Political Artifacts Research Articles

The Manganari's Legacy: an atlas of the Black Sea, Drawn from Nature

This article delves into the historical and cartographic significance of the Manganari Atlas, a monumental work that marked a pivotal moment in the maritime cartography of the Black Sea during the nineteenth century. Originating from the Russian Empire's strategic desire to enhance navigation and assert its presence in the Black Sea, the atlas represents not only a technical achievement in mapping but also a cultural and political artifact of its time. Through a meticulous analysis of the atlas, this study highlights the challenges encountered in its creation, the technical innovations employed, and the political motivations driving its development. The atlas is examined not merely as a collection of maps but as a synthesis of the cultural, linguistic, and geopolitical landscape of the era, reflecting the Russian Empire's aspirations. The panoramic images by Kukharevsky are particularly noted for their potential to aid in coastal geomorphological studies and the reconstruction of various geographical landscapes. The article also addresses the necessity of understanding the technical aspects of cartography for accurate analysis and comparison of historical maps.

Protest Anthems as Songs of Mourning: Feminist Activism Through Collective Expressions of Grief

This article explores the multifaceted role of protest anthems in social movements, emphasizing their dual function as powerful expressions and integral components of socio-political activism within the broader context of symbolic forms, political practices, and material realities, while acknowledging their potential to drive political change. The study examines three feminist protest anthems: Un violador en tu camino from Chile, Baraye from Iran, and Quiet from the United States, which have gained traction through social media platforms. The study draws on trauma, collective identity, and feminist solidarity to reveal the social and political landscapes in which these anthems emerged. It also examines the social wounds they mourn, the blend of verbal and non-verbal elements used to convey mourning and trauma, the collective responses they provoke, and their implications for communities. The article argues that feminist protest anthems are vital cultural and political artifacts that offer feminist collectives a means to address social injuries and their causes, fostering communities and catalyzing social change by invoking shared experiences of a painful past. Ultimately, these protest anthems are discursive practices promoting solidarity, mobilizing against prevailing discourses perpetuating societal injuries.

The Bible as Political Artifact: On the Feminist Study of the Hebrew Bible by Susanne Scholz, and: The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible by Susanne Scholz (review)

The Bible as Political Artifact: On the Feminist Study of the Hebrew Bible by Susanne Scholz, and: The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible by Susanne Scholz (review)

Does Cultural Pluralism Matter? Views from Experts Involved in the Production of Accounting Textbooks

Objective –The paper seeks to evaluate the perceptions and attitudes of individuals involved in the production of accounting textbooks about providing cultural pluralism in the textbooks.Methodology –This paper used semi-structured interviews with key actors of accounting textbook production, including translators, independent reviewers, adaptors, authors and commissioning editors. With one exception, all interviewees are also academics at universities. Results –The paper finds that accounting textbooks are cultural and political artifacts that reflect the the cultural, political, and ideological viewpoints of the powerful groups in the world. In other words, the textbook contents are the results of power domination. They have used accounting textbooks as powerful educational media to homogenise cultural and ethical values of accounting and accounting education to be solely based on Anglo-American capitalism. This has greatly affected the professionals involved in the textbook production. Therefore, it is not an urgent matter for them to incorporate diversity of perspectives into accounting textbooks used in Indonesia.Novelty/Originality –Although accounting research has explored the issues of accounting textbooks, such as the readability, price, selection, and use, studies that consider the political and cultural role of accounting textbooks especially from the perspective of individual involved in the textbook production are still scant. In particular, there is no research in Indonesia that presents the views of people who produce accounting textbooks regarding the content of their textbooks.

Moral panics, sexuality and childhood: the manufacture of the “kit gay” as a political artifact in the 2018 presidential dispute from the social media Twitter

Resumo A partir da análise da fabricação e circulação da materialidade do “kit gay” na rede social Twitter no contexto das eleições presidenciais de 2018, o artigo aborda a força afetiva e política do discurso de proteção à infância contra perigos sexuais na produção de um pânico moral. Argumenta que, ao articular eficazmente as cruzadas anti-pedofilia e antigênero, o “kit gay”, entendido como artefato político e categoria de acusação, produziu efeitos decisivos na arena política brasileira contemporânea.

Decolonizing Spanish: Ladino and Chavacano as Sites of Global Hispanophonia

The current institutional attempts by the Cervantes Institute of Manila and the Spanish Royal Academy of Tel Aviv to revitalize Chavacano and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), respectively, by assimilating them into Spanish pose a fundamental paradox: how can the official institutions of the Spanish language document, map, and characterize the subalternized speaking communities of the “Global Hispanophone” (Calderwood) while resisting the temptation to impose a neocolonial agenda on their cultural sovereignty?  (DeGraff; Deumert et al.) Drawing upon an understanding of languages as cultural and political artifacts, in this essay I will first discuss the “modern” colonial invention of Spanish as a North Atlantic universal (Trouillot 2002) and the subsequent development of the pan-Hispanic and Hispanophone linguistic ideologies in postcolonial times (Del Valle). My historiographical critique of “Global Spanish” from the peripheral perspectives of Ladino and Chavacano will expose both the discursive enthronization of Castilian into “(Global) Spanish” and the century-long pejoration of Ladino and Chavacano as processes motivated by ideological factors, rather than structural (morpho-syntactic) aspects. I will conclude that a genuinely decolonizing dynamic cannot accept any form of linguistic re-Hispanicization premised on the supposed unsuitability of Ladino and Chavacano for contemporary purposes. Rather, it can only materialize through the implementation of linguistic self-determination and self-organization, both of which are predicated on the self-respect and dignity of their community of speakers.

The “Black Art” Renaissance:African Sculpture and Modernism Across Continents

The “Black Art” Renaissance:African Sculpture and Modernism Across Continents

The Politics of Calendars: State Appropriations of the Contested Iranian Past

This paper seeks to investigate how commemorative practices, rituals, and holidays are invented, deployed, and recast for political and ideological purposes, to reinforce and sustain a particular narrative of national identity. It argues that the choice of particular moments of a country’s past to be commemorated in calendars as national holidays and the way in which the collective past is preserved and remembered both reflect and articulate a country’s vision of its present essence, of who its people are. Recognizing the link between the collective memory and national identity, the Iranian states before and after the 1979 revolution made a special effort to articulate their narrative of the past by commemorating a particular set of holidays and rituals. Viewing the calendar as a political artifact, this paper compares changes in the Iranian national calendars in the Pahlavi era (1925–1979) and the Islamic Republic (1979–2018). It examines the inclusion of new religious holidays and the removal of national days associated with the monarchy as well as the assignment of new meanings and celebratory practices to the old ones as the signifiers of a political maneuver to articulate a new shared public memory and narrative of identity since the 1979 revolution. It then examines two nationwide celebrations before and after the 1979 revolution, representing two state-sponsored, competing narratives of Iranian identity: firstly, the 2500-year celebration of the Persian Empire in 1953, and, secondly, the Ashura commemoration, a religious gathering dedicated to the remembrance of Shia Imams. These commemorations provided the state a unique political opportunity to present its own appraisal of the past and, in turn, national identity.

Langdon Winner’s Intellectual Trajectory and Political Engagement: A Latin-American Perspective from Ecuador

In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Langdon Winner was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Sharon Traweek. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. This response to Winner’s Bernal lecture considers his legacy beyond the US. The author traces Winner’s influence in Ecuador and Latin America more generally through a tracing back of Winner's politea which draws on Plato’s technē as a model for understanding inherently political artifacts.

Dark

Dark

From Emergency to Emergence: re-think design approach in a transition age.

This position paper look at the COVID-19 pandemic human condition that arises with fundamental conversations about design as a fluid social, cultural, and political artifact. The aim of our position comes from the necessity of consider some concepts to analyse epistemic and ontological consequences of the pandemia in the field of design research. There is no question about the huge impact of pandemic disease on the planet. On the other hand, terms as environment, digital, hyperobjects have already deeply changed our perception of the reality, our daily life, our behaviours. Rather than an emergency to be responded to quickly, the virus is here intended as an opportunity to let problems and solutions already in place for some time, aware that it is not life that has changed after the pandemic, but the most accurate perception we have of it.

Constructing Cost of Living Indexes

This article examines the first two estimates of the Argentine cost of living index, focusing on their producers, Alejandro Bunge and José Figuerola. The Bunge index, released in 1918, did not hold as a stable social and political artifact because it lacked legitimacy in the eyes of many sectors of society. This was a consequence of Bunge’s personal connections, and of the close relationship between the index and Bunge and between the index and his macroeconomic vision, which differed from that of the economic and political elite. The trajectory of the second estimate, released in 1935 by the National Labor Department, highlights the importance of the working class as a social actor in fostering the adoption of the cost of living index. The legitimacy of the National Labor Department’s index was enhanced by the connections between Figuerola and the International Labour Organization. The contrast between the two histories suggests that for a cost of living index to hold as a stable social and political artifact during the first half of the twentieth century, a connection between the index and industrial relations had to exist. In particular, the index should contribute toward the formation of the working class as a visible object for policy intervention.

Economic statistics as political artefacts

Macroeconomic statistics simultaneously shape and try to capture the political economy we study. Their biases mold social and political dynamics; they also infect academic and policy analysis. Political economy can both benefit from and advance an understanding of economic statistics as political artefacts. To help unlock that potential, this article builds on scholarship dispersed across disciplines and highlights three points. First, a binary debate that either acclaims or vilifies economic data is misdirected. Indispensable for public policy, quantification is neither good nor bad per se; the question is what its specific ramifications are. Second, macroeconomic statistics have been built around an ideal of white male factory work for wages. The further economic activity is removed from that image, the more statistics misrepresent or ignore it, with systematic biases as a result. Third, the real-world impact of statistics always depends on how they are understood, used, and subverted. It hinges on statistical practices, not just on abstract measurement approaches. As political economists we are political agents when we define, and reproduce, our object of study. We face both an analytical and a normative imperative to work with and towards statistics that do justice to the world and the people in it.

Antes o mundo não existia: imaginário das línguas e livros de autoria indígena

Ainda que permaneça demasiadamente aberta a pergunta sobre o que seja um livro indígena (seja pela presença indígena como tema, autoria, personagem, etc), tais livros ocupam cada vez mais a cena literária brasileira. É sabido que apenas a partir do final da década de 1970, a figura do autor indígena surge no mercado editorial brasileiro. A literatura de autoria indígena, registrada e transmitida por meio de livros, como ato político, tradutório e (inter)cultural por excelência, permite-nos pensar a escrita literária como índice identitário, isto é, como construção de imagem de si e como abertura ao outro, como relação? Por essa via, propomos a leitura dos livros de autorias indígenas, como ato performático que deseja dialogar de modo emancipatório com uma comunidade de leitores, em meio a diferenças culturais irredutíveis e em meio à invenção de regimes discursivos heteróclitos, verbais e visuais. No momento em que a pergunta sobre a autoria indígena parece se colocar, por fim, como uma questão histórica irredutível a ser enfrentada pela crítica literária e/ou cultural, uma outra pergunta também emerge (parece retornar), ainda mais radical: o que nos traz um livro quando se torna um artefato poético e político, dispositivo epistêmico, produzido pelas mãos de comunidades de tradição oral? O livro, talvez assim, possa ser compreendido como poética insurgente, como dispositivo, para afirmação de identidades culturais contra hegemônicas.

Digital protest in Singapore: the pragmatics of political Internet memes

This article investigates the use of Internet memes as political protest in Singapore. The proliferation of political memes after the controversial 2017 Singapore presidential election was curious, considering the government’s strict policies in regulating discourses both online and offline. By analyzing memes that circulated after the election, this article examines how the aesthetic form of political Internet memes intersects with current communicative ideologies to disperse their authorship, thereby allowing Singaporeans to communicate political dissent indirectly in ways that can always be subsequently disavowed as humor. In particular, the political productiveness of memes stems from their ambivalent status, as they are capable of being evaluated according to two competing ideologies centered on two intensional prototypes: first, of memes as political artifacts; second, of memes as humorous artifacts. Empirically, this article builds on existing digital media scholarship by demonstrating the need to factor language and media ideologies into analyses of digital media.

Rethinking performativity: ethnographic conceptualism

ABSTRACT Ethnographic conceptualism takes its cue from conceptual art and uses artistic interventions as an anthropological research tool. The term ‘ethnographic conceptualism’ was coined to sum up the method of the exhibition project Gifts to Soviet Leaders (Kremlin Museum, Moscow 2006) as simultaneously a reflection on the vast and complex economy of public gifts to heads of Soviet state, a distinctly post-Soviet political and cultural artefact, and as a tool for ethnography of post-socialism. This article explores ethnographic conceptualism’s contribution to performativity theory. I look at how it makes visible the tension between what such projects perform and describe. In doing so, I use ethnographic conceptualism as a vantage point to revisit the foundational distinction of performativity theory between the constative and performative statements (Austin). Drawing in this artistic and research method, I redefine the performative, not as a domain or a type of utterance that is distinct from the constative, but as an act of drawing this distinction.

Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll

Reviewed by: Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll Karida L. Brown (bio) Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. By Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. (Morgantown, West Virginia University Press, 2019. Pp 432. $99.99 cloth; $28.99 paper; $28.99 ebook) “The function, the very serious function of racism is a distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” –Toni Morrison, “A Humanist View,” (1975) Our late American Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning author and social critic Toni Morrison summed up the crux of the issue in the quote above. In shorthand, “racism is a distraction.” So too, are the longstanding tropes that have for nearly two centuries had a stronghold [End Page 203] on Appalachia—who it is and who it can be, what it is, and why. The arbiter of these readily available insidious scripts usually comes in the form of some out-of-town representative who gets passed the bullhorn by the publishing industry to “re-discover” the region anew and to translate its elusive meaning to a mainstream outside audience. This time around, he came as a hybrid. A second-generation child of eastern Kentucky migrants, a young man who grew up in a working-class town in Ohio but was raised up off-and-on by his grandma in the hollers of Jackson, Kentucky; a person who was in it, but not of it. His name, this time around, is James David Vance. He has come to us as the twenty-first century reincarnate Pied Piper of Appalachian Distraction. In most cases, the most powerful response to such tropism is silence. Not because those in room who are being caricaturized, whether for profit or for political gain, have nothing to say about these trite proclamations, but instead because we are too busy doing our work to put our precious words, art, and poetry in service of a distraction. There are, however, always exceptions. Once every blue moon some production emerges within the mainstream media that is so penetratingly egregious that it requires nothing less than a chorused response. Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll’s edited volume Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy does just that. The book is organized in two sections: part one, “Considering Hillbilly Elegy,” comprised of contributions responding to J. D. Vance’s book, and part two, “Beyond Hillbilly Elegy,” which consists of a collection of original essays, poems, and images by Appalachian writers and artists. Together these contributions serve as a powerful multi-vocal response from forty-four of our most lauded Appalachian creatives to the monolithic tropology that is Hillbilly Elegy. Read together, the pieces in the first part of Appalachia Reckoning push the reader to critically examine the institutional that ensures Appalachia will remain the poor white inherently debased “Other” in the popular imagination. What is Appalachia? Really, what is it as a place, a [End Page 204] metaphor, and a political artifact? Who are the actors who contribute to the production of knowledge about a place? How does power circulate through this industry to render some, like Vance, an authority, and others as of little consequence to the conversation? The inner-workings of these sleights-of-hand have been exposed time and time again, however, when a Pied Piper comes back into the midst, the work of the Appalachian creative is to clap-back. That is our responsibility. Please allow me to whet your appetite by briefly highlighting some of the volume’s pieces. In the opening essay “Hillbilly Elitism”, historian T. R. C. Hutton deals with the question of who Hillbilly Elegy was written for. Surely not with the people that it represents, but for...

Committing to human rights in Australia’s corporate sector

ABSTRACT This paper draws on data collected from ASX 50 listed corporations. As the UNGP makes clear a visible and accessible policy commitment is the most basic form of recognition that corporations can afford to human rights under the schema it offers. The paper takes the position that this policy commitment gives corporations a chance to declare a positive relationship with human rights. The presence or not of a policy statement, and the form that the statement takes, tells us much about the relationship between the corporate sector in Australia and human rights. The data reveals a low prevalence of policy commitment across the largest publically listed corporations in Australia. The paper selects a range of variables against which to examine whether commitment occurs or not. The most significant factor that supports policy commitment is membership of human rights engaged global Business and Industry Non-Governmental Organisations (BINGOs). We might expect a rather stronger public commitment to human rights reflecting the position apparently taken by Australian corporations on other ESG standards. However this expectation has to be set against the absence of human rights discourse as a political and cultural artefact at the domestic level.

Political artefacts, aesthetics and heritage: the Valley of the Fallen

ABSTRACTWhen considering the values which define heritage, aesthetic value is usually one of the most important, nearly always linked to the idea of work of art and to concepts such as beauty or harmony. Furthermore, aesthetics and politics tend to be dealt with separately. However, the link between aesthetics and politics is key in order to manage the meaning of those artefacts made with the intention of altering the political environment (political artefacts), particularly when they could be (or when they have already become) heritage. This paper puts forward the idea that in order to fully comprehend the social effects of political artefacts, their relationship with aesthetics must be understood. The function of aesthetics in modifying the meanings and connotations of heritage, when the latter is considered to be negative from a socio-political point of view, is also examined. In order to exemplify this relationship between aesthetics and politics, the resignification of the Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caídos), the most iconic and important Francoist memorial in Spain, is discussed.

The Bible as Political Artifact: On the Feminist Study of the Hebrew Bible. By Susanne Scholz. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017. ix + 325 pages. $39.00.

The Bible as Political Artifact: On the Feminist Study of the Hebrew Bible. By Susanne Scholz. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017. ix + 325 pages. $39.00.