Ongoing Contestation Research Articles

Nepali Women Using Community Forestry as a Platform for Social Change

Successful implementation of decentralized programs such as community forestry depends on participation of local users. Although women in Nepal have been recognized as the primary users of forests, they are widely reported as marginalized in decision-making processes. Previous studies mostly take a static view, focusing on exclusionary structures to explain how and why women are marginalized. A focus on social change processes would allow better understanding of whether and how women use interactions with the executive committee or during general assemblies to renegotiate their social role and rights. Based on a survey, interviews, and group discussions in two community forest user groups, we argue that women are engaged in an ongoing contestation of current structures to widen their participation in decision making and become increasingly active agents in community forestry. We point out the need to understand participation as an ongoing and open-ended process of social change rather than as a predefined outcome.

Environment and Citizenship in Latin America: A New Paradigm for Theory and Practice

As a reflection of the ecological pressures associated with rapid modernization and globaliza- tion, the environment has become an enduring theme of public debate and protest in Latin America. Over the past decade, scholars have made increasing connections between such debate and a range of questions related to citizenship. Meanwhile, a discourse of 'environmental citizenship' has a growing prevalence in policy across the region. While these developments echo similar political and academic trends in the Global North, the Latin American context demands a unique set of theoretical and meth- odological approaches to studying the intersection of ecology and citizenship, sensitive to the specific historical, cultural, and ecological character of the region. We outline a research agenda spanning ques- tions of land, identity and citizenship; environmental justice and de-colonization; social subjectivity and the state; urban natures and citizens; and the materiality/subjectivity of nature. This array of approaches points to a more acute conceptualization of citizenship, both in terms of its understanding of politics and its treatment of ecology; it also offers a point of view that recognizes citizens and natures as dynamic realities, which mutually condition each other in a sphere of ongoing contest. Keywords: environmental citizenship, environmental policy, ecology, nature, social subjectivity. During the latter part of the twentieth century Latin American societies emerged from an era of authoritarian regimes and began processes of democratic renewal, with the environment becoming one of the first issues around which civil society movements coalesced. As a reflection of the ecological pressures associated with rapid modernization and globalization, based largely on the export of agricultural products and natural resources, the environment has remained an enduring theme of public debate and popular protest. This political ferment around environmental issues has made important contributions to new characterizations of the rights, re- sponsibilities and relations of citizenship in Latin America. Constitutional changes in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela have variously reconsidered rights related to access to land and a healthy environment (Gudynas 2009), while Ecuador's 2008 constitution goes so far as to provide rights to nature itself. Articu- lating these changes to the global scale, in 2004 the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) launched a Latin America Global Environmental Citizenship Project (Unep/Pnuma 2006). This has been followed by other formal recognitions of the relationship between environment and citizenship, including the Peruvian Ministry of Environment's 2009 Environmental Citizenship Prize, Brazil's Secre- tariat of Institutional Articulation and Environmental Citizenship and Chile's Youth National Environmental Citizenship Day. Reflecting these trends, scholarship related to environmental questions in Latin America has increasingly incorporated themes related to citizenship. Researchers working with rural and indigenous peoples have probed relationships that link the politics of land, livelihood and identity, often in the context of struggles for politi-

Higher, Faster, Louder: Representations of the International Music Competition

Competitions have been a visible and controversial part of the classical music world for over a century, yet sociologists have strangely neglected to study their social significance.This article explores the competition's ongoing contest for legitimacy by considering the case of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.Through a discourse analysis of publicity materials and media coverage, I reconstruct the symbolic frameworks that guide the construction of the event and the interpretation of competitors' performances. I also trace the critical challenge to the idealized representations of the event, and decode the gender ideologies implied in commonly used metaphors. Demonstrating the centrality of meaning in musical production and reception, I aim to expose the limitations of the production perspective and Bourdieu's model of the artistic field, offering in their place a new approach based on social performance.

Situating Organizations in Politics

Organization scholars have long been interested in both collective action and the complexities revealed through dialectical analysis. A diachronic view provides one means of intertwining these concerns by exploring the way durable, systemic changes emerge temporally from ongoing contestation among stakeholders. The author explores this diachronic view through a decade-long multistakeholder conflict concerning the Grand Staircase— Escalante National Monument in the U.S. state of Utah. The case makes evident the historic unfolding of power dynamics: A successful resistance movement becomes a regime of control in an ongoing struggle among groups. The author concludes by discussing the capacity of diachronic analysis to illuminate (a) politics among organizations, (b) transformative potential of dialectics, (c) interplay of symbolic and material spheres, and (d) mutual yet distinct roles of dialectical and paradoxical tensions.

What’s Political about the New Feminisms?

In this article, I examine these to argue that they are not simply part of a backlash against feminism but are instead, in many cases, part of an ongoing contest over the meaning of feminism. Critical commentary on new feminisms has often accused this work of conflating consumerism with political action, personal change with political change, and cultural and cosmetic accommodations with economic and political restructuring.1 While not entirely unfounded, these criticisms undervalue the real contributions some recent feminisms are making to social liberation movements, because these contributions do not easily fit into more familiar models of feminist politics. Rather than dismissing all the new feminisms as media hype or conservative backlash, I prefer to subject them to careful interrogation, not least because in addition to influencing some feminist work in the academy, they have had a far-ranging influence in the political, economic, and cultural spheres. Most of the new feminisms can be grouped under the rubrics of postfeminism, feminism, or both; these describe a loosely related set of beliefs about the contemporary scope and role of feminism as well as the sites and possibilities for the development and deployment of political agency. Because these terms postfeminism and third-wave feminism are often (usually erroneously) used interchangeably, I want to explicate the different meanings of the terms and show how they are related (a shared girl power ideal), as well as how they are not (in nearly all other ways). While both are responses to dissatisfactions with liberal, socialist, and radical forms of second-wave feminist theory, they express these dissatisfactions for somewhat different reasons and in different ways, as I will show in the next

Medical Culture in Transition: Mughal Gentleman Physician and the Native Doctor in Early Colonial India

AbstractThe essay explores a Greco-Arabic healing tradition that arrived in India with the Muslims and evolved with the expansion of the Mughal Empire. It came to be known as unani in the sub-continent. It studies unani texts and its practitioners in the critical period of transition to British rule, and questions the idea of ‘colonial medicine’ being the predominant site of culture and power. It shows that in the decades immediately preceding the early 19th century British expansion, unani underwent a critical transformation that was triggered by new influences from the Arab lands. These changes in local medical culture shaped the later colonial intrusions in matters related to health. The essay concludes that the pro-active role of the English Company and the wide usage of the printing press only added new contenders to the ongoing contest over medical authority. By the 1830s this complex interplay moved health away from its previous focus on individual aristocratic virtue, to the new domain of societal well being. It also projected the healer not merely as a gentleman physician concerned with individual health, but as a public servant responsible for the well being of society at large. These changes were rapid and survived the reforms of 1830s. They ensured that ‘colonial medicine’ remained entangled in local contestations over medical authority.

Greater Cairo’s housing crisis: Contested spaces from inner city areas to new communities

This article examines housing crises, access and vacancy within Greater Cairo’s metropolitan communities. The impact of the Greater Cairo Master Plan and New Towns Policy on the housing crisis are investigated through some case studies focusing especially on new towns and on New Cairo City, to the east of downtown Cairo. The empirical research attempts to qualitatively examine the complex reasons for the failure of various policies and implementations (GCR master plan, new settlements schemes, new towns plans) in meeting housing needs of middle and low-income people. This has resulted in the emergence of nearly empty new towns, and the expansion of exclusive gated communities, a phenomenon which aggravated social injustice and housing inequality. A small area survey employs ethnographic techniques of informal discussions with secondary stakeholder agencies (local municipality, planners, NGOs, real estate agents and land developers) and in-depth interviews with primary stakeholder groups ranging from urban poor households within resettlement housing to affluent residents within gated communities. The article tackles the on-going contest between local population, and real estate and property speculators within Greater Cairo’s urban policy, whilst calling for a stakeholder approach to tackle the problem of housing access and vacant dwellings. This would involve public–private partnership and grass roots co-operation between tenants, resettled people, NGOs, housing experts and local authorities.

Beyond Creole Nationalism? Language Policies, Education and the Challenge of State Building in Post-conflict Southern Sudan

This paper seeks to go beyond a focus on the role of elites in low-capacity states to consider the interaction of language policies and mass responses to these policies in southern Sudan. It reviews processes of elite formation in southern Sudan, the impact of the civil war and the current challenges facing state building there. In common with many post-colonial states, nationalism in Sudan, both north and south, has been elite led and has been characterized by persistent attempts by Khartoum-based governments to impose their conception of the Sudanese state on southern Sudan and resistance to such efforts. Official language policies in southern Sudan have alternated between English and Arabic reflecting this ongoing contestation of identity. This paper considers the impact of the most recent language policy change in favour of English from a local southern Sudanese perspective. It concludes that, while the new language policy has had an impact on people's expectations and, hence, on their professed desire to acquire new language skills, current state capacity in southern Sudan is such that it is unlikely that these policies will have an impact on southern Sudanese identity formation amongst the general population in the short to medium term, although it will continue to reinforce existing processes that contribute to the creation of a southern Sudanese elite identity.

J-Horror: New Media's Impact on Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Les récents films d’épouvante japonais, connus collectivement sous le terme de « J-Horror », exemplifient le phénomène de la dispersion transnationale d’un cinéma digital multî-médiatîque qui est, paradoxalement, déterminé par des contingences culturelles, industrielles et économiques régionales. Le potentiel véritable du cinéma digital ne se retrouve pas dans les effets spéciaux générés par ordinateur qui apparaissent dans la série Star Wars, mais plutôt dans les mouvements régionaux, comme le « J-Horror », qui renversent le courant traditionel des capitaux et de la culture, c’est-à-dire, le monopole hollywoodien. Ce phénomène n’est pas nouveau dans l’histoire du cinéma. Ce qui le rend unique est le déploiement vernaculaire de sa spécificité médiatique, temporelle et régionale.

PATRICK O'MALLEY. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance and Victorian Gothic Culture.

It is no longer a surprise that late-Victorian decadence should have been so closely associated with religion, in particular Catholicism: recent work by Ellis Hanson and Jardath Killeen has mapped this connection. The complex relationship between Catholicism and the Gothic has been less discussed, however. The nineteenth century is too often thought of as the great age of secular doubt, perhaps because, as Patrick O’Malley claims, our modernity prevents us from thinking critically about religion. O’Malley's impeccably researched Catholicism, Sexual Deviance and the Gothic serves as a valuable reminder of the centrality nonetheless of issues of religious belief to Victorian public and private life. Throughout this book, Catholicism is portrayed as the source of simultaneous fascination and repulsion in nineteenth-century literature and culture, still far more a threat to the present than a practice safely confined to the past. This threat, O’Malley argues, is often directed at sexual standards: Havelock Ellis in Sexual Inversion, for instance, claimed that ‘in many cases the best and only documentation of deviant sexual activities’ (p. 22) he found was in Roman Catholic records. ‘It is the argument of this book that there is a persistent conjunction of tropes of Catholicism with those of non-normative sexual expression or identity in the literary, artistic, and polemical culture of nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, and, further, that that conjunction reflects an ongoing contest over Britain's sectarian purity as well as its sexual values’ (p. 3). Furthermore, the conjunction is Gothic because of ‘the increasingly troubling fact that England itself was once a Catholic country, that Catholicism is the terrible “buried” secret at the very origin of English Protestantism’ (p. 22).

Evidence and Education: The Braided Roles of Research, Policy and Practice in New Zealand

Calls for educational policy and practice to be evidence-based have become insistent, yet there is ongoing contestation of the purpose and value of educational research. This paper addresses criticism of research from practitioners, politicians and policy makers and from within the research community itself. It examines the impact of the PBRF in New Zealand and the call for evidence-based practice here, in the UK and the US. It draws attention to research studies that are possible models for a principled and methodologically inclusive way forward and develops a set of principles for guiding future development in teacher education and educational research.

Sharing without Knowing: Collective Identity in Feminist and Democratic Theory

Many feminist and democratic theorists share the presumption that politics requires a pregiven subject (“women” or “the people”) whose identity is grounded in commonality. Drawing on Linda Zerilli's interventions in feminist debates, Ferguson develops an alternative account of collective identity that emerges instead from multiple, overlapping, and discontinuous social practices. This reconceptualization of identity demands a corresponding reconceptualization of democracy, characterized by the ongoing contestation of the very subject (“the people”) whose existence it presupposes.

INNUMERABLE TRANSMISSIONS: WI-FI® FROM SPECTACLE TO MOVEMENT

This paper analyses Wi-Fi, a mundane wireless networking technology, in terms of a cultural flow of meanings concerning movement of people and data. The principal analytical problem addressed in the paper is how to make sense of the profusion of images, practices, events, objects and social groupings associated with Wi-Fi. Rather than treating the abundance as driven by the IT industry's desire to find the Next Big Thing, or as hype that obscures actual social realities, the paper suggests that different ideas, ambivalences, frustrations and problems with Wi-Fi form part of an ongoing contestation of the meaning and value of information infrastructures. Using a model of culture drawn from Ulf Hannerz, the paper describes how meanings flow in three axes: ideas or modes of thought, forms of externalization and social distributions. Wi-Fi offers a significant opportunity to analyse how different movements of people and data are collectively negotiated and figured. The reflexive and tactical uses of wireless networks to contest ideas of information and movement are key elements of this negotiation.

Is Liberalism the Only Way Toward Democracy?

This article identifies a foundation for Confucian democratic political thought in Confucian thought. Each of the three aspects emphasized is controversial, but supported by views held within the historical debates and development of Confucian political thought and practice. This democratic interpretation of Confucian political thought leads to (1) an expectation that all people are capable of ren and therefore potentially virtuous contributors to political life; (2) an expectation that the institutions of political, social, and economic life function so as to develop the virtue of being a perfected human being; and (3) an expectation that there be public space for political criticism and for ongoing contestation over the duties and behaviors of individual leaders and citizens and over the functioning of the institutions that are to cultivate their behavior.

Responsibility and Social/Political Choices about Choice; or, One Way to be a True Non-voluntarist

Linking choice with responsibility is a seduction our voluntarist society often cannot resist. We generally wish to hold people responsible in our tort and criminal law for their free choices - and conceive of responsibility as intimately bound up with personal choice. Samuel Scheffler may have diagnosed why many redistributive forms of liberalism often fail to command support in the public sphere: because they regularly deny what seems to be a basic moral intuition of our society - that people should be held responsible for their free choices. To be sure, the contours of what counts as a free choice and what counts as a product of duress, genetics, or upbringing sufficient to vitiate or mitigate responsibility is always a matter of vigorous ongoing contestation. Still, there remains a strong intuition in our society's collective moral psychology that responsibility is somehow deeply connected to free choices. Indeed, we might not be able to make sense of ourselves as selves without feeling justified in claiming responsibility first and foremost for what we perceive to be our own free choices. The potential that the Causal Thesis may be true - that some weak form of determinism obtains - does not deter us: to reinforce our aspiration for free will, we tend to design our punitive policies and moral practices of praise and blame consistent with it, in spite of our failure to have a clear faith that our institutions contribute to members' true freedom. We do this, some would argue, to retain the basic connection of responsibility to choice; the business of apportioning responsibility somehow seems manageable, justifiable, and legitimate if it is tied to choice. Accordingly, even many determinists among us are compatibilists. Here, I make an effort to think hard about the purported connection between responsibility and choice - and try to avoid the seduction of voluntarism. I build from the work of Meir Dan-Cohen, who has done the most to develop a theory of responsibility unmoored from choice. In the process, I touch upon love and creativity, two areas of social life that provide a window into a different conception of responsibility that can be used to guide our practices of praise and blame in morality, the criminal law, and torts.

Decentralization and Democracy in Latin America

When the Spanish invaded the Inca empire in 1532, the cult of the ancestors was an essential feature of pre-Columbian religion throughout the Andes. The dead influenced politics, protected the living, symbolized the past, and legitimized claims over the land their descendants occupied, while the living honored the presence of the dead in numerous aspects of daily life. A central purpose of the Spanish missionary endeavor was to suppress the Andean cult of the ancestors and force the indigenous people to adopt their Catholic, legal, and cultural views concerning In her book, Gabriela Ramos reveals the extent to which Christianizing death was essential for the conversion of the indigenous population to Catholicism. Ramos argues that understanding the relation between death and conversion in the Andes involves not only considering the obvious attempts to destroy the cult of the dead, but also investigating a range of policies and strategies whose application demanded continuous negotiation between Spaniards and Andeans. Drawing from historical, archaeological, and anthropological research and a wealth of original archival materials, especially the last wills and testaments of indigenous Andeans, Ramos looks at the Christianization of death as it affected the lives of inhabitants of two principal cities of the Peruvian viceroyalty: Lima, the new capital founded on the Pacific coast by the Spanish, and Cuzco, the old capital of the Incas in the Andean highlands. Her study of the wills in particular demonstrates the strategies that Andeans devised to submit to Spanish law and Christian doctrine, preserve bonds of kinship, and cement their place in colonial society. Rapid and widespread death decimated the descendants of the Inca Empire, but the mere number of the dead does not tell the story. Rather, Ramos brilliantly demonstrates that, beginning with the execution of Atahualpa, death and the dead were one of the great colonial sites of ongoing contestation about both the here and now and the hereafter. In an exquisitely researched study, Ramos traces the shift from pre-Columbian to colonial Andean funerary rituals and the differing ways that they became the center of how 'Andeans and Europeans communicated and exchanged their visions of power and the sacred,' in a true dance of death. --Thomas B. F. Cummins, Harvard University Death and Conversion in the Andes is a highly innovative study that looks at the conquest period in a new light. By analyzing how the conception of death and death rituals changed during the early colonial period, Gabriela Ramos is able to gain many new insights into how the conquest modified indigenous beliefs. For those interested in ethnohistory and the effects of colonialism in Spanish America, this is a must read. --Erick D. Langer, Georgetown University

Multilateral Cooperation and Peace and Security

MULTILATERALISM IN AN AGE OF EMPIREThe case for Canada persevering with multilateral system, in face of American disposition to act unilaterally, can be made in four points, as follows:* US is undoubtedly most powerful country ever seen and will remain so for any reasonably foreseeable future, but most Americans are little interested in empire or even domination and, in any case, as is evident in Iraq, US power does not create its own reality;* Canada should cooperate actively in defence of North America but should take care not to further identify itself with an American foreign policy that is estranging US from much of rest of world and endangering Americans in process;* multilateral cooperation will continue because there is no satisfactory alternative; and,* multilateral system, nevertheless, needs both renovation and innovation and promoting such reform ought to be major Canadian foreign policy priority.THE UNITED STATES: EMPIRE, HEGEMON, OR WHAT?To discuss multilateral reform it is necessary also to discuss US attitudes and policies that affect that reform. A fundamental question at beginning of this new century, in wake of 9/11, is whether US will be with international community or against it. Will other countries be able to work with United States in larger, common interest, or have to work around it? Will United States be subject of multilateral cooperation or object of it (not in sense of facing coalitions that will seek to balance American power, although that, too, is imaginable if United States were further to ignore international law and to show no decent respect to opinions of mankind)?1 We live in an increasingly globalized, integrated, interdependent world that requires cooperative management to function effectively and no single country, not even United States, has capability to run alone even if it wants to. Happily, notwithstanding aspirations of few hard-headed, soft-handed Washington consultants and commentators, misplaced Canadian speech writers, and other vicarious imperialists, there is scant evidence that most Americans want to.While empire debate is back, mostly among academics, it is difficult to make argument persuasively that US is an empire in any conventional meaning of word, i.e., a large state or group of states under single sovereign.2 Since UN charter proscribed the threat or use of force against territorial integrity or political independence of any state,3 and since last vestiges of colonialism largely disappeared in 1950s and 1960s, few countries have even contemplated conquest of others and still fewer have attempted it, although admittedly some might argue that that is what happened in Iraq.Most basically, if America is an empire, who are its subjects, and why are they not obeying? The extent of cooperation with US in war in Iraq, or its aftermath, is hardly consistent with coercive imperial power. Although Canada is arguably most likely candidate for domination (more than 80 percent dependent on US market for its prosperity, as doom-and-gloom, trade-policy-is-foreign-policy, integrate-or-die school never tires of reminding Canadians), it never felt coerced to sign up for war.Whatever outcome of ongoing contest over levers of American policy, power of American liberal values and scope and speed of modern communications preclude kind of brutality used to build empires in past. Tactics used by British to subdue and control Mesopotamia, for example, would not be tolerated today in Iraq by American public or anyone else.4 There was no CNN or BBC World Report or al Jazeera in 1920s. Consider global-not least American-outrage over Abu Ghraib or American decision not to destroy Fallujah and Najaf. Nor would even British objectives in Mesopotamia-economic self-aggrandizement-be acceptable these days by much more aware and integrated international community. …

Contesting remembering and forgetting: the archive of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

After sketching a context of remembering and forgetting in apartheid South Africa, this article overviews the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as process and goes on to examine the TRC as archive. Records of the TRC and public access to these records as well as records about the TRC are discussed. Concerns about future scenarios of custody, preservation and access are raised. The dynamic relationship between remembering, forgetting and imagining must be given space, and measures that limit the ongoing contestation of meaning must be resisted. (Innovation: 2002 24: 1-8)

Legal Engineering

Recently, in the case of Kumho Tire Co v. Carmichael, the US Supreme Court revisited the seminal Daubert judgment, and the meaning of the Federal Rules of Evidence (1975) when considering the appropriate admissibility standard for non-scientific expert evidence in US federal courts. This article examines the Kumho decision in relation to the evolving US federal jurisprudence surrounding the admission and use of expert evidence. In particular, inter-related representations of law, science and engineering, the jury, expertise, and the social costs of litigation, derived from amicus curiae briefs and briefs submitted on behalf of each of the parties, are contrasted with the eventual judgment in an attempt to map some of the social contours informing the decision. As part of an ongoing contest, the case of Kumho is interpreted as the latest in a series of judgments generally favourable to corporate defendants aspiring to raise the standard for the admissibility of expert evidence through strategically adumbrated images of evidentiary reliability, concerns about jury competence, and the prevalence of so-called `junk science'.

A Gulf of Difference: Disputes over Gulf War-Related Illnesses

The social discovery of Gulf War-related illnesses, like other occupational and environmental disease, is firmly rooted in ongoing disputes over causation. Pressure from veterans groups, as well as intra-governmental disputes, have driven innovative research directions and challenged the dominant epidemiological paradigm. This dominant epidemiological paradigm was originally a position that viewed stress as the primary causal factor. In the emerging dominant epidemiological paradigm, researchers view veterans' symptoms as similar to other multi-symptom diseases and conditions, but with a firmer respect for the reality of those symptoms. In addition, some researchers pursue interactions between stress and physical exposure. We examine the evolution of the DEP to demonstrate that in many disease disputes, an affected population challenges government and science decision-making, and even ways of knowing, in an attempt to negotiate a disease definition and etiology that results in better treatment and prevention. After considerable research effort, only limited evidence has been found for environmental causation, and even many researchers sympathetic to veterans are doubtful that much more will be found. We analyze the social discovery and ongoing contestation of these illnesses, and the consequent effects on health and public policy. For extension to other disease disputes, we provide an overall model of disease discovery and contestation, examining the key forces of government, science, and citizens.