly address the infant. Findings suggest that the mother exhibited a high frequency of disruptive behaviours, as coded in the AMBIANCE, in the beginning of therapy. These decreased considerably by the end of treatment. In addition, the therapist was seen to respond consistently and flexibly to maternal disruptive behaviours, employing different interventions. Furthermore, the therapist talked directly to the baby for a significant amount of the session time, especially early on in treatment, addressing several different issues. Disrupted maternal behaviours can be discerned and systematically observed in PPIP sessions; these may be addressed in psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy through the therapist’s verbal and nonverbal interactions with the mother and baby. Using different coding systems to examine patterns of interaction in detail, it is possible to gain insight into the therapeutic process, furthering our understanding of change mechanisms in psychoanalytic work with infants and their parents.

The phase of experimentation in public spaces: the cases of Milan, Barcelona and Rio de Janeiro

Urban centres constantly face moments of disruption, which inevitably impact inhabitants’ lives. Although there are many transportation infrastructures inside cities, the vast majority contemplates only the private automobile. To change this situation, the concept of experimentation in public spaces has emerged. In this paper, we make a comparative analysis with the focus on understanding their motivation, materials, approach, date of the initial intervention, benefits and contributions. We chose three case studies to support it, two in Southern Europe – Piazze Aperte and Supermanzanas - and one case study in Latin America – Parking Days. Results show similarities in motivation, materials used, and the importance of citizens during the process. Differences are related to the stakeholders that initiated the interventions, and the perception of the legitimacy of the actions.

Ecological interchangeability: supporting team adaptive expertise in moments of disruption.

While undesirable, unexpected disruptions offer unique opportunities to enact adaptive expertise. For adaptive expertise to flourish, individuals and teams must embrace both efficiency and adaptation. While some industries do it readily, others continue to struggle with the tension between efficiency and adaptation, particularly when otherwise stable situations are unexpectedly disrupted. For instance, in healthcare settings, the efficiency mandate for strict compliance with scopes of practice can deter teams from using the adaptive strategy of making their members interchangeable. Yet, interchangeability has been hinted as a key capacity of today' teams that are required to navigate fluid team structures. Because interchangeability - as an adaptive strategy - can generate antagonistic reactions, it has not been well studied in fluid teams. Thus, in this exploratory qualitative study we sought to gain insights into how interchangeability manifests when fluid teams from five different contexts (healthcare, emergency services, orchestras, military, and business) deal with disruptive events. According to our participants, successful interchangeability was possible when people knew how to work within one's role while being aware of their teammates' roles. However, interchangeability included more than just role switching. Interchangeability took various forms and was most successful when teams capitalized on the procedural, emotional, and social dimensions of their work. To reflect this added complexity, we refer to interchangeability in fluid teams as Ecological Interchangeability. We suggest that ecological interchangeability may become a desired feature in the training of adaptive expertise in teams, if its underlying properties and enabling mechanisms are more fully understood.

Eugeni d’Ors’s politics of aesthetics: a revision of his authoritarianism

ABSTRACT Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s theorization of the aesthetic as a primary domain of experience where political norms and distinctions are configured, this article reconsiders Eugeni d’Ors’ authoritarianism. By reading a wide array of his newspaper columns in both Catalan and Spanish, I first show that d’Ors’s allegiance to Prat de la Riba’s conservative political Catalanism and his support for Primo de Rivera’s and Franco’s dictatorships share common aesthetic roots that put forward an invariable distribution of the sensible. Second, I argue that d’Ors’s grounding of his politics in aesthetic categories opens a space of indistinction that temporarily loosens the strict hierarchies that structured his view of political communities. As seen in his fictional narratives La Ben Plantada and Sijé, as well as in his reflections on Baroque art, these moments of creative disruption, however, fall short of fully articulating modes of perception that break with those privileged in his classical aesthetic theory.

GIVING BACK: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving by L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano

Reviewed by: GIVING BACK: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving by L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano Josen Masangkay Diaz GIVING BACK: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving. By L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano. Temple University Press. 2021. While the enduring influence of the expatriate (or balikbayan) on the Philippine nation and its economy has been a long-studied phenomenon within Filipino, Filipino American, and Philippine studies, L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano offers a new critical way to explore questions about diasporic practices as they lie within the myriad structures of the global economy. Mariano’s monograph, Giving Back: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving, theorizes the politics of giving as a mode for studying the complexities of Filipino American belonging to the homeland and outside of it, shifting U.S.-Philippine relations, and circuits of development under the regimes of globalization. Mariano centers the practice of “giving back” as a key feature of Filipino American diasporic communities through which diasporic subjects send remittances to the home-land as both obligation and responsibility. Challenging the unidirectional movement of this immigrant narrative, however, the concept “diaspora giving” reconceptualizes giving back as a set of processes that attempt to stabilize homeland and Filipinoness in the name of diaspora. For Mariano, both “diaspora” and “giving” are sites of multiplicity that hold several different practices, identities, and arrangements that underscore the transnationality of Filipino American attachment to the homeland. Diaspora giving identifies Filipino Americans as development actors often recruited to participate in the neoliberalizing economy of the Philippine development state. Moving away from discourses that highlight “love” of homeland as the foundation of the remittance economy, the book disrupts the linearity of this narrative to argue that both migration and distance are themselves transnational spaces that cultivate ideas about connection and responsibility. To this end, Mariano skillfully points to the ways that Filipinoness is never a stable entity, and the interrogation of giving practices offers insight into the ways that these acts regulate and produce alternative Filipino American diasporic formations, what Mariano calls the resubjectification of Filipino Americans’ roles for national development under globalization. Giving Back relies not upon the “policy-oriented evaluations” that measure the impact of remittances on homeland states (13). Instead, its archive follows the paths of resubjectification, using ethnography and textual analysis to trace the complexities of charity and philanthropy, which are critical operations for international and global development. Mariano historicizes charity as a colonial discourse that “brings abstract citizens together into [End Page 73] nations, constructing home or the domestic in relation to foreign spaces populated by the colonial other” (13). The four chapters of the book conceive of different forms of diaspora giving, turning not only to individual remittances but also to transnational anticolonial activism. Where the Filipino American immigrant is often configured as distinct from the Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) based on the terms of citizenship and settlement, the first chapter traces the ways that these figures are mutually constituted by a political economy structured by labor migration and state development. Mariano argues that although Filipino American diasporic subjects might not see themselves as connected to other diasporic Filipino workers, both share histories and experiences of mobility and return and have been positioned to serve as key actors for national development. Mariano’s work to disrupt the logics of Filipino American choice and OFW duty is imperative. It reveals that both choice and duty are embedded within the structure of feeling of neoliberalism. In Chapter 2, Mariano studies writer and organizer Ninotchka Rosca’s activism to provide examples of counterhegemonic giving that does not subscribe to the logics of U.S. imperialism and global capital. In doing so, Mariano theorizes homeland “disorientation” as an analytic for locating moments of disruption within the progressive pathways of state development. Disorientation interrupts the singular orientations that Filipino Americans have toward homeland. The third chapter follows Philippine Development Foundation (PhilDev), a transnational nonprofit organization, as a model of philanthropy that frames itself as the singular vehicle for addressing suffering and precarity in the Philippines, especially in its collaboration with the Philippine state. Corporate social responsibility through PhilDev and earlier Ayala foundations regulates giving by imagining itself as “doing good...

Surviving a Crisis: Transformation, Adaptation, and Resistance in Higher Education

After periods of crisis, it has been assumed that social institutions like higher education will also change radically – and perhaps even fail. In contrast to this expectation, this paper demonstrates that such moments of intense disruption result not only in transformation but are additionally accompanied by significant levels of adaptation and some resistance. Drawing from a larger study of the impact of crisis on higher education, this paper explores some of the ways that higher education responds to major political, economic, and social change at both system and organizational levels. Taking the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as the moment of crisis, the paper presents findings from a comparative case study of three ex-Soviet countries with new primary source data generated by interviews with experienced faculty members at the frontline of change. Understanding what it takes for higher education to survive a crisis makes an important contribution to comparative higher education studies by showing the variegated ways that higher education institutions and systems respond to crisis and to filling the gap in theory-driven explanations of system and organizational responses to major change.

Reframing purpose and conceptions of success for a post-Covid-19 South African higher education

The Covid-19 pandemic raised immense challenges for universities. Staff and students had to quickly transition to an unfamiliar mode of emergency remote teaching and learning (ERTL) with its associated affordances and losses. The experiences of students and staff and the lessons learned during this time will affect the provision of teaching and learning in the future. During ERTL, a group of academics and teaching and learning support staff from different faculties at a large research-intensive public university in South Africa came together to support each other and share experiences of enhancing teaching and learning in higher education. This led to reflection on the impact of Covid-19 on the higher education landscape through community of practice. The aim of this conceptual paper is to discuss alternative notions of institutional purpose and lecturers’ conception of success that might influence the emerging post-Covid-19 higher education landscape in the global south. We claim that a more nuanced and critical understanding of these concepts is essential to evaluate the gains and losses experienced during Covid-19. Our argument hinges on our reflections of supporting teaching and learning during 2020 and 2021, and our observations of the challenges experienced by lecturers as they transitioned to ERTL. We suggest that it was in the moments of disruption and disequilibrium that lecturers were required to re-think the purpose of their courses and of higher education more broadly. Furthermore, it challenged us as a collective and individually to reflect critically on the measures of success within courses that changed dramatically in response to the prevailing circumstances, as well as more broadly within the sector.

Covid-19: A Liminal (Transformative) Experience

Applying the threshold concept of liminality to the Covid-19 pandemic, the essay explores the connection between the development of creativity and critical, disruptive life moments. It argues that it is during critical moments of social disruption that humans best adapt to the requirement of changing societal norms by transitioning to thinking and actions that transform the way they relate to each other and the world. The takeaway of the essay is that liminal space and the thinking and actions that unfold within it are a necessary part of the human condition because it prepares us for the inevitable changes and challenges that delineate the human condition.

‘Partial functional redundancy’: An expression of household level resilience in response to climate risk

Abstract This article extends ecological framings of resilience into socio-ecological and governance domains for urban infrastructure managers concerned with climate risk. Under moments of disruption, reliable and equitable access to adequate provision of public goods is anticipated to be increasingly challenging in cities across the world due to observed and anticipated disruptions of climate change and variability on city-wide infrastructures. Many cities facing such conditions are seeing rapid population and infrastructure growth enhancing exposure and vulnerability. One such example of disruptive climate risk is enhanced water scarcity. Private responses to the Cape Town drought adopted off-grid water technologies in order to secure their own supply while curtailing their dependence on the public water system. Unintended consequences of the nascent off-grid capacity created by private actors precipitated system transformations and accommodation challenges to disrupted public systems. The novel capacity generated through these responses to urban risk demonstrate what is identified here to be ‘partial functional redundancy’ – a key expression of resilience. Such response actions demonstrate partial and pragmatic expressions of redundancy through types of reserve capacity as a source of resilience in response to water insecurity.

Intimacy in the Time of COVID-19

In this essay, we tell a story with data about how our relationship with technology has transformed our collective notion of intimacy and rituals of connecting with others. Framed by the COVID-19 pandemic, our starting point is that technology is neither good, bad, nor neutral. The goal of this study is to step back and have conversations with people –from all over the United States of various ages, occupations, and relationship statuses– about how they define intimacy and understand these practices in a mediated environment. In this essay, we discuss technology as more than a performative platform. It is an ambient architecture that sets the tone for interactions meant to preserve social ties and sustain social capital potentially depleted through pandemic conditions of seclusion. Through the voices of our participants, we conceptualize how intimacy is experienced and understood, and how this relational quality is amplified in a mediated environment during moments of disruption. In the end, what COVID-19 has revealed as we reflect on our relationship with technology is the fluidity of intimacy in moments of change.

Equity at the edge of chaos: Applying complex adaptive systems theory to higher education

AbstractComplex adaptive systems (CASs) theory provides a framework for understanding how systems of multiple, independent, and intelligent agents interact with each other in a nested and overlapping set of environments to create both a whole that has an identity apart from any of its individual components as well as a setting in which simple cause‐and‐effect relationships are rarely linear or predictable. CASs are resilient and ever‐evolving, adapting both to internal and external stimuli according to both tacit and explicit rule structures to move continually toward the better realization of an ideal state as defined by those rules. Managing change within CAS requires capitalizing on moments of disruption, sometimes referred to as the edge of chaos, to guide the system toward a different, more desired state. Higher education institutions and systems can easily be described as meeting the criteria for CAS, containing multiple layers of both hierarchical and collegial networks that seem at times to stubbornly resist transformative change, while simultaneously adapting and evolving. This article will use Minnesota State's Equity 2030 strategic priority and efforts to implement a shared understanding of data democratization as examples to explain the application of CAS theory to higher education and discuss how applying transition management approaches from the CAS literature has the potential to lead to long‐term and sustainable structural change.

Contesting Settler Colonial Accounts: Temporality, Migration and Place-Making in Scarborough, Ontario

The paper considers how the logic of settler colonialism, the active and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, shapes scholarship on migration, race and citizenship in Canada. It draws on the insights of settler colonial theory and critiques of methodological nationalism to do so. The concept of differential inclusion and assemblages methodology are proposed as a way to understand the relationship between Indigeneity and migration in a settler colonial context. The paper develops this conceptual proposal through an analysis of a single place over time: Scarborough, Ontario. Authors present portraits of Scarborough, Ontario, Canada to understand how migration and Indigenous sovereignty are narrated and regulated in convergent and divergent ways. Together, the portraits examine historical stories, media discourses, photography and map archives, fieldwork and interviews connected to Scarborough. They reveal how the differential inclusion of migrant, racialized and Indigenous peoples operates through processes of invisibilization and hypervisibilization, fixity and erasure, and memorialization. They also illustrate moments of disruption that work to unsettle settler colonial dispossession.

Framing Our Story: Youthist and Queer Temporalities in Lopez's <em>The Inheritance</em>

Abstract This essay offers a temporal read of Lopez’s The Inheritance, a two part Broadway production, exploring questions about what gay men of differing ages can and might mean to one another. The article examines how systems of gay cultural youthism are negotiated through the play’s narrative structure, in particular considering the characters of Leo, Adam, Toby, and Eric. Next, the article interrogates the ways Henry, Walter, and Morgan are constructed through the narrative and in relation to younger characters, investigating the play’s articulation of aging and generativity. The next section looks at the temporal operations of the script, wherein straight temporal commitments are framed as more desirable, whereas narratives of gay suicide operate to constrain queer temporal imagination. Finally, the article considers the narrative framing of Toby and Eric, the centralized thirty-somethings, to negotiate the play’s articulation of proper or preferred gay male aging, maturation, and intergenerational relations. Within each section, the temporal criticism is troubled by key moments that complicate the critical reading, identifying potential moments of queer excess and disruption.