Political Sense Research Articles

(Self) Critical Pedagogy: Performing Vulnerability to Teach STS in Singapore

As more and more STS positions open in different regions of the world, there is an increased transnational migration of scholars trained in one part of the world working in another. Yet, there is often little guidance for scholars on how to negotiate their positionalities in different cultural, political, and pedagogical expectations. In this essay, I reflect upon my three years at a major Singaporean institution of higher learning, teaching STS and social theory, by discussing how I articulated a fragmented identity and performed vulnerability through my different intersubjective roles—researcher, educator, mother, employer, Indian, American—to model the kind of critical thinking I wished my students to undertake. I focus on negotiating my American political sensibilities in the Singaporean context, when trying to teach race and technology in Singapore.

Saving Russia. Neorealist Theorists and the Interpretation of the Kremlin’s International Policy according to the Actor-Network Concept

The Russian-Ukrainian war of 2014–2024 and the destructive role of Russia negatively affects regional and global aspects of the life of peoples and states. It has created a threat of serious chaos in international relations. Russia’s aggressive policy has caused a crisis in world politics that even the great powers of today cannot overcome. The return to a new Cold War and the outbreak of a major war in Europe threatens the entire modern international system with dangerous turbulence. The purpose of the study is to analyze the concept of effectiveness and the role of influential international actors in the modern Russian-Ukrainian war in the field of actor-network theory. The research methodology is based on the principles of science, objectivity, historicism and the basic conceptual and theoretical provisions of the study of world politics and international relations. Actor-network theory was introduced by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour in the second half of the 1980s. In accordance with this theory, relations between participants are determined by the network itself and are marked by the intensity and orientation of the network of interactions. In the sense of international relations and world politics, this means that they are under the strong or even decisive influence of powerful international actors (big powers and flexible interstate coalitions). Russia is seen as one of the most influential international players or “core of localities” that interact. Accordingly, other influential international actors are very cautious about the complete break of relations with Russia; they do not consider the possibility of its complete defeat in the aggressive war against Ukraine. Such a position was reflected and substantiated in various theoretical approaches, examples of which are the ideas of neorealism representatives such as John Mearsheimer, Farid Zakaria and Henry Kissinger.

Social Media As An Online Public Sphere: A Study among the First-Time Malay Voters

In a developing democracy like Malaysia, social media is pervasive in its influence on politics and democratic processes, particularly among the youth. Social media promotes the expression of opinions among groups, thereby opening up the realm of the public sphere in a semi-democratic country like Malaysia. Unlike the original conception of the public sphere, social media consists of spaces where citizens belonging to different groups and cultures, speak in different registers or languages, finding meaningful participation. Based on online interviews with 44 first-time voters among the Malay youth group, this article investigates the aspects of the interaction between young voters and the social media “public sphere.” It examines the platforms they use to communicate about politics, how they make sense of politics, and how they interact with other citizens through social media. The findings reveal four prevalent themes. First, young people have a keen interest in accessing political information on social media, albeit passively. Secondly, Twitter and Facebook were found to be the most influential social media channels for first-time voters seeking political information. Thirdly, out of concern about the surveillance practices on social media, private WhatsApp groups have emerged as the primary platform for first-time voters to engage in political discussions and debates. This leads us to the fourth theme, where the stories that feature on WhatsApp and Instagram are gaining prominence as the dominant platform for sharing political information. This trend highlights the potential for the incidental and ephemeral consumption of political content through these platforms. This trend may have significant implications for how political messages are communicated and received on these social media platforms.

Decarbonization and the Capitalist State

ABSTRACTDecarbonization is the most important challenge of our time. Though quite modest, states are taking more climate action. How should we approach these efforts? Sociologists have paid less attention to decarbonization overall but frameworks in political sociology can make sense of state power and climate politics. In this review, I first discuss two sets of literature. The first extends “state‐capacity” and institutionalist frameworks. The second is based on radical and Marxist state theories. Following this, I draw from Mann's concept of “infrastructural power” which combines elements of both and can situate state power in a transnational context. Using this concept and recent literature in political economy, I discuss three infrastructures—finance, trade, and energy—and consequential ways states have altered them in recent years. These actions reveal profound geoeconomic contradictions which will undermine decarbonization. Together, this review provides a wide survey of state theories and macroscopic climate politics with the hope of spurring further discussion and debate.

The "Social Kingship of Christ" and Religious Pluralism: A Comparison of Two Broad Approaches

precis: The titles of "Lord" and "King" have been applied to Christ since the earliest days of Christianity. Many have interpreted these titles as implying that Christ, as the God-human, is the only human to contain the fullness of the divine authority. In the Catholic tradition, this was also interpreted in a political sense, as implying that Christ is the highest authority in both the spiritual and the socio-political realms and that all authority, whether religious or secular, is derived from that of Christ. This implies a belief in the finality of Christ, that is, of Christ as the most definitive revelation of God to humankind and, therefore, as the highest authority. This essay examines different views of how to reconcile the belief in the finality of Christ with the reality of life in a pluralistic society, comparing two broad approaches put forward by Christians in recent decades—a confessional, and a more ecumenical approach.

Rhetorical Functions of Lexical Collocations in the Inaugural Speech of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu

In political communication, inaugural speeches are pivotal, signifying the start of a leader’s term and a new chapter in a nation’s history. These serve as a momentousoccasion where the leader outlines their vision, pledging to guide the country to prosperity and unity. This study delves into the inaugural speech delivered by PresidentBola Ahmed Tinubu upon assuming the highest office in Nigeria in May 2023. Through a meticulous analysis of lexical collocations, the study uncovers the underlying linguistic intricacies, thematic emphasis, and rhetorical strategies employed by President Tinubu in his address, to gain insights into the rhetorical techniques used to connect with the audience and convey his vision as well as the impact of his address on political discourse and public perception. Downloading the speech from the Punch Newspaper website, the analytical approach followed the principles of lexical collocation theory and systemic functional linguistics. The analysis reveals eight strategic rhetorical purposes in President Tinubu’s use of lexical collocations in his speech. These functions encompass appeals to religiosity, political sensibility, national pride, patriotism, unity, hope, calls to action, policy clarification, and exemplifying an inclusive government. His language choices resonate with the audience, eliciting emotions and nurturing a national sense of pride and identity. The analysis of President Tinubu’s inaugural speech contributes to a better understanding of his linguistic legacy and communication strategies during his tenure in office. It becomes a part of the historical record, revealing the president’s approach to governance and leadership.

Locating Medical Television

Medical television programmes, across their history, have had specific relationships to places and spaces. On one level, they have represented medical and health places, such as, consulting rooms, hospitals, the home, community spaces, public health infrastructures, etc. Television producers have represented these places, in line with the capabilities of television technologies and grammars. Moreover, producers have borrowed their images of medical and health places from other media (film, photographs, museum displays, etc.) and integrated, adjusted and reformulated them into their work. But medical television has also worked spatially in the political sense of being broadcast internationally, nationally, and locally; therein interacting with differing regimes and polities. This facet includes regional and local broadcasting, as well as public-private divides, including pay television, advertisement and audience measurement. On both levels, medical television programmes have served to represent familiar and unfamiliar locations and medical modes to patients and medical or health practitioners. This issue of Media History on medical television follows the conference of the same title, Locating Medical Television, organised in the framework of the ERC funded BodyCapital project and the Science Museum London. It intends to locate medical television more precisely; to engage (medical) TV history with recent questions concerning the relevance of space within and beyond national borders.

On some current aspects and new approaches to scientific understanding of the national characteristics of Russian statehood formation and evolution

The object of the study is the process of Russian statehood formation and historical transformation. The subject of the study is the analysis of existing in the Russian scientific and public thought (pre-revolutionary and modern) different approaches to the interpretation of national features of Russian statehood foundations origin and evolution. The authors emphasize a number of fundamental problems of Russian statehood development, which today require creative comprehension by scientific community. The article substantiates the position on the enduring significance of domestic researchers’ and thinkers’ conclusions about the uniqueness of the process of Russian statehood foundations origin in the Old Russian state, which was fundamentally different from similar processes in Western states, the Tsardom of Muscovy political system specificity, which consisted in the cathedral structure of the state and received ideological justification in the “autocratic sobornost” doctrine. Special attention has been paid to the conclusions related to assessing significance of the long coexistence in the Russian state of two parallel beginnings such as the monarchical vertical of power and the rich veche tradition, which compensated for the relative weakness of the monarchy in technical and political sense. For the first time the issue of what place in Russian statehood transformation was occupied by the Time of Troubles of the early 17th century has been investigated in detail. Attention has been drawn to the conclusions of pre-revolutionary scientists and thinkers about the determining role of the Time of Troubles, which it played in the new attitudes’ formation to the state and state power in Russian society, including in the context of modern interpretations. The determining role of zemstvo bodies in the years of the Time of Troubles in the collapsing state preservation and revival has been pointed out. The conclusion has been made about the similarity of the Russian system of power with the Byzantine model, traditionally characterized by a combination of a rigid monarchical vertical and horizontal of developed self-government. The role of the state idea uniting society in preserving stability and sustainability of any state has been emphasized.

Decolonising Australian Gold Rush Narratives with Critical Geopolitics

AbstractSettler-colonial futurity and colonial onto-epistemology are embedded across mainstream Australian public education institutions and schooling. While Country is central to Indigenous being, knowledges and pedagogy, Australian public and school education and curricula regularly fail to engage with Country and place in its historical, political, institutional, more-than-human, and relational dimensions. This paper investigates how colonial discourse and narratives permeate public and schooling education resources about mining and the Australian gold rush, including those presented in local Victorian gold rush museums. These support an influential story of Australia’s past/present that erases First Nations1 custodial relations with Country, strengthens settler-colonial futurity and celebrates and legitimises its colonising and extractive relations between people, Country, and ecologies. The paper presents an argument for attending to critical, relational geopolitics in education and environmental education to destabilise and shift these ways of understanding. It considers opportunities and challenges presented by Australian curricula in terms of their capacity to develop geopolitical understandings of past/present/future social and ecological in/justice, and to support new political understandings and sense of connection and belonging with Country.

Making sense of politics: how affective dispositions and everyday experiences connect young people with the political

ABSTRACT This study aims to understand the cognitive, affective and socially situated processes through which young people make sense of politics. We ask (1) how young people construct understandings of political issues, and (2) when these understandings facilitate their orientation to and connection with political issues. To answer these questions, we conducted 4 × 4 focus groups with groups of 15–30-year-old Dutch people, each time focusing on a, then current, political issue: the Syrian Civil War, the (so-called) US Muslim travel ban, the 2017 Dutch general election, and the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. Our analysis of the group discussions shows that young people make sense of and become emotionally involved in political issues through: (a) feelings of indignation that link a political issue with one’s personal values, (b) media-facilitated affective orientations towards political actors that function as representations of a political issue, and (c) the connection of a political issue with meaningful social contexts and experiences. Our findings add to extant scholarly work on political learning by shedding light on the affective, situated and social processes through which political understandings and orientations are formed in young people.

The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany By Jennifer M.Kapczynski and CarolineKita (Eds.), University of Michigan Press. 2022. pp. 268. $75.00 (hardcover), $59.95 (e‐book)

The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany By Jennifer M.Kapczynski and CarolineKita (Eds.), University of Michigan Press. 2022. pp. 268. $75.00 (hardcover), $59.95 (e‐book)

Critical peace education and critical hope: co-researching with middle school students in India to imagine possibilities for social change

ABSTRACT An existing culture of conflict tends to shape practices within schools, which often maintain and in turn, contribute towards perpetuating stratifications at the societal level. Through this study, the author seeks to challenge this culture of conflict by creating a pedagogical space and facilitating possibilities of collective thinking, relationality, and action, with a focus on nurturing a culture of peace. With a goal of gaining insight into how middle school students from two school sites in New Delhi, India, are embodying and interacting with notions of peace and conflict as they make meaning of their social worlds, the author conducts a youth participatory action research (YPAR), which is complemented with semi-structured interviews. A total number of 12 participants collectively engage in a YPAR process across 13 virtual sessions, which were held on a bi-weekly basis. Guided by a critical peace education and critical hope framework, the author examines a ‘moment’, which reveals complexities around how pedagogies of critical hope can engage young people in affective, ethical, and political sensibilities to imagine possibilities for social change.

The Cultural Publicity Function and Influence of the Chinese Militia during World War II

During the Second World War, in the Sino-Japanese battlefield where China resisted Japanese invasion, the importance of the militia publicity and education for the construction of the base area was self-evident. It not only played an important role in the battles, but also encouraged members to actively participate in promotional activities, using leaflets, slogans, broadcasts and other media to convey the importance and necessity of the war of resistance to the public, which stimulated the public’s enthusiasm and determination to resist the Japanese invasion. At the same time, militia also enhanced publicity and education through the organization of classes, lectures and other forms of activities, improving the public’s political awareness and sense of resistance. Because of their close relationship with the public, the militia were able to better carry out the functions publicity and education, which had an important impact on the cultural construction of the base areas behind enemy lines.

A Century of Changing Perceptions of "Christian Militias" in Iraq

This article traces the history of Iraq's Assyrian Christians in armed struggle from the second half of the twentieth century to the contemporary era. It argues that, while "Christian militias" are not a new phenomenon, their modes of engage ment in sectarian politics are new and representative of Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 United States–led invasion. By contrast, during the twentieth century, and particularly during the rule of the Ba'th Party (1968–2003), Assyrian activists were involved in secular and leftist political movements confronting the regime from within the larger Iraqi opposition. The history of this earlier, foundational period is contextualized to make sense of the sectarian politics of the post-2003 period. I make use of archival sources retrieved from Baghdad and Mosul as well as oral interviews, periodicals, memoirs, and songs in both Arabic and Aramaic.

Precarietà e classe. Genitori in occupazioni precarie e ‘lotte quotidiane'

This study presents the results of exploratory research on precarity and class. Through key concepts drawn from critical sociology, we try to understand class as class struggle, but not in the political sense of the concept. Here class struggle means the uninterrupted efforts of a whole group of people, within the given circumstances, to create better living conditions. Precarity is part of these circumstances and it is framed within the dynamics of valorisation of labour, which tends to reduce the person to simple labour-power. The participants are parents in pre-carious employment and we want to report and reflect on their efforts to achieve decent living standards. The intent of this study is critical, it does not want to demonstrate whether the "precariat" is a social class or not, but through the narratives of parents in precarious employment about their difficult circumstances, this research wants to explore how daily struggles can be understood as class struggles of people at the margins.

Expanding Eurocentric Narratives of International Relations through Conservative Cooperation

Since the mid-1990s, critical International Relations (IR) scholars have increasingly drawn on postcolonial studies to call for opening up IR. However, it has turned out to be a more challenging task than initially imagined. It requires insight into the reasons behind the differences between the forms of national IR and the implications of such variation for our understanding of the international. Such differences need inquiring into by treating those from outside North America and Western Europe as thinking actors and paying attention to their accounts of the international. Eurocentrism occurs when research is designed in a way that occludes the global theory by drawing a direct line from ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe to modern day ‘West’ with next-to-no sociological insight into ‘connected histories’ of societies. Over the years, methodological Eurocentrism has produced a particular narrative about Europe’s place in world history. Thus, Eurocentric narratives have allowed designing research by virtue of the persistence of concepts that have been informed by the very same narratives. The critical point being, the very concepts through which we make sense of world politics (such as state, development, sovereignty and security) have their limitations not only when transplanted to other parts of the world but also when studying ‘Europe’ itself.

Is Politics "Practicable" without Religion?

ABSTRACT: I challenge the "presupposition strain" in political theology—the thesis that politics needs religion, that politics presupposes religion, and that we cannot make sense of politics without an appeal to transcendent theological concepts. I do this by critically examining Simon Critchley's claim that politics is not practicable with religion. Critchley shares a common framework with Carl Schmitt; it is this framework of political theology that needs to be exposed, questioned, and criticized.

Twitter (X) use predicts substantial changes in well-being, polarization, sense of belonging, and outrage

In public debate, Twitter (now X) is often said to cause detrimental effects on users and society. Here we address this research question by querying 252 participants from a representative sample of U.S. Twitter users 5 times per day over 7 days (6,218 observations). Results revealed that Twitter use is related to decreases in well-being, and increases in political polarization, outrage, and sense of belonging over the course of the following 30 minutes. Effect sizes were comparable to the effect of social interactions on well-being. These effects remained consistent even when accounting for demographic and personality traits. Different inferred uses of Twitter were linked to different outcomes: passive usage was associated with lower well-being, social usage with a higher sense of belonging, and information-seeking usage with increased outrage and most effects were driven by within-person changes.

Ideological and Political work in Universities Coordinating with Educational Management for Holistic Education

In the context of globalization, university students' ideologies and value orientations are facing the impact of diverse cultures. Therefore, how to better conduct ideological and political education and guide them to establish correct values has become a focus in higher education management. The achievement of this goal is inseparable from the organic integration and collaborative education of ideological and political work and educational management. ideological and political work plays a crucial role in university education, serving as an important means for students' ideological guidance and value leading. Through ideological and political courses, thematic education, practical activities, and other forms, it guides students to understand the country's major policies and social hot issues and cultivates their political quality, moral character, and sense of social responsibility. Educational management is crucial for ensuring teaching quality and maintaining order in teaching. By formulating a series of measures, it creates a conducive learning environment for students, helping them complete their studies successfully. Collaborative education emphasizes the mutual cooperation and support between ideological and political work and educational management. By setting common goals, integrating resources, sharing information, etc., ideological and political work and educational management form a synergy, jointly impacting students and promoting their all-round development.

Cronotopias do Encontro: infância, universidade e movimentos sociais

ABSTRACT This text aims to talk about the importance of the meeting between the university and social movements, focusing on the production of knowledge about childhood, as well as its politicization. Inspired by the work of Mayana Redin, we bring to the fore a story of Brazilian childhood forged in struggle, a story of social movements told from the participation of children, and the academic look at the participation of children in social struggles. It is in this sense that we named the discussion as a “chronotopy of meetings”, to the extent that we are interested in the stories and the political sense that permeate the possibilities of meetings between teaching, research, social struggles and children. To this end, we researched academic productions undertaken at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels of the Faculty of Education of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) in the last five years, specifically in the field of Childhood Studies, in order to observe their correlations with the curriculum and the academic trajectory of the university, that prepares its teachers (pedagogos) to work in social movements. As a result, we signal the incipience and, on the other hand, the urgent need for research in this convergence of fields, affirming the importance of the displacements that such productions cause in the curriculum, in the socialized production of knowledge, as well as in the praxis of daily struggles.