Dominant Notions Research Articles

Entangled social movements: extractivism and water justice in El Salvador

ABSTRACT El Salvador’s 2017 national metal mining ban and contentious 2021 water law seemingly represent distinct cases of social movement victory and failure. However, this study deploys relational methodologies to examine how El Salvador’s anti-metal mining and water justice movements emerged together, became partially separated, and remained thoroughly entangled. The concept of social movement entanglement builds on and extends dominant notions of relationality in social movement studies by emphasizing processes of intra-relation, mutual constitution and becoming-with. Rather than study how separate movements interact, investigating entanglement highlights how social movements become separated and remain entangled through acts of material and discursive politics. Examining the entangled origins, mobilizations, and outcomes of El Salvador’s anti-metal mining and water justice movements shows how these movements were neither the same nor distinct. Salvadorans bearing the brunt of water injustices lived these movements as one struggle. However, to pass the historic metal mining ban required anti-mining activists to distance their social movement goals and discourses from the more politically contentious and legally complex water law. Vitally, the strategic separation of these movements led to their further entanglement, as the historic ban informed, reinforced, and legitimized transformations within the water justice movement. From their origins to their evolving presents, El Salvador’s water and mining politics have remained entangled. Such entanglements implicate social movement theory, methodology and praxis in El Salvador and beyond and center the power-relations that shape what counts as social movement success and failure, and whose interests and environments are worth fighting for.

Selkea! Memories of Eating Non-Kosher Food among the Spanish–Moroccan Jewish Diaspora in Israel

Drawing on life-story interviews and ethnography conducted in Israel from 2009 to 2023, this article examines how members of the Spanish-speaking Moroccan–Jewish diaspora in Israel recalled their habits of eating non-kosher food in Morocco. We explore how these memories emerged in response to commonplace discourses that depict Moroccan Jews as a distinctly religious-traditional ethnic group, untouched by European secular influences, and dichotomous to modern secular cultures in Israel. Contrary to this image, members of the community whom we interviewed highlighted a Jewish Moroccan life that was deeply connected to Spanish colonialism and the broader Hispanic and Sephardi worlds. We focus specifically on the concept of selkear, a Haketia (Judeo-Spanish) term meaning to let something go, make an exception, or turn a blind eye. Our analysis of our participants’ memories provides a nuanced understanding of Jewish religiosity in the context of colonialism and of how Mizrahi–Sephardi immigrants in Israel reclaimed their Judaism. Highlighting the practice of eating non-kosher food is thus a strategy used to challenge dominant notions of rigid religious commitment within the Sephardi diaspora and their interpretation in Israel.

REDEFINING MEDIA:

This article, based on changing trend of “mediamorphosis”, discusses an institutional viewpoint on media. It elaborates why a new definition to solve the problems of law making, drawing communication and media position in the state and society, and to liberate its users from the notion of single technology dominance in regulations is the need of the hour. It proposes that media may be envisaged as a process institution for transforming information into knowledge for the audience by creation and enlargement of message through instruments of process and delivery.

A historical perspective on the neurobiology of speech and language: from the 19th century to the present.

In this essay, we review 19th century conceptions on the neurobiology of speech and language, including the pioneer work of Franz Gall, Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud, Simon Alexandre Ernest Aubertin, Marc Dax, Paul Broca, and Carl Wernicke. We examine how these early investigations, anchored in the study of neurological disorders, have broadened their scope via neuropsychological and psycholinguistic theories and models. Then, we discuss how major technological advances have led to an important paradigm shift, through which the study of the brain slowly detached from the study of disease to become the study of individuals of all ages, with or without brain pathology or language disorders. The profusion of neuroimaging studies that were conducted in the past four decades, inquiring into various aspects of language have complemented-and often challenged-classical views on language production. Our understanding of the "motor speech center," for instance, has been entirely transformed. The notion of cerebral dominance has also been revisited. We end this paper by discussing the challenges and controversies of 21st century neurobiology of speech and language as well as modern views of the neural architecture supporting speech and language functions.

Big Tech influence over AI research revisited: Memetic analysis of attribution of ideas to affiliation

There exists a growing discourse around the domination of Big Tech on the landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) research, yet our comprehension of this phenomenon remains cursory. This paper aims to broaden and deepen our understanding of Big Tech's reach and power within AI research. It highlights the dominance not merely in terms of sheer publication volume but rather in the propagation of new ideas or memes. Current studies often oversimplify the concept of influence to the share of affiliations in academic papers, typically sourced from limited databases such as arXiv or specific academic conferences.The main goal of this paper is to unravel the specific nuances of such influence, determining which AI ideas are predominantly driven by Big Tech entities. By employing network and memetic analysis on AI-oriented paper abstracts and their citation network, we are able to grasp a deeper insight into this phenomenon. By utilizing two databases: OpenAlex and S2ORC, we are able to perform such analysis on a much bigger scale than previous attempts.Our findings suggest that while Big Tech-affiliated papers are disproportionately more cited in some areas, the most cited papers are those affiliated with both Big Tech and Academia. Focusing on the most contagious memes, their attribution to specific affiliation groups (Big Tech, Academia, mixed affiliation) seems equally distributed between those three groups. This suggests that the notion of Big Tech domination over AI research is oversimplified in the discourse.

Constructing Chinese Firms as Development Catalysts: State-Firm Public Diplomacy Collaboration in Kenya

ABSTRACT The debate surrounding China’s public diplomacy in Africa highlights how the state coordinates and leverages Chinese actors, including firms, to advance diplomatic objectives. However, this article questions the notion of unidirectional state dominance by exploring the intricate interactions between the Chinese state and firms around promoting and publicizing corporate social responsibility (CSR), which is conceptualized as a public diplomacy tool of corporations to engage with the foreign public. Using the lens of public diplomacy, the author examines the unconventional state-firm interplay in the symbolic domain, shedding light on practices of China’s expansion in Africa. Through two empirical cases, the author demonstrates the interdependence and collaboration between the Chinese state and firms, revealing their divided interests and contested cooperative efforts to enact public diplomacy in Kenya.

Entrepreneurial working-class masculinities and curating the corporeal: social media influencers, porntrepreneurs and the case of OnlyFans

PurposeFor the most part, the majority of the research on entrepreneurial masculinities has focused on the traditional business and finance sector, capturing a masculinity infused with notions of dominance, a cut-throat disposition and corporate acumen. There has been relatively less attention focused on the reproduction of masculinities and monetized body work in digital forms of entrepreneurship.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual article explores some of the entrepreneurial and performative skills utilized by male OnlyFans creators as they curate not only their bodies but also their sexualities in order to attract subscribers and maximize profits.FindingsMapping the relationship between entrepreneurialism and masculinity on OnlyFans is significant considering the platform’s popularity and the changing nature of digital entrepreneurship. Drawing connections to previous research on working-class entrepreneurial masculinities, we highlight how male OnlyFans creators, who are largely from working-class backgrounds, are actively practicing entrepreneurial skills.Originality/valueWe foreground the work of social media creators as sexualized and aesthetic labour, making connections between digital entrepreneurship, working-class masculinity, sexuality, and (idealized) bodies. Our article concludes with making recommendations for future research on the study of gender and sexuality within for-profit digital entrepreneurship.

Some novel concepts of intuitionistic fuzzy directed graphs with application in selecting a suitable place for opening restaurant

In this manuscript, we first initiate several types of effective arcs of intuitionistic fuzzy directed graphs, followed by discussions on different types of dominations in intuitionistic fuzzy directed graphs and their application in decision-making. The notion of dominations in fuzzy graphs, fuzzy directed graphs, intuitionistic fuzzy graphs and picture fuzzy graphs have been extensively discussed in the literature. Thus, the work presented in our study is two-fold: on one side, it extends the notion of domination in fuzzy directed graphs, while on the other side, it fills the gap existing in the literature. Initially, we introduce several types of effective arcs like semi-λ effective arc, semi-ν effective arcs in intuitionistic fuzzy directed graphs. Subsequently, we initiate the notions of dominations and domination numbers for several types of intuitionistic fuzzy directed graphs based on these effective arcs. We present numerous significant characterizations of dominations in intuitionistic fuzzy directed graphs by utilizing minimal dominating sets. Furthermore, we investigate the minimal dominating sets and domination numbers of intuitionistic fuzzy-dipaths and dicycles, and provide various fascinating results. Finally, by utilizing the concepts presented in this study, we provide the algorithm for the solution of the problem related to decision-making regarding the opening of restaurants in various areas of the different cities.

Agency, authority and universality in the promotion of global ELT textbook series

ABSTRACT There is at present much focus in ELT on describing and promoting teacher and learner agency. However, ELT as a professional field is concurrently characterised by an increasing orientation toward authoritative texts, particularly those imbued with authority at the transnational level. Global textbooks are a notable example, since they, along with global language testing and language policy, play an increasingly important role in determining teaching and learning practices across a range of different settings. Our focus in this paper is on how the authoritativeness of global textbooks is upheld in online promotional materials. Examining websites of three contemporary ELT textbook series, we analyse discourse strategies employed to legitimise the authoritative position of the textbooks and their publishers. We find that publishers legitimised their authority through strategic links to external forces (policy, testing), in this way foregrounding the universality of the textbooks. In contrast, the websites represented the agencies of teachers and learners only minimally, primarily as subordinate to the agency attributed to textbooks themselves. We conclude with a reflection on the need for applied critical scholarship in ELT that can offer practical alternatives and thus disrupt dominant notions of universality and the hierarchization of knowledge these are based on.

Estimation of the Local Conditional Tail Average Treatment Effect

The conditional tail average treatment effect (CTATE) is defined as a difference between the conditional tail expectations of potential outcomes, which can capture heterogeneity and deliver aggregated local information on treatment effects over different quantile levels and is closely related to the notion of second-order stochastic dominance and the Lorenz curve. These properties render it a valuable tool for policy evaluation. In this article, we study estimation of the CTATE locally for a group of compliers (local CTATE or LCTATE) under the two-sided noncompliance framework. We consider a semiparametric treatment effect framework under endogeneity for the LCTATE estimation using a newly introduced class of consistent loss functions jointly for the CTE and quantile. We establish the asymptotic theory of our proposed LCTATE estimator and provide an efficient algorithm for its implementation. We then apply the method to evaluate the effects of participating in programs under the Job Training Partnership Act in the United States.

3 Stories from the Chthulucene

“3 Stories from the Chthulucene” attempts to work through some of the theoretical framework outlined in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). The term “Chthulucene” derives from H. P. Lovecraft’s science-fictional tentacled being, the Cthulhu. Haraway theorizes the Chthulucene as an alternative to dominant notions of our time as the Anthropocene. Rather than seeing humans as separate from the environment and acting on it, Chthulucene theorists see humans as part of an intricate web of relations between human and more-than-human life, where humans act through the environment. The methodology used in this article is research-creation, specifically creation as research. This article begins with three autofictional vignettes that aim to play with research questions such as: How might Haraway’s concept of “tentacular thinking" impact the way narrative is structured? Is there an accessible way to write Haraway’s theories so that they are approachable but still “writerly"? How can writer and reader together (re)imagine utopias, in particular queer utopias, so that they are still situated strongly in the present? A supplementary essay follows these three vignettes and attempts to tease out some of these findings within a more typically academic format.

Local dominance unveils clusters in networks

Clusters or communities can provide a coarse-grained description of complex systems at multiple scales, but their detection remains challenging in practice. Community detection methods often define communities as dense subgraphs, or subgraphs with few connections in-between, via concepts such as the cut, conductance, or modularity. Here we consider another perspective built on the notion of local dominance, where low-degree nodes are assigned to the basin of influence of high-degree nodes, and design an efficient algorithm based on local information. Local dominance gives rises to community centers, and uncovers local hierarchies in the network. Community centers have a larger degree than their neighbors and are sufficiently distant from other centers. The strength of our framework is demonstrated on synthesized and empirical networks with ground-truth community labels. The notion of local dominance and the associated asymmetric relations between nodes are not restricted to community detection, and can be utilised in clustering problems, as we illustrate on networks derived from vector data.

Sex reconfigured: DIY hormone therapy and vernacular endocrinology in transfeminine communities in China

Faced with a restrictive institutional medical landscape, trans people in China turn to DIY (Do-It-Yourself) hormone therapy. While existing health literature has studied the risks and impacts of informal hormone therapy, little is known about the practical strategies and the embedded meaning-making processes around hormone-taking on the ground. Building on digital and in-person participant observation conducted in two cities in China and semi-structured interviews with eight transfeminine individuals between 2021 and 2022, this article examines the embodied practices and community knowledge of tinkering with hormones. Specifically, I examine the ways that conventional biomedical notions of efficacy and risk are both enrolled and contested to understand bodily becoming in the community space. Closely engaging with biomedical structures, ideas, and knowledge, trans people challenge and reformulate dominant notions of efficacy, risk, and toxicity. A form of DIY hormone literacy is taking shape in the community, informed by the hands-on engagement with medicine, an affinity with pharmaceuticals, and people's temporal narratives of transition. Throughout these processes, DIY practitioners multiply the materials and imaginations of medicine. They reshape the narrowly-defined biomedical model of sex and enable an alternative onto-epistemology of hormonal sex-gender that is amenable to modification and constantly in flux. Drawing from medical anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), and feminist, queer, and trans studies, this article contributes to the conversation on the politics and poetics of sex-gender and embodied knowledge production in the community space.

Syncretic Narratives: Ethnic Diversity and Identity Politics in Post-Colonial Malaysia

The account of post-colonial Malaysia is indeed an intricate one, the relationship between the ethnic bunch and identity politics is both dynamic and complicated, creating a syncretic narrative with nuanced understanding of human culture. Delving into the many layers of Malaysia's socio-political landscape to examine the subtle linkages between ethnicity, culture, and power relations. A mosaic of nationalities, each adding to the rich fabric of the country's cultural past. Malaysia is an amalgamation of many customs, dialects, and beliefs, ranging from the Indigenous Orang Asli to the Malay majority, as well as the Chinese diaspora and India. However, underneath the facade of diversity is a crucible of identity politics, where historical grudges and power imbalances collide with current socio-economic realities. The legacy of British Colonialism with its divide and rule strategy, may still be felt in Malaysia's socio-political environment, impacting notions of race and identity today. While attempts to construct a national identity have been made, they frequently collide with notions of ethnic dominance and marginalization, exacerbating tensions and divides within Malaysian society. The quest for a unified national identity is loaded with difficulties, as Malaysia grapples with the complexity of its heterogeneous background while under the constraints of globalization and modernity. Despite the obstructions, there are moments of optimism and resilience as Malaysians traverse the contours of their hybrid identity, gaining strength from the variety that distinguishes their country. Through debate, openness, and a commitment to social justice, Malaysia has the opportunity to break free from identity politics and embrace a more inclusive and equitable future.

Powered by Secrecy: Contesting Imaginaries of Migration Governance in Turkey

ABSTRACT In light of a growing body of literature on migration and border governance engaging with the legal and institutional production of heterogenous forms of non-knowledge, this article aims to contribute to this scholarship by attending to the role of secrecy through the case of Turkey. This paper turns the spotlight on the migration governance in Turkey by investigating the ways in which secrecy is perceived, contested, and reconfigured by civil society actors. The article argues that the extensive use of secrecy engenders perceptions that vacillate between two opposing imaginaries: the central migration authority as an incompetent entity and as a security agency with an aura of omnipotence. By drawing on and subverting Luc Boltanski’s notion of domination as a reality-stabilising function, we propose that the undecidable nature of the migration governance enables a form of domination hinging on the destabilisation of reality in the eyes of subjects that are paralysed, disarmed, and disabled to cope with the policies in practice.

Riding the change: Exploring women’s navigation of risk and respectability through two-wheeler mobility in Dhaka

This paper sheds light on the understudied phenomenon of female two-wheeler riders in Bangladesh, and their everyday negotiations of moto-mobility in patriarchal public spaces. In transportation research, female riders have traditionally been characterized as occupying the pillion seat. By conducting ethnographic observations of two-wheeler training clubs in Bangladesh (Dhaka) and qualitative interviews with female riders, the paper expands the discussion of gender and mobility beyond the usual focus on car and public transport in the Global South, which is critical for planning equitable and inclusive transport policies. Using the motility framework (access, competence and appropriation), this paper unravels the cultural, spatial and social dynamics of women's everyday moto-mobility. Through engagement in women-only training clubs which also serve as gendered social spaces, female riders actively build technical and spatial competence. They opt for safety-conscious approaches in driving behaviour, subverting traditional/masculine notions of dominance and authority. The findings also reveal how young riders subvert families and communities to acquire and ride motorbikes, but still largely conform (and adapt) to social norms to manufacture respectability (following normative sartorial choices, sex-segregated seclusion/purdah). In other words, their resistance is in proportion to how much they can assert themselves without facing negative repercussions from communities and society at large. As their presence and performances of micro-subversions rewrite spatial geographies (of risk and respectability), this has implications for reshaping the everyday transport geographies of women in urban public spaces. By presenting gender scripts as an element of appropriation in the constant negotiation of mobility, this paper contextualises motility in a non-western setting, and shows how multiple (seemingly contradictory) gender performances can feed into each other and regroup to facilitate women's access (to mobility) and rights in a gendered city.

Male Teachers’ Narratives: Experiences of Teaching in Early Childhood Education

Globally, women are over-represented in teaching in the early years of primary school, or the Foundation Phase, as it is known in South Africa (SA). We explore how male teachers in SA may experience challenges in teaching in primary schools that are complicit in reproducing men as managers. Men tend to be positioned within dominant notions of masculinity, which produce masculine power in school management, while primary teaching is characterised as ‘women’s work’. Teachers of both genders are complicit in safeguarding the primary school as a nurturing, female domain while reproducing gendered binaries and unequal power relations. Through semi-structured interviews and a focus group discussion, we explore the experiences of five male early childhood development (ECD) teachers from five rural primary schools in diverse settings in Free State, SA. Males have challenges in ECD as they are not allowed to teach but are encouraged to be involved in management, where they may sit on different school committees such as those related to sport and discipline, and also take care of the school premises. There is a need to create alternate masculinities beyond rigid notions of appropriate gender performances and address social challenges such as the paucity of male teachers, children being exposed to only one gender, and gender transformation in SA. In this way, the challenges facing male ECD teachers, who are not being entirely accepted in this field, will be eliminated.

Teologi som sträng vetenskap?

This article is written as a response to Mårten Björk's "Akademisk teologi som universell kunskapsform" in Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 98 (2022). The article begins with an attempt to identify and describe what the author finds to be a unique quality of Björk's text as well as the deeper intentions of his argument. As a next step, it discusses the consequences of Björk's theological position, critically and constructively. The interpretation centres around questions regarding scientific methods, dominant notions of knowledge, and infrastructural aspects of the contemporary research milieu within the humanities.

From “The Cotton Wool” to Criticality: Unpacking FC Bergman’s The Sheep Song

ABSTRACT This article discusses the relationship between the critical potential of the arts and dominant notions of criticality. Traditionally, “critical thinking” is often equated with rationality and deliberation. Feminist thought has criticized both the traditional notion of the public sphere for its exclusion of groups based on their modes of discourse, and critical thinking for its overreliance on a limited model of criticality that excludes affectivity. Through an analysis of FC Bergman’s theater performance, The Sheep Song, we explore emergent structures of feeling that include such new critical affects. We draw inspiration from Maxine Greene’s work on how aesthetic sense-making can break through the “cotton wool” of taken-for-granted ways of thinking and seeing. Our analysis shows how specific moments of transition between scenes and representations of disability have the potential to foreground an audience’s sense- and meaning-making. However, the performance opens and then closes off the emergence of criticality, thereby showing the temporary nature of critical affects.

'We also have lives, you know'

Using a multimodal discursive approach supplemented with semi-structured interviews, this article analyses the identity work of Hong Kong-based Filipina labour migrants on social media. The study is premised on the representational potential of these media forms to circulate ideas that either challenge or reinforce dominant notions of migrant life. The intersections of gender, race and class in the participants’ discourses are salient as they attempt to make sense of their lives in the host city through online signifying affordances. Further, a desire to differentiate themselves from dominant notions of being a Filipino woman in Hong Kong is prominent, illustrating the need to interrogate limiting and oppressive characterisations of migrants that are emplaced in both online and offline realities.