Production Of Hegemony Research Articles

A Conjunctural Mapping of People’s Park

Following calls to spatialize conjunctures, this article proposes and practices conjunctural mapping through a case study of the ongoing struggle at People’s Park in Berkeley, California. Although the method of conjunctural analysis enables and requires an investigation into the multiple forces at work in the production of hegemony, such analyses tend to focus on cultural, economic, political, and social (or horizontal) dimensions of winning or contesting consent, without necessarily locating the formations of these expressions at different (vertical) scales. What is the role of the geographical in producing and countering hegemony, and how do we consider questions of scale in a conjunctural analysis? We offer an example through a conjunctural mapping of People’s Park, where the University of California, Berkeley, and park defenders address pressures and seize opportunities at the scales of the subject, city, and state to respectively redevelop or protect the park. Mapping their multiple geographies reveals how the neoliberal crisis (in higher education, affordable housing, and public space) takes place and requires work at each scale in the struggle for hegemonic settlement. Spiraling outward and upward, cases like People’s Park show that conjunctures are best analyzed through consideration of local complexities and scale articulations.

Hegemonic practices in multistakeholder Internet governance: Participatory evangelism, quiet politics, and glorification of status quo at ICANN meetings

In this exploratory study we examine a less scrutinized aspect of multistakeholder arrangements: the presence and directionality of hegemonic power in the language used in the stakeholder deliberations. Specifically, we examine the deliberations of ten stakeholder groups of ICANN’s policy development body. Using meeting transcripts from 2011 to 2020, we operationalized hegemony as a latent, dependent variable (HEIN) by linking stakeholder participation to the policymaking agenda. We employed a mixed-methods approach comprising textual linguistic analysis (using DICTION 7.1), principal components analysis, and an autoregressive moving average model to identify the statistical significance of key variables that emerged from textual linguistic and principal components analyses. We found that three primary rhetorical devices – participatory evangelism, quiet politics, and glorification of the status quo – were present, which reinforce the entrenched power structure that favors some stakeholders and interfere with other stakeholders’ efforts to influence Internet governance decisions. In addition, four Diction variables, Commonality, Leveling Terms, Satisfaction, and Commonality at the GNSO (Generic Names Supporting Organization) level, yielded a positive impact on the production of hegemony, and Insistence was negatively associated with HEIN.

The Lived Social Contract in Schools: From protection to the production of hegemony

• The social contract can be studied along the four parameters (4Ps) of: protection, provision, participation and the production of hegemony. • Applying the 4Ps framework to education yields unique insights on the social contract as a lived and differentiated experience of citizenship. • Analysis of the lived social contract in Egypt challenges earlier conceptions of the Arab social contract, its disintegration and the uprisings. • Youth experiences in Egyptian schools reflect the gendered and classed dimensions of the lived social contract and their political implications. • The schools reveal withdrawn protection, poor privatized provision, securitized Islamized participation and weak incoherent legitimation. This article proposes a framework for studying the social contract along the four parameters (4Ps) of protection, provision, participation and the production of hegemony. To appreciate the differentiated experience of how these parameters are lived, this framework is applied to schools as arenas that uniquely capture the dynamics of power and legitimacy in society. The education sector reflects broader transformations in the state bureaucracy, in social policy and in the lived experience of key elements of the social contract from the rule of law and gendered violence to formal and informal privatization, everyday forms of participation and the narratives and practices around nationalism and neoliberalism that legitimize these changes. Applying this approach to the case study of Egypt updates earlier propositions about an Arab social contract and nuances the notion of a tradeoff between provision and participation rights in understanding regime legitimacy. It underlines the critical changes to protection and legitimation over the past decades and the implications of the outsourcing of various elements of the social contract to market, charitable and religious forces. Drawing on rare research inside schools catering to different social classes before and after the 2011 uprising, the article describes how their realities reflect the transformations of lived citizenship in this historical juncture. Egyptian schools reveal a ‘lived social contract’ that is underpinned by selective retraction of protection, a collapse of provision, impoverishment and Islamization of participation and a resulting disengagement from the production of hegemony.

World anthropologies: Disciplinary transformations within systems of power

From world anthropologies’ perspective, in this article we explore the diversity of anthropologies being practiced around the world in the early twenty-first century and the ways in which the pluralizing potential of globalization might enable anthropologists worldwide to benefit from this diversity. Our critical standpoint on the monotony and incompleteness of the current international anthropological landscape, as it has come to be structured by hegemonic forces, stems from the conviction that assuming their own diversity is a crucial (political, scholarly) strategy for anthropologies if they are to reproduce and enhance themselves in a globalized world.

Production of Hegemony and Production of Space in Nairobi

The high profile attributed to African urban economies in the global market, the promise of the evergreen ‘development project’ and the contradictions produced by the rapid urbanization process contribute to make African cities important domains for the affirmation and maintenance of hegemonic projects. The discourse about the city is a key terrain through which hegemony is fought.Nairobi is a point in case, where power and discourse have been interwoven with the production of the city. Since independence, the World Bank and United Nations have largely influenced urban policies. Nowadays, new players and interests are engaged in this battle for ideas.Four urban projects initiated in the last decade by actors operating at multiple political and geographic scales are analysed in the paper. The main objective is to reveal the imaginaries they embed and explain why they have become hegemonic.

El discurso social en el cine histórico de Hollywood

In the 1980’s, Eliseo Veron studied the problems posed by social discourses understood as phenomena which produce meaning. These phenomena can help understand social construction of reality. Historical cinema can be included is one of them. The “linguistic turn over” in the elaboration of historical stories has offered us not only new spaces for the concept of historical task, but also for its representation. Therefore, we can say that the massive, global presence of Hollywood cinema, its economic leadership and its formulas for message elaboration are today part of a mechanism which generates a social discourse very much related with the production of hegemony. The idea of “social discourse” has been revived by Marc Angenot, to analyze the literary France of the year 1889 though its theoretical and methodological consequences can be applied to other types of social “elaboration of reality”. This social elaboration of reality is based in another construction designed by the film production and also according to the audience’s expected media knowledge, the audience’s media memory, understood as those concept-images found in popular imagery, which are a known locus which films must be based on. This paper wants to start building an analytic tool useful to understand the structural elements within this particular type of social discourse, specially taking into account that nowadays the film version of a historical fact is considered the real thing that happened. This process is based in the partial suspension of the spectator’s disbelief, which elaborates a model of representation which makes this biased version of the past believable.

Fazer cultura. Fazer(-se) estado: vernissages e performatividade de estado em Córdoba

O artigo explora os processos de formação do Estado e as políticas culturais governamentais em Córdoba (Argentina) durante a primeira década do século XXI. A partir da análise das cerimônias que marcam a inauguração de mostras de arte, ou vernissages, são discutidas as dimensões performativas das práticas estatais e descritas performances que, em nome da cultura, “fazem Estado” através de formas altamente estetizadas que apelam para a captação sensorial. Nessas performances, que envolvem os sujeitos a partir da estimulação poética de seus sentidos, o Estado se materializa duas vezes. A “magia do Estado” se faz quando acrescenta e estatiza as relações de interdependência entre diferentes agentes e quando materializa uma imagem atraente encarregada de reforçar a distinção como recurso para a produção de hegemonia.

A cultural political economy of transnational knowledge brands

This paper adopts a “cultural political economy” (CPE) approach to examine the production of hegemony and related hegemonic struggles during the socio-spatial changes occurring in the Pearl River Delta. Drawing from the case of Hong Kong/Pearl River Delta, economic restructuring has given rise to the “hollowing out” debate. In face of this debate, two knowledge brands, the Harvard-Porter’s “competitive advantage” (1985) and MIT-Berger-Lester’s “industrial performance” models, have been stabilized as competing modes of developmentality (development governmentality) and have operated as paper-based economic panopticons to order/manage, at a distance, the organization of Hong Kong’s/Pearl River Delta’s space, policy, and, ultimately, the conduct of its population. These modes of developmentalities have met resistance from other forces in other spaces and with other interests, including from below. Nonetheless the two main power blocs are engaging in inter-bloc negotiations in the light of such resistance and are creating a hybrid strategy under the dominance of the service bloc.

The Role of Philanthropic Foundations in the Reproduction and Production of Hegemony: Rockefeller Foundations and the Social Sciences

The substantive focus is upon the relation between Rockefeller philanthropy and the development of the social sciences during the period, 1910 to 1940. Two major propositions are examined. First, that philanthropic foundations attempt to maintain the social order rather than alter it. Specifically, that during the period under study philanthropic foundations were key institutions in both the reproduction and production of cultural hegemony. Second, that a “critical-conflict” perspective has most value when one is attempting to understand the nature and sources of change in the systematic production of both knowledge and intellectuals. Attention is focussed upon the process by which Rockefeller policy for the social sciences emerged. The policy is described and analysed. The ideological viewpoint of Rockefeller philanthropy as identified in the policy-making process is located in the wider political economy. Confirmation is provided for the two propositions. Hegemony, ideology and social class are essential concepts when one is attempting to understand and explain the role of philanthropy in capitalist societies.