Negotiation Of Rights Research Articles

Social justice in education from the perspective of the Roma in the Czech Republic – A case study

Abstract This paper addresses the current educational rights of the Roma community (in the Czech Republic). The aim of the paper is to present the educational system, its advantages and disadvantages and the ways in which the legal system supports educational rights. The second part of the paper focuses on the exercising and negotiation of rights in the contemporary social context. The work is based on ethnographic research conducted since 2005 by the Levínská, Bittnerová, & Doubek team in socially excluded localities. The data analysis is based on the theoretical concept of cognitive anthropology and the cultural models theory (D’Andrare, & Strauss, 1992). Cultural models and the ways in which parents, students and teachers negotiate rights are presented. The tension between rationality and morality (Bateson, 1958) is demonstrated by the models’ endurance; communication, cognitive and material support; and independence. Although the system itself provides equal opportunities, the prospects that education affords are a fundamental problem. One obstacle is racial bias, which influences members of the dominant group. Another significant obstacle is poverty and the costs of higher education, which are beyond the financial capacity of poor families. A third obstacle is knowledge, which is insufficient in excluded localities and poor families, and that families are unable to give students adequate support in navigating the full scope of student responsibilities.

Creolizing the Nation

Creolizing the Nation

Kinship, seniority, and rights to know in Datooga children's everyday interaction

This paper explores the epistemics of social relations among Datooga-speaking children of rural Tanzania. It describes two linguistic resources for epistemic management in the Datooga language, namely, questions and an epistemic particle néadá. The paper then investigates children's use of these two resources in a 3.5 h sample of children's spontaneous interaction, taken from a video corpus. Questions often establish epistemic asymmetries by positioning addressees as more knowledgeable, while use of the particle néadá projects speech participants' equal rights to know, typically in emphatic contrast to the epistemic implications of an earlier turn. Of special interest is how children's negotiation of rights to know reveals sensitivity to social relations, particularly those defined by kinship and age. Though by no means ever-present, concepts of kinship and seniority are made relevant in these children's interactions. Children oriented to kinship relations when deferring to other people's rights to know about their own kin, and they positioned speech participants in junior–senior relationships when requesting generalizable knowledge. The paper contributes to empirical research on children's everyday language use with insights from a rural African community.

Unaccompanied Migrant Children’s Rights: A Prerequisite for the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals in Spain and Sweden

Starting from a child rights-based approach to sustainable development, this contribution underlines and compares the discourses in selected Spanish and Swedish migration and education policies on the rights of unaccompanied minors to education and discusses their impact on the enactment of the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals in both countries. Based on critical discourse analysis, this research shows the co-existence of two different discourses: one on unaccompanied minors as global rights holders and the other on unaccompanied minors as foreign citizens. By describing unaccompanied migrant minors as citizens rather than children, international migration agreements make it possible for the Spanish and Swedish governments to deprioritize other international agreements on refugees’ rights, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the 2030 Agenda. Furthermore, as child rights and sustainable development are mutually reinforcing, the negotiation of rights shows that there are obstacles to accomplishing rights-based Sustainable Development Goal 4 in the 2030 Agenda.

Not in My Office: Rights in an Armed Campus Space

When the Texas legislature in August 2016 allowed concealed handguns on campuses, the implementation of the legislation assumed a spatial meaning. At issue was not so much what the impact of firearms in educational establishments would be but where concealed guns could be carried and which specific locations were to be determined as exclusion zones. The decision-making process boiled down to a negotiation of rights by the federal government, state legislature, university, and members of the campus community. In particular, the question of gun rights was interpreted through notions of space, freedom, and privacy, as understood through amendments to the US Constitution.

Driving in the middle of the road: Paradoxes of women’s role under the New Saudi Arabian Nationalism

King Salman and prince Mohammad bin Salman yearn to shift Saudi Arabia away from oil dependency via the project Vision 2030, which includes a set of liberalisations for women, such as legalisation of driving and economic empowerment. Topics related to women have been a taboo to Saudi society; thus, it is interesting to understand their role in these reforms and their negotiation of rights within the state. I argue that these reforms are not politically liberalising, as they do not rearrange the patriarchal structure. Moreover, they walk in line with a top-down nationalist project that excludes and arrests, among others, female activists that previously fought for the right to drive, stressing the limitations on women’s freedom under Salman’s rule

Unequal urban rights: Critical reflections on property and urban citizenship

In the fast-growing cities of the Global South, urban forms of citizenship and urban rights are unequally defined and locally negotiated. The aim of this paper is to add the themes of property, landownership and housing as perspectives in the understanding of urban citizenship and to demonstrate how the urban is an arena for the negotiation of rights. This is done by examining urban citizenship and the graduated system of locally negotiated rights, including the right to property, the right to belong to an urban community and the right to urban resources. The research is located geographically in Nepal, where a typology of different classes of citizenship is developed in order to explain how classes of urban citizenship have different rights in the urban. Central to this is an analysis of unequal rights and unequal access to essential urban resources and services. The paper finds that the definition of (new) classes of urban citizenship in Nepal is critically embedded in historical practices and social structures. This demonstrates the relevance of further research into exclusionary practices in urban areas in the rapidly urbanising Global South and adds to the discussion of different types of urban citizenship and unequal rights to the urban space.

Lacan, Deleuze and world politics: rethinking the ontology of the political subject

In this fascinating study, Andreja Zevnik challenges dominant modes of global politics and their theorization. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the book is Zevnik's use of the Guantánamo Bay detention centre as a prism through which she channels the light of Lacan and Deleuze, thereby illuminating the practices of sovereign power and resistance in a period in which what constitutes law at the domestic and international levels is contested. The focus of the book is on law as ‘an ordering principle that governs all forms of social exchange in the world’, with natural and positive law being in turn underpinned by psychoanalytic law (p. 23). Zevnik's unpicking of the edifice of law addresses the fictiveness of its foundations (p. 33). The key distinction Zevnik draws is between Oedipal law (based on Freud's treatment of the origins of the law in a mythic act of parricide and subsequent reinscription of the paternal law among the community of men who murdered the tyrant father), and sinthome law, which offers an alternative understanding of law as a knot conjoining the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, without recourse to Oedipal logic. Sinthome law allows law to be expressed in non-essentialist terms and crucially as a negotiation of rights as opposed to a series of paternal commandments. Rendering Oedipal law in fictive terms allows the exposure of the ‘very narrow expression of being-ness’ that it embodies and enables the proliferation of legal identities and processes beyond sovereign power and its associated paternalistic governmentality. Where the Oedipal law constrains and canalizes desire, sinthome law bonds authority and jouissance (a Lacanian concept, which in Zevnik's reading is synonymous with enjoyment and/or the affirmation of desire, broadly conceived), producing new forms of representation. The Lacanian idea of ‘not-all’ (a category of unknown pleasure/possibility) is opposed to the universalist and dominating tendencies of Oedipal law. Where Oedipal law orders and commands, ‘sinthomal law enables individuals to … escape rigid social structures’ (p. 46), thereby helping to create ‘a different ontology of thinking and making politics’ (p. 48). Oedipal law's weakness lies in its incapacity to deal with what lies outside its domain. Deleuze's significance for Zevnik's project is his identification of the category of the ‘thought of the outside’ that transgresses the limits of Oedipal law. Sinthomal law is typical of ‘the thought of the outside’ in that ‘a different political subject emerges’ but it is ‘an unstable form, more a break with the symbolic order than an institution of another different order’ (p. 68) in which the ‘subject is no longer at the centre of philosophical investigation. That place is not left empty or filled by practices, appearances and different chaotic movements and flows’ (p. 69).

Fenomeni religiosi, pratiche devozionali e formazione delle identità sociali nell’Italia settecentesca: Ornago e il caso della fontana miracolosa

The discovery of a supposedly miraculous fountain in 1714 in Ornago caused the development of a religious devotion which was related to a small chapel close to the fountain dedicated to the Beata Vergine del Rosario and spread quickly also outside the boundaries of the parish. The belief that the water of the fountain had a miraculous nature and thaumaturgical powers lead the archiepiscopal curia of Milan to intervene with the creation of a number of congregations devoted to verify the healings which were considered to be miraculous. Through a micro-historical analysis, this article aims at exploring the religious phenomena and the devotional activities which were born after the discovery of the fountain, the relationship between the clergy and the laymen of the surrounding community, between the social groups acting inside the parish and the diocese of Milan and between the intermediary groups and the figures belonging to the highest classes of the community. This point of view allows to understand how in the ancient regime the dimension of the sacred, overcoming the specifically religious limits, came to gain also a remarkable civil and “political” value. The analysis of the events after the discovery of the Ornago fountain highlights the wide notion of religiosity in the ancient regime and shows how the religious phenomena and the devotional activities turned out to be an area affected by jurisdictional debates, negotiation of rights and the reshaping of the identity among the numerous social groups constituting the society of the ancient regime.

Rights, citizenship and political struggle

This paper adds a new perspective to recent debates about the political nature of rights through attention to their distinctive role within social movement practices of moral critique and social struggle. The paper proceeds through a critical examination of the Political Constitutionalist theories of rights politics proposed by Jeremy Waldron and Richard Bellamy. While political constitutionalists are correct to argue that rights are ‘contestable’ and require democratic justification, they construe political activity almost exclusively with reference to voting, parties and parliamentary law-making, neglecting the vital role rights play in political struggle outside and against the official institutions of democratic citizenship. In contrast to the political constitutionalist stress on the patient and reciprocal negotiation of rights within formal electoral processes, this paper locates the political nature of rights in their conflictual logic as ‘claims’ in multiple spheres that function to mobilise oppositional support against powerful adversaries and challenge dominant understandings. An activist citizenship of rights is frequently necessary, it argues, given the structural barriers of power and inequality that distort legislative decision-making and lead to the denial of fundamental moral entitlements to less powerful groups. The paper provides an illustration of activist citizenship taken from a contemporary squatting movement centred around the right to housing, Take Back the Land. In exercising the moral right to housing, for which they demand political recognition, through the occupation of vacant buildings, the practices of Take Back the Land reflect the conflictual dimension of rights as claims in keeping with their historical role in empowering subordinate groups to challenge unjust relations of power and inequality.

Being in the Know: Socio-Epistemics and the Communicative Constitution of a Management Team

Increasingly, organizational research is taking the linguistic turn in social sciences seriously. Consequently, the central role of communication in the constitution of the organization is also finding greater acceptance. Using conversation analysis as a research methodology and transcripts of naturally occurring talk as data, the purpose of this article is to add to this growing body of research and to explicate how orientation to epistemic rights talks the hierarchy of the organization into being. Findings indicate how the negotiation of rights to have and to display status-based knowledge of head office index the discursive identities of knowing participants, which enacts the situated identities of hierarchic superiors. Therefore, through the sequential properties of talk, status-based epistemic rights and obligations are enacted so that a management team is made relevant, which incarnates the lived hierarchy of the organization and “does” authority.

Christianity, cultural change and the negotiation of rights in land and sea

Various aspects of Christian belief and practice have been documented as significant across Aboriginal Australia. In recent years, many communities have been involved in seeking to achieve traditional rights in land and sea as recognised in Australian law. Asserting and proving these rights entails demonstrating continuity of traditional law and custom since the establishment of British sovereignty. While legal discourse indicates that this does not exclude cultural change, law and custom must continue to derive from pre-sovereignty traditions. This article addresses the extent to which Christian belief and practice have been articulated and researched in applied anthropological work, against the background of relevant academic studies. If a sophisticated theory of cultural change and continuity is germane to researching land claims and native title, what is the significance of Christian syncretism in Aboriginal relations with place and the inheritance of ancestral connections to ‘country’? Several case studies are examined.

Bees, farmers, tourists and hunters: conflict dynamics around Western Tanzania protected areas

Following important donor funding in Tanzania since the 1990s to support community based natural resource management, several cooperation agencies have implemented projects aiming at developing innovative conservation strategies combining protected and sustainable use areas. Based on data gathered in the Katavi Rukwa Lukwati and Ugalla core areas of Western Tanzania, this paper compares and analyses how projects developed their strategy and objectives to address conflicts between local population and conservation agents, and how this led to changes in conservation practices. The projects managed to achieve their objectives in conservation and poverty reduction at various degrees. Enhanced conflict resolution capacity involving private stakeholders, conservation agents and local communities, as well as improved collaboration between projects, helped to solve part of the conflicts. This was the case with the negotiation of rights of access for beekeepers to Rukwa game reserve. However, enduring sector based approaches continue to hinder opportunities for developing multiple use approaches. Contrasted results of the projects can be explained by factors inherent to projects’ planning and management, but also by factors that are beyond projects’ influence such as the historical and contemporary context in terms of governance of natural resources and more globally, of power relationships between the state, private organisations and the communities.

The rights and duties of post-adolescent daughters: Daughters' and parents' accounts

The article deals with the conceptualisation and negotiation of post-adolescent daughters' rights and duties in their families of origin. More and more young Europeans and particularly many young Slovenians are staying with their parents in the post-adolescence period (and even later) or come home from their university city every weekend. This means that two adult generations live together in the same household; so they have to negotiate the rights and duties of the younger generation in different areas, from very personal domains (e.g. appearance) to more far-reaching life decisions (e.g. the post-study life situation, moving out of the parental home). The study provides at least a partial insight into the processes involved in the negotiation of rights and duties in families with post-adolescent daughters. The data stem from semi-structured interviews conducted in autumn 2006 in Slovenia with 70 first-born post-adolescent girls and both of their biological parents. The respondents answered closed- and open-ended questions referring to four vignettes suggesting controversial situations. The answers allow a view of the conceptualisations of post-adolescents' rights and duties, the distribution of decision-making power and the way of dealing with such situations. The results show that post-adolescent daughters are very dependent on their parents in various areas. It turned out that the contemporary Slovenian family with post-adolescent daughters is prepared to negotiate: patterns of intrafamilial communication range from the traditionally grounded commanding pattern where children have to obey unequivocally (but less than 10% of parents resort to the bare use of authority), to an open, active negotiation pattern where the balance of power is more equal and the achievement of consensus is very important.

Negotiating race and place in the Garifuna Diaspora: Identity formation and transnational grassroots politics in New York City and Honduras

This paper is an exploration of the relations between the politics of identity and the socio‐economic and political processes of the current era of globalization. Using ethnographic material from the transnational grassroots organizations of the Garinagu—an Afro‐Indigenous population living in transnational communities between Central America and the US—I show the multiple ways that they articulate their identity between and among the tropes of “autocthony,” “blackness,” “Hispanic,” “diaspora,” and “nation.” This construction and negotiation of identity is intimately connected to the negotiation of rights vis‐à‐vis nation‐states and international political bodies, where ideologies of race, ethnicity, nation, and citizenship carry with them different implications for rights and belonging. I argue that the complexities of this case point to the uneven processes of globalization, within which the power to define the ideological terrain of economic and political struggles is still profoundly unequal.

International migration, rights, and the decline of ‘actually existing liberal democracy’

Theories of post‐national rights for non‐citizens presuppose a general trend in expansion of rights consistent with the growth of the post‐World War Two welfare state. In the late twentieth century, the context for the negotiation of rights has altered dramatically, such that most governments in capitalist democracies have accepted the priority of deficit reduction and global competitiveness over the promotion of social and redistributive justice. As unemployment and insecurity of citizens within advanced economies have deepened, immigration, refugee and citizenship policies have become more restrictive. Restrictive policies are supported by first world citizens defending declining public resources against growing numbers of third world migrants, who are also ideologically construed as ethnic/racial cultural threats. Policies of border fortification against undocumented and autonomous migrants have a spillover effect, leading to violence and undermining social citizenship rights for permanent residents. The article concludes that in order for deterritorialised human rights to become a reality, the negotiation of transborder rights must deal with obstacles such as the reluctance of states to cede control over immigration and non‐citizen rights, and the weakness of international human rights, migrant worker and refugee conventions. Most importantly, post‐national rights will have to combat the illiberal tendencies of ‘actually existing liberal democracies’ which have been accepted, however reluctantly, as a condition for participation of states in the global economy.