Ideological Production Research Articles

Ideological productions in human geography as an apparatus of the state/power

ABSTRACT … ‘Humanity’ is an apparatus that could be used ideologically (Schmitt 1963, 55). This study analyses the ideological practices of the state/power -including panoptic surveillance and organic integrity practices- in the discipline of human geography through the lenses of curriculum, scientific freedom, and autonomy. Human geographers have long analysed the sociospatial traits of societies using scientific perspectives. However, in many socioeconomically less-developed countries like Turkey, human geography and other social sciences, portray social issues through the meticulously designed ideological expectations of powers, rather than universal scientific criteria. This ideological structure damages the scientific development of human geography and hinders students’ abilities to practice coexistence with other groups by instilling a dependent consciousness.

Indigenous secularism and the secular-colonial

Many non-Indigenous people assume that secularism—the belief that religion and politics are and should be different spheres of life—is foreign to Native American experience. This partly explains why the topic of Native conversions in early New England has always been so controversial, since conversion implies the differentiation of religion from politics. Be that as it may, history shows that Indigenous peoples are well acquainted with secularism and have been debating it within their communities for centuries. This essay demonstrates proof of concept for a history of Indigenous secularism via a case study of Samson Occom, whose vision of Indigenous self-determination was informed by secularist ideas about sovereignty and conversion. It also offers a critique of scholarly romanticizations of Indigenous peoples' primordially “holistic” a-secularism. This romanticization is the product of a secular-colonial ideology which presupposes the otherness of Indigenous peoples when it comes to differentiating between religion and politics.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

The Making ofHomo Socialist: The Discursive Analysis of the Ideological Production of Class in China, 1949–1976

AbstractBased on a critique of the history project titled “Oral History of Peasants’ Ordinary Life in the Revolutionary Era of China,” this article provides an analysis of class ideology production from Land Reform Movement to the Cultural Revolution in China. Thirty years of socialist construction in China was based on the craft of making the Homo Socialist. The focus here is on how personal experiences were transformed into state-endorsed conduct via the discourse of class and class struggle. Over the course of the sociopolitical transformations leading to the Cultural Revolution, “class” changed from a socioeconomic designation to a political behavioral metaphor, and in the end a purely symbolic gesture; personal experiences were transformed from hallmarks of class privilege to virtual identification with imagined class struggle. And the peasants went from being “owners of bitterness” to “debtors of bitterness” on the way to becoming “sinners of the revolution”—who gradually submitted themselves to the regime in the name of revolution, liberation, and redemption. These transformations were realized through discursive practices connecting personally embodied experiences with the abstract Marxist theory of class and class struggle. Examining the shifting nature of class ideology production helps to explain how the Chinese Communist Party understood the effects of its governance and how people found class ideology meaningful to them, even when it reached the point of absurdity.

The concept of “scientific atheism”: The history of its construction and introduction into philosophy and political practice (1954–1964)

The main purpose of the article is to reveal the socio-historical context of the emergence of the concept of “scientific atheism”, designed to solve ideological and political problems in the USSR in 1954–1964. The article shows how the concept of “scientific atheism” turns into a conceptual category, is filled with new content, forms an appropriate discourse and becomes a tool that produces socially significant meanings used in the practice of ideological production during the period of building socialism in the USSR.The author demonstrates how the understanding of atheism that existed in previous Marxist literature as a philosophical criticism of religion, based on the natural sciences and philosophical materialism and connected with the study of the historical forms of religion and its modern features, was rejected. Such an understanding of atheism did not satisfy the current political demand associated with the new tasks of communist construction. The article shows that a special role in the construction of the ideological component of the concept of “scientific atheism” in the early 1960s was played by I.D.Pantskhava, head of the Department of History and Theory of Atheism at Moscow State University, and also the secretary of the Central Committee L.F.Ilyichev, who headed the Ideological Commission of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which, in the wake of a new anti-religious campaign, initiated the development of practical recommendations in the field of atheistic upbringing of the population, among which the need to form the theoretical content of scientific atheism as an independent philosophical discipline aimed at solving urgent political problems stood out. The article introduces previously unknown archival materials into academic circulation, shedding light on the 1964 discussion about the features of Marxist atheism and the subject of “scientific atheism”.

Forest owners as political actors

Conflicting interests make forests an inevitably political issue. We examine the political roles that Finnish forest owners take as decision-makers and citizens. Inspired by post-political theories of democracy, we examine forest owners’ aim of open, constructive treatment of the controversies between views, ideologies and actors. Our data consisted of a survey (n = 452) informed by an interview (n = 24). We applied a mixed-method critical discourse analysis. The forest owners produced four alternative discourses of forest-related controversies, the major controversy being that between productivism and environmentalism. The ‘involved discourse’ positioned itself in between these two ideologies, although closer to the former. From this position, it expressed an eagerness to discuss any issue with anyone. The ‘pragmatist discourse’ criticised ideological environmentalism but did not perceive its own productivist ideology. The ‘receding discourse’ perceived its own environmentalist ideology and criticised the productivist one but was not eager to discuss forest policy issues. The ‘uninvolved discourse’ excluded controversies, and thus the political dimension, from a forest owner’s life. The involved discourse was closest to the constructed ideal of respectful, agonist, re-politicisation of forest issues. Recognition of one’s own ideology while being comfortably close to the hegemonic view of the forest seemed to be the main factor behind this orientation. Yet, political views that challenged the status quo and demanded a transformative change towards sustainability were pushed into a silent antagonism. A major forest policy challenge is how to bring forest owners with these transformative ideas – the proponents of ecological citizenship – into the sphere of agonist re-politicisation.

‘I like my accent but…’: EFL teachers’ evaluation of English accent varieties

In this study, we investigated Turkish EFL teachers’ level of recognition of English accent varieties and their attitudes regarding three common domains, status (e.g. educatedness, intelligence), solidarity (friendliness, kindness), and dynamism (confidence, talkativeness). We also explored the English teachers’ choices of English accents in various language-using contexts. Through the verbal-guise technique, we were able to evaluate the teachers’ language attitudes towards accents, yet we also integrated a questionnaire to further examine the issue for teacher attitudes and ideologies concerning language education. The findings revealed that recognition of English accent varieties was greater with American English and the local accented English. The ratings of status, solidarity, and dynamism showed that speakers’ accents had a strong effect on how the language teachers treated them. Few teachers reported to include various English accents in language courses due to the teachers’ strong preference for L1 accent varieties in the class. Similarly, the L1 accents were ranked significantly higher in the formal contexts, the teaching model in particular. In sum, the accent matter remains to be a meaningful variable for the production of normative language ideologies in the language education market. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2021.1965153 .

Building (specific) citizens: Politics, curriculum, and the quest for exclusive rights to ideological production

Building (specific) citizens: Politics, curriculum, and the quest for exclusive rights to ideological production

Historicizing the ideology of ‘the market’

The concept of the market is a linchpin notion in the analysis of contemporary capitalism. This article seeks to question how the term has tended to oscillate between two problematic types of use: either underspecifying the history and politics tied to the concept or, conversely, overloading the notion with a proliferation of too many meanings and applications. As a way to chart an alternative approach which can objectify and critique some of these patterns, this paper re-excavates the notion of ‘the market’ through a historicization of its ideological production and consumption. In particular, the argument brings political economy scholarship into a conversation with theoretical advances in the analysis of ideology, notably Michael Freeden’s so-called ‘morphological approach’. The article illuminates not only past usage patterns but also how the potency of the expression has been refreshed within recent decades associated with neoliberalism. In this way, through a dissection of this master category, the article also aims to contribute to identifying more precisely what is new in the neoliberal ideological ecosystem.

Ideas and party change: the role of predistribution in labour’s ideological renewal

ABSTRACT The literature on political parties and ideologies tends to highlight the instrumental nature of that relationship. In those accounts, political parties are either constrained by ideology or they use ideology to fit their power-seeking strategies. But there is a third dimension in this relationship that has been overlooked and which reveals key and interesting insights about how political parties contribute to the production of ideologies. This article seeks to contribute to the growing literature on the relationship between political parties and ideologies by proposing a new methodological approach, which combines V. A. Schmidt’s discursive institutionalism and Peter A. Hall’s historical institutionalism, to study how political parties engage in processes of ideological production. This methodological approach, is applied to the analysis of how the idea of ‘predistribution’ shaped party change in the Labour Party under Ed Miliband, shows: a) how political parties use ideas to make sense of the world and to address specific political challenges they face; b) how political parties link zeitgeist ideas to their own ideological traditions; c) how parties try to renew ideological traditions whilst pursuing other goals.

Being the Woman They Wanted Her to Be

Conventional wisdom holds that the Stasi policed East German artists because of their potential dissident and ideological production. In contrast, Cornelia Schleime’s Stasi Series (1993) reveals the secret police’s preoccupation with her domesticity as a sign of her rebellion. For the photo-text series, the artist assigns fourteen excerpts of her Stasi file to as many self-portrait photographs. The images and texts inform each other, providing a biographical sketch of Schleime’s life in two temporalities (the 1980s and 1993) and from two seemingly incommensurate perspectives (the Stasi and her own). The Stasi files document in careful detail Schleime’s private life in the years that immediately preceded her 1984 emigration. Although the truth of these texts is suspect, the artist does not completely discredit them. Rather, she unites her file to her 1993 present by performing its contents in photographs that exhibit both mockery and resignation. This article considers how the artist’s use of her archive reveals as much about the limitations of her Stasi source as it does about her unique perspective as both subject and interpreter. It examines Schleime’s project in relation to contemporary archival and surveillance-oriented art practices to demonstrate how the Stasi Series adds to their concerns over information and power, memory and document, observation and self-representation.

Troll Tracking: Examining Rhetorical Circulation of Anti-Intellectual Ideologies in Right-Wing Media Attacks

Abstract This case study proposes a method of troll tracking to analyze how right-wing media attacks circulate and contribute to increasing anti-intellectualism in the United States. Given the increase in right-wing political “news” sites as originators of trolling activity and their propensity to espouse anti-intellectualism, we are interested in understanding more deeply how particular instances of this targeted outrage become rhetorical. Our analysis reveals how metaknowledge circulates misinformation through commentary that carries anti-intellectual ideologies rapidly across time and space. This process of detachment reveals important implications about the (re)production of anti-intellectual ideologies, the evocation of collective outrage that manifests as sexism and transphobia, and the gatekeeping of academic knowledge production.

Creating a Collective Intellectual in the Political Field

The Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire [Revolutionary Democratic Rally] (RDR) was a political venture created in France in 1948 with the aim of defending a neutralist position, refusing the either-or alternatives between the Atlantic and Soviet blocs. This article begins with a sociographic presentation of the militant intellectuals who founded this original political initiative; then, we address the political activism and positionings of this distinctive partisan milieu, where intellectuals were characteristically overrepresented. We analyse the RDR’s methods of establishing a new position within the political and intellectual fields, as well as the way in which their forms of intervention and positionings were influenced by their members’ social profiles and trajectories as activists. Lastly, we question how the RDR’s members intervened within the domain of ideological production - both as a partisan venture and a collective intellectual - and to what extent the search for such a fragile equilibrium impacted its success or failure.

Gender, Animals, and Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis

The so-called animal turn in the humanities has given rise to an increased interest in the ways in which representations of animals shape human cultures. In Victorian studies, scholars have attended to the significance of domestic pets and other animals in the production of Victorian ideologies and subjectivities. Recent studies often point out the role animals played in the formation of Victorian domesticity. While these studies in general assign a key role to animal figures in the mediation of traditional domesticity, this essay explores the opposite phenomenon taking place in the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis, a novella in which pets and farm animals are prominent. In this work, the eponymous protagonist, a young woman living on a farm, falls in love with a cosmopolitan engineer. Rather than portraying Phillis as an ethereal angelic creature who would be typical of the ideal Victorian woman, Gaskell ascribes to her a passionate nature, though hidden behind a constrained façade. Phillis is partly able to express her deep-set emotions, including her interest in the cosmopolitan engineer, when interacting with animals. This non-traditional gender role becomes possible through the representation of birds and the family dog. Animals enable the imagination of a femininity that resists restrictive gender codes. The traditional association of animals with women has sometimes worked to denigrate the latter, but as Gaskell shows that this link also has an emancipatory potential.

Textbook Representations of the Economy of East and West Germany at the Time of the Golden Age

This article examines the presentation of West Germany’s “economic miracle” and East Germany’s planned economy in school textbooks published between 2014 and 2016. The textbooks tell a success story of the “social market economy” that hardly takes into account the academic research of the last forty years. The results furthermore show that contemporary sources were altered in the process of textbook production in order that they adhere to the German success story. These findings, however, do not only point to conscious ideology production and a lack of knowledge, but also suggest that competition among publishers is an explanatory factor. Multiperspectival and controversial presentations of the economy occur only sporadically. It is therefore questionable to what extent the textbooks benefit historical learning.

America in Pakistani Print Media: A Semiotic Discourse Analysis based Study of Pak-Us Relationship

Print media semiotic discourses are one of the best sites for ideological investment and their role is very significant in the production and dissemination of certain ideology. The aim of the present study is to critically decode the semiotic discourse(s) of Pakistani English newspaper DAWN (daily) with special reference to the representation of Pak- Us relationship through the analysis of the semiotics discourses. The data for the present research has been collected from the mentioned newspaper. The time span for data collection ranges from October 2018 to December 2018. Out of ten (10) caricatures which represent Pakistan attempting to survive at its own rather than depending on America one was purposively selected for linguistic and semiotic analyses. The study is descriptive and utilizes qualitative research design. For this purpose, the researchers have devised an amended research model by drawing upon Fairclough (1995), Kress (2010) and Kruger’s (2000) research models to analyse linguistic, semiotic and focus group discussions data. The semiotic analysis has also been validated by incorporating the remarks of focus group participants. Based on the analysis of data the study concludes that noting is absolute in politics as far as Pak- Us relations through semiotic discourses are concerned. Additionally, the research reveals that print media semiotic discourses work insidiously to represent socio- political changes by employing linguistic and meta-linguistic devices and techniques.

“Aviso de gatilho”: efeitos de corpo, testemunho e denúncia

Este artigo se inscreve no campo da Análise de Discurso e intenta discutir efeitos de corpo, testemunho e denúncia no poema “aviso de gatilho”, de Mariana Rocha Arduini, no qual o sujeito simboliza, por meio da escrita, a experiência da violência sexual. Para tanto, as análises problematizam questões constitutivas de suas condições de produção, como pertencimento, silenciamento e interseccionalidade e versam sobre os rastros de memória que permitem significar o poema como uma escrita de resistência à divisão racial e sexual do trabalho de escritura. Assim, procura-se compreender modos de simbolização da experiência da violência sexual constitutivos do poema como gestos de resistência à produção ideológica de sentidos que hipersexualiza o corpo da mulher negra.

YouTube and Political Ideologies: Technology, Populism and Rhetorical Form

Digital (participatory and shareable) media are driving profound changes to contemporary politics. That includes, this article argues, important changes to the production, dissemination and reception of political ideas and ideologies. Such media have increased the number and political range of ‘ideological entrepreneurs’ promoting forms of political thought, while also giving rise to distinct genres of political rhetoric and communication. All of this is affecting how people come to be persuaded by and to identify with political ideas. In developing and justifying these claims, I draw on the Political Theory of Ideologies, Digital Media Studies and Rhetorical Political Analysis. I begin by showing how a populist ‘style’, induced by broadcast media, has been intensified by digital media, affecting ideological form and content. Next I consider, in detail, a particular example – YouTube – showing how it shapes political, ideological, communication. I then present a case-study of the UK-based political YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson. I show how the political ideology he propagates can be understood as a blend of Conservatism and Libertarianism, expressed in a Populist style, centred on the ‘revelation’ of political truths and on a promise of therapeutic benefits for followers. In a closing discussion I argue that this may be understood as a kind of ‘charismatic’ authority, and that such a political performance style is typical of these kinds of media today.

A Public Health Frame for Fracking? Predicting Public Support for Hydraulic Fracturing

ABSTRACT The American public is split on support for hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”). This study seeks to better understand fracking attitudes by predicting support via economic, environmental, and public health concern. We find support for fracking is intertwined with political partisanship. We show those identifying as “other” political party are significantly more likely to claim “don’t know” in response to questions of fracking support. However, fracking attitudes are not solely the product of political ideology, but also of perceived effects on the environment, the economy, and especially public health.

The cultural field and the world of letters in the West: training and development


 
 
 The objective of the article is to reflect on the historical process of configuration of the cultural and intellectual field in the modern world. In the first instance, a synthesis of the development of what some intellectuals in the West have called the Republic of Letters is presented, as a literary space that emerged in the late Middle Ages in Europe as a result of the confrontation of Latin with the vernacular languages of the territories, consolidating itself in the 18th century as a relatively autonomous intellectual space. Subsequently, the tension in the modern intellectual field is shown between the intellectual as a professional who intervenes in symbolic production in different areas of culture and as a politician, participating in ideological production to the extent that it contributes to the construction of political horizons. Finally, the article reports on the effects of globalization and the market on cultural production, which tends to homogenize, but also results in the articulated division of the world, reordering differences and inequalities according to the linguistic regions of the producers.