Political Subjects Research Articles

Investigation of the Misinformation about COVID-19 on YouTube Using Topic Modeling, Sentiment Analysis, and Language Analysis

The work presented in this paper makes multiple scientific contributions with a specific focus on the analysis of misinformation about COVID-19 on YouTube. First, the results of topic modeling performed on the video descriptions of YouTube videos containing misinformation about COVID-19 revealed four distinct themes or focus areas—Promotion and Outreach Efforts, Treatment for COVID-19, Conspiracy Theories Regarding COVID-19, and COVID-19 and Politics. Second, the results of topic-specific sentiment analysis revealed the sentiment associated with each of these themes. For the videos belonging to the theme of Promotion and Outreach Efforts, 45.8% were neutral, 39.8% were positive, and 14.4% were negative. For the videos belonging to the theme of Treatment for COVID-19, 38.113% were positive, 31.343% were neutral, and 30.544% were negative. For the videos belonging to the theme of Conspiracy Theories Regarding COVID-19, 46.9% were positive, 31.0% were neutral, and 22.1% were negative. For the videos belonging to the theme of COVID-19 and Politics, 35.70% were positive, 32.86% were negative, and 31.44% were neutral. Third, topic-specific language analysis was performed to detect the various languages in which the video descriptions for each topic were published on YouTube. This analysis revealed multiple novel insights. For instance, for all the themes, English and Spanish were the most widely used and second most widely used languages, respectively. Fourth, the patterns of sharing these videos on other social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter, were also investigated. The results revealed that videos containing video descriptions in English were shared the highest number of times on Facebook and Twitter. Finally, correlation analysis was performed by taking into account multiple characteristics of these videos. The results revealed that the correlation between the length of the video title and the number of tweets and the correlation between the length of the video title and the number of Facebook posts were statistically significant.

Fascist transnationalism during the occupation of Albania (1939–43)

Abstract This article links the study of transnational and imperial fascism in the context of the Italian occupation of Albania by examining how Italian authorities sought to turn Albanians abroad into assets rather than liabilities. Organising and monitoring Albanians occurred through conferences, youth institutions and consular activities. Studying such concrete contacts and negotiations allows us to explore the practical issues latent in expanding fascist political subjectivity in transnational and imperial contexts. On the one hand, Italians hoped to verse Albanians in a fascist identity by using existing organisational strategies while silencing or converting potential anti-Italian critics. On the other, many Albanians expressed and offered support for these Italian efforts, though with reservations and conditions, raising questions as to what it meant to be an Albanian nationalist and/or fascist in the years of occupation. The Albanian case therefore contributes to our understanding of the tensions inherent in ‘universalising’ fascism for colonial subjects.

European Academy of Paediatrics statement on the clinical management of children and adolescents with gender dysphoria.

Gender issues have become a polarised and political subject in modern paediatrics and indeed, in broader society. These include the management of infants with disorders of sex development and transgender sports participation, but especially recently regarding the management of gender dysphoria. The European Academy of Paediatrics (EAP) acknowledges that there are deeply held beliefs about this issue based on conscience and social norms. Several European countries, led by the UK, have recently reviewed the management of gender dysphoria in children and young people. Recognising the need for far more research into treatments such as pubertal suppression and cross-sex hormones in children and young people, we review the current ethical and legal dilemmas facing children with gender dysphoria, their families and the clinical teams caring for them. We suggest an approach that maintains the child's right to an open future whilst acknowledging that the individual child is the crucial person affected by decisions made and must receive appropriate support in decision-making and care for any associated mental health or psychological issues. Noting that national approaches to this vary and are in flux, the EAP advocates a child-centred individual rights-based analytical approach.

Perspective and sexual politics in Mémoire de fille

It is striking how often the first-person memories in Annie Ernaux's 2016 work of life-writing Mémoire de fille are rendered from a third-person perspective. Visual depictions of the author’s younger self are shown to us as if the older Ernaux who is narrating the story were present at the scene, seeing her former self from the outside. The events recounted include sexual exploitation and public shaming for falling foul of the era's sexual double standards, and, in the aftermath of this, an identity crisis and an eating disorder. How does Ernaux’s complex interplay of empathy and distance with regard to her younger self affect the social and political themes in the work, and the ethical stance of the text towards them? And how is the reader implicated by the perspective through which Ernaux has us view her teenage self of 1958?

Abstract States: Modernism in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey

Abstract A decade after modernist art history's tentative embrace of postcolonial modernisms, a new crop of books are leveraging this disciplinary acceptance to examine hitherto shrouded aspects of the field. Anneka Lenssen's, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (2020), Zeina Maasri's, Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut's Global Sixties (2020) and Sarah-Neel Smith's, Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey, (2022) offer candid appraisals of postcolonial modernism's exposure to colonial and nationalist institutions, Cold War cultural networks, and the hierarchical effects of canonical modernism. Reviewed together in this article, these books reveal the distinctive orientations of modernism in contiguous Syria, Lebanon and Turkey along with the methodological value of formalist methods to assert artistic agency. Through refractive readings of artworks and other materials, Lenssen, Maasri and Smith invert disciplinary anxieties about postcolonial art's political subjection, making a case for postcolonial art's perceptiveness to the instability and abstraction of the institutional forces to which they are subject.

Industrial democracy between neocapitalism and postfordism. The political and intellectual trajectory of Bruno Trentin (1926-2007)

During his long political trajectory Bruno Trentin (1926-2007) never ceased to question the relationship between work and democracy. The Italian intellectual and trade union leader denounced the domination of the «productivist ideology» of scientific management over the entire social and political Left. According to this ideology, trade union action was reduced to the animation of distributive conflict, while the political struggle was played out outside the economic sphere, through the conquest of the state. Contrary to this vision, the 1960s were the source of a new self-management political culture, born of the encounter between the Marxist, Christian and libertarian traditions of the labour movement, which aimed to make workers and their unions «political subjects» in their own right by gaining real decision-making power over the organisation of work. The decline of Fordism offers an opportunity for a new "contract" in which work can achieve its political recognition and autonomy within the workplace and not from outside. It is from this history that Trentin draws to defend the actuality of a project of liberation from subordinate «work». In this article I reinscribe Trentin's reflections in the long history of his career as an intellectual, trade unionist and political activist, as well as in the controversies and the impasses that have shaped his life and the history whole Italian and European labour movement during the twentieth century.

Development of problem based e-comic on the theme of domestic politics on student learning achievement

Development of problem based e-comic on the theme of domestic politics on student learning achievement

A Moving Image of Scepticism: Cavell on Film, Gender, and Gaslighting

This article examines the political themes in Cavell’s philosophy through a reading of the film Gaslight in the context of contemporary American politics. It demonstrates how Cavell’s ideas offer valuable insights into gender politics, fascism, and propaganda in American society. The article proceeds in three sections, first reviewing Cavell’s ontology of film and genre to elucidate his claim that film embodies scepticism. Next, it analyses gaslighting in the film as an enactment of gendered politics of scepticism and explores Cavell’s resources for responding to it. Lastly, it investigates the political implications of gaslighting, particularly in light of its association with post-truth politics, using Cavell’s interpretation as a philosophical framework to understand instances like Donald Trump’s manipulation of America.

“You Said Independence?” The Case of Scotland's and Catalonia's Nationalisms: A Discussion of J. H. Elliott's Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion

Abstract This review essay addresses one of the most complex contemporary political issues: secessionism. The review essay discusses J. H. Elliott's 2018 book, Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion, to raise questions regarding the processes of independence in the European Union. Particularly, it focuses on the problematic conceptualization of the debates about Catalan independence in twenty-first-century Europe, explaining why concepts such as nation and nationalism should be rethought, which also implies the need to rethink the use of symbols such as national flags. It also insists that one cannot write on such an urgent political topic without addressing at length the role of culture in political thought and national sentiment. The author theorizes the role of the emotions in the creation of political subjectivities, concentrating especially on the central role that the web and the media are given in the fight for independence.

Political Disputes in the Structure of A. Solzhenitsyn’s novel “In the First Circle”

The article is devoted to the analysis of socio-political discussions in A. Solzhenitsyn’s novel “In the First Circle”. The “playwriting” of dialogues and polylogues on political topics has received an original compositional embodiment here and is based on the mobile, acutely conflicting interaction of various speech flows. Political disputes acquire a moral and philosophical dimension in the work, push the interlocutors to historical assessments and prophecies about the future social structure. Episodes of situational mass disputes are combined with individualized, lengthy and conceptually rich discussions, which often have their own compositional preliminaries and “afterwords”. The article examines in detail the substantive and rhetorical aspects of conversations and clashes involving Rubin, Nerzhin, Sologdin, Gerasimovich, pays attention to uncle Avenir’s political strategies, internal disputes, the evolution of Volodin’s social views, the positions of Galakhov, Radovich, Clara Makarygina. Paradoxically, it is the prisoners’ disputes that show in the novel the highest level of moral, intellectual, and political freedom, unthinkable for the social climate of the Stalinist decades. In the structure of the novel, explicit political battles and hidden, forcibly suppressed social differences form a holistic, branched macro-plot in which, despite the pressure of the totalitarian system, individual and collective social reflection continues to pulsate.

PSB Radio and the Public Sphere in South Africa: #SAfmSunrise, Radio, and Citizenship

This article explores public service broadcasting (PSB) radio in South Africa, focusing on SAfm. Using a mixed methods approach comprising a broadcast content analysis and social media textual analysis, the article uses theories of the public sphere and democratic listening to analyse the role of SAfm in the context of PSB broadcasting. The article focuses on the flagship breakfast show, analysing station content alongside tweets containing the hashtag #SAfmSunrise. Breakfast shows can be considered significant as they typically attract the largest proportion of audience share over the course of a broadcast day. Moving beyond the normative Habermasian notion of the public sphere, this article draws on the work of Ekeh, who highlights the bifurcated nature of publics in Africa. While SAfm does not strictly conform to normative notions of a deliberative public sphere, to some extent, it fulfils Ekeh's conditions of a public characterised as a bourgeois privileged class. Moreover, I argue for SAfm as a space of conflict and contestation, and thus constitutive of a public, despite its shortcomings in relation to the mandate of PSB broadcasting. SAfm, I argue, creates a form of political subjectivity, with interest and participation in mainstream party politics highlighted as the main conditions for citizenship.

Emotivism Trends in Digital Political Communication: The Influence on the Results of the US Presidential Elections

Citizens, organizations and institutions are increasingly making use of digital social networks such as Twitter as a means by which to express their position as regards political topics. However, an increasing amount of academic literature coincides, in that it highlights the emotive and expressive nature of these positions. In other words, for the most part, the political opinions that are publicized are more like backing based on support or rejection (without arguments or motives). In parallel, said expressions have a key emotional element (expressions of a positive or negative affective disposition). This article consists of an analysis that aims, on the one hand, to measure the affective disposition of US citizens as expressed on Twitter during the two most recent electoral campaigns (2016 and 2020). Similarly, we have generated a model that facilitates the measurement of the extent to which the content of the aforementioned messages demonstrates arguments or motives, or lack of. By way of the use of a database for the same Twitter accounts in both elections, we provide very consistent results that highlight the lack of argumentation of the public debate and the notably polarized profile of the affective dispositions shown by participants. We use the thesis of emotivism to give a more significant analytical weighting to this research.

Emancipuojanti poezija: skaitymai prie Žemaitės kaip feministinis artivizmas

Although contemporary Lithuanian poets and readers often claim to be apolitical, politically charged poetry or literary behavior are not always apparent and can take various forms. The article examines the annual women’s poetry readings in the Žemaitė Square during the Poetry Spring Festival as a political event. Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s literary field theory, the event can be interpreted as a collective response of feminist artivism to the established power structures. The readings provide a space for the exchange of social, symbolic, and cultural capital among the poetesses, enabling them to gain visibility and prominence within the literary field. Furthermore, the political significance of these readings emerges through the experience of emancipatory art, as defined by Jacques Rancière. The ‘distribution of the sensible’ not only establishes poetesses as political subjects but also fosters a sense of potential equality among all agents in the field. The collective experience of art engenders an aesthetic community capable of challenging prevailing power structures and envisioning possibilities that extend beyond societal norms.

Literární reflexe pandemie Covid-19: přehledová analýza frankofonní a české prózy

This paper deals with a hitherto only marginally explored topic - a characterization of the basic tendencies, variants and forms of literary reflection on the pandemic of the covid-19 disease between 2020 and 2022, based on the material of two European literatures (Czech and French, respectively Francophone). After an introductory theoretical overview that recalls some of the more general patterns of cultural (re)mediation of trauma and traumatic memory, the study focuses on an overview analysis of genre, thematic and narrative lines. It describes the production of early collective short story volumes, as well as variants of autobiographical and diary prose, and novels that use the framework of pandemic experience to reflect seriously and subversively on the transpersonal, social or political themes of modern times. In the last section, the article includes a discussion of the relative absence of more aesthetically significant or critically and readerly appreciated " major" literary representations of the pandemic era.

Territorial subjectivities. The missing link between political subjectivity and territorialization

Political subjectivity and territorialization often appear disconnected in recent debates. We propose a fresh approach based on Latin American scholarship to understand subjects and territories as relational: Subjects are (de)stabilized in processes of territorialization, while territories are (de)stabilized in processes of subject formation. We introduce the concept of territorial subjectivities and use examples from the literature to show how these emerge in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Dresden. Placing an analytical focus on becoming rather than being, the contingency of territorial subjectivities is key to this novel conceptual link that supports a differentiated reading of socio-territorial struggles in diverse geographical contexts.

Brittle bonds: queer relationalities in literary and cinematic forms in India

Abstract From factories to hostels, homes to neighbourhoods, how do embodied practices in stratified spaces shape the contemporary terrains of queerness in India? In this article, I analyse two recent cultural texts from India, Neeraj Ghaywan’s Geeli Pucchi (Sloppy Kisses, 2021) and Hansda Sowvender Shekhar’s (2018) novel My Father’s Garden, Speaking Tiger Books, Delhi, to engage with the fraught dynamics of relationality and queerness. My analysis contests any easy celebration of community – by foregrounding the movements of dispossessed protagonists who do not fit into the paradigm of the privileged subject of queer politics. Yet these texts capture the fleeting possibilities of reaching towards one another in spaces carved through the operations of exclusion and discrimination. I bring together two texts in which the direct references to sexual identities formed via governmental or non-governmental networks are largely absent; rather, they ask fundamental questions about the in-between terrain of the relational. The dynamics of distance and connection is opened up in complex ways in these cinematic and literary texts as they create imaginative idioms to explore the brittleness of queer bonds formed through the hierarchized operations of class, caste and ethnicity. Through an analysis of the formal aspects of these texts, and the practices of spectatorship and readership they facilitate, I seek to underline how formations of sexuality in India can be unpacked only through a close engagement with the critical discourse on gender, caste and ethnicity.

Toward Pedagogies of Decoloniality: Evaluating Teaching Practice and Syllabus Design in IR Undergraduate Modules

Abstract Undergraduate teaching in international relations (IR) primarily focuses on state-centric topics of sovereignty, anarchy, and power politics, its dominant theories governed by Western interests. However, the implementation of decolonial pedagogies requires more than simply “adding” non-Western theories to curricula. The myth of Europe must be ruptured, revealing its idealized and partisan foundations, uncovering knowledges from the interstices. This article contributes to the pedagogic literature by exploring attempts to decenter the discipline, evaluating teaching practice and syllabus design in three IR undergraduate modules. Drawing on thirty-five semi-structured interviews with lecturers and students, it argues that students benefit from the introduction of decolonial pedagogies, developing broader curricula knowledge, and, crucially, epistemic criticality. Despite these benefits, implementing decolonial praxis in 12-week modules can be challenging. The article suggests starting-points for lecturers seeking to decenter their teaching, calling for pedagogies of decoloniality to be implemented at a departmental level, with faculty and institutional support.

‘We are not ready’ – contradictions and contestations in basic education organising in South Africa at the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT This article reflects on our participation in two efforts at education organising at the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic – the national C19 People’s Coalition, and the Progressive Organisations Formation (POF). We suggest our experiences as participants in these movements reflect a broader political climate in South Africa in which large-scale, organised resistance is absent in the ‘post-1994’ basic education context. Using Gramsci’s concept of ‘interregnum’ and Gentili’s ‘crisis-as-dispositif’, we examine both collectives and their power relations to ask why we could not coalesce into legitimate, self-sustaining organising efforts, despite unviable conditions in basic public education in South Africa. We theorise the dispositif at work as captured resistance in the C19 People’s Coalition, where the process of NGOisation was evident, and nostalgic resistance in the POF, where the theory of change amongst an older vanguard of teachers had not yet reckoned with a ‘post’-apartheid political subjectivity in schools. What our direct experiences suggest is the state of unreadiness of South African education organisations, to both respond to unexpected exogenous shocks or sustain protracted struggles on any given issue. The original declaration of the C19 People’s Coalition Basic Education working group, ‘We are not ready!’, could not have been more ironic.

Policing tenancy: the struggle for housing and land in Los Angeles

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the role of state power, specifically policing, in the precaritization of tenancy. By focusing on nuisance abatement lawsuits, we demonstrate how the state intervenes in landlord-tenant relations to render tenants as nuisance and subject them to containment and removal. We interpret the dialectics of containment and removal as an important part of the struggle over land. If tenancy has typically been understood in relation to rent extraction, we are concerned with the relationship between tenancy and state-organized land grabs. The paper thus focuses on two conjunctures of redevelopment in Los Angeles. We further argue that while the legal-bureaucratic archives of state power rarely record tenant struggles, it is crucial to understand the tenant as a political subject. Through close attention to tenant struggles, and the community histories thereof, we demonstrate the hard-won, but fragile, victories achieved by tenants in the face of redevelopment.

Medicine, access, spirit, and survival: An intersectional look at concepts of health among a diverse sample of LGBTQ adults

Research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/gender expansive, and queer (LGBTQ) health is dominated by disparities in disease, access, and risk behaviors. Such research is critical for examining the myriad factors that limit the lives of gender and sexual minorities. Few studies, however, have explored LGBTQ people's concepts of health. People's accounts of health are important, as they reveal insights into a person's relationship to the social world and are fundamental to accessing care. Semi-structured, in-depth individual interviews were conducted with a diverse sample of 40 LGBTQ-identified adults living in New York City, aiming to explore (a) how LGBTQ people conceptualize health, and (b) how participant constructions of health reflect personal, social, cultural, and political subjectivities as well as institutionalized discourses of health and illness. Through framework analysis, four primary themes were identified: (1) health as medicine; (2) health as mind-body-spirit; (3) health as survival; and (4) health as access. Implications for the health professions, including patient-centered care, shared decision-making, and provider training, are discussed.