Political Subjects Research Articles

Gender, Education and Citizenship as Ideological Weapons of an ‘Army of Holy Women’ in Bengal: The Matua Matri Sena

This paper seeks to analyze the recent phenomenon of the development of a Matri Sena (literally, an ‘Army of Holy Women’) among the Matua sect of West Bengal, India. Historically known to have suffered caste-based untouchability and forced migration due to communal conflict, the Matua community’s current political motivations surround the issue of ‘refugeehood’ and Indian citizenship. Given this background, the emergence of the Matri Sena as a complex identity among a religion–caste–gender–nation nexus is oriented towards bipartite objectives: one, to actualize the gender-egalitarian ethos that informs Matua religious foundations, and two, to claim legal citizenship status for its community members precisely through a new gendered ideology. We argue that the women gurus of the Matri Sena are able to realize their religious/political aims by fashioning themselves as mothers of an ideal family, community, and by extension, the nation. In deploying their specific gendered ideological constructions, they enact their new roles as influencers in both private and public Matua lives. In such renderings, the woman guru’s mother-figure emerges as a political subject through crucial engagements with Matua religiosity on one hand, and dominant Hindu nationalist discourses on the other. In this article, we critically analyze ways in which the Matri Sena constructs a new maternal notion of religio-political power, and how such power furthers both collective Matua aspirations and contemporary national imaginations.

Lean-back and lean-forward online behaviors: The role of emotions in passive versus proactive information diffusion of social media content.

One of the main drivers of social media's influence is the easy way of generating information cascades via forwarding messages. Two basic modes of forwarding information consist in sharing it without changes (lean-back) or adding or modifying the content of the original message (lean-forward). In this work, we study these two modes of online information sharing. Using data from six cases extracted from Twitter, in which retweets make up most of the content, we analyzed emotions in passive versus proactive information diffusion. Our findings show that emotional valence does not indicate significant differences between lean behaviors, while the activation level of emotions presents contrasts. For example, disgust is more intense in lean-back and anger in lean-forward behavior. We also find that in proactive lean-forward communication, disgust and joy synchronize with the emotions of lean-back messages. Finally, a causal analysis of lean-forward information sharing reveals that disgust provokes a consistent increment of itself while it also decreases the appearance of anger in political topics. We discuss the implications of our findings for the study of emotions in active versus passive forwarding of information in social media.

A Selected Review of Exemplary Diversity Articles Published in the Journal of Management Education

Issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are timely topics in business, education, and politics. As Associate Editors for the Journal of Management Education ( JME) we recognize the journal’s ability to contribute to these conversations. In this article, we take stock of DEI research in JME and review 17 exemplary articles published since 2000. A common theme in these articles is that management educators play an important role in creating inclusive classrooms to educate the next generation of leaders of multicultural organizations and that this task should be done proactively. Yet, even the most well-intentioned faculty members may be worried or lack the confidence to handle DEI-related challenges and conversations in the classroom. This collection of articles is intended to help guide business faculty through the unprecedented challenges associated with teaching DEI or having difficult discussions about diversity. The articles in this collection (1) advance the way we think about DEI by offering frameworks, reviews, and new perspectives, (2) address some of the most pressing and prevalent issues related to cultural-diversity and gender, and (3) provide activities and exercises to be implemented in the classroom to increase student sensitivity.

Play and Counter-Conduct: Migrant Domestic Workers on TikTok

ABSTRACT This paper examines how migrant domestic workers subvert domination, exploitation and subjection through performances in TikTok videos. Through this medium, workers exercise autonomy in severely restrictive employment and living conditions, where collective action may not only be improbable but also illegal. I argue that these videos demonstrate Foucauldian counter-conduct or the “art of not being governed so much”. Counter-conduct is a form of resistance distinct to those who have limited access to the public sphere, due in part to the gendered nature of cooking, cleaning and caring. Domestic work is not normally included in labour laws, and the place of employment are private homes. This makes it difficult to organise or make rights claims. I build on literatures of everyday resistance to examine the practices and subjectivities by migrant domestic workers in Gulf countries. In so doing, so-called “modern slaves”, enact freedom, already present, as subjects of ethics and politics..

Debate on Women's Reservation in Politics and Contemporary Indian Cinema: a Feminist Overview

Gender discrimination is an important cause that relegates the position of women in Indian Pol- itics. It is a ground for denying rights and is not an argument posited in opposition to the notion of universal rights of women. In India except for the ballot machine, women's participation as contest- ants, elected representatives, members of the Government, and so on was negligible. The nature of the problem is varied such as lack of time due to domestic responsibilities, socio-cultural norms lim- iting mobility, and patriarchal control discouraging women from coming into conflict with men. Pa- triarchy always indicates the ramparts between public and private for women. The inner-outer dis- tinction specified that the world is external, the domain of material, and the home represents the inner spiritual self. The world is typically treacherous terrain a pursuit of material interests where practical consideration reigns supreme. It is also eventually the domain of the male. In the home, its essence remains unaffected by the profane activities of the material world. And the woman is its representa- tion (though indirectly it is controlled by men). It has been observed that the identification of social roles by gender corresponds with the separation of the social space into ‘Ghar and Bahir. There are so many factors that in turn merely reiterate the real problems women have faced. Film and sociology are interlinked. Four interrelated themes, i.e., i) identity, ii) interaction, iii) inequality and iv) institutions, help sociologists to analyze society in detail. Sociologists can use films as social texts to explore these core themes. Here in the context of post-nineties Indian Cinema or series, I would like to explain how did Indian filmmakers visualize the political subjugation of women through their cinematic gaze. Did they focus on the long battle of women to achieve political empow- erment? Research questions have carried following objectives :-1) No interaction with the Woman Pradhan or other officials with relevant officers. 2) Inactive or proxy members 3) internationalization of socially defined gender roles and an inherent acceptance of patriarchy, caste, and class barriers. 4) Non-articulation and inability to identify obstacles. 5) Patriarchal values have combined with political intimidation from opposing parties and vested groups and the system itself has hampered the func- tioning of Elected Women Representatives. Films like Samsodhan (1996) God Mother (1999), Bandit Queen (1994), Satta (2002), Deoal’ (2004), Gulaab Gang (documentary) (2012), Thalaivii (2021), Panchayat (2021) will be discussed from a particular sense of representation, where the term ‘representation’ will be used from two dis- courses i) Representation as ‘Speaking of’ as in terms of politics and ii) ‘Representation’ as in the art or the philosophy of filmmaking. Literature, articles, autobiographies, interviews, memoirs, docu- mentaries etc will be used as secondary sources.

In Defence of White Freedom: Working Men's Clubs and the Politics of Sociability in Late Industrial England.

While ongoing discrimination in jobs, welfare, and housing in 1970s England belied the social democratic promise of 'equality of opportunity' and the much-touted British value of 'fair play', racism at the door of the working men's club told a different story. For reactionaries and liberals alike, it spoke to the uncertain future of working-class politics in late industrial England. This article shows how the legal and political controversies surrounding whites-only working men's clubs contribute to our understanding of the 'white working class' as a political subject in British public life. Even more, it reveals how-among club members-whiteness came to be invested with feelings of intimacy, kinship, respectability, and independence.

Mit Druckerzeugnissen Druck erzeugen ‒

Abstract This essay introduces the German term “Druckerzeugnisse” to portray pamphlets as formats that are particularly useful for expressing political protest and demands due to their interwovenness into political action. By analyzing “Druckerzeugnisse” of central groups of the German New Left during the “long sixties” this essay follows two objectives. 1. It argues that “Druckerzeugnisse” allow for factoring in political contention into intellectual historical research in a manner that remains close to the intentions of activists. 2. In doing so, “Druckerzeugnisse” are useful sources for new impulses in the intellectual history of the New Left due to their capacity to determine conflicting changes in the self-perception of political subjects. Based on the selection of “Druckerzeugnisse” this essay argues that the intellectual history of the New Left is marked by deep conflicts that eventually resulted in a Post-New Left.

AHM-FC Model in the Evolution Analysis of Ideological and Political Subjects

Abstract This paper proposes a new fusion neural network (FC) based on attribute hierarchy (AHM). This paper studies the evolution model of ideological and political subjects based on this method. It is abbreviated as the AHM-FC model with unequal weighted features. Then, based on the Bayesian network and least squares feature hierarchy analysis, this paper gives the conditional probability and attribute weight of ideological and political subjects. Furthermore, this paper establishes the theme evolution model of “double fusion and three stages.” In this way, it has been fully applied in ideological and political teaching in colleges and universities. Experimental results show that FC-AHM based on unequal weights can predict the evolution of ideological and political objects with higher accuracy.

Trauma, protest, and therapeutic culture in Algeria since the 1980s.

This article focuses on the shift in sensitivities that took place between the 1980s and 2019 toward psychological suffering in Algeria. Promoters of psychotherapy showed an increase in receptivity-via the media, public authorities, and the general population-to their practices and discourses during this period. Based on professional literature, interviews with psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts, and newspaper articles and essays, this article considers the following aspects: the use of psychotherapy, the authority of psychoanalytic/psychopathological analyses, and the ethics of relation in politics. Taking a social and cultural history of politics approach, it traces the discontinuous politicization of psychotherapy over the course of events (namely the uprising of 1988, the civil war of the 1990s, and the 2019 popular movement) and examines the interactions between the state, popular mobilizations, and the psychotherapists. The civil war of the 1990s coincided with the normalization of "trauma" on a global scale, and procedures for the prevention of posttraumatic stress disorder were put in place in Algeria from 1997 onwards. In this process of legitimizing psychological suffering and its treatment, the promoters of psychotherapy who belonged to the less visible margins gained authority. The year-long protest movement (2019) against the regime performed the ethics of relation, focusing on human relations, reflexivity, and living together. Promoters of psychotherapy identified consistently with the political subjectivities produced within the 2019 popular movement characterized by massive pacifist marches against the regime.

"This Is Fake News": Characterizing the Spontaneous Debunking from Twitter Users to COVID-19 False Information

False information spreads on social media, and fact-checking is a potential countermeasure. However, there is a severe shortage of fact-checkers; an efficient way to scale fact-checking is desperately needed, especially in pandemics like COVID-19. In this study, we focus on spontaneous debunking by social media users, which has been missed in existing research despite its indicated usefulness for fact-checking and countering false information. Specifically, we characterize the tweets with false information, or fake tweets, that tend to be debunked and Twitter users who often debunk fake tweets. For this analysis, we create a comprehensive dataset of responses to fake tweets, annotate a subset of them, and build a classification model for detecting debunking behaviors. We find that most fake tweets are left undebunked, spontaneous debunking is slower than other forms of responses, and spontaneous debunking exhibits partisanship in political topics. These results provide actionable insights into utilizing spontaneous debunking to scale conventional fact-checking, thereby supplementing existing research from a new perspective.

Becoming a Fearless Tiger

Abstract This article offers an analysis of how a revolutionary organization—the LTTE in the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009)—used military training camps to produce new members. By framing war as a “transformative social condition” (Lubkemann 2008), I will show that the LTTE did not only teach recruits how to fight but also attempted to produce new political subjectivities and construct a new community. Through the imposition of discipline and punishments, control over the recruits’ body and emotions, and the spread of nationalistic narratives, the LTTE aimed to transform them into freedom fighters embodying the political will of the organization. The proposed research on a self-making process under an authoritarian regime will lead us to develop a more nuanced understanding of the contrast that is usually drawn between will and coercion.

Lustration in the Social Change of the Bulgarian Transition (1990-2007)

The article examines the political subjects of social change during the Bulgarian tran-sition from totalitarianism to democracy (1990-2007): the subcultures of ‘former com-munists’ and of ‘anti-communists’ formed in the early 1990s. The research question is about their attitudes in the past and presence to lustration – a point of intersection for the ideology, ideologemes, political rhetoric and practice of the ‘left’ and ‘right’, and an example of the divergence of the social projects of the main political forces – the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) and the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF). The re-search is based on a historical analysis of act and archival materials, periodicals, memoirs and surveys, as well as socio-anthropological analysis of in-depth interviews and focus groups.

Die Zeitschrift "PLAN": Österreichischer Identitätskurs, individuelles und kollektives Gedächtnis in der Nachkriegszeit by Desiree Hebenstreit

Reviewed by: Die Zeitschrift "PLAN": Österreichischer Identitätskurs, individuelles und kollektives Gedächtnis in der Nachkriegszeit by Desiree Hebenstreit Alois Kernbauer Desiree Hebenstreit, Die Zeitschrift "PLAN": Österreichischer Identitätskurs, individuelles und kollektives Gedächtnis in der Nachkriegszeit. Schriften der Wiener Germanistik 7. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2022. 261 pp. It was a long way from the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918 and the onset of the first Austrian Republic, dubbed as the "state which no one wanted," as Hellmut Andics titled his book on the first Austrian Republic, to the last decades of the twentieth century, when a solid national Austrian consciousness existed, one not shaken by the crumbling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and its consequences for Austria, which lost its highly appreciated role as "neutral" mediator between the former blocs of East and West and found itself as merely one among many small European states. Nothing illustrates the delicate situation of the new beginning in 1945 more than the activities of Karl Renner in the days before and after the end of World War II in reestablishing Austria, seven years after he had declared to vote for the Anschluss on April 10, 1938. It was probably thanks to his experience as politician that the turbulent weeks of late spring and early summer 1945 ended in a comparatively smooth outcome securing a new beginning. Otto Basil, inspired by Karl Kraus's Fackel, had edited three issues of his newly founded literary journal PLAN in 1938. When he revived the venture in October 1945—despite all the difficult circumstances—PLAN became one of the most important journals during its brief existence until early 1948. It contained articles of artists who had not been allowed to publish during the Nazi period and literary texts of young writers who only two decades later belonged to the best known in the German-speaking world. Basil made certain that the contributions were innovatively future-oriented, on the one hand, and that many of them discussed the tormenting question of how to deal with the horrible past, on the other. Desiree Hebenstreit's investigation of the journal PLAN focuses on its role as a platform for the discourse on Austrian identity. It is based on her thesis, published in 2015. Some chapters of the introduction are simply too short to take into consideration all the necessary aspects, such as the one on the discourse about an "Austrian identity and an Austrian nation," which aroused controversy (not only among historians) in the middle of the nineteenth century that never vanished until 1938 and was resumed after World War II. Nonetheless, these sections of the book are well-written overviews. [End Page 131] The main part, however, is simply perfect. Hebenstreit thoroughly looks through all the issues concerning the central problem, starting with the editor Otto Basil, the members of the editorial department, including the indispensable editors Rudolf Geist and Theodor Kramer. Although Basil was most interested in the verbal form of literature and valued expressionism and surrealism above all, he included political topics as well. Questions were also raised about such issues as whether there were such things as specific aesthetic aspects or formal characteristics in "Austrian" literature. In the first years of the reestablished republic, politicians as well as intellectuals from many different cultural circles felt an urgent need to create and promote a consciousness about the Austrian state and its culture on which partisans of the different political parties could agree. There were the agonizing problems of the status of those who had found a way to coexist with the National Socialist dictatorship during the previous seven years as well as the denazification of the numerous members of the former NSDAP. In 1946 the Austrian government decided to support celebrations on the anniversary of the first mentioning of "Österreich," which had been used 970 years earlier for the first time to denote a small territory located in today's Lower Austria. In five of PLAN's issues, contributions to the ongoing social-political discussions were published in a separate category entitled "Austriaca." In the following chapters of her book, Hebenstreit looks into the discussions about complicity with National Socialism, specifically...

Groundwork for Democracy? Community Abeyance and Lived Citizenship in Hong Kong

Studies on Hong Kong’s contentious politics have focused primarily on the high tides of mobilization. Scant attention is paid to what became of the intense mobilizations following their decline. This article spotlights the “abeyance” politics of community activism, in which activists sought to make territorial communities an arena of social and political participation in quieter times after mass mobilizations. Drawing on the concept of abeyance from political sociology, we argue that community activism served as “abeyance structures” after the mass mobilizations in the early 2010s, a major protest cycle preceding the 2019 anti-extradition movement. Based on mixed methods and original data, we argue that these abeyance structures not only allowed activists to maintain their political engagement but also gave rise to various practices of “lived citizenship” in territorial communities. These practices produced a changing sense of political subjectivity among citizens, establishing a more grounded notion of democracy that emphasizes their participation in local affairs and social entitlements. Our findings aim to enrich the literature on movement abeyance and provide a nuanced understanding of political activism in Hong Kong beyond street politics.

'Consent' as epistemic recognition: Indigenous knowledges, Canadian impact assessment, and the colonial liberal democratic order.

This article unpacks the logic of the equivalence invoked by the Government of Canada between Indigenous consent and the inclusion of Indigenous peoples and knowledges in impact assessment. We situate the logic within the politics of recognition in Canada-a politics that aims to shore up national unity in the face of regular challenges to it. We use the Canadian results from a recent scoping review on conceptions of environmental justice in impact assessment to highlight the challenges of invoking recognition, and we provide a theoretical analysis of these challenges. To do this, we highlight the ways in which 'we-making' is 'knowledge-making' and 'knowledge-making' is 'we-making'. In this sense, recognizing Indigenous knowledges is part of Canada's answer to the challenge of constructing and stabilizing a political 'we': a community of political subjects with shared connection to a nation state via the institutional, social, and cultural apparatuses that generate the kind of publicly visible legal and technical knowledge upon which the state's authority depends. We show how this project relies on actively obscuring the relationship between 'we-making' and 'knowledge-making' by treating 'knowledge-making' as neutral and un-situated, putting into practice a universalist logic. This logic shores up power because obscuring the situatedness of dominant knowledges also obscures the situatedness of the dominant political orders with which they are intertwined. We ultimately argue that Canada's approach to recognizing Indigenous knowledges helps consolidate power by sidestepping ongoing jurisdictional struggles with Indigenous peoples.

A New Diaspora Press: Persian Periodicals in 1950s Israel

ABSTRACT Iranian Jews produced roughly 15 periodicals during the twentieth century, on which some initial work has been undertaken. These periodicals, newspapers, and pamphlets gave a voice to the community and served to foster the consolidation of political subjectivity and syncretic national ideologies within the public sphere. With that, scholarship still lacks any significant exploration of the publications produced by those Iranian Jews who emigrated to Israel after it declared independence in 1948. In an initial step towards illuminating these fruitful historical resources, this article views in parallel two publications produced by the community during the first years of Israeli statehood: Kurosh and Setareh-ye Sharq. Following a short background on the arrival of Iranian Jews in the country and the conditions they faced, the article analyses the publications as manifestations of two distinct approaches to adaptation to the new environment. In Kurosh, there is evidence of an anti-establishment spirit of independence, facilitating an activistic and assertive Iranian Jewish consciousness in the land that was anchored in connection to Iranianness. In Setareh-ye Sharq, meanwhile, we find top-down discursive and social pressures on the community to accept a normative vision of Iranian identity in Israel.

The political economy of hipsters in Kazakhstan: mobilization, hybridity and class

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the political subjectivity of hipsters in Kazakhstan, the dynamics of their political mobilization, how they are influenced by global flows, and their constitution within broader issues of class. By conceptualizing hipsters as cultural hybrids who use tactics of everyday resistance and détournement in challenging the authoritarian regime in the country, the work eschews conventional approaches to the study of political mobilization in Central Asia by looking beyond ethnic, religious, and informal movements and instead focusing on this new creative class. The analysis reveals the paradox of hipsters in that they both challenge the regime through détournement, while also being the main beneficiaries of the regime’s neoliberalism. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with young people in Kazakhstan, the essay finds that hipster capacity for successful mobilization is limited because they struggle to draw support from wider society as a consequence of their focus on ideational rather than material politics.

Naked men on the run, regression to childhood: cultural figures of the trauma during the First World War

AbstractAlthough there is a wide-ranging historiography dealing with psychoneurosis, various manifestations of psychic suffering widespread among traumatised soldiers during the Great War have received less attention. This essay, based on an analysis of soldiers' clinical files in Italian psychiatric hospitals, draws out these phenomena. The main forms assumed by this kind of trauma are three: soldiers who strip off their uniform and wander around naked; a sort of regression to childhood; and a particular type of hysteria. The essay stresses how existingstereotypes about women were adapted to form a new way of describing masculinity in crisis, and the new political subject: the masses. Too many emotions, too many nerves, define the affected men: they are subjects deprived of personality, and their predicament highlights the transition from soldier-hero to mass-soldier.

You Know You're Right: How Intellectual Humility Decreases Political Hostility

Political hostility is a pervasive problem in American politics, producing dangerous consequences for individuals and society. Recent research in social psychology suggests that intellectual humility may be able to reduce political hostility, but the underlying causal relationship remains unclear. The purpose of this article is to examine how intellectual humility lowers hostility toward people who disagree (dissenters) about specific political topics. Results from a national survey indicate that those holding political beliefs with humility feel less negativity toward dissenters. Fixed‐effects regression models also show that intrapersonal variation in intellectual humility predicts issue‐specific hostility across political topics. Furthermore, a survey experiment priming intellectual humility caused a corresponding decrease in hostility toward dissenters without impacting underlying opinions. Altogether, these results suggest that fostering intellectual humility may be a fruitful avenue for alleviating the hostility and anger that often accompany political disagreement.

From a Pin to an Elephant: Politics of Consumption and the Debordian Spectacle in James Lovegrove’s Days

ABSTRACT This article starts with a historical account of the general decline of class consciousness in the UK throughout the 1980s, when the vision of personal affluence was increasingly connected to people’s choice in the marketplace, rather than their class identity at the sites of mass production. Personal desires were recognized by the Thatcher governments and taken as the motivation to pursue a unique style of life – a marker of Thatcherite individualism – through consumption. In this case, I will read one of James Lovegrove’s early novels, Days (1997), as an example of the consumer dreamland in which a different political identity can be formed. This consumption-based identity, however, is established upon the production of not material commodities but Debordian spectacles. These politicized consumers, as I will argue, never become liberated agents in the matrix of social production. They are, instead, spectators in the Debordian sense, who are granted not a political subjectivity but a collective unconscious.