Past Debates Research Articles

Dark tourism geographies: ontological, epistemological and axiological perspectives

In this state-of-the-art review, we provide an overview of past debates and current trends in dark tourism geographies, and conceptually examine its theoretical intersections with critical issues, emerging ideas, paradigmatic progress and future research directions from three perspectives: ontological, epistemological, and axiological. Axiological trends and concerns in dark tourism geographies involve: the absence of cultural humility; the ‘digital turn’; and intersections between entertainment and education. Onto-epistemological observations include: the gap between theory and praxis; a reluctance to engage with real and pragmatic issues of contemporary social, political and environmental importance; and the growing use of new materialist perspectives demonstrating the potential for an interdisciplinary and changing assemblage within geography that goes beyond traditional anthropocentric views of place. Finally, we suggest that dark tourism, as a field, must include pluriversal, polyvocal and transformative possibilities and embrace the fuzziness, mobility, and fluidity of its boundaries.

The Status Quo of the English Past-Tense Debate

The Status Quo of the English Past-Tense Debate

Race, Medieval Studies, and Disciplinary Boundaries

Abstract Debates in medieval studies about race and the global Middle Ages parallel past debates in comparative literature. Both comparative literature and medieval studies struggle with their Eurocentric origins while simultaneously trying to negotiate a non-Eurocentric approach to their respective disciplinary boundaries. While trying to globalize medieval studies, medievalists have remained in disciplinary silos, especially in regard to a transnational and transtemporal understanding of race. This article's author argues that a comparative approach to periodization, rather than holding onto a concept of the “medieval,” is a more productive way to understand premodern race.

Settlement and Territories: Early and Middle Saxon Settlements and the Antiquity of Hundreds in Suffolk

ABSTRACT Despite the past debate surrounding the relationship between sites of Early and Middle Anglo-Saxon activity and parish boundaries, the relationships between Anglo-Saxon settlements, cemeteries and the boundaries of larger territorial units, particularly hundreds, remains little explored. This article investigates the important association between Anglo-Saxon settlements and hundred boundaries using data from the Suffolk Historic Environment Record (HER) and Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS). It is argued that the relationship between Early and Middle Saxon settlements and hundred boundaries is variable, a pattern which may be associated with the differing origins and character of individual or groups of hundreds. This observation offers a method for distinguishing those hundreds that once formed post-Roman folk territories from those which were laid out later.

Influence via Ethos: On the Persuasive Power of Reputation in Deliberation Online

Deliberation among individuals online plays a key role in shaping the opinions that drive votes, purchases, donations, and other critical offline behavior. Yet, the determinants of opinion change via persuasion in deliberation online remain largely unexplored. Our research examines the persuasive power of ethos—an individual’s “reputation”—using a seven-year panel of over a million debates from an argumentation platform containing explicit indicators of successful persuasion. We identify the causal effect of reputation on persuasion by constructing an instrument for reputation from a measure of past debate competition and by controlling for unstructured argument text using neural models of language in the double machine-learning framework. We find that an individual’s reputation significantly impacts their persuasion rate above and beyond the validity, strength, and presentation of their arguments. In our setting, we find that having 10 additional reputation points causes a 31% increase in the probability of successful persuasion over the platform average. We also find that the impact of reputation is moderated by characteristics of the argument content, in a manner consistent with heuristic information processing under cognitive overload. We discuss managerial implications for platforms that facilitate deliberative decision making for public and private organizations online.This paper was accepted by Anandhi Bharadwaj, information systems.Funding: This research was supported in part by the University of Wisconsin Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and by the Carnegie Mellon University Graduate Student Assembly and Provost’s Office. Computing support was provided in part by the Social Science Computing Cooperative at the University of Wisconsin Madison.Supplemental Material: Data and the online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4762 .

Editorial: encounters with Western media theory

Beginning in 2020, the Crosscurrents section of this journal featured 10 provocative essays on the theme of “Encounters in Western Media Theory.” These essays stemmed from scholars’ engagements with various canonical texts in media, cultural, and communication studies that took the Anglophone Global North as a taken-for-granted site for making sweeping theoretical claims. In this editorial, we reflect on the critiques and arguments that scholars have developed to move past debates about “internationalizing” and “de-westernizing” the field of media, communication, and cultural studies. Taken together, the essays published in this themed section grapple with the shifting terrain of academic knowledge production and the potential for redefining practices of reading, citation, and teaching.

Polymorphic justice and the crisis of international order

Abstract The post-1945 international order is in crisis, spurring a wide-ranging debate about its future in a period of rapid global change. A critical dimension of this crisis has been neglected by existing perspectives, however. At multiple levels the post-1945 international order is being challenged by claims of justice. Diverse actors criticize the order for its economic inequalities, social hierarchies, institutional unfairness, intergenerational inequities, and historical and epistemic injustices. This article, which serves as an introduction to a special section on ‘Injustice and the crisis of international order’ seeks to map and explicate this polymorphic politics of global justice. We begin by reviewing past debates about justice and order in world politics, highlighting their narrow and over-stylized engagement with justice politics. To fill this gap, we develop a typology of contemporary justice claims, differentiating between recognitional, institutional, distributive, historical and epistemic, and intergenerational claims. Our goal is not only to distinguish these distinct kinds of justice claims, however. We argue that justice claims are also intersectional, multiscalar and multivocal, with significant implications for how the relationship between justice and order is managed in contemporary world politics.

God in Motion: A Critical Exploration of the Open Theism Debate, ManuelSchmid, Baylor University Press, 2021 (ISBN 978‐1‐4813‐1408‐4), viii + 208 pp., hb $24.99

God in Motion: A Critical Exploration of the Open Theism Debate, ManuelSchmid, Baylor University Press, 2021 (ISBN 978‐1‐4813‐1408‐4), viii + 208 pp., hb $24.99

Might as Right? The Nature of Laws of War applicable to Targeting and Detention in International Armed Conflicts

Abstract Do laws of war applicable to International Armed Conflicts (iac s) authorize targeting and detention or do they simply regulate targeting and detention as an exercise of power in war by belligerents without providing authorization? This question has been the subject of debate in the recent past. The traditional understanding of laws of war, simply as a protective regime has come under increasing challenge from claims laws of war authorize targeting and detention in International Armed Conflicts. While these claims have mainly been made to establish in laws of war satisfaction for the requirement of Human rights law for a legal basis for targeting and detention, the transmutation of what in the perspective of laws of war is simply an exercise of power into legal permission has consequences beyond that relationship. It also impacts the relationship between laws of war and jus ad bellum, and more gravely it cloaks what is an otherwise exercise of brute power in war with the garb of legal competence. It transmutes what is simply might into right. The transmutation, re characterizes an iac from the perspective of laws of war as simply a fact, into its legal construct. Therefore, this paper interrogates the nature of the laws of war, to show they simply regulate targeting and detention in iac s without providing legal permission.

청년후계농사업 선정 농가의 가족기업농적 성격 고찰

Improving the agricultural manpower structure is an urgent issue in our agriculture. The Young Farming Project is a major project of the youth farmer support policy, targeting young farmers who want to start a new independent farming by further developing the existing succession farm selection project. In our laws and regulations, agricultural holdings are defined as farmers and agricultural corporations, and individual economic units, such as youth successors, are targeted for support. However, since there are various individual economic units within the agricultural holdings, it is necessary to try the business target from various angles in the policy project to introduce new farmers from the outside. In this study, the production unit called the young successor farm, which has the characteristics of the production unit called the family farm, is identified as an individual production unit called the farmhouse, and its characteristics are examined through the concept of the family farm business. In Korea, we are used to understanding family farm and corporate farm as opposite concepts, but in the West, family farm and corporate farm are no longer viewed as opposing concepts due to the past debate on the existence of family farm, and the focus is on how family relationships and business activities are regulated within the farmhouse. By understanding family farm through the concept of a family business, it will be possible to provide a richer perspective for policy improvement in the future.

Using animal history to inform current debates in gene editing farm animals: A systematic review

There is growing interest in gene editing farm animals. Some alterations could benefit animal welfare (e.g., improved heat tolerance in cattle with the “slick” gene), the environment (e.g., reducing methane emissions from cattle with induced pluripotent stem cells), and productivity (e.g., higher weight gains in cattle with the “double muscling” gene). Existing scholarship on the acceptability of such modifications has used myriad approaches to identify societal factors that shape the ethics and governance of this technology. We argue that integrating historical approaches—particularly from the relatively new and burgeoning field of animal history—offers a form of “anticipatory knowledge” that can help guide discussions on this topic. We conducted a systematic review of the animal history literature in English, German, and Spanish to identify the influence of political, scientific, economic, social, and cultural factors on the development and acceptance of such technologies. We identified analogous structures and fault lines in past debates about farm animals that provide insights for contemporary discussions about gene editing. Those analogous structures include the market power of meatpackers or the racialized precepts in livestock breeding, and fault lines, like the disconnect between states and citizens over the direction of food systems. Highlighting these similarities demonstrates how external forces have shaped—and will continue to shape—the acceptance or rejection of emerging biotechnologies as applied to farm animals.

Putting labour values to work

Abstract Conventional wisdom has it that Marxian value theory, and labour values themselves, are logically inconsistent, theoretically shaky, and empirically irrelevant. In this paper, we discuss recent research showing that this conclusion is not warranted. While past debates have definitively proved that labour values, or employment multipliers, cannot be used to explain equilibrium prices, this does not mean that a sound, empirically oriented Marxian approach cannot be built which assigns a central role to labour values. To be specific, we argue that they can be used to understand certain fundamental laws of capitalist economies – in particular the relation between profitability, technical progress, and accumulation – and also to construct normatively interesting indices capturing certain inequalities in well-being freedom.

Factors Affecting Physicians' Credibility on Twitter When Sharing Health Information: Online Experimental Study.

Largely absent from research on how users appraise the credibility of professionals as sources for the information they find on social media is work investigating factors shaping credibility within a specific profession, such as physicians. We address debates about how physicians can show their credibility on social media depending on whether they employ a formal or casual appearance in their profile picture. Using prominence-interpretation theory, we posit that formal appearance will affect perceived credibility based on users' social context-specifically, whether they have a regular health care provider. For this experiment, we recruited 205 social media users using Amazon Mechanical Turk. We asked participants if they had a regular health care provider and then randomly assigned them to read 1 of 3 Twitter posts that varied only in the profile picture of the physician offering health advice. Next, we tasked participants with assessing the credibility of the physician and their likelihood of engaging with the tweet and the physician on Twitter. We used path analysis to assess whether participants having a regular health care provider impacted how the profile picture affected their ratings of the physician's credibility and their likelihood to engage with the tweet and physician on Twitter. We found that the profile picture of a physician posting health advice in either formal or casual attire did not elicit significant differences in credibility, with ratings comparable to those having no profile image. Among participants assigned the formal appearance condition, those with a regular provider rated the physician higher on a credibility than those without, which led to stronger intentions to engage with the tweet and physician. The findings add to existing research by showing how the social context of information seeking on social media shapes the credibility of a given professional. Practical implications for professionals engaging with the public on social media and combating false information include moving past debates about casual versus formal appearances and toward identifying ways to segment audiences based on factors like their backgrounds (eg, experiences with health care providers).

A more global urban studies, besides empirical variation

An expanded set of sites, a more differentiated set of references and linguistic diversification have been discussed as needed changes in urban studies. The critiques of the limitations of urban studies, in terms of both the scholarship and the scholars, offer important and concrete responses to expanding the scope of the field. Yet this tremendous special issue on ‘Comparative Methods for Global Urban Studies’ with 10 papers cutting across a range of sites and topics is decidedly not only about empirical variation; this is an important distinction worth drawing more attention to. The creativity expressed in these papers comes at an auspicious time in urban studies where new routes for doing urban theory are needed to move past debates about singular versus plural epistemologies of the urban. As a kind of research that demands more translation, exchange and collaboration, perhaps comparative urban research as a mode of theory-building can help to humble the chest-pounding, posturing, privilege of thinking and speaking the language of theory. The theoretical ambitions of these very different papers show how urban theory need not only be about better understanding urbanisation within the epistemological confines of late capitalism. Rather than reifying a shared grammar of urbanisation as a necessity to understand each other, they may entice scholars everywhere to develop a broader vocabulary and perhaps even learn another language.

Leask, Nigel. Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour c. 1720–1830.

Leask, Nigel. <i>Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour c. 1720–1830</i>.

Economics as the scientization of politics

This paper uses Beck's concept of reflexive modernity, and a Foucauldian approach, to critique the positivist philosophy associated with contemporary conventional economics, and to show its inadequacy for the environmental emergency. The paper suggests economics is not neutral but performs an ideological function in justifying the political and social order. Economics can be deconstructed by tracing its history, thereby laying bare its philosophical and political roots. The environmental debate repeats past debates of the 1920s and 30s. By employing the 'subjugated' institutional economics approaches economics can be redefined, and the path to a truly Green New Deal can be unearthed.

Troubling solutions through anthropological fieldwork: Mediation research in Ghana, Australia, and the United States

Social workers and anthropologists encounter different representations of mediation as a professional practice: On the one hand, Social Work is grounded in mediation as expert knowledge that helps others to resolve interpersonal disputes. For example, mediation as Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) can enable court cases to resolve without formal trials. On the other hand, Anthropology is grounded in mediation as a research field site and by past intervention experience of anthropologists. As mediation professionalized and became mandated across public institutions, anthropologists became strong ADR critics. Academic debate between mediation proponents and critics ended as critics abandoned research in the 1990s and 2000s. My initial research goal was to pick up from past empirical study. Research was conducted in Australia, Ghana, and the United States in two areas of mediation practice; resolving parenting disputes between adults who are separating or not married, and “elder mediation” cases involving older adults. Initial findings reified past debate through data that supported proponents and critics. Further insight was gained through return to fieldwork using an expanded, ethnographic case study design. This article provides a journey through a seemingly intractable divide that was ultimately resolved through prolonged time in fieldwork focused on understanding client perspectives. I show how social work and anthropology scholars of professional mediation have been positioned on opposite sides of an expert knowledge/fieldwork research boundary. This boundary can be made productive through open exchange about mediation as a practice that evolves through an interplay of expert knowledge, intervention practice, and client engagement.

An Analysis of the Monetary Transmission Mechanism of M&amp;A, Greenfield FDI, Domestic Investment, and GDP Per Capita Growth: The Structural Vector Correction Model in Indonesia

Purpose: The study aims to evaluate the different implications of mergers and acquisitions (M&amp;A) and Greenfield foreign direct investment in the transmission mechanism effects on the growth of gross domestic product per capita (GDP per capita) in Indonesia. The origin of the study stems from past academic debates that contested whether Greenfield FDI or M&amp;A bear more effect on the economic growth in emerging markets.

The Oxymoron of Carbon Dioxide Removal: Escaping Carbon Lock-In and yet Perpetuating the Fossil Status Quo?

There appears to be a paradox in the debate over carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies. On the one hand, CDR is recognised as a crucial technical option to offset residual carbon emissions from fossil fuel use, so that it can help a transition to the net-zero energy system. But on the other hand, a serious concern is raised about CDR as a way to circumvent necessary emissions reduction, hence perpetuating the status quo of fossil fuel use. This apparent paradox of CDR, however, has less to do with technology itself but more with the difficulty to move away fromcarbon lock-in—the deeply entrenched fossil-fuel-based energy system. The challenge of decarbonisation is indeed about eroding the deep lock-ins that perpetuate the production and consumption of fossil fuels. To understand the role of CDR in overcoming carbon lock-in, looking back the past debate on carbon capture and storage (CCS) is instructive. Although both CCS and CDR are criticised for keeping the fossil status quo, there is a crucial difference between them. Unlike CCS, CDR can possibly avoid the risk ofreinforced lock-in, given its physical decoupling from fossil fuel use. And yet CDR has the risk ofundue substitutionthat continues unjustly fossil carbon emissions. A change of the framing question is thus needed to puzzle out the paradox of CDR. To rightly place CDR in the challenge of rapid decarbonisation, we should ask more how CDR technologies can be used in alignment with a managed decline to fossil fuel production.

A theory of integrated gendered work evaluation (IGWE): A gender analysis of the unequal race for leadership through work evaluation of satisfaction and stress in Europe

ABSTRACT This paper proposes the theory of integrated gendered work evaluation in public relations (IGWE). It holds that gender inequalities in the workplace are intrinsically linked to work-related evaluations, specifically measured through levels of satisfaction and stress. We theoretically place our proposal in the integrative phase of feminist theory that acknowledges the holistic nature of workers’ lives and their commitment to fulfill not only their worker or employer roles but also their commitments to family and communities. The empirical contribution of this paper builds on past debates from two decades ago: the need for research to isolate factors that perpetuate gender discrimination. It explores factors of gender inequalities and conflicts that can affect the work-related evaluation of those people who make up the majority of the industry’s employees: female public relations professionals. IGWE theory provides a new way of identifying, contextualizing, theorizing and analyzing how gender discriminations affect work evaluations combining both workplace and private life experiences from an integrated gender perspective.