Political Misrepresentation Research Articles

Deconstructing the urban viewpoint: Exploring uneven regional development with Nancy Fraser’s notion of justice

Uneven regional development fomented by city-centric growth agendas generates significant challenges for regional peripheries. Placing regional margins and other plural geographies at the centre, in this article we apply a normative framework based on justice theory to uncover the dominance of urban viewpoints in urban regional development policy. Departing from Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional justice theory, we provide a deconstruction of city-centrism by illustrating how regional disparities in two regions in Sweden are not only reproduced by economic maldistribution but also by political misrepresentation and cultural misrecognition. By doing so, we illustrate the fruitfulness of applying a normative justice framework to create a broader understanding of factors that contribute to the political production of uneven regional development and need to be addressed if a transformative and progressive change is to occur.

Pathologies of representation: Lungisile Ntsebeza on the political misrepresentation of rural South Africans

Lungisile Ntsebeza’s empirical work on rule and resistance in South Africa’s countryside has a subterranean philosophical seam. Implicit in both his historical studies and his contemporary fieldwork-based studies of rural conflict is a philosophical question: what constitutes adequate political representation? Ntsebeza’s work, exemplifying engaged scholarship, is rich in evaluative insights. But the conception of democracy which is his explicit evaluative yardstick is both too narrow and too indeterminate. It leaves no space for the crucial work of representation carried out by unelected non-governmental organisations and local organisations; and we are given no concrete detail about how participatory and representative democracy are to be integrated, as Ntsebeza insists they should be. Showing that his writings can be brought into conversation with approaches to political representation in contemporary political philosophy, this article argues that Ntsebeza’s evaluative work is most helpfully understood as identifying and diagnosing several pathologies of representation. Normative theory is often most constructive when it articulates distinctive types of system failure, rather than simply stating ideals. Each of the pathologies of representation recoverable from Ntsebeza’s analytical work is a recurring way in which rural South Africans have been politically misrepresented or otherwise inadequately represented – a type of flaw which all systems of representation must guard against.

Toward an Intersectional Approach to Health Justice.

Despite unprecedented global wealth creation, health inequity-the unjust health inequality between classes and groups among and within countries-persists, reviving the relevance of social justice as a lens to understand and as an instrument to intervene in these issues. However, the theoretical aspects and polysemous character of social justice as applied in the field of public health are often assumed rather than explicitly explained. An intersectional justice approach to understanding health inequality, inequity, and injustice might be useful. It argues that preexisting class-, race/ethnicity-, and gender-based health injustice and the socially differentiated impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are shaped, interconnectedly, by economic maldistribution, cultural misrecognition, and political misrepresentation. Pursuing health justice requires analyses, strategies, and interventions that integrate the economic, cultural, and political spheres of redistribution, recognition, and representation, respectively. Such an intersectional approach to health justice is even more relevant and compelling in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. This article is broadly about class, race/ethnicity, and gender political economy of public health-but with a narrower focus on maldistribution, misrecognition, and misrepresentation, shaping social and health injustices.

The Vehicle Gap: Wealth Inequality and Road Injury Risk Characterization in Vietnam

Road traffic injury (RTI) is a frequently overlooked issue in the literature of global health. This perspective examines the ways in which wealth inequality exacerbates RTI risk characterization in the specific model of Vietnam. The framework of the Equality-Sustainability Hypothesis, as suggested by Cushing et. al, is used, with a specific focus on three factors: political misrepresentation, discrepancy in consumption intensity, and lack of social cohesion. Policies regarding helmet coverage, healthcare infrastructure, road quality and social psychology are critically analyzed, with sources drawn primarily from epidemiological study designs. Such analyses provide the basis for various policy suggestions towards the end of the perspective that focus specifically on wealth inequality as the primary point of intervention. Overall, this perspective suggests that the Equality-Sustainability Hypothesis holds true in the example of RTIs in Vietnam, which is specifically referred to as a “Vehicle Gap”, and that this hypothesis be made more comprehensive by liberalizing its definition of environment to also include man-made infrastructure.

The Radical Right versus the Media: from Media Critique to Claims of (Mis)Representation

Criticizing mainstream media for their ‘lies’ or ‘fake news’ has become a common political practice on the radical right. Further empirical research is needed to better understand the intricacies of these attacks on media, in particular for the way they relate to criticism of the political system as a whole and to matters of political representation. How do radical right actors construct a sense of political misrepresentation through their critique of media, and how does this allow them to make representative claims? This is what we explore in this article through a discourse analysis of the Flemish radical right youth movement Schild & Vrienden. Drawing inspiration from constructivist theories of representation, we explore the entanglement in empirical practice between two dimensions of representation: 1) between its literal meaning (as ‘portrayal’) and its political meaning (as standing or speaking for), and 2) between representation and misrepresentation. With our analysis, we shed light on the increasing politicization of the media as a non-electoral space of representation and misrepresentation, and on the role played by media criticism in the radical right’s broader (meta)political strategies.

Social Injustice in Surveillance Capitalism

A rapidly accelerating phase of capitalism based on asymmetrical personal data accumulation poses significant concerns for democratic societies, yet the concepts used to understand and challenge practices of dataveillance are insufficient or poorly elaborated. Against a backdrop of growing corporate power enabled by legal lethargy and the secrecy of the personal data industry, this paper makes explicit how the practices inherent to what Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’ are threats to social justice, based on the normative principle that they prevent parity of participation in social life. This paper draws on Nancy Fraser’s theory of ‘abnormal justice’ to characterize the separation of people from their personal data and its accumulation by corporations as an economic injustice of maldistribution. This initial injustice is also the key mechanism by which further opaque but significant forms of injustice are enabled in surveillance capitalism—sociocultural misrecognition which occurs when personal data are algorithmically processed and subject to categorization, and political misrepresentation which renders people democratically voiceless, unable to challenge misuses of their data. In situating corporate dataveillance practices as a threat to social justice, this paper calls for more explicit conceptual development of the social harms of asymmetrical personal data accumulation and analytics, and more hopefully, attention to the requirements needed to recast personal data as an agent of equality rather than oppression.

Theorization, Harm, and the Democratic Imperative: Lessons from the Politicization of the Democratic-Peace Thesis

The migration of democratic-peace theory from academia to the American political arena resulted in misrepresenting the theory politically. Both the form and content of the political misrepresentation are different from those of the theory. It is argued here that rather, than the theory itself, it is its political misrepresentation that influenced public deliberation and the recent American efforts to democratize the Middle East. Thus, the inputs of theorizing the democratic peace are shown to cause political harms and policy mishaps. Identifying the harms, the mishaps and the theoreticians' indirect responsibilities for them, I conclude that theoreticians are ascribed with political responsi bility ensuing in a democratic imperative to show greater concern and involvement in the political destinies of their theories and to participate more actively in the public deliberations that shape policies. Nowadays, it is not rare to hear international relations (IR) scholars sneering at the democratic-peace thesis and blaming it and its proponents for the Iraq War. And to make matters worse, the problems of the war are taken to be the ultimate theoretical refutation of the thesis and to all practical?and theoretical?intents, democratic-peace theories are now seen by many as defunct. However, although my purpose is not to take sides in the theoretical debate on the validity of the thesis, I can safely argue?to paraphrase Mark Twain?that the reports of the thesis' demise are greatly exaggerated. The point is that this fashionable schol arly sneer has opened the door for a discussion of the theoreticians' responsibili ties for the real-life ramifications of their theories. Two kinds of responsibilities are mainly discussed here: The first is the political responsibility ensuing in a democratic imperative. The second is scholarly responsibility ensuing in a theo retical imperative. For different reasons, each of these responsibilities burden theoreticians with the imperative to show greater concern and involvement in the political destinies of their theories and to participate more actively in the public deliberations that shape policies.2 Although it may be argued that theory can benefit society and policy-making, the way theorization is conducted today causes two forms of political harm. The

Voices for the Voiceless: Testimonial Literature in Latin America

All forms of political domination depend on human construction of social and cultural differences among persons and peoples, for without differences there would be no basis for distinguishing those who wield power from those who are to it. The most potent political ideas about difference are those that are naturalized such that they seem to be created not by humans themselves but by nature. Such ideas are ideologically powerful because they assert that, for example, men are naturally superior to women or that white people are naturally superior to dark people. Such ideas justify conditions of domination that they reflect so that ideas dialectically create difference. Naturalized ideas are hegemonic to degree that they pervade different areas of culture from figures of speech to formal education, religion, law, and literature. Literature is usually produced by members of dominant classes in society who tend to represent and naturalize difference as it is seen from their social and cultural position. In colonial situations major authors tend to write not only from positions of class superiority but also from centers of empire. Writing from this skewed subject position within global context, such authors presume to represent to write about and to write for subaltern peoples who are relatively powerless to represent themselves either symbolically or by more immediate political means.' Such literature, as one of forms of cultural construction of difference, is better seen not as representation, but as an epistemological and political misrepresentation. From vantage point of late twentieth century it is easy to appreciate ideological dimensions of colonialism that flowed from quest for God, gold, and glory, or in words of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Bible,