Political Subjects Research Articles

English Language in the Context of Cultural Diplomacy

In the context of inter-state diplomacy, the need for English language proficiency remains essential. This would likewise apply to the promotion of the nation's cultures in the interest of establishing and strengthening a diplomacy with other countries. The use of cultural aspects for diplomatic purposes here is referred to as cultural diplomacy. Culture becomes the main aspect to attract the attentions of the projected partnering countries. In this context, culture can take the form of drama and music performances, cultural seminars, painting exhibitions, and others. This article aims to explain the concept of cultural diplomacy and its relevance with the use of English as the medium of instruction. The data were collected through the library study. Meanwhile, the analysis is carried out within a qualitative research framework where the relevant theories and the data were interpreted and synthesized. The research is also characterized by the interdisciplinary approach covering the subjects of culture, linguistics, communication, and politics. The results of the analysis affirm that English plays a significant and strategic position in supporting the exercises of cultural diplomacy. This is also supported by the intensive as well as frequent use of the international language in various forms of cultural diplomacy.

Teaching the Russian War on Ukraine

In this article I discuss an approach to teaching about the Russian war in Ukraine that uses the war as a focal point for teaching about topics in comparative politics and international relations. I discuss the pedagogical advantages for political science teaching, including meeting the interests of students, introducing students to theories in political science, and re-centering courses on the region away from Russia. I then discuss how the various political science topics and research questions are related to the war, and I conclude with a section on assignments and methods for student engagement that work well with this type of course.

Rethinking Borders Through a Complexity Lens: Complex Textures Towards a Politics of Hope

ABSTRACTThis article aims to explore the potential of a complexity approach for promoting a more comprehensive understanding of b/ordering processes and their relation to contemporary post-global phenomena. Specifically, the paper - which is theoretical rather than empirical - sets out two aims. On the one hand, to show how a complexity approach - with a focus on Morin’s “complex thought” - is helpful for advancing research on borders, thereby establishing a dialogue with the conceptualization of borderscapes and bordertextures within critical border studies. On the other hand, to reflect on how theoretical knowledge on border complexities can be operationalized through anthropological reflections on cultural complexity and borders. The article concludes by considering how borders as complex textures might be reinterpreted as a space of political creativity, where it may also be possible to cultivate a politics of hope, thereby opening up the way to alternative political subjectivities and agencies.

Sustainable airline planning and scheduling

With sustainability becoming one of the core topics in politics, public discussion and, consequently, in various industries, the airline industry, as one of the major greenhouse gas emitters in the transport sector, has also come under scrutiny. Despite many advanced models for airline planning and scheduling, most models do not explicitly consider sustainability issues. Our paper extends existing research by including the five most strategic stages of the airline planning and scheduling process along with explicitly emphasizing sustainability considerations. We use the resulting mixed-integer quadratically constrained problem in a computational study to show that airlines in our setting can reduce the number of flights (and thereby the level of emissions) without the need to make a substantial sacrifice in profitability. Due to the complexity of the problem, the results also indicate the need for a solver specialized in efficiently solving mixed-integer convex problems.

JERUSALEM, A HOLY AND CREATIVE CITY: Advisory Practices and the Grounding of Urban Mobilities within the Context of Ethnic Conflict

AbstractThis article assesses how the agency of international advisors can provide policy recommendations that, instead of introducing urban policy initiatives for multicultural encounters, sharpen political and spatial segregation within the context of ethnic conflict. The article explores the variegated nature of neoliberalization and argues that the adoption of strategic planning and creativity discourses enables the development of a sophisticated political rationale for governing ethnic diversity. The analysis focuses on a range of advisory practices—including the role played by Michael Porter at the Harvard Business School and Richard Florida at the Creative Class Group in advising former Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat—in order to understand the dynamics of grounding imaginaries concerning a neoliberal role for the state and the depoliticization of the public sphere in a disputed city. By surveying official policy documents, journalistic interviews and two reports submitted by Porter and Florida to Barkat, the author examines how the branding of Jerusalem as a creative city involved managerial practices that classified the city's diverse population according to categories of creative and non‐creative labor rather than political subjects. The adoption of such discourses facilitated a novel approach for enhancing the state‐building ethno‐nationalistic project while at the same time reproducing the dynamics of occupation and annexation.

Concept of DEMOCRACY in Russian Political Discourse from Perspective of Chinese Linguistic-Cultural Tradition

The article is dedicated to the issue of defining the concept of DEMOCRACY. Its meaning in the Russian political discourse is clarified on conceptual, figurative, and value levels. The peculiarities of this concept in the Russian political discourse are identified from the perspective of the Chinese linguocultural tradition. The similarities and differences in the content of the concept of DEMOCRACY in the linguocultural traditions of Russia and China are examined. To achieve the stated goal, the method of linguocultural analysis of the text was used in the research. Informational and analytical texts on political topics published in the mass media of Russia and China were used as research materials. The concept of “sovereign democracy”, relevant to Russian political culture, and “people’s democracy”, represented in Chinese political discourse, are analyzed. The theoretical foundations and prospects for the development of these concepts, associated with national linguocultural traditions, are evaluated. The ecessity of forming a corpus of interrelated concepts for the development of national ideologies as complex and interacting images of national political worldviews is emphasized.

Second screening and trust in professional and alternative media: the mediating role of media efficacy

Abstract In the media convergence landscape, consumption of traditional, well-established media is increasingly combined with newer digital and online platforms such as blogs, podcasts, and social media, which has changed the way news users engage with media content. This study examines the relationship between hybrid media use—specifically, second screening—and trust in both professional and alternative media. Drawing on a two-wave U.S. panel data, first, we find that the second screening positively predicts individuals’ belief in the media’s ability to help them comprehend complex political matters, known in the literature as media efficacy. Furthermore, second screening is positively associated with alternative media trust but is not significantly related to trust in professional media. However, media efficacy positively mediates the connection between second screening and trust in both alternative and professional media. By delivering valuable information to help the public understand intricate political topics, the second screening promotes news media trust.

Model podmiotowego rozwoju miast. Analiza politologiczno-prawna

THE MODEL OF SUBJECTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF CITIES: POLITICAL AND LEGAL ANALYSIS The development policy of the cities is analyzed and studied mainly with the help of concepts typical of geography, spatial economy and sociology. The article proposes to look at this issue through the prism of political science. The epistemology of the concept of political subjectivity, the theory of rational choice, the new institutionalism and system analysis will be used. Based on the conclusions from the theoretical part, the authors distinguish four criteria for the political analysis of the position of cities in Poland. They are: the criterion of resources and interests, the criterion of efficiency, the criterion of relations, and the criterion of coordination. Those criteria relate to, i.a. activities of political authorities in relation to cities, the influence they have on implementation of functions assigned to them, as well as the way in which the role of cities in the state’s political system changes. Based on the analysis of the four criteria, it is possible to determine whether cities are to a greater extent subjects or objects of activities of the central center of political power in the state. Using a schematic matrix of city development models proposed by the author, it is then possible to determine whether, in political terms, we are dealing with a subjective development of cities in Poland.

Viral Voices: Exploring Twitter as a Platform for Public Engagement in the 2022 Philippine Election

The May 2022 Philippine national and local elections were the first to be held under a global pandemic, and social media likely shaped its outcome. Twitter overflows with many election-related conversations barely three weeks before the Philippine national and local elections. Given the physical limitations caused by the Covid-19 epidemic and the rising use of this technology by Filipinos, it was anticipated that support for social media in candidate campaign strategies would expand. This study aims to determine the pattern of relationship and interaction between Twitter users on political topics related to the election. Moreover, this study identifies the likes, dislikes, comments, opinions, or feedback about the public conversation content. In particular, Social Network Analysis (SNA) was employed to better understand how Twitter was used in public conversation during the 2022 Philippine election,. In addition, Sentiment analysis was used to understand better the online users' positive, negative, or neutral responses. The result shows similarities and differences revealed by the social networks. Results also indicated that users tend to share and seek information from reliable sources such as verified Twitter users and news websites

Performances of Death

Abstract Hunger striking is a form of protest that escapes conventional forms of political participation. I argue that as a spectacular performance of death, the hunger strike not only draws attention to a particular cause or exert moral pressure on an opponent but can galvanize and strengthen a nascent political identity. Drawing on the example of the hunger strike of suffragette Marion Wallace-Dunlop, which I argue performatively constructed the identity of the disciplined “true suffragette,” I explain the hunger strike as a political becoming. Undertaken behind bars, by those denied citizenship rights, this protest should be understood not necessarily as the free expression of an already existing member of the demos but instead as a way of becoming a political subject while contesting and reconfiguring political boundaries.

COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES TO PROMOTE THE IMAGE OF A RUSSIAN POLITICIAN IN TIMES OF CRISIS

The study is devoted to identifying the eff ective communication practices in the formation of media content aimed at promoting a positive image of a politician during times of crisis. The problem fi eld of the study is related to the solution of such issues as the study of the structure and functions of the image of a political leader; the identifi cation of eff ective PR-tools for forming the image; the development of a methodology and the conduct of sociological research devoted to the technologies of forming the image of a political leader and the interpretation of study results. These problems are comprehensively solved in the study in the framework of the theory of media communication and PR-technologies. The novelty of the study lies in the systematization of eff ective media technologies for the formation of a political image and in identifying patterns of their use, which will, to a certain extent, infl uence and manage the level of social tension of the population in such new conditions for society as the global lockdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic and, as a consequence, the crisis in many areas of society life.The paper presents the results of a sociological study, the object of which was to identify the infl uence of the communicative behavior of politicians in the Stavropol Territory in the online environment on the formation of their image. As a method of collecting information, a mass survey of the population of the Stavropol Territory in the form of an online questionnaire was chosen .As a result of the study, it was concluded that during the period of critical situations the importance of a competent selection of those media technologies that are aimed at forming trust-based and long-term relations between political subjects and potential voters increases providing the purposeful design and promotion of a politician’s positive image. The study made it possible to identify the most eff ective tools for shaping the image of a politician during the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic period were identifi ed: speeches or information on television about the activities of politicians, posts on social networks and a direct line by a politician on television or on social networks.

TEXT IN NEW MEDIA: SPECIFICITY OF THE VERBAL COMPONENT

The priority tasks in the article are 1) understanding the phenomenon of new media as a technical, social and communicative phenomenon, 2) describing the specifi cs of new media in terms of semiotic, functional features, features of information decoding and derived features of the text of new media, genetically related to the traditional text, but transforming in the conditions of a new sociality. To solve the second problem, the texts of the news community “Lentach” (social network “VKontakte”) for the period from March 2022 to March 2023 were considered as empirical material and a number of their specifi c features were established. The thematic fi eld of the analyzed texts was not a relevant feature for solving the problems of this article, but in order to achieve a long-term goal (determining the communicative strategies of a media text), the selection of texts was based on the criterion of the presence of political topics in the text (aspects of foreign and domestic policy were taken into account). In the polycode media text of new media, within the framework of this article, the object of attention was its verbal component: the traditional nature of its presence in the media message was noted and a number of specifi c features were established at diff erent levels of text organization. At the phonetic-graphic level, visual techniques for segmenting information and simulating oral speech are observed; on morphemic – intensifi cation of creative word-formation processes; on lexical – stylistic and speech interference, instrumental use of tropes and lexical resources, specifi c metaphorization of the text; at the syntactic level – activation of expressive syntax. In the texts of new media, as in traditional ones, variations of the language game are found, the functions of which can be considered the self-identifi cation of the linguistic personality, the eff ects of media infl uence, the activation of the dialogue potential of the media text, the destruction of the classical linearity of the media text.

“As if I were otherwise” metapragmatics of ego-splitting and virtualization, nanchatte!

Abstract Nanchatte is a Japanese gag expression, whose literal English translation could be “I have just completed the saying of something like what I have just said.” Its meaning partially overlaps with English expressions such as “Just kidding,” or “I am just saying.” Its felicitous execution is often intended to “crack up” listeners, to take the edge off an impression of formality, arrogance, aggression, austerity, or bluntness, to break the ice, mitigate face-threat or potential embarrassment, keep meaning ambiguous, or other similar performative effects. Positioned right after the completion of the preceding utterance, nanchatte performs a self-quoting speech act, in which it reflexively and retroactively turns one’s own utterance as reporting speech into reported speech. Ex post facto reframes the utterance from a narrating event to a narrated event, which then turns the speaker from the subject of the utterance to the object in the real-time temporal process of the utterance, splitting and doubling the subject “I” and the world it inhabits between the actuality and the virtuality. By doing so, nanchatte structurally produces the space of non-position-taking. As frivolous as it might be, nanchatte’s structural condition warrants a serious semiotic analysis. Drawing on Husserl’s concepts of neutrality modification and ego-splitting, this essay will discuss how and what kind of political subjectivity could be produced in the quoted space afforded by nanchatte. I proposes the concept of virtualization as a performative effect of nanchatte. As I will detail below, nanchatte as a self-quoting operation – that is, “I” quotes what “I” have just said – unsettles other familiar binaries in the illimitable movement of the virtual and the actual, and this paper considers its broader political implications.

Women workers’ education at the Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions: excavating histories of transnational collaboration with the ICFTU

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between the Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions (Türk-İş) and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) from the 1960s until the 1990s with a focus on the transnational collaboration of activists who organised educational activities for women workers and trade unionists to empower them as rights-seeking political subjects and strengthen their position within the trade union movement. Demonstrating how women’s trade union education evolved within the framework of local politics as well as global processes such as the Cold War and the emergence of a UN-led gender equality regime, it argues that global inequalities, geopolitical differences, and Türk-İş leaders’ ambivalent attitude towards women’s status in the trade union movement led to a loose, sporadic relationship between local activists and those from the west. At the same time, it was often these activists’ sustained efforts towards collaboration and the circulation of their agendas that pressured Türk-İş to invest in women’s empowerment in trade unions. Utilising archival and trade union sources as well as oral history interviews, the article integrates the work of women labour activists in feminist labour historiography, offering a more comprehensive understanding of trade unions’ gender politics in Turkey and globally.

Belonging, responsibility and reflexivity: mediated intimacy among Finnish nonbinary and trans social media users

ABSTRACT Platforms are essential spaces for gender and sexual minorities to develop identities and build connections. However, even though social media activism has itself been a recurrent unit of analysis, less is known about the ways in which the everyday use of social media facilitates political agency as a form of subjectivity. This article examines the experiences of Finnish nonbinary and trans social media users through a conceptual focus on mediated intimacy. The conceptualisation sheds light on how divergent discourses and institutional sites interweave private and public domains through media, influencing subjectivity. An unstructured diary interview method is utilised to understand the participants’ specific experiences and guide the participants to a better awareness of the feelings sparked by daily media use. Three modes of political subjectivity— belonging, responsibility and reflexivity—are identified. These modes are used to discuss how non-cisgender users navigate their experiences in data-driven media. Emphasis is placed on how the processes of reflecting on one’s gender identity often involves the broader political milieu.

The impact of monolingual language policies on the multilingual language ecology of Sri Lanka

AbstractThis qualitative study examined the role of different languages used in the country in the lives of 12 participants from the four main ethnic groups of Sri Lanka (i.e., Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, and Burgher). It sought to understand how monolingual language policies have impacted upon the country's plurilingual language ecology. The study examined the language ideologies of participants to understand how structures of social power have worked through monolingual language policies to influence and shape their language behaviors and practices. While the impact that language policies have had on different Sri Lankan languages has been examined, no study has analyzed it through the point of view of language ideologies of actual speakers of different languages. The observations made by the participants show that the monolingual ideologies of the language policies of 1832 and 1956, by assigning sole official language status to English and Sinhala respectively, have caused them to gain dominance and diminished the status of other languages, thereby altering the plurilingual language ecology of Sri Lanka. Their observations also showed how the 1956 policy's establishment of Sinhala as the dominant language within the language ecology of the country had elevated the position of the majority community—the Sinhalese, and strengthened the power of the then government which had ridden into power through the Sinhalese majority vote. The analysis of data also indicated that, although the 1956 policy was implemented with the aim of dismantling the structures of power introduced during colonial rule, both policies have served to support and reinforce a social hierarchy based on a Western model. What the data revealed about the role that the two monolingual language policies of 1832 and 1956 seem to have played in establishing and reinforcing the dominance of Sinhala and English respectively, suggest that although political subjugation of the country by European powers has officially ended, Sri Lanka continues to operate within the structures of power established during colonial times.

Corporate Political Activism and Information Transfers

ABSTRACT Prior research suggests that (1) politically active firms have an information advantage over firms that do not engage in the political process but also that (2) politically active firms are more likely to disclose policy-related information. We examine whether there are externalities associated with the processing of political information by politically active firms. We study this question in the setting of intraindustry information transfers around earnings announcements. Measuring firms’ political activism using campaign contributions, we find stronger intraindustry information transfers from politically active firms to their industry peers. These information transfers are stronger when there is more discussion during conference calls of political topics that have industry- or market-wide implications. Similarly, these information transfers are also stronger when there is greater political uncertainty. Our paper highlights an important information externality related to politically active firms’ disclosures and improves our understanding of how politically active firms affect their industries’ information environment. Data Availability: The data used in this study are publicly available from the sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: D72; M41; M48.

Beyond Governance and Prevention: On the Use(s) of Aristotle for Theorizing Money’s Politics

What are the contents, limits, and possibilities of Aristotle’s works for critical thinking about money? Recent scholarship has (re)turned to Aristotle as an authority for two key political approaches to money. The first aims to democratize the governance of monetary institutions in order to realize more just economic outcomes. The second seeks to prevent money, or its inherently deleterious excesses, from corrupting political actors and political life. Arguing that these two approaches are insightful, important, and incomplete, I reengage Aristotle’s account of money across the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics to theorize money as a vital but underexplored means of political subject formation. I illuminate how the use of money produces collective and constitutive relations that emerge by way of people’s engagements and entanglements with the things they produce, acquire, desire, and exchange. Bringing this to light also makes visible, I argue, how Aristotle understands money as something capable of being used to both bring about social justice and to pervasively corrupt the foundations of shared democratic life. Taking stock of this dual capacity of money, I show how money’s relationship to subjectivity simultaneously makes money the site of a seemingly intractable problem for politics under capitalism and the means to revive it and reconnect it to democratic life.

Becoming a humanitarian state: A performative analysis of ‘status-seeking’ as statecraft in world politics

AbstractStatus-seeking is ubiquitous in world politics, and the literature is currently dominated by state-centrism and rationalism, which is almost exclusively focus on state elites. This results in a thin and limited understanding of what ‘status-seeking’ is, where it works, and how it is effected. This article challenges the existing approaches by introducing a performativity framework and offers an overhaul of how ‘status’ can be studied. It suggests replacing ‘status-seeking’ with ‘status performances’ that are conceptualised as part of ‘statecraft’ process. Drawing on post-structuralist and queer approaches as well as aesthetics in International Relations (IR), it is argued that status performances participate in the production of the state itself as a subject in world politics, so all states are ‘status-seekers’. This subject-production process occurs in multiple political sites, including the academic IR discourse in a country and visual presentations in the media. It is concluded that there is no ‘status’ beyond the subject, and status can never be achieved because it always needs repetitive performances. The argument is illustrated by an analysis of the production of ‘Turkey’ as a humanitarian state and demonstrates how this is effected in state-elite pronouncements, IR scholarship in Turkey, and visual representations.

“Flaming Madras handkerchiefs and calico blazing with crimson and scarlet flowers”: Antebellum World Systems in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative

Abstract Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (ca. 1853–61) is the earliest known work of fiction written by a Black woman in the United States. Its distinctiveness lies in the internationalism through which the labor regimes of the southern plantation are shown to be intimately bound to global sites of colonial dispossession. Besides unpacking the entangled strands of British and American imperialisms, the author-narrator critically emulates conventions of the nineteenth-century transatlantic literary marketplace, evincing an understanding of both her embodied self and her intellectual labor as commodities in a world system built with racialized labor. Crafts’s novel revises the notion of chattel slavery as provincial, situating it instead within the Atlantic World’s expansive flows of capital and commodities. It presents not a geographically and socially demarcated institution but a plantation empire that goes far beyond the contours of the American South or, indeed, the continental United States, creating a remarkably nuanced conception of Black positionality, one informed not only by race but also by global capital. As part of a broader field-based inquiry, this article probes the affordances of thinking about antebellum Black Atlantic political subjectivity as positioned between two imperialist projects: British abolitionism and American plantocratic expansionism.