Political Categories Research Articles

How Social Media Stigmatizes Substance Use: A Trend Analysis Examining a Politicized Visit to a Pediatric Hospital Unit

Social media has become a ubiquitous platform for language directly impacting women with opioid use disorder (OUD) and children with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). This study examines stigmatizing language applications related to OUD and NAS on Twitter during an event involving a political figure’s visit to a pediatric hospital unit. Analysis of N = 2,789 tweets across three stages of the event showed notable trends. Before the event, 56.07% of tweets focused on information sharing, while during and after the event, 22.64% and 20.69% of tweets were categorized as medically divisive and political. Chi-square analyses indicate significant differences in tweet categories, with the political category experiencing the most substantial increase during and after the event. Despite sharing information and opinions, stigmatizing language regarding NAS and OUD was pervasive. The researchers argue for more active involvement of healthcare professionals on social media to promote accurate information and advise patients on where to access supportive information and resources.

How to build an agribusiness giant: the role of rural extension services in Brazil during the 20th Century

In this article, we argue that Brazil’s ‘exporting vocation’ is not a natural tendency but the result of national political and economic projects aligned with the international context and external interests. To support this thesis, we reconstructed the trajectory of rural extension services during the 20th century in three distinct phases, according to the official philosophical and pedagogical perspectives adopted in each. Based on extensionist reports and an interdisciplinary bibliographical review, our objective is to present the sociopolitical and economic panorama along with the motivations, general characteristics, and consequences of the extension service in establishing Brazil as an agribusiness giant. We conclude that rural extension services assisted rural and agrarian development that favoured the agrarian elite in the concentration of land, resources, and knowledge. It also consolidated agribusiness as an intensely active political category at all levels of Brazilian government.

Heat and the city: Thermal control, governance and health in urban Asia

This special issue focuses on the under-studied but increasingly pressing issue of urban heat. Cities are getting hotter, both due to the global crisis of climate change, and the related phenomena of Urban Heat Islands, which locally amplify increased global temperatures and exposure to solar radiation. We know a great deal about how heat is affecting cities from a scientific and public health perspective. Urban studies scholarship, however, has been slower to foreground heat as a social, spatial, and political category of analysis, at least in comparison to discussions of carbon emissions and their control, energy and infrastructure, rising sea levels or flooding, and activism towards sustainability. While many of these themes also figure in this collection, our focus is on the varied phenomena of urban dwellers feeling, avoiding, suffering under, mitigating, culturally interpreting and attempting to anticipate and plan for, the reality of elevated air temperatures and solar radiation. What we call thermal control, governance, and health is the multi-level and multivalent social and material response to uncomfortable and potentially injurious temperatures, an elusive topic this special issue makes visible and constitutes what we hope will be an ongoing urban research agenda.

Displaced person(s): the production of a powerful political category

ABSTRACT Recent migration research suggests using “displaced persons” as a broader, more inclusive term than “refugees”, affording us an opportunity to recall the historical genesis and transformation of the concept of “displaced persons”. The concept emerged in the 1940s in the context of the control of forced migration. This article traces the evolution of the term “displaced person”, arguing it was created as a “category of action” for bureaucratic and political purposes, rather than to describe social realities. Understanding this historical context reveals more broadly how such categories have always been tools for political control, underscoring the need for reflexivity in migration studies.

The Politics of the Excluded: The Political Thought of Wong Chin Foo

This article examines the concepts of citizenship and exclusion in the writings of the nineteenth-century Chinese American figure Wong Chin Foo (1847–1898) and situates his works within the context of Chinese Exclusion in the United States. Against a backdrop of intensifying racial violence and legal and social exclusion, Wong repudiated racial stereotypes that were used to justify Chinese exclusion. He argued that the Chinese were culturally and morally distinctive but assimilable to American society. Central to his argumentative strategy was his critical reappropriation of the idea of the Chinese as unassimilable “heathens.” However, his conception of citizenship as conditional on “character and fitness” exposed the exclusionary nature of American citizenship and reinscribed its boundaries along racial and class lines. In treating Wong as a political thinker in his own right, this essay makes three contributions. First, it offers a historical elucidation of what Gordon Chang has called “the politics of the excluded.” Wong’s works show how central categories of politics and political thinking—like citizenship—are reconfigured by the very people those categories were designed to exclude. Second, this essay offers an alternative interpretive framework for reading texts within Asian American political thought and intellectual history. Finally, this essay forms a theoretical intervention by showing how Wong discloses the peculiarities of Asian American positionality in debates about racial citizenship in America.

John Adams – the American Cicero? From the Genealogy of Res Publica Americana

When creating a new republic, the Foundings Fathers deemed it necessary to become well versed in the lessons of history, in order to avoid the fates of previous republics. Above all other historical corollaries, Americans evoked the example of the republican Rome that had upheld a system of government that aspired to ordered liberty as supported by a mixture of public civic virtue and effective institutional design for nearly five centuries. The comparisons were possible because the American colonies had kept the grammar school system of education then common in England, giving all educated Americans a basic grasp of Cicero’s reputation and writings, who represented eloquence, moral virtue and hostility towards tyranny. He thus became a source of inspiration for the Founders, and John Adams directly considered himself an American Cicero. In the article, the authors try to answer the question about the legitimacy of such a position of the 2nd President of the US. To do this, they compare the basic political categories of Cicero and Adams, pointing out their similarities and differences. They also examine to what extent Cicero’s thought could be applied to the reality of the young American republic.

In-Between Categories: Documenting Greek Children’s Legal Belonging in the Suez Canal Region

This paper looks at the complex manner in which children were documented in Ottoman Egypt and their access to citizenship later in postcolonial Egypt. It discusses the making of social and political categories, like citizenship and statelessness, and how Greeks moved through those categories. This paper also analyzes how these categories were imposed, first by the Ottoman Empire and then by the Egyptian nation-state. The end of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, and the declaration of the Egyptian Republic in 1953, the Suez Crisis in 1956, the Arab-Israeli Wars in 1967 and 1973, and the new labor laws of the 1950s and 1960s, among other events, impacted Greeks and others who lived in Egypt at that time. The impact among Greeks in Suez Canal cities was particularly evident in the community’s cohesion, as most evacuated the cities in 1967 with almost everyone else following in 1973. These economic and political factors, and the social processes the community underwent, defined Greek children’s relation with the Egyptian postcolonial state.

Fair trade certification and class formation in Nicaragua’s coffee plantations

ABSTRACT Focusing on the first Fair Trade USA-certified coffee plantation in Nicaragua, this paper examines its overlooked effects on class formation among coffee workers. It first explores the type of workers the certification aims to shape; second, their impact on short-term material interests; and third, the emergence of a distinct class with a conscious understanding of their struggles. I show how, by emphasizing economic aspects, the certification oversimplifies the complex and antagonistic relationship between workers and landowners. I argue that the ‘market-driven’ class formation resulting from certification can hinder workers’ transition from a ‘class-in-itself’ (socio-economic category) to a ‘class-for-itself’ (political category).

In search of Zion: reconsidering the political category of Zionist utopias

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the so-called Zionist utopias in order to reconsider these unprecedented Jewish utopian novels, which arose in the late nineteenth century, from a different perspective to the canonical one that formed within the Zionist historiography of the 1940s. To do so, it examines the literary textual corpus and includes other new utopian sources that have not been considered thus far. It then offers a brief reconstruction of the rediscovery of this utopian imaginary by Zionist scholars. Finally, this article proposes a new historiographical interpretation based on the disjunction between dreaming of Zion and founding Israel in order to deconstruct the underlying Zionist teleological view and thus reconsider these utopias in the long history of Jewish emancipation.

Problematic aspects of the implementation of legal guarantees of human and citizen rights in Ukraine

The article describes the basic rights and freedoms of a person and a citizen, which are inalienable rights and freedoms enjoyed by a person from birth. They form the basis of the legal status enshrined in the state constitution and enjoy the highest legal protection. The most important and complex relations between people and the relations between the state and the person in legal form are regulated by formulating the rights, freedoms and obligations underlying the legal status of a person, which is one of the most important not only legal, but also juridical. also political categories. The most important features of the rights and freedoms of a person and a citizen are: naturalness, continuity, equality, social justification, respect for international standards, state guarantee. The problem of guaranteeing the rights and freedoms of a person by giving them a real character is not only of a practical nature. In the modern context of the development of the rule of law and civil society, it is important to develop a holistic scientific concept of human rights and freedoms, which covers a wide range of theoretical provisions regarding the essence and content of rights and freedoms, their structure and mechanism. Local self-government bodies play an important role in ensuring constitutional rights and freedoms. A real environment for the existence of human rights is possible in the conditions of a democratic state governed by the rule of law. Democracy, rule of law and human rights are inseparable. The rule of law is a guarantee of the reality of human rights in terms of protection from violations by the authorities, and human rights are the main condition and characteristic of democracy, the humanistic and human dimension of the rule of law. The article concludes that the basis of democracy in the state is the guarantee of the rights and freedoms of man and citizen by the Constitution of the state, not only formally, but also in practice. Therefore, taking into account the individual shortcomings of state bodies in regulating the system of human and citizen rights, the number of human rights organizations is growing day by day, both at the national and international levels. At the same time, the article concludes that it is impossible to build a legal state in a society with developed legal nihilism. And respect for the rights of society can be caused only by concern for the same rights of people and citizens.

What Is Colonialism? The Dual Claims of a Twentieth-Century Political Category

Although a master category of contemporary social and political thought, the conceptual import of colonialism has long been contested. Turning to the political thought of Jawaharlal Nehru, this article reconstructs the surprising, and often surreptitious, intellectual transformations that rendered colonialism into a generic name for European rule over Asia and Africa. It demonstrates how the dual claims of colonialism—a historical reference for the global event of European expansion and a threadbare analytical definition for a particular form of rule—generated a powerful framework in the anticolonial age. While the expanded juridical uses of colonialism in the Cold War era undermined its historical claims, the priority would reverse with its postcolonial re-signification as a shorthand for studying the paradoxes of global modernity. Reframing these debates, this article argues that reflexive navigation between the dual claims of colonialism is key to a capacious appreciation of its historical and normative contentions.

Contours of a Historical Materialist Theory of Transsexuality

This article proposes to engage with the etiological question haunting the transsexual subject as a sociogenic project of identifying and analyzing relevant problematizations of transsexuality. The article elaborates on the social contexts of the biomedical, sociological, and genealogical problematizations of transsexuality, critically assessing their onto-epistemic stances and political fields. Building on the limitations of these three problematizations, the article projects a fourth problematization drawing from Marxist-feminist approaches. To this end, it engages critically with four different conceptualizations of transsexuality in current trans Marxist debates and establishes the conditions for a distinct historical materialist problematization. Finally, the article puts forward a definition of transsexuality as a technology of containment of the possibility of gender mobility and ambiguity within the Western biopolitical generative dispositive in its functional relation to the capitalist mode of production. The containment works through the displacement of a structural conflict of social reproduction specific to the Western modern/colonial gender order to the interiority of the trans subject, ultimately foreclosing the possibility of the democratization of relations of procreation. Gender intransigence is proposed as an epistemic and political category for historical materialist problematization of transsexuality which can provide an alternative to the hegemonic framework of gender identity.

Historical Territorialization of Mining Companies in The State of Bahia

Purpose: This article proposes to develop a territorial, historical, dynamic, open and plural analytical framework, referring to mining companies operating in the State of Bahia. Theoretical Framework: Through socioeconomic, ecological and historical analyses, we clarify multiple relationships between past and contemporary facts, based on the theoretical and conceptual perspectives of the cartographic exercise of New Social Cartography, developed by professor Alfredo Wagner. Method: The methodological instrument is New Social Cartography, through which we seek to highlight companies, agents of mineral exploration, highlighting phenomena inherent to their activities. Using methods that involve the leading roles of communities in the construction of knowledge. Results and conclusions: We observed that in Bahia, as, generally speaking, in Brazil, sophisticated models of mining colonization were established, with embryonic approvals from the Kandir Law, one of the legal provisions that must be urgently questioned and repudiated, in the name of freedom and lives. Research implications: Exposure and elucidation of global policies involving mining processes, presenting a worrying dynamism, with major ruptures and structural transformations (economic, political, cultural and mental). Originality/value: we contrast political categories and reified legal norms, demystifying them, presenting immeasurable losses inherited by human populations, their sociocultural frameworks, living organisms and the abiotic environments of ecosystems.

Arguing Pakistan in Late Colonial India: The Political Thought of Shabbir Ahmad Usmani

Scholars of modern South Asia have remained divided on the role of religion in the creation of Pakistan. Many have argued that Pakistan's “founder,” Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was a secularist, his argument for Pakistan resting on an abstract notion of Islam within an Enlightenment framework of conceiving minority, nation, and state. Why, then, did madrasa-trained Muslim scholars, the ulama, support his demand for Pakistan? This article explores the political thought of the most influential Muslim scholar immediately before partition, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani (d. 1949). I argue that Usmani viewed Pakistan as a particular kind of Islamic democracy. While he drew on medieval Muslim juridical and political discourses, Usmani's readings reveal his debt to Western political categories. By paying attention to the tensions and opportunities offered by this encounter of modern political conditions with Islamic intellectual thought, this article outlines an Islamic vision of the political that resonates beyond the politics of colonial India.

La fraternidad: de principio olvidado a motor de las dinámicas sociales

In referring to freedom, equality, and fraternity, the triptych of the French Revolution introduced these principles into political categories. The history of the three has followed autonomous paths. Fraternity developed together with cristianitas, before freedom and equality reached maturity as categories, though. The development of the principles of freedom and equality occurred at the eclipse of fraternity. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights puts together the triptych once more and demands that we confront a catalog of unalienable and indisputable rights. For this purpose, it is necessary to submerge ourselves into fraternity roots and essence, which does not exclude conflict, but provides methods for overcoming or living healthily together with it.

Passive Citizenship: A Criteria for Denial of the Social Inclusion of Indigenous People in Angola in the Context of the Portuguese Estado Novo (1933-1974)

This article aims to understand the citizenship of the indigenous peoples of Angola in the Portuguese Estado Novo between 1933 and 1974. The main objective of this research, carried out in a philosophical approach of interdisciplinary relationships and analysis of contradictions, is to show how passive citizenship developed in Angola in the colonial context of the Portuguese Estado Novo, analyzing the reasons that contributed to certain political, legal and ideological discourses being a criterion for denying the social inclusion of indigenous Angolans. The methods used were genetic analysis, and the familiar analogy with hermeneutic and phenomenological methods, associated with qualitative theoretical research of a bibliographic nature that reveals the structured representation of the issue of citizenship in the context in question. The results obtained, through the analysis of theories, models and other sources of information, determine the validity of these instruments by indicating critical points coinciding with the confirmation that refers to the validity, in the Estado Novo, of social and political categories embodied in “ citizenship passive”, whose content is based on the civilizational mission as a criterion for the social inclusion of indigenous Angolans.

Public opinion risk perception of decision makers’ in transboundary watershed emergency water supply

ABSTRACT In recent years, the number of public opinion risks related to sudden transboundary drought events has continued to increase. Research on the perception of public opinion risks has become an indispensable and increasingly important part of emergency management research in transboundary watersheds. Based on relevant literature and interview materials, an exploratory theoretical construction was conducted using the grounded theory research method. The research results indicate that four main categories of public opinion risks, namely, political, economic, ecological and environmental, and socio-cultural, have a significant impact on the perception of public opinion risks among decision-makers in transboundary watershed emergency water supply. The formation mechanisms of decision-makers’ perception of public opinion risks vary in each of these four categories. This research not only enriches the relevant research on the influencing factors of decision-makers’ perception of public opinion risks in theory but also provides decision-making reference and guidance for transboundary watershed water resource management in practice.

The End of Liberal Peacebuilding

The End of Liberal Peacebuilding

Reframing nationalism and national identity in Anek

ABSTRACT Foregrounding Anubhav Sinha's Hindi mainstream film Anek (released on 27 May 2022), I will draw upon the discourses of nationalism and nation to examine the issues of separatist insurgency, violence, and militarization in the Northeast from the affective and performative lens in order to unsettle the reified categories of identity politics. As ‘nation-building' has important implications for nationalism and the nation-state, an attempt is made to map out the contours of the historical legacy of state formation in the Northeast India, which is characterized by ‘ethnic polities’ of Northeast groups with a connection to a real or imagined homeland, and the recurrent politics of subnationalism. Delineating the current scholarship on the relationship between hot and banal nationalism, an endeavour is made to offer new ways to understand insurgency and counter insurgency in the Northeast. Lastly, the paper explores how sports serve as a galvanizing force for mobilizing national identity and unity.

What Is the Nexus between Migration and Mobility? A Framework to Understand the Interplay between Different Ideal Types of Human Movement

Categorising certain forms of human movement as ‘migration’ and others as ‘mobility’ has far-reaching consequences. We introduce the migration–mobility nexus as a framework for other researchers to interrogate the relationship between these two categories of human movement and explain how they shape different social representations. Our framework articulates four ideal-typical interplays between categories of migration and categories of mobility: continuum (fluid mobilities transform into more stable forms of migration and vice versa), enablement (migration requires mobility, and mobility can trigger migration), hierarchy (migration and mobility are political categories that legitimise hierarchies of movement) and opposition (migration and mobility are pitted against each other). These interplays reveal the normative underpinnings of different categories, which we argue are too often implicit and unacknowledged.