Recent Movements Research Articles

Heritage Mobilisation as Radical Politics in a Left-Wing Social Movement

ABSTRACT Left-wing movements are said to invest mainly in class struggle to address global capitalism and the growing dominance by the far right. Recent left-wing movements, however, increasingly invest in culture. This article explores this investment with a focus on the mobilisation of heritage (historical architecture, cultural traditions, histories, and narratives). Through the case of Dresden’s No-Pegida movement, I show that heritage is an often-unrecognised sphere of mobilising radical politics from the left. Attention to how the left mobilises heritage can indicate that investments in culture occur in intersectional and transversal ways. This article uses examples from a qualitative study of No-Pegida to discuss heritage mobilisation in demonstrations and community work. I show that heritage comes to matter for the left when responding to heritage populism from the far right. The left’s heritage mobilisation can be understood as a refusal of authoritarian populism and an opposition to the far right’s spatial cleansing attempts. It is further an important step for reconfiguring the local creative middle-class through the inclusion of refugee and migrant artists and for centring subaltern philosophies about culture.

Cartographies of Contemporary Class Struggles

This essay provides an interdisciplinary analysis of the work of the Iconoclasistas, a Buenos Aires-based duo whose practice combines graphic art, counter-cartography, radical pedagogy, and militant research. The Iconoclasistas’ heterodox landscape illustrations and collectively produced maps demonstrate how various territorial conflicts in South America express class struggles that operate at multiple geographic scales. In so doing, they show how apparently local conflicts express dynamics of transnational capitalist accumulation, including its neocolonial character, while also revealing material relations between seemingly disparate popular struggles. This essay focuses on the Iconoclasistas’ early work representing urban life in Argentina from 2007, as well as on works addressing the deleterious effects of extractivism (or neoextractivism) created between 2007 and 2019. I argue that these works contribute to the insights of ecological Marxism by showing how contemporary processes of capitalist accumulation plunder nature and shape social and natural environments in ways that degrade the living conditions of people of the working and popular classes, as well as those of other species. The Iconoclasistas’ collective mapping workshops utilize techniques of Marxist pedagogy, while bringing attention to visual ideologies and ways spatial relations shape consciousness. This essay shows how this practice was influenced by the politics and organizational forms of recent social movements, and how it contributes to their production of knowledge. It also situates the Iconoclasistas’ work within a tradition of Marxist cultural praxis that values formal experimentation and that concerns itself with reworking the social relations of cultural production, distribution, and reception.

Late Mesozoic Tectono-stratigraphic evolution of the Hekimhan Basin and the environs (central eastern Anatolia): implications for the eastern Taurides and Gürün Curl

ABSTRACT The east-west trending Taurides form a curved area in central eastern Anatolia known as the Gürün Curl. In order to understand the origin of the Gürün Curl and Tauride evolution in general, the results of a new field study of this region have been synthesized together with previously published data. We suggest that the geodynamic evolution of the area began with the likely presence of a Tethys Ocean transform fault. This fault separated the Taurides into the Akdere Sector in the west and the Munzur Sector in the east in the Late Cretaceous. During the late Santonian–early Campanian, ophiolites obducted onto the Munzur Sector, while platform sediments continued to accumulate in the Akdere Sector. This was followed by the development of an Andean-type arc-type magmatism (the Baskil Arc) during the early–middle Campanian in the Munzur Sector. Continued closure of the Tethys led to the collision of the Bitlis Massif in the south of the Munzur Sector in the Campanian. This, in turn, resulted in continental subduction and slab roll-back that was controlled by a Subduction Transform Edge Propagator (STEP) Fault that lay on the original transform fault between the Akdere and Munzur sectors. Because the subducted slab was free at its western corner, the western edge rolled back faster than in the east, leading to an asymmetrical extensional regime on the upper plate that created the late Campanian Hekimhan Basin. While these geodynamic events were taking place in the Munzur Sector, the Akdere Sector was in a platform setting. During the Palaeocene, the Late Mesozoic units of the Akdere Sector began to overthrust on the Hekimhan Basin and the ophiolites. Following the Palaeocene, all these tectonostratigraphic units were covered by Eocene sediments around the Gürün Curl of which the modern appearance was completed by the Miocene to Recent movements along the strike-slip faults.

White Fortressing: How Racial Threat and Conservatism Lead to the Formation of Local Governments

A large body of research has shown that American politics have been highly influenced by conservative movements born in American White suburbia. Yet, suburbs are also moving left and becoming more diversified. I argue that this context has led to new cityhood movements in unincorporated areas of some regions of the US. By forming cities, unincorporated communities detach themselves from shared county-level authorities and the wider populations served in these jurisdictions. What triggers municipal incorporations today and how are recent incorporation movements different from those of the postwar era? To answer these questions, I conduct fieldwork in Georgia. I find that municipal incorporations are a modern type of segregation triggered by sentiments of racial threat and conservatism, which I call White fortressing. I update the study of government formation by analyzing a new wave of municipal incorporations and contribute to the literature works on White flight, racial threat, and residential segregation.

History-dependent muscle resistance to stretch remains high after small, posturally-relevant pre-movements.

The contributions of intrinsic muscle fiber resistance during mechanical perturbations to standing and other postural behaviors are unclear. Muscle short-range stiffness is known to vary depending on the current level and history of the muscle's activation, as well as the muscle's recent movement history; this property has been referred to as history dependence or muscle thixotropy. However, we currently lack sufficient data about the degree to which muscle stiffness is modulated across posturally-relevant characteristics of muscle stretch and activation. We characterized the history dependence of muscle's resistance to stretch in single, permeabilized, activated, muscle fibers in posturally-relevant stretch conditions and activation levels. We used a classic paired muscle stretch paradigm, varying the amplitude of a "conditioning" triangular stretch-shorten cycle followed by a "test" ramp-and-hold imposed after a variable inter-stretch interval. We tested low (<15%), intermediate (15-50%) and high (>50%) muscle fiber activation levels, evaluating short-range stiffness and total impulse in the test stretch. Muscle fiber resistance to stretch remained high at conditioning amplitudes of <1% L0 and inter-stretch intervals of >1 s, characteristic of healthy standing postural sway. A ∼70% attenuation of muscle resistance to stretch was reached at conditioning amplitudes of >3% L0 and inter-stretch intervals of <0.1s, characteristic of larger, faster postural sway in balance-impaired individuals. The thixotropic changes cannot be predicted solely on muscle force at the time of stretch. Consistent with the disruption of muscle cross-bridges, muscle resistance to stretch during behavior can be substantially attenuated if the prior motion is large enough and/or frequent enough.

Elucidating Intimate Partner Violence Rate Disparities Between Same- and Opposite-Sex Couples: A Demographic Approach.

Studies on intimate partner violence (IPV) rates typically find higher rates for same-sex couples than opposite-sex couples. Regardless of sexual orientation, the risk for IPV perpetration is concentrated among young adults. Given that the HIV/AIDS epidemic significantly lowered the life expectancy of sexual minority men and that recent social movements have encouraged more youths to "come out," population age differences may contribute to the observed differences in IPV rates between same- and opposite-sex couples. The present study applies direct age standardization and decomposition techniques to data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System and the American Community Survey to examine this possibility across 2,584 same-sex male, 4,029 same-sex female, and 284,614 opposite-sex physical IPV incidents. The results of the direct standardization procedures indicate physical IPV rates for same-sex male and same-sex female households would be 11.8% and 27.3% lower, respectively, if they had the same population age structure as opposite-sex households. The results of the decompositions indicate that differences in population age structure contribute 48% and 44% of the elevation in IPV rates in same-sex male and same-sex female households, respectively, compared to opposite-sex households. These findings demonstrate the promise of demographic methods to explain differences in offending rates between groups. These results suggest the need for prevention and intervention strategies aimed at youths. Future studies should be conducted with data on sexual orientation and gender identity to better elucidate the contribution of population age structure among various sexual and gender minority groups. Research comparing trends among sexual minority populations to the heterosexual population in particular should account for age where possible.

Analyzing U.S. Macroeconomic

The Federal Reserve's recent movement to control inflation has brought up the most urgent problems for investors. As a result of households accumulating money throughout the early epidemic when they were stuck at home and receiving substantial assistance from the U.S. government, many can now make large purchases. However, the recent lockdowns in China are aggravating supply chain bottlenecks, and the conflict in Ukraine is reducing global food and fuel supplies. Due to this imbalance between supply and demand, the consumer price index is rising. U.S. headline inflation is currently reaching its multi-decade peak, and a tight labor market requires stricter monetary policy to control economic growth.

Putin: populist, anti-populist, or pseudo-populist?1

ABSTRACT Vladimir Putin’s populism is much contested. There are three research questions. The first is empirical: is Putin a populist, and on what grounds? The second is methodological: can comparative measuring techniques help analyse the presence of populism? The third is theoretical: what (if anything) does the case of this ‘populist icon’ tell us about the populist phenomenon? Four domains of Putin’s politics are analysed: Russia’s support for international populists, Putin’s leadership style, and his leadership ‘strategy’; finally, content analysis is utilized for an in-depth look at the articulation of ideas in Putin’s principal speeches from 1999 to 2023. Putin is not substantively a populist, since the state (not the people) is his central political subject and his ‘populism’ reinforces centralized state authority. Ideationally, he is demotic (people-centrist), but also fundamentally statist, which vitiates this people-centrism. Some populist themes are used instrumentally in foreign policy, but even here the statist impulse predominates. Methodologically, the content analysis works well at showing the limited articulation of populist themes relative to demotic ones. Theoretically, this study is fully consonant with recent movements in populist studies to provide complexity-oriented accounts which avoid reifying and over-emphasizing populism.

Analysis of Recent RMB Exchange Rate Movements

Analysis of Recent RMB Exchange Rate Movements

Designing and implementing maker curriculum for promoting 7th graders’ maker competence

“Competence” is a very important concept in education and has been valued by several countries and international organizations in recent years, sparking a wave of curriculum reforms worldwide. The STEAM education is considered a feasible way to equip all students with problem-solving skills in various real-world situations and complicated challenges, as well as nurturing them 21st century skills and competencies. Moreover, a recent maker movement that focuses more on hands-on creation, design, and innovation is considered an innovative way to redefine the learning process through which students’ maker competence can be nurtured. Based on this trend, new national curriculum guidelines were established by Taiwan’s Ministry of Education in 2014. Particularly for the technology domain in the junior high school level (grade 7–9), “Life Technology” and “Information Technology” become requirements, where an interdisciplinary and competence-based maker curriculum needs to be developed. Based on this curriculum reform wave, we emphasize for the implementation of a targeted maker curriculum as a way to increase 7th-grade students’ maker competence. A post-test quasi-experimental design was employed to gather the data, and corresponding statistics were applied for quantitative comparison. A total of 230 7th-graders from eight classes in the targeted junior high schools participated in this study. Students in the experimental group received an interdisciplinary and competence-based maker curriculum as the intervention, which was designed and implemented with the support of the teacher professional development community and briefly presented in this paper. The quantitative findings revealed that the 7th-graders who received the experimental intervention possessed significantly superior marker competence compared to those who received regular technology courses. Based on these findings, maker competence (i.e., knowledge, attitude, and skills), which can be fully established within interdisciplinary and competence-based maker classrooms, was significantly favorable for helping targeted adolescents survive in this ever-changing and fast-paced era. Consequently, as teacher educators and teachers, we must endeavor to redefine the way of learning and construct a learning environment that is full of the maker spirit and STEAM integration.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: decision science research opportunities

ABSTRACTAs of July 2022, all Fortune 100 companies have made public announcements about their commitments to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). At the same time, more universities are offering DEI certificates or degree programs. Despite this recent social movement, DEI research in decision science remains nascent. DEI can be a politically sensitive topic, but its economic and social impact on organizations and employees deserves careful examination. This article intends to engender a discussion of various DEI research opportunities for decision science researchers to explore.

Grooving in the midcontinent: A tectonic origin for the mysterious striations of L’Anse Bay, Michigan, USA

Abstract A striated surface is present at an erosional unconformity between foliated Paleoproterozoic Michigamme Formation and fluvial conglomerate and sandstone of the Neoproterozoic Jacobsville Formation exposed at L’Anse Bay (Michigan, USA). These striations have been interpreted to be the result of ice flow in either the Proterozoic, the Pleistocene, or the modern. Recently, the glacial origin interpretation for this striated surface has been used to argue that it may be related to ca. 717–635 Ma Cryogenian snowball Earth glaciation. This interpretation would make the surface a rare example of a Neoproterozoic glacial pavement, with major chronostratigraphic implications that in turn impose constraints on the timing of intracratonic erosion related to the formation of the Great Unconformity. In this contribution, we present new observations showing that the surface is a tectonic slickenside caused by largely unconformity-parallel slip along the erosional unconformity. We document structural repetition of the Michigamme-Jacobsville contact with associated small-scale folding. The unconformity-parallel slip transitions into thrust faults that ramp up into the overlying Jacobsville Formation. We interpret that the surface records contractional deformation rather than ancient glaciation, recent ice movement, or recent mass wasting. The faulting likely occurred during the Rigolet phase of the Grenvillian orogeny, which also folded the Jacobsville Formation in the footwall of the Keweenaw fault.

Black Lives Still Matter: Freedom Schools as an Embodiment of Critical Literacy Through Reflection and Action

The continuation of racial inequities in the United States has ignited the recent Black Lives Matter Movement, a protest of police brutality and gun violence. Black lives matter in public school classrooms, too—where students of color face barriers to equitable educational experiences. The Children's Defense Fund Freedom School program is a major component in developing critical literacy skills through critique, inquiry, and transformation through social justice and action. Critical literacy is enacted through identity—mainly as difference, self, consciousness, narrative, and positionality. Historical and contemporary relevance of Freedom Schools connects to the urgency of the Black Lives Matter Movement.

Missed Opportunities for Critical Consciousness in Canadian High School Coaching: An Exploratory Case Study

OttawaHigh school sport coaches are important non-parental sources of influence who can help adolescent athletes develop in and beyond sport. In light of recent social movements that have led citizens to organize in the name of social change, there is a need to examine how coaches can leverage high school sport to foster athlete development in manners that address social inequity and promote social justice. In the present exploratory case study, one coach’s attitudes on social justice in Canadian high school sport are explored. Two semi-structured interviews were conducted with the coach participant and subjected to a reflexive thematic analysis. Findings highlight how the coach was in the process of further developing critical consciousness surrounding his coaching yet relied mainly on a reactive approach when addressing social justice issues, resulting in missed opportunities for displaying and/or developing critical consciousness. Using a critical positive youth development framework (CPYD; Gonzalez et al., 2020), practical considerations and reflections are offered in terms of how youth sport coaches can be better trained to proactively address social justice issues through sport. Future directions for research in the Canadian high school sport context related to social justice are also discussed.

Whole mitogenomes reveal that NW Africa has acted both as a source and a destination for multiple human movements

Despite being enclosed between the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert, North Africa has been the scenario of multiple human migrations that have shaped the genetic structure of its present-day populations. Despite its richness, North Africa remains underrepresented in genomic studies. To overcome this, we have sequenced and analyzed 264 mitogenomes from the Algerian Chaoui-speaking Imazighen (a.k.a. Berbers) living in the Aurès region. The maternal genetic composition of the Aurès is similar to Arab populations in the region, dominated by West Eurasian lineages with a moderate presence of M1/U6 North African and L sub-Saharan lineages. When focusing on the time and geographic origin of the North African specific clades within the non-autochthonous haplogroups, different geographical neighboring regions contributed to the North African maternal gene pool during time periods that could be attributed to previously suggested admixture events in the region, since Paleolithic times to recent historical movements such as the Arabization. We have also observed the role of North Africa as a source of geneflow mainly in Southern European regions since Neolithic times. Finally, the present work constitutes an effort to increase the representation of North African populations in genetic databases, which is key to understand their history.

Collective identity, solidarity, and sisterhood in the ASAB cleaning women’s strike in Sweden and the Women’s Day Off in Iceland

ABSTRACT In recent years feminist movements have increasingly employed the form and rhetoric of strikes in framing their protests. The rise of the women’s strike movement has been seen as an indicator of an invigorated wave of feminist activism that focuses, to a greater extent, on structural economic injustices. The aim of this article is to provide a historical aspect to the growing research on strikes as a multifaceted form of protest. The article analyses articulations of collective identity, solidarity, and sisterhood in two different kinds of ‘women’s strikes’ that took place in the Nordic region during the mid-1970s; the ASAB cleaners’ strikes in Sweden during 1974–1975 and the Icelandic Women’s Day Off that took place on October 24, 1975. The article explores how the relationship between gender and class was conceptualized by participants, organizers, and bystanders. We employ these cases to study how solidarity and sisterhood across differences among women might have appeared in practice while at the same time reflecting internal tensions and varying interests. Moreover, the article reflects on the specific form of the strikes and the potential impact their respective form might have had on the political articulations that came out of them.

Has Authorship in the Decolonizing Global Health Movement Been Colonized?

Decolonization in global health is a recent movement aimed at relinquishing remnants of supremacist mindsets, inequitable structures, and power differentials in global health. To determine the author demographics of publications on decolonizing global health and global health partnerships between low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and high-income countries (HICs). We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of publications related to decolonizing global health and global health partnerships from the inception of the selected journal databases (i.e., Medline, CAB Global Health, EMBASE, CINAHL, and Web of Science) to November 14, 2022. Author country affiliations were assigned as listed in each publication. Author gender was assigned using author first name and the software genderize.io. Descriptive statistics were used for author country income bracket, gender, and distribution. Among 197 publications on decolonizing global health and global health partnerships, there were 691 total authors (median 2 authors per publication, interquartile range 1, 4). Publications with author bylines comprised exclusively of authors affiliated with HICs were most common (70.0%, n = 138) followed by those with authors affiliated both with HICs and LMICs (22.3%, n = 44). Only 7.6% (n = 15) of publications had author bylines comprised exclusively of authors affiliated with LMICs. Over half (54.0%, n = 373) of the included authors had names that were female and female authors affiliated with HICs most commonly occupied first author positions (51.8%, n = 102). Authors in publications on decolonizing global health and global health partnerships have largely been comprised of individuals affiliated with HICs. There was a marked paucity of publications with authors affiliated with LMICs, whose voices provide context and crucial insight into the needs of the decolonizing global health movement.

A Tale of Two Cities: Policing and Firearm Homicides in Boston and Philadelphia.

Recent political movements have raised questions about the effectiveness of police funding, but the impact of law enforcement budgets on firearm violence is unknown. We hypothesized that department funding and measures of police activity would be associated with decreased shootings and firearm homicides (FH) in two major cities with different police funding patterns. We collected data from these sources: district attorney's offices, police departments, Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reporting program, the Centers for Disease Control, the Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll, and the American Community Survey. Data included demographics, police department budgets, number of officers, homicide clearance rates, firearms recovered, shootings, and FH, 2015-2020. Totals were normalized to population and number of shootings. We used panel linear regression to measure associations between policing variables, shootings and FH while adjusting for covariates. FH significantly increased in Philadelphia. In Boston the trend was less clear, though there was an increase in 2020. Police budget normalized to shootings trended towards a decrease in Philadelphia and an increase in Boston. The number of firearms recovered annually appeared to increase in Boston but peaked mid-study in Philadelphia. In multivariable analyses, police budget was associated with neither shootings nor FH. However, increased firearm recovery was associated with lower shooting (β = -.0004, p = 0.022) and FH (β = -.00005, p = 0.004) rates. Philadelphia and Boston demonstrated differences in police funding, 2015-2020. While budget is not associated with shootings or FH, firearm recovery is, suggesting that removal of firearms from circulation remains key. The impact this has on vulnerable populations requires further investigation. III, retrospective cross-sectional.

Introducing the SMILE_PH method: Sense-making interviews looking at elements of philosophical health

The present article is a primary introduction to the semi-structured interviewing method SMILE_PH, an acronym for Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health. Beyond grounding this new methodology theoretically (a work that is started here but will in the future necessitate several developments), the main motivation here is pragmatic: to provide the recent philosophical health movement with a testable method and show that philosophically-oriented interviews are possible in a manner that can be reproduced, compared, tested and used systematically with a population that has received no training in philosophy. The SMILE_PH approach was conceived by the author during an ethically approved pilot study focused on the philosophy of life of persons living with spinal cord injury (SCI), with the intention of rectifying the epistemic obstacles generated by rationalist, Socratic or unstructured ways of in-depth interviewing. The six-step structure of the method is also inspired by hundreds of individual dialogue sessions with philosophical counselees, led by the author between 2018 and 2022: the SMILE_PH method progressively gathers phenomenological data about 1 – our bodily sense, 2 – our sense of self, 3 – our sense of belonging, 4 – our sense of the possible, 5 – our sense of purpose and 6 – our philosophical sense.

A review of N‐mixture models

AbstractN‐mixture models were born in 2004 of the necessity to model animal population size from point counts with imperfect detection of individuals, where capture‐recapture methods are infeasible. Initially developed for applications where population size was assumed constant, N‐mixture models were extended in 2011 to include population dynamics, allowing application to populations whose size fluctuates during the study. A further extension in 2014 accommodates populations with multiple “states” such as age class or sex. More recent extensions model spatial movement of animals among habitat patches or the spatial spread of infectious disease in a human population. The core idea underlying this class of models is a hierarchical structure, where the observation model is defined conditional on the model for true abundance. This hierarchy allows researchers to incorporate information about observation and abundance processes, while permitting distinct inferences about elements affecting detection and those affecting abundance. Another benefit of the hierarchical approach is the ability to accommodate many existing sampling protocols such as removal sampling and distance sampling. One drawback to N‐mixture models is that since they estimate both abundance and detection from replicated but unmarked counts, model parameters may not be clearly identifiable. A second drawback is that when observed counts are large, calculating the N‐mixture likelihood is computationally infeasible. This difficulty motivated an approximate likelihood based on the normal approximation to the binomial. The normal approximation provides a diagnostic of parameter estimability based on the closed‐form expression of the Fisher information matrix for a multivariate normal likelihood.This article is categorized under:Data: Types and Structure &gt; Image and Spatial DataStatistical Learning and Exploratory Methods of the Data Sciences &gt; Modeling Methods