Precarious Relationship Research Articles

Astrology and Science: A Precarious Relationship. Part 2: Considerations of Empirical Investigations on the Validity of Astrology

In Part 2 of “Astrology and Science: A Precarious Relationship”, the results of a population survey are first presented to reveal definitory problems in determining astrology. When investigating "astrology", of crucial importance are which concepts and practices to include. After definitional clarification, the anomalistic aspects of astrology or astrological practice are attended to with a distinction made between the above-below-theorem as the traditional basic assumption of astrology and possible psi phenomena that can occur in astrological counseling practice. Further sections describe problems in scientific studies on the validity of astrology. Such problems could have led to the failure of these efforts. Furthermore, specific methodological problems in the investigation of the above-below-theorem and in matching tests are addressed. In a final step, various scientific approaches to astrology are listed with their respective specific questions, methodological approaches and relevance for the scientific world view or astrological practice.

Astrology and Science: A Precarious Relationship. Part 1: Historical Review of German Astrology in the 20th Century and Current Developments

This two-part essay illuminates the difficult relationship between astrology and science from different perspectives. While the first part provides a historical review of developments in the 20th century in German-speaking countries, the second part (in the next issue) concerns theoretical and methodological considerations for empirical investigations of the validity of astrology. During the 20th century, astrology in the German-speaking world was influenced by a few people who pursued a special quest for connectivity with scientific findings and models as well as a natural philosophical foundation. The astrologer Thomas Ring developed an elaborate astrological anthropology, the "revised astrology", which claimed to be compatible to other scientific disciplines like biology and psychology. Hans Bender, who was willing to carry out experiments in order to test astrology, became an interested counterpart to Ring. This openness to scientific scrutiny combined with the desire to replace old concepts based on magical-analogical thinking with concepts more compatible with scientific models, met the criticism of several astrologers in the 1990s. The critics found the psychological-scientific aspiration represented too restrictive. This led, besides general socio-cultural developments, to a change in the "astrology scene", which is described, among other things, on the basis of some expert interviews at the end of the first part.

Jesse Egner’s Disidenticications: Steven Baboun in Conversation with Jesse Egner

In this article, Steven Baboun interviews Jesse Egner about his photographic series, Disidentifications—a series of absurd, unusual, and playful portraits of queer individuals meant to evoke the uncanny, humor, and curiosity. Inspired by the theory of disidentification as described by queer theorist José Muñoz, this series examines the liminality of disidentities that neither identify nor counter-identify with a dominant ideology. As a gay man with a non-normative body, Egner has experienced extensive rejection from members of his fellow gay community, forcing him into a precarious relationship with himself. The playful and performative acts and symbols in these photographs reflect this relationship, while the fragmented narratives and uncertainty—existing in a space between reality and fantasy—reflect the liminal space of queer identity.

Processo de trabalho de supervisão de enfermagem em policlínicas: limites e possibilidades

OBJETIVO: Descrever os limites e as possibilidades do processo de trabalho de supervisão de enfermagem em policlínicas. MÉTODO: Estudo descritivo, exploratório e de abordagem qualitativa, realizado em cinco policlínicas de uma grande cidade do Estado da Bahia, Brasil. As entrevistas semiestruturadas foram realizadas com as cinco supervisoras de enfermagem e analisadas pela de técnica análise de conteúdo. RESULTADOS: As supervisoras de enfermagem relataram como principais limites para o seu trabalho a resistência da equipe em participar de eventos educativos, relação precária entre demandas de usuários, insuficiência no quantitativo da equipe de enfermagem, dificuldade na regulação de usuários, recursos humanos e financeiros ineficazes. Entre as possibilidades foram relatadas a comunicação, o relacionamento interpessoal e a boa articulação entre a gestão e coordenação. CONCLUSÃO: Os limites encontrados ratificam as dificuldades encontradas na gestão dos serviços de saúde, assim como atestam a complexidade e necessidade da supervisão de enfermagem em promover boas práticas para um cuidado qualificado.

Birth control survey research, technical bureaucrats and the imagining of Japan’s population, 1945–60

This article explores a birth control survey conducted by the Japanese government between 1945–1960, and analyses how this research, both as scientific practice and knowledge, resonated with government efforts to manage the population during post-war reconstruction. Focusing on Shinozaki Nobuo, a Ministry of Health and Welfare ‘technical bureaucrat’ (gijutsu kanryō or gikan) specializing in population issues, this article depicts how human agency participated in the at times precarious relationship between policy and practice. It also explores how the epistemological framework inscribed in the resulting scientific knowledge harmonized with the economic and political rationale supporting post-war reconstruction. This article contributes to the study of modern Japan by highlighting the critical, yet thus far underexamined role that population science and technical bureaucrats played in Japanese statecraft. At the same time, it demonstrates that the interaction between state governance of population and the creation of scientific knowledge about the populace was fundamentally complex.

Witnessing the Ruins: Speculative Stories of Caring for the Particular and the Peculiar

Educational scholars and practitioners are confronting long-held anthropocentric pedagogical practices as well as notions of care. To trouble the notion of care, this article draws from the collaborative research that stories the collective experiences of children, educators, and researchers at an early years learning centre located in an emerging suburban enclave of a mid-sized city in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Our work is guided by the question of how we as educators and scholars reclaim and augment the politics of care. Through the practice of storying everyday encounters, we explore how emerging and precarious relations with more-than-human others, both real and imaginary, challenge anthropocentric notions of care.

Sos Venezuela: an analysis of the anti-Maduro protest movements using Twitter

ABSTRACT In this study, we analyze the evolution of the protests after the election of the Venezuelan Constitutional Assembly in 2017. We adopt the idea of a social conflict over diverging opinions about how the world should be. Sharing similar opinion is one basis for a sense of collective identity that facilitates participation in action to bring about desired changes in the world. We approach social conflict as an interaction between different opinion-based groups, in which opinions are formed and transformed leading and supporting different forms of collective action. We analyze Twitter conversations before, during, and after the events of the summer 2017 anti-regime protests in Venezuela. Correspondence and cluster analysis of a corpus of 60,036 tweets is used to investigate the theme and opinions from July to September 2017. Results show that opinions become more extreme and one-sided in response to overt repression and the authority’s lack of negotiation with movements. After the repression of the protests and President Maduro’s successful implementation of an elected Constitutional Assembly, tweets supporting the rule of law and democratic procedures dissipated, while more radical positions strengthened. These finding suggests that democratic principles rest on a precarious relationship between the individual and the authority. Protest movements may arrive at the paradoxical position in which radicalization is the most straightforward response to repression: The most radical positions survive, while the moderate ones are co-opted or suppressed by the regime. We argue that this dynamic may have potentially negative consequences for democracy and social change.

“We are All Refugees”: Camps and Informal Settlements as Converging Spaces of Global Displacements

ABSTRACT This paper is in conversation with two important bodies of literature: one on informal settlements (informal and insurgent grassroots practices) and another on camps (spatial practices and governance of refugees). Reading inhabitants’ experiences in Korail, an informal settlement in Dhaka, Bangladesh, through the literature grounded in the experiences of refugees, we seek to contribute to the relational theorization of informal settlements and camps as an expanding and overlapping reality in the era of intensified global displacements. Weaving back and forth between the camp literature and Korail’s reality, we bring to light the comparable spatial practices and governance of the so-called citizens and the so-called stateless. We present the insights we gain from this analytical conversation under three organizing themes: experiential to highlight the precarious relationship of the two groups to citizenship and place, what we call a state of “citizenship in wait” and “in-situ displacement”; institutional to highlight the humanitarian matrices of care that provide governmental structures in both contexts; and micropolitical, to characterize dwellers’ contestations with state and humanitarian governance that constitute the processes of life-making in informal settlements, much as in the camps. Conceptually the paper lends a forceful voice to the mounting critiques of the state-centered canon in planning theories and the needed Southern turn in planning theorization. Politically, it lends a hand to the efforts of activists working to overcome exclusions and erasures that are endemic to the politics of citizenship, that pit refugees against the poor, and to gesture toward forging solidarities for a humane urbanism.

Talk–Action Dynamics: Modalities of aspirational talk

This paper investigates talk–action dynamics in the context of organizations, focusing in particular on situations where the talk concerns complex organizational aspirations, that is, situations where the implied action takes considerable effort to unfold and therefore extends into an unknown future. Using corporate social responsibility (CSR) as recurrent exemplar, we address talk–action dynamics in four different modalities of aspirational CSR talk: exploration, formulation, implementation and evaluation. By conceptualizing the precarious relationship between talk and action in each of these modalities, the paper disentangles talk and action, all the while acknowledging that the two are mutually intertwined. Hereby, the paper extends theories of communicative performativity, recovering the perlocutionary dimension and focusing on uptake beyond the moment in which the speech act is uttered.

Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist and the Mimic Bildungsroman

According to Tobias Boes the much-debated Bildungsroman has proven to be an “unparalleled success as a model by which writers and critics alike can understand the world around them” (p. 242). In the changing perception of the humanistic subject, the word Bildung (formation, development) has a precarious relationship with contemporary British fiction. Commenting on the representational possibilities of contemporary literary narratives, Mark Stein proposes that they “have a dual function: they are about the formation of the protagonist as well as the transformation of British society (Britishness) and cultural institutions” (p. 22). Drawing on these observations I argue in this study that Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist is one such novel that mimics the classical Bildungsroman and problematizes it through its subversion of the traditional characteristics of the hero who is supposed to reach a stable and integrative end point in society and become the model citizen. Hari Kunzru’s The Betty Trask Award 2002 winning novel, The Impressionist is a multifaceted narrative that ranges across a multitude of geographical settings. Murat Aydemir (2006) contends, “The narrative tries out, tries on, different conceptualizations of inter- or cross-cultural identity” (p. 205). At the same time, the exploitative regime of “empire” manifests itself in the synchronized presence of connection and the segregation of the new “citizen of the world”. By focusing on how performativity resonates throughout the novel, I discuss the ways in which the novel mimics and performs the Bildungsroman, and offers new modes of belonging.

Incomplete Commodification: Book Review of Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright

This review essay offers an interpretation of the history of proprietary rights in news as a process of incomplete commodification. Like other species of information, news increasingly came to be treated as a commodity whose exchange value is extracted in markets through the support of property rights. This process of commodification, however, was incomplete because it was hampered and resisted due to three distinctive features of news: its information-intensive character, its close entanglement with public-sphere speech, and its precarious relationship with the modern construct of authorship. The essay identifies three eras in which these distinctive features played out differently with respect to proprietary rights in news: the period of proto-copyright privileges; early, thin copyright; and modern, increasingly commodified copyright. It concludes by suggesting a few lessons from this history relevant for contemporary renewed pressures to further commodify news through proprietary rights.

The Catholic Worker Movement and Racial Justice: A Precarious Relationship

The Catholic Worker Movement, widely known for its critique of violence and capitalism in American culture, has largely neglected racism. This seems surprising because its urban houses of hospitality, staffed mostly by middle-class whites, provide material resources disproportionately to impoverished African Americans. The movement's embodiment as a white movement and the failure of its founders (Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin) to prioritize racial justice has impeded its ability to adequately confront racism. This article contrasts the ways in which racism was addressed by the founders with the way it was addressed by two prominent African American Catholic Workers. The article includes a new Catholic Worker narrative to explain the movement's relationship with racial justice and offer suggestions for ways the movement can mine its own rich resources to become an authentically anti-racist movement.

Black Sex in the Quiet

This essay rereads black feminist engagements with silence and the constellation of terms that vibrate around it—invisibility, interiority, domesticity, privacy—to both demonstrate black feminism’s precarious relationship to silence and indicate the ways in which that contention with silence has spurred a fraught move toward confession and publicity. This form of black feminist storytelling—characterized as a bind of black sexual freedom—generates a culture of confession and exposure that reinforces black female fungibility under the guise of sexual liberation and limits alternative conceptions of black erotic freedom. Given that both silence and publicity are fraught spaces for black sexual injury and its redress, this essay posits that a discursive and material space like what Kevin Quashie has theorized as “the quiet” offers black women and the black feminist imagination alternative ways of reading, rehearsing, and enacting black erotic freedom. Extending Quashie’s conceptualization of “the quiet,” the essay develops a conception of “black sex in the quiet,” a hermeneutic that acknowledges the ways in which black fungibility renders every space precarious yet mines the various ways that black subjects carve out alternative imaginaries of black intimacy in the space of the public. Black sex in the quiet is used to read neo-soul artist Erykah Badu’s music video “Other Side of the Game,” an ostensible scene of black cis heteronormative domesticity, for quiet articulations of black erotic freedom.

Beyond solutionist science for the Anthropocene: To navigate the contentious atmosphere of solar geoengineering

The emerging narrative of the Anthropocene has created a new space for changes in global environmental change (GEC) science. On the one hand, there is a mounting call for changing scientific practices towards a solution-oriented transdisciplinary mode that can help achieve global sustainability. On the other hand, the scientists’ desire to avoid exceeding planetary boundaries has broken a taboo on researching solar geoengineering, a dangerous idea of deliberately cooling the Earth’s climate. Whilst to date the two features have been discussed separately, there is a possible confluence in the future. This paper explores this close yet precarious relationship between transdisciplinary GEC science and solar geoengineering in the context of Future Earth, a new international platform of Earth system science. Our aim is to understand how a transdisciplinary mode of science can navigate the contention over solar geoengineering and its course of research without breeding polarization. By seeking the immediacy of ‘problem-solving’, Future Earth is drawn into the solutionist thinking that orders the mode of engagement in pursuing consensus. However, because conflict is inescapable on the solar geoengineering debate, transdisciplinary engagement might as well aim at mapping out plural viewpoints and allowing people to disagree. In transdisciplinary engagement, as co-design signifies the engagement of stakeholders with decision-making in science, a fair and transparent procedure of making decisions is also needed. From our own experience of co-designing research priorities, we suggest that, if carefully designed, voting can be a useful tool to mediate the contentious process of transdisciplinary decision-making with three different benefits for collective decision-making, namely, efficiency, inclusivity and learning. For the future directions of transdisciplinary GEC science, since the Anthropocene challenges are truly uncertain and contentious, it is argued that the science for the Anthropocene should move away from a solutionist paradigm towards an experimentalist turn.

Echoes of the Rejection of the Aulos in Augustan Poetry

Abstract Athenian elites of the late fifth century BC rebelled against aulos-playing as part of the school curriculum and launched a socio-cultural campaign against the instrument. Echoes of this ‘anti-aulos’ crusade reverberated in literature in the centuries to follow as motifs of hostility towards aulos music. Ovid (Fasti 6.657-710) and Propertius (2.30b) engage in this discourse, largely disregarding the motives of the Athenians for spurning the instrument; instead they embed the rejection myths in their poetical programmes in the context of their precarious relationship with Augustan authority. This paper argues that while both poets oppose the rejection of the doublepipes, they do so for entirely different reasons. Although the negative image of the aulos is present in Latin literary sources, it is largely disconnected from the substantial role of the instrument in Roman musical culture.

Justice Deferred: Legal Duplicity and the Scapegoat Mentality in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Jim Crow America

Although best known as a poet, African-American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) developed a unique voice in his fiction. This article explores the bifurcation Dunbar discerned between the law as an instrument of justice and as a stabilizer of the segregationist status quo in Jim Crow America. Dunbar creates characters who are systematically scapegoated for crimes they did not commit in order to expose the law’s precarious relationship to justice. His treatment of lynching as a paradigmatic manifestation of the scapegoat mechanism links this practice to a political theory of violence, whereby the innocent are punished for the crimes of the guilty, and society requires their sacrifice in order to redeem its guilt. Without relinquishing his faith in the law, Dunbar used prose narratives to expose the disjuncture between law and justice made manifest by the US Supreme Court’s rationalization of racial discrimination in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). While considering the light Dunbar’s fictions shed on the relationship between law and justice, I locate these interventions within a longer history of thinking about the role of the writer as a scapegoat who enables society to sin without experiencing guilt.

Perpetual Vanishing: Animal Lives in Contemporary Scottish Fiction

Animals, writes Akira Mizuta Lippit, ‘exist in a state of perpetual vanishing’: they haunt human concerns, but rarely appear as themselves. This is especially notable in contemporary Scottish fiction. While other national literatures often reflect the ‘animal turn’ in contemporary theory, the number of twenty-first-century Scottish novels concerned with human–animal relations remains disproportionately small. Looking at a broad cross-section of recent and understudied novels, including Mandy Haggith’s Bear Witness (2013), Ian Stephen’s A Book of Death and Fish (2014), Andrew O’Hagan’s The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (2010), Malachy Tallack’s The Valley at the Centre of the World (2018), James Robertson’s To Be Continued (2016), and Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border (2015) highlights the marginalisation of both nonhuman animals and texts centred on them. The relative absence of engagement with animal studies in Scottish fiction and criticism suggests new opportunities for reevaluating the formulation of environmental concerns in a Scottish context. By moving away from the unified concepts of ‘the land’ to a perspective that includes the precarious relations between humans, nonhuman animals, and their environment, these texts highlight the need for greater, and more nuanced, engagement with fictional representations of nonhuman animals.

Variants of Frontier Mimesis

At the turn of the twentieth century, the French colonial administration adopted various strategies and tactics to ‘pacify’ and control the culturally heterogeneous regions dividing the lowland realms of the Lao and Vietnamese courts, while upland powerbrokers aimed to forge strategic alliances with the new colonial power. This article takes the concept of mimesis as a means to explore the interplay of alterity and identity. With reference to the work of Michael Taussig, along with other theories of imitation, I will discuss processes of mutual appropriation and differentiation within the precarious relationship between colonizers and colonized. Mimesis here provides an alternative reading of upland Southeast Asian history beyond the binaries of dominance and resistance prevalent in James C. Scott’s recent work on the anarchist history of zomia.

Member Heterogeneity in Agricultural Cooperatives: A Systems-Theoretic Perspective

All over the globe, cooperatives are plagued by pervasive member heterogeneity problems that are induced by the radical and dynamic changes in the business environment. Most current solutions to these problems emphasize strengthening member loyalty and commitment. Yet, many of these solutions are symptomatic rather than fundamental. Searching for fundamental solutions, this paper draws on the Luhmannian system-environment paradigm. Bringing this paradigm to bear on the cooperative scholarship, the paper views cooperatives as operationally closed systems maintaining a precarious relationship to their outer environment, which includes cooperative members. In view of their operational closure, cooperatives tend to overstrain the carrying capacity of their environment by being active in the areas marked by a limited extent of the true commonness of member interests. This overstraining results in a host of problems associated with member heterogeneity. The fundamental solutions following from the system-environment paradigm require the adjustment of cooperative boundaries and goals in light of the evolving range of the true common interests of members. In terms of methodology, we review the extant literature, synthesize the main elements of the system-environment approach and conduct a meta-analysis of case studies and other empirical research to highlight our theoretical arguments.

Medium (Un)specificity as Material Agency—The Productive Indeterminacy of Matter/Material

In this article, I consider some of the debates brought to the fore by the proliferation of recent textile focused exhibitions, namely, the tension between a continued allegiance to medium specific conventions and the richness, hybridity, and heterogeneity afforded by the post-medium condition of contemporary art. Through a new body of sculptural and installational practice, I propose a constellatory opening up of textile in which the medium specific can be (re)mapped in a fluid and fragmentary way. Drawing particular reference from Adorno’s conception of the constellation and mimetic comportment, this model of practice involves a mode of behavior that actively opens up to alterity and returns authority to the affective indeterminacy of the sensuously bound experiential encounter. This is demonstrated through a range of practice strategies—“thingness,” “staged (dis)contiguity,” and the play between “sensuous immediacy and corporeal containment”—which mobilize a precarious relationship between processes of attachment and detachment. Acknowledging the critical currency afforded to textile through feminist and poststructuralist critique, the work moves away from “a rhetoric of negative opposition” and predetermined discursive frameworks, returning authority to the aesthetic impulse, privileging the ambiguous resonances of an abstract sculptural language over more overt strategies of representation.