Notion Of Progress Research Articles

Re-imaging empowered princesshood against the rise of the fourth-wave feminism: A thematic study of Disney’s princess live-action remakes

From 2014 to 2023, The Walt Disney Company launched five princess live-action remakes and two adaptations to update its iconic female characters. In both media discussions and academic literature, these revamped princess productions have been celebrated for their embodiments of fourth-wave feminist qualities, such as confidence, independence and girl power. However, the exact process of framing women’s empowerment on-screen – translating abstract feminist ideologies into specific visualizations and bodily performances of Disney princesses – has been treated as a taken-for-granted phenomenon placed beyond interrogation. Through a thematic analysis of all released remakes, this article demonstrates how the live-action princesses are represented to reflect fourth-wave feminist notions and what gender messages are delivered by this renovated series. I identify two visual styles and three plot devices that are used repetitively across the remakes to endow the princess characters with a progressive persona. I further discover that, despite being empowered at first glance, the remakes’ engagements with fourth-wave feminism remain superficial and eventually channel the stories back to existing gender stereotypes and imbalanced structures. This conclusion contributes to the scholarship by ascertaining Disney’s strategic leverage of contemporary gender ideologies on-screen and revealing the problematic nature of such corporate-dominated, pro-feminist agendas.

Chronicity, Women’s Suffering, and Prayer: a Budding Prayer Group’s Response to Chronic Developmental Crises in Zimbabwe

Abstract This paper uses textual analysis of an audio note that circulated on WhatsApp in 2018 presenting the founder of a rapidly growing predominantly women-only Zimbabwean prayer group. The audio note’s content is taken as an emergent ethnography exposing emic views of women’s lived realities. The analysis uses notions of ‘chronicity’, (Vigh 2008, 10–15) and ‘women’s suffering’ (Cole 2012, 384–6) to ground the audio note’s content in Zimbabwe’s prolonged socioeconomic and political crises. Chronic crises produce unique social actions (Vigh 2008), such as popular religious practices and theologies (Miller-McLemore 2018). The group prefers do-it-yourself (DIY) prayers which demand constant environmental and self-assessment, and comparing with peers. The group’s construction of women’s suffering as anathema to ideal Pentecostal personhoods discussed in four themes discernible from the audio note is revealing (Harnisch 2000). Techniques of DIY prayers echo the feminist notion that ‘the personal is political’. Thus, the group potentially contributes to gender transformation.

Lodging complaints against platform power: how Lebanese journalists and activists experience reporting mechanisms, platform failures, and techno-alienation

ABSTRACT Since Western technology platforms began colonizing online spaces, they have neglected Majority World populations, including those in MENA/SWANA countries like Lebanon. This neglect exacerbates harassment and violence against marginalized individuals, reinforcing systemic harms in Lebanon's cisheteropatriarchal and sectarian society. Our study draws on 14 in-depth interviews with women and queer journalists and activists in Lebanon who have faced online harassment and violence. Utilizing Sarah Ahmed’s feminist notion of complaint, we explore the flaws in platforms’ reporting mechanisms and document what we term ‘techno-alienation’: a state where those marginalized by these platforms feel abandoned and unable to envision an inclusive digital future. Participants highlighted that online platforms are addressing these issues too little, too late, leading to estrangement and disengagement among users who feel left behind.

A case for democratic pluralism instead of democratic minimalism

This paper proposes a theory of democratic pluralism instead of democratic minimalism developed by Shadi Hamid in his book “The Problem of Democracy”. Democratic pluralism will leverage pluralism to create a possibility for reconciliation between liberalism, secularism, religion, and democracy. It presents a framework of democratic pluralism based on four key elements: (1) a conception of democracy that includes performance and political action in the public sphere beyond electoral participation; (2) recognition of diversity and intercultural dialog, alongside the agonistic dimension of pluralism; (3) moderation of individual autonomy and identity politics; and (4) pluralistic accommodation of religion. The paper critiques Hamid’s monolithic notions of liberalism, secularism, and democracy, suggesting that more nuanced approaches to these concepts are necessary. It contends that rather than abandoning liberalism and secularism, exploring compatible versions of liberalism and Islam within a pluralistic framework offers a more promising path for reforming religion and polity in the Muslim world.

Property-time: serial archives, settler logics, and illiberal space–time oddities

Liberal theories of property assume a linear and serialized temporal orientation facilitated by title registries, recording systems, and the exaltation of land archives. These assumptions, what I call ‘property-time’, can be productively put into relation with dominant geographic theories of space in two ways. First, I argue that distinguishing liberal notions of property-time from geographic space–time allows us to observe a key dialectic involving the attachment of value (and capital) to space, a process that tracks alongside contradictions of capitalist desire: the desire to continually reshape space (becoming) and to extract enduring and permanent, individuated value from it (being). Second, liberal temporalities of property struggle to apply in illiberal global contexts. Here, states enact urban accumulation regimes that deviate from linear, individuated and sequential notions of property by manipulating records and surgically erasing past ownership. These acts are often characterized as forms of state variegation and provisionality. They are also endemic to how both capital and value are created and/or arbitraged by states through the land regime. These formations remain difficult to connect to traditional theories about the production of value under capital because assumed time logics of property limit our theoretical capacity to describe illiberal urban accumulation regimes.

Erasing Palestine in Germany’s Educational System: The Racial Frontiers of Liberal Freedom

Since the first Merkel government in 2009, Germany’s reason of state (Staatsräson) has been increasingly formulated as ‘unconditional solidarity’ with the state of Israel, thus evolving into a logic and practice of erasing Palestine and Palestinians. In such a context, the article delves into the most recent events at German schools and universities since October 7, 2023, and examines how these educational sites have become fundamental avenues for reaffirming Germany’s Staatsräson, as well as potential spaces for its contestation. Combining the work of Lisa Lowe and Nadera Shaloub-Kervorkian, we show how liberal notions of freedom emerge and follow racial frontiers that systemically erase Palestine in the educational structures, from schools to universities. While these processes consolidate Germany’s Staatsräson, protest movements of students and pupils offer the most radical spaces to resist it.

Imagined Buddhisms and the Limits of Female Liberation in Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire

This study considers how Urdu Indian writer, Qurratulain Hyder historicizes the role of Buddhism in her magnum opus, River of Fire. Previous studies have approached the question of religion in River of Fire in relation to the radical nationalisms of Hinduism and Islam. Meanwhile, Buddhism—a religious philosophy often perceived as innocuous in the polemics of Partition—has received only a passing nod. This study demonstrates that Hyder’s imagination of Buddhism from the perspective of female domesticity, unravels a more complicated religious and literary legacy than what was generally understood among her contemporary intelligentsia. In the opening chapters of the novel, Hyder draws on classical Buddhist literatures such as the Therīgāthā, to challenge romanticized imaginations of Buddhism. This article teases out this intertextuality between the novel and the Buddhist canon as a moment that foregrounds the implications of liberation for generations of women silenced by hegemonic religious and national histories. Drawing on Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, I argue that Hyder explores alternative conceptions of feminine self-realization and liberation which interrogate not only traditional monastic notions of freedom and liberation but also feminist and Buddhist discourses of equality in the nation.

Concrete Freedom at Work: Hegel’s normative conception of freedom and its relevance to organization studies

In organization studies, the prevailing understanding of freedom has revolved around a specific concept of autonomy. However, we propose an alternative and normative concept of freedom, drawing inspiration from the philosophy of Hegel and a reinterpretation of his ideas by Robert Brandom. We begin by diagnosing the liberal conceptions of freedom as opportunity and autonomy that shape the predominant understanding of freedom at work within organization studies. We then follow Hegel and conceive freedom as the expansive realization of oneself through the commitment to meaningful constraints. In contrast to the dominant liberal notions of freedom, Hegel allows us to understand professional commitments and communal obligations at work as the medium of freedom. We argue that concrete freedom at work requires (a) that workers see their work as intrinsically valuable and (b) that neither they nor their employers are unconditionally free to define norms for how work is to be organized and pursued. We then demonstrate the theoretical implications of shifting from the liberal conceptions of freedom prevalent in organization studies to a Hegelian conception of freedom. The Hegelian theory leads to a more nuanced understanding of worker decision-discretion, motivation and the meaningfulness of work. Additionally, it has implications for research on bureaucracy and institutional logics. We end by considering the limits of the empirical applicability of our Hegelian theory, and by highlighting its normative value for practitioners and critical management scholars.

The human after math: Nnedi Okorafor’s unruly engagements with Cartesian desire

ABSTRACT This article contends that Nnedi Okorafor remakes a European Enlightenment notion of mathematics in her speculative trilogy Binti (2015-2018). The titular character has the power of mathematical thinking, where through the contemplation of mathematical signs, she absents herself from her immediate physical surroundings and enters into a dream-like space. Reading Binti alongside Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, I argue that Okorafor draws on an Enlightenment notion of mathematics as training in reason, where it was believed that through the encounter with mathematical objects, man could learn to think independently of their cultural and religious backgrounds, becoming universal. Her critique of Enlightenment math is not explicit, but rather raises philosophical questions about what exactly math is and how it could have secured the secular human. Binti reveals that math is a linguistic technology for producing imaginative realms detached from the real world that could allow for different experiences of becoming. Okorafor’s work brings mathematics in conversation with literature and also Fanon’s thinking about race and the body. This essay examines how African speculative fiction can intervene in modern liberal notions of the human by interrogating and remaking the seemingly objective discourses that make up our current hegemonic mode of being human.

Liberal Tolerance for an Intolerant Age

Abstract: In agreement with Bryan Garsten's notion of liberalism as "refuge," liberal societies are distinct in their toleration of badness. They give people the permission and even the right to do wrong. Tolerance, however, does not apply to that to which we are indifferent or to that which we approve of. True tolerance involves the refusal to police bad or defective behaviors, and it therefore makes liberal political movements inherently fragile. Even so, tolerance and "refuge" are essential because people, especially the powerful, cannot be trusted to police the right people, on the right occasions, with the right force.

The Art of Neighboring beyond the Nation: Ethnic and Religious Pluralism in Southwest China

Northwest Yunnan is nested in the border areas of Tibet, Myanmar, and Southwest China. The religiously and ethnically diverse region has astonishingly seen a lack of “conflict”, as is often assumed in regions of ethnic and religious differences. This paper argues that there is an organic form of pluralism through frequent inter-ethnic and inter-religious marriages, multi-lingual daily interactions, and strategic ethnicity registrations. Ethnic and religious boundaries are made permanently or temporarily permeable through the celebration of boundary-crossing rituals such as weddings and funerals and other shared experiences such as collective labor and migrant work. Despite an increasingly strong push to be integrated into the state power through various top-down developmental projects, minority peoples here still use kinship, collective rituals, and other shared experiences to foster group formation that is fluid, porous, and malleable, instilling empathy and obligation as the basis of this pluralistic borderland society. This organic form of pluralism presents an alternative to the nation as the standard modern form of community. This paper ultimately argues that this specific type of plurality requires us to think beyond the normative liberal notions of religious tolerance and diversity that are still promoted within the frame of the exclusivist nation-state.

To Mica With Love

A growing body of research exploring the lives of Black Canadian students largely focuses on achievement and disciplinary outcomes. Such scholarship centers the negative experiences of Black boys, overlooking the quotidian lives of Black Canadian girls in public schools. The lack of educational research engaging Black Canadian girls hinders scholars, educators, and communities from fully reimagining schools for liberation. Drawing from literature and personal stories, this arts-informed autoethnography investigates how I partnered with three Black Canadian girls to reconceptualize their role in research processes. The study relied on disability critical race theory (DisCrit), Black feminist notions of homeplace, and Endarkened storywork to share and analyze narratives of Black girl leadership and innovation. The study revealed how Black researchers and Black Canadian girls used the arts, storytelling, and space to reimagine research processes as homeplace. The study emphasized the need for scholars to engage in research that uphold marginalized Black girls as producers and leaders striving for social change.

Directing innovation towards just outcomes: the role of principles and politics

ABSTRACT Contemporary innovation theorists tend to defend a combination of Schumpeterian and Keynesian politics of innovation as a solution to the problem of the directionality of new technologies. Their hope is that the Schumpeterian motor of innovation would keep entrepreneurs incentivised to take market opportunities and the Keynesian state would invest in infrastructure, redistributing risks and rewards. In contrast, Hayekian theorists of innovation insist that state interventions aiming at directionality suffer from epistemological and moral problems. For them, politics of innovation ought to abandon the idea of directionality altogether because it is morally questionable and creates disincentives for taking up new risky ventures. Instead, the politics of innovation ought to be restricted to promoting an institutional environment that is conducive to entrepreneurship. I will argue that despite differences, both theoretical camps rely on liberal notions of morality and politics which justify predominantly distributional currencies of justice, overlooking questions of relational equality in innovation.

Women under the Panchayat Regime: Parijat’s Under the Sleepless Mountain as a Feminist Project

The representation of the female in Nepali fiction has been a fascinating subject for critics. This paper examines the representational position of the women as projected in Parijat’s Under the Sleepless Mountain. In this novel, the novelist critiques the patriarchal society’s treatment to women in a different social structure. Parijat’s female characters are projected as suffering and marginalized people of the Nepali society around the student’s revolution of the early 1980s. Other issues raised in this paper focus on students and subaltern characters who are treated badly as they raise voice against the oppressive Panchayat system and other kinds of dominance. She writes against social wrongs and ill intended human activities. She exposes the character’s desire for freedom, individuality and equal rights. Thus, the objective of this study is to find out the answers to whether the suffering of women, laborers and students are concretely represented in her novel or not. In this paper, this researcher explores the issues around the plight of the female, which are interpreted from the feminist perspective. The relevant feminist notions developed by the feminist critics such as Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson, Catherine Belsey and Susan Bassnett have been adopted for textual analysis as a methodological tool. This paper concludes that the gender discrimination and political disharmony are the major obstacles to women upliftment.

Besluitneming in die Gereformeerde Kerkverband

Decision-making in the Reformed Churches in South Africa The hypothesis for this article is that no complete certainty can exist on whether a resolution taken by a meeting of people is an authoritative expression of the will of God. The church [ekklésia] of Christ refers to the universal church of all times and places, as well as the local church (congregation). The general nature of collective decision-making involves the notions of representation and voting. The Reformation liberated churches from the overlordship of Rome, but also had the unintended consequence of the entrenchment of the liberal notions of individual sovereignty and self-sufficiency. The foundational Reformed confessional documents were formulated and adopted at gatherings convened and overseen by extra-clerical (state) institutions. It is likely that decision-making in the churches was directly influenced by the rationalism, humanism, and liberalism that has been influential since the 17th century. Contemporary participants in collective decision-making can find it difficult to distinguish between liberal-democratic processes and those of the church. Christ is the only head of his church and exegesis and hermeneutics are not exact sciences, it is, however, possible to deliberate on alternative Scriptural interpretations, but impossible to prove one to be correct and the other false. The inability of a major assembly of churches to resolve an exegetical question unanimously, attests to the human inability to know the will of God completely. Resolutions of major assemblies should be subject to unrestricted revision as the assemblies are not meetings of a church or of the church itself. Influential opinions among Reformed authors hover between independentism and collegialism, both having been influenced by liberal thinking.Contribution: A range of interdependent matters need to be clarified to resolve questions concerning representation in and decision-making by major assemblies. A list of such questions has been set out at the end of the article.

Rehearsals of Release

Dispossession is not only harmful for the material deprivations it instantiates (though these harms are brutal, even genocidal). To the extent that dispossession occurs within a societal context in which possession is the ultimate virtue, dispossession further diminishes the social significance of those dispossessed; beneath a global regime of neoliberalism, to be lacking in possessions is to be rendered non-agential, unworthy of political representation, and, ultimately, subject to premature death for the profit of others. In the United States and other white-dominated nations, the sickness of white supremacy and its coinciding colonial incursions are rooted in liberal notions of property, doctrines of what can be possessed, what significance possession confers, and who is permitted to do the possessing. This possessive individualism benefits those who have longest held the ability to accumulate wealth via dispossession: already-wealthy white men. This social reality has ruinous effects for those whose cultural values are not predicated on possession yet are subject to the hegemonic forces of white supremacy. In this writing, I propose three “rehearsals of release,” replicable and mutational performances, that can be practically implemented in the lives of those with Settler inclinations. These rehearsals are designed to lessen tendencies toward dispossession and replace them with practices of de-possession, the exploration of a life lived in affinity with ongoing transfers and transitions of unbound matter rather than its monumental hoarding. While none of these rehearsals “solve the problem” of white supremacist neoliberalism, they permit practitioners to meaningfully engage with decoloniality in material, experiential, and intuitive ways and, with hope, encourage the emergence of a shared consciousness that turns away from dispossession and toward the circulation of care.

The Prospects of the G20’s Support of Liberalism: International Order and the Sustainable Development Goals

ABSTRACT This article examines the question of whether the G20 can support liberal notions of international order. It contends that the contribution of the G20 to promote order has not been fully considered and that there are significant difficulties but some limited possibilities whereby the G20 can support liberal aspirations related to international order. It is the case that the G20 offers prospects for a broader and more pragmatic conception of order to promote the stability of globalisation. This pragmatic possibility has always been present in the G20’s informal association of developed states and rising states which has had a flexible agenda that attempts to address both the economic and social aspects of globalisation. This article argues that the recent engagement by the G20 with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) points to a possible impetus for a post-liberal foundation of a pragmatic order able to manage a multifaceted understanding of globalisation.

The Forgotten Dreams of History-from-Below

Abstract In his 2003 essay, “On Agency,” Walter Johnson faulted the way scholars’ focus on agency presumed a “unidirectional trade between past and present,” treating “history writing as a mode of redress.” It marginalized “human-ness lived outside the conventions” of a “liberal notion of selfhood.” Restoring agency to the enslaved made the scholar feel better about themselves without making the world any better: “therapy rather than politics.” Looking back on this pivotal assessment of social history from the vantage of twenty years, its criticisms seem relevant to the use of agency in its time (and ours) more than to the concept’s original invention in the era of decolonization after World War II. In that time, drawing on anticolonial thought, history-from-below emerged precisely to contest liberal notions of selfhood and reform the existing, whiggish two-way trade between past and present. Revisiting that turn reminds us that questions raised by the category of “agency” were present at its making and that it is unlikely that academic scholarship can fulfill more than a therapeutic function without affiliated struggles to remake the academy and popular politics. Reminding us of history-from-below's foundational commitment to building up “the present-life of the past” and challenging the individuated ideal of selfhood, this essay notes the continued urgency of recovering alternative subjectivities as we face the planetary crisis created by dominance of Enlightenment notions of history and selfhood. Though scholarship in the academy may not be capable of the political impact Johnson imagined, it nevertheless furthers history’s actual end of internal transformation.

An Ecofeminist Analysis of Nature Imagery in Sylvia Plaths Ariel

Sylvia Plaths Ariel, characterized by dark themes, idiosyncratic imagery, and raw emotional intensity, holds an enduring fascination for readers and critics alike. While much scholarship has examined this collection through a psychoanalytic or biographical lens, this research seeks to uncover an underexplored dimension of Ariel its ecofeminist undertones. The abundant nature imagery provides a particularly rich source for the investigation of her pre-ecofeminist consciousness. This research adopts a mixed-methods design that combines a corpus-based approach with an in-depth analysis of representative imagery. Excel-based calculation results show that the relatively large presence of nature imagery infuses Ariel with a riveting, dreamy atmosphere. The textual analysis further reveals that Plaths subtle interweaving of the female experience and the natural world resonates with ecofeminist notions of patriarchal oppression and mutual liberation. By unearthing the ecofeminist dimensions of Ariel, this research aims to provide fresh insights into this masterpiece while shedding light on the richness and complexity of Plaths thematic concerns and poetic expression.

From Islamists to Religious Patriots

Abstract This article explores the complex and intersectional identities and positionalities of Kurdish Islamist women activists in Turkey in the context of heightened violence and tensions linked to the ongoing Turkish-Kurdish conflict. While both female Islamist activists and Kurdish activists in Turkey and the wider region have been subject to in-depth research over the past decade, Kurdish Islamist women have largely been overlooked in the literature. The article focuses on the complex relationship between ethnicity and religion in understanding Kurdish Islamist women’s mobilization, political views, perceptions of gender norms and relations, and self-ascribed identities. Based on original empirical research carried out in southeastern Turkey in 2015 and 2018, the article engages with the relevant literature on Islamist women’s mobilization, particularly in relation to Turkey, to complicate discourses of empowerment and critiques of liberal notions of agency while also challenging prevailing depictions of Kurdish women’s mobilization. It pays attention both to the intersecting power configurations enabling and challenging Kurdish Islamist women’s everyday lives and political engagement, and to changing political economy locally, nationally, and transnationally.