Class Relations Research Articles

Sara E. Lampert. Starring Women: Celebrity, Patriarchy, and American Theater 1790–1850.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, female actors played not only starring roles on the American stage but also were central figures in the transformation of the theater and of American culture. These starring women found themselves at the center of debates over class relations and gender roles and expectations. Indeed, as Sara Lampert persuasively argues in this well-researched work, women performers were active agents of change inside and outside the theater and have long deserved more attention from theater and women’s historians. Male actors and managers and the Astor Place Riot have received most of the attention. Lampert’s focus opens up this dramatic world and reveals so much more about the gender dynamics of the theater business and American society in general in the mid-nineteenth century. These actresses and dancers helped transform the American theater from a male-dominated, often rowdy space where all classes mingled into a genteel, feminized amusement of the middle class. And, more significantly, by being the highest paid and the most-visible women workers of the time, they helped define, even as they challenged, the gendered parameters of female celebrities. Always conscious of their need to remain appealing to respectable audiences, starring women walked a delicate line between transgressing and reaffirming middle-class notions of womanhood—notions that these women aided in solidifying over the nineteenth century.

Bourdieu’s Field Theory Revisited: A Case for ‘National Signification’

ABSTRACT This essay investigates whether the term national signification may serve better than the more common national identity to describe how sports people variously enrol and reference the nation to position themselves and their practice. Taking the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu as a ground for analysis, this essay investigates four cases involving elite athletes from Norway to situate them within the field of sports culture and the larger fields of power and class relations. For Bourdieu actors’ ‘practical sense’ mediated between their subjective striving for autonomy and the objective weight of structured class relations. This essay shows how these athletes’ struggle for relative autonomy is differently expressed by the way they enlist the nation to position themselves within the field of power. An athlete’s positions within the larger, structured fields circumscribe their articulatory space, and realising this state of affairs can aid our understanding of how these elite practitioners differently enlist the national sign in their specific quest for cultural autonomy. The analysis shows athletes that are better placed in economic terms can afford to take greater risks when it comes to the national signifier. Conversely, a relative smaller access to economic gain appears to correlate with an increase in the importance granted to the national signifier. Thus, the nation becomes a sign that can be actively enlisted in an ongoing struggle for relative autonomy from the field of class relations, rather than an attribute that is passively endorsed by them. What this suggests is that a term such as national identity is less descriptive for the actual work of these elite players; instead, we propose that an active national signification more aptly describe how these cultural actors enlist a highly coveted sign to achieve their specific aim.

Research on the construction of event logic knowledge graph of supply chain management

Knowledge graph technology plays an important role in knowledge supporting for efficient supply chain management (SCM) of manufacturing enterprises, a SCM knowledge graph can be constructed based on the relevant case corpus. In order to solve the problems of coarse concept granularity of event ontology knowledge in SCM cases, potential words of characters in the existing entity recognition models may not be matched or matched incorrectly, key features of entities with different lengths may interfere with each other in the expression of attention mechanism, and lack of a large number of annotation training samples, a top-down construction method of SCM event logic knowledge graph (ELKG) is proposed. Firstly, SCM event argument classes and class relations are defined, an event logic ontology model is built, and the event argument entities according to event logic ontology are labeled. Then, an active learning event argument entity recognition (EAER) model based on two-stage generative adversarial network (GAN) is proposed. In GAN generator, an EAER model based on binocular attention-based stacked BiLSTM with CNN (BACSBN) is proposed, which combines word-level character feature attention mechanism and n-gram pooling feature attention mechanism to improve the attention to character features of constituent words and highlight entity key information with different lengths, respectively. Two-stage GAN adversarial training and label space attention mechanism are introduced to select the correct predicted label samples for active learning training. The experimental results show that BACSBN can improve the entity recognition accuracy, and the two-stage GAN’s active learning can further improve the recognition effect on the basis of full annotation sample training, and can still maintain a high accuracy in the absence of a large number of manual annotation data. Further, according to the sentence pattern and keyword matching, the matching relations of argument entities are completed, and the SCM ELKG is constructed to provide knowledge support for autonomous SCM.

End-to-end deep speaker embedding learning using multi-scale attentional fusion and graph neural networks

As an attractive research in biometric authentication, Text Independent Speaker Verification (TI-SV) problem aims to specify whether two given unconstrained utterances come from the same speaker or not. As state-of-the-art solutions, end-to-end approaches using deep neural networks seek to learn a highly discriminative speaker embedding space.In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end approach for speaker embedding learning by focusing on two crucial factors: speaker embedder architecture and objective function. The proposed module in the speaker embedder is composed of an Efficient Multi-resolution feature Representation (EMR) block followed by a Multi-scale Channel Attention Fusion (MCAF) block. The EMR effectively addresses the issue of fixed resolution convolutional kernels which commonly used in most embedder architectures. Moreover, the MCAF significantly improves the simple summation-based feature fusion used in residual embedder networks. Regarding the objective function, we conduct the speaker embedding space towards learning the embedding-to-embedding relations, in addition to only embedding-to-training class relations employed by most previous methods. So, we propose to employ a dynamic graph attention network, on top of the proposed embedder to learn all informative relations between embeddings, and then learn both embedder and graph-based networks in an end-to-end manner.We conduct various experiments on a large-scale benchmark dataset called VoxCeleb1&2. The effectiveness of all proposed components is verified through an ablation study. We show the superior or competitive performances of the proposed approach compared to seven well-known embedding architectures and 32 SV systems, regarding two evaluation metrics, EER and minDCF, as well as the number of embedder parameters.

Bandits and Liberals, Rebels and Saints: Latin America since Independence by Alan Knight

This book of essays is full of personality. Readers come to know the author and his likes, dislikes, quirks, and delights before they have even finished the introduction, and the friendship between author and reader continues to build throughout the essays. The book is also full of erudition (Knight’s early training in the history of many places besides Mexico emerges in enlightening ways), insights (most often, but by no means only, for Mexico), and lovely writing (slightly baroque, with lots of dashes, parentheses, and other well-placed extenders that somehow manage to conclude their sentences brilliantly).The essays, written between 2008 and 2016 but never published, center on the period from the late colony to about 1930, with forays both backward into the early colony and forward into the later twentieth century. The text spans 215 pages, and the must-read, chatty notes add another 150. All the essays use comparative methods to sharpen understandings of national or regional phenomena, but the first four primarily operate within Latin America (Mexico being at the core of the comparison). The last three essays situate Latin America within a more global comparative framework. The first grouping contains one chapter that reconsiders Hobsbawm’s take on banditry in light of recent research, concluding that much of Hobsbawm’s view is still useful; one about liberalism across Latin America that accomplishes a great deal in fewer than forty pages (more below); one about religion and conflict; and one that, with excellent results, explicitly asks when and why the histories of Mexico and Peru diverged only to converge in the late colony, the aftermath of independence, and the early twentieth century.1The second grouping has chapters about the British and U.S. formal and informal empires in Latin America, the role of internal colonialism in shaping those empires, and the changing British views of Latin American revolutions. Its chapters about the Mexican Revolution in comparative global perspective include an interesting and convincing discussion of the similarities between Plutarco Elías Calles and Kemal Atatürk—especially their “Jacobinism,” as Knight calls their particularly vehement revolutionary anticlericalism. The book takes the roles of religion, anticlericalism, and the Catholic Church seriously, much more so than do Knight’s classic volumes on the Mexican Revolution.2Yet even though culture, and especially religion and church, is more present in this volume than in Knight’s early output, these essays nonetheless remain fundamentally rooted in the social-science approaches that have consistently shaped his work. Knight’s way of making sense of the “sprawling, shape-shifting thing we call ‘liberalism’” (64), for example, is to identify three “generations” of liberalism across time, the last of which, in the late nineteenth century, splits into three different types—developmental, social, and anarcho. Knight then analyzes these different generational liberalisms from three cross-cutting angles—political economy and class relations, culture (religious and popular), and nationalism. Using these categories as conceptual tools, he produces a compelling comparison of the histories of Latin American liberalism. Every chapter proceeds in a similar way. The goal of identifying and categorizing historical patterns is to reveal complexity, not to emerge with a homogenizing generalization. Most scholars who cover all of Latin America use this process to elucidate complexity and pattern, as well as structure and contingency, but few do so as well as Knight does in this valuable set of essays.

The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil Edited by Brodwyn Fischer and Keila Grinberg

With an introduction and a collection of fifteen chapters, Fischer and Grinberg have provided one of the most insightful and wide-ranging analyses of slavery, abolition, and its legacies in Brazil published to date. The editors’ introduction highlights three individuals who re-surface throughout the volume. Son of a wealthy landowner in the province (now state) of Pernambuco, Joaquim Nabuco (1813–1878) founded the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society in September 1880. That Society and Nabuco’s book Abolitionism (1883) helped to foment a movement that brought Brazilian slavery to an end in 1888. Nabuco denounced slavery’s impact on all sectors of Brazilian society, highlighting how it corrupted the rule of law and harmed economic development.From the same state of Pernambuco, Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987) became one of Brazil’s most famous intellectuals of the twentieth century. Freyre’s depiction of beneficent slave owners and “racial democracy” in post-emancipation Brazil have been thoroughly debunked. Nevertheless, his descriptions of patriarchalism, family structure, sexuality, and race mixture remain hugely relevant.The third intellectual is Abdias do Nascimento (1914–2011), an African Brazilian from São Paulo. As activist, journalist, playwright, and professor, Nascimento relentlessly affirmed the contributions of Africans and their descendants to Brazilian society. By emphasizing Black resistance to enslavement and detailing the pervasive racism directed toward Blackness since the founding of the nation, Nascimento fueled controversial debates. Many of his initiatives became government policy, such as the revision of educational curricula to include diverse histories and affirmative action in employment. Nabuco’s critiques of institutions and economics, Freyre’s expansive social histories, and Nascimento’s studies of culture inspired research that is readily witnessed in The Boundaries of Freedom. Extended stays and experiences outside Brazil influenced all three of these men; several of the chapters address the theme of transnationalism.In a section entitled “On the Ethic of Silence,” Hebe Mattos comments on the book’s interdisciplinarity: “The theoretical references for this work [the collection of chapters] from E. P. Thompson’s cultural Marxism to the micro-historical methodologies of Fredrik Barth, emphasize the relational and political meanings of collective identity formation, as well as the relationship between normative structures and social agency” (317). Tying macro-histories (such as paternalism, plantation economies, class relations, and expanding capitalism) with micro-histories (such as slave flight, court appeals, day-by-day violence, labor conditions, and residential patterns), contributors shed light on silent histories and “precarious freedoms” during and after slavery. Quantitative methods provide evidence of the transport of enslaved children to the province of Pernambuco. Local legislation banned the purchase of goods produced by slaves and prevented access to taverns. “Subterranean structures” ensured the marginalization of female slaves and free Black women after emancipation. Free Black intellectuals, such as Teodoro Sampaio and André Rebouças, employed personal and professional skills to negotiate their way in hostile environments. Complex themes related to social agency and Black resistance emerge through contributors’ meticulous readings of original written documents and newspapers, as well as a close viewing of posters, paintings, and photographs located in archives large and small inside and outside Brazil.In a chapter describing relations between Brazil and Uruguay, Grinberg shows how tensions mounted pursuant to Uruguay’s emancipation decree of 1842. Slaves who crossed the border into Uruguay gained their freedom; they could not be re-enslaved if they returned to Brazil because of an 1831 Brazilian law that banned the importation of slaves to Brazil. Planters in the southernmost province of Rio Grande do Sul condemned their own government for failing to prevent slave flight and protect their property (ownership of slaves). Instead of following traditional approaches to the study of diplomacy, Grinberg points to the need to “forge a social history of international relations” (131). Such a plea, alongside the path-breaking insights shared in this volume, could not be more relevant.

Class, affect, margins

While academic attention to class has fluctuated in tandem with wider social struggles, it invariably returns from relative quiet periods with a renewed vigour, reasserting its usefulness in understanding and connecting unequal social transformations. Contributions here look to extend class analysis toward the affective and emotional dynamics of social life in a period of social polarisation and fragmented class politics. In this introduction we advocate for a renewed critical discussion on class trajectories and transformations across social sciences, everyday life and political economic agendas. We are prompted here by the contributions to the collection, which inspire a (re-)exploration of the interrelations between fields of action in their approaches to class. The discussion is structured around three processes central to contemporary class relations: reconfigurations of class(es); the (de-)homogenisation of meanings and feelings of class; and the reconstitution and historicisation of margins and inequality.

An Application of Poisson Distribution Series on Harmonic Classes of Analytic Functions

Many authors have obtained some inclusion properties of certain subclasses of univalent and functions associated with distribution series, such as Pascal distribution, Binomial distribution, Poisson distribution, Mittag–Leffler-type Poisson distribution, and Geometric distribution. In the present paper, we obtain some inclusion relations of the harmonic class H(α,δ) with the classes SH* of starlike harmonic functions and KH of convex harmonic functions, also for the harmonic classes TNHβ and TRHβ associated with the operator Υ defined by applying certain convolution operator regarding Poisson distribution series. Several consequences and corollaries of the main results are also obtained.

Networked geographies of private landlordism: mapping flows of capital accumulation and rent extraction

Recent years have seen the resurgence of private-rental housing as both a place to live, and a site of capital investment. Individual landlordism is a key feature of this resurgence. This paper aims to understand the networked geographies of private landlordism. Drawing on Dutch register data, containing geocoded information on the full population and housing stock, this paper is able to uniquely link private-rental units to their (landlord) owners. By linking landlords’ places of residence and investment, flows of capital across space are visualized. Empirically, these findings show that, despite the liquidity of capital and the typical focus on transnational investments, most landlords invest locally or regionally, resulting in urban-regional networks of landlordism. These patterns pertain to landlord spatial strategies as well as the functioning of urban systems. Conceptually, findings demonstrate that property-based class relations between tenants and landlords are spatial relations as well, linking places of accumulation with places of extraction and reproducing spatial patterns of (dis)advantage.

The Work of Retirement

AbstractIn the past few decades, caregivers, such as nursing assistants and home health aides, have come to compose the fastest-growing segment of the paid workforce in the United States. At the same time, corporate caretakers of workers’ savings, such as pension funds and mutual funds, have become the nation's largest investors, bound by fiduciary duties of trust. And unprecedented numbers of elder employees and retirees have become the biggest supposed beneficiaries of both care labor and trust capital, depending on health workers and asset managers in their daily lives. At the center of this emerging structure of work, wealth, and welfare lies the pension system, a telling crucible of class relations in our time. Several recent books across different disciplines examine the shifting politics of pensions in the United States and around the world. The spate of new studies presents an opportunity to explore the remarkable role of retirement funds in reorganizing labor and finance over the past fifty years. Rather than offering a historiographical critique of current work, this expository essay surveys the main findings of a larger and longer body of scholarship on organized labor and investment related to pensions. Though focused on the United States, it places the American story in a comparative context. The survey points to a fertile field for further study: as retirees have increasingly relied on professional asset managers and caregivers, the finance and health sectors have undergone converging crises over fiduciary duty and elder care, posing parallel challenges for organized labor.

Fearful or fearless? The impact of fear on feminist activism

ABSTRACT Fear is an emotion we generally try to avoid. It is associated with reflexes such as immobility, flight or, in the case of activism, demobilization. This article partially questions this received wisdom based on empirical research with feminists in Quebec (Canada) and Romandie (Switzerland). This article suggests that fear can also sometimes be a ‘drive to action’ for feminists and, at other times, rein in their activism. It first examines the varying effects of fear on feminist activism and links these to the different positioning of feminists within social relations of race, class and sexuality. Second, it suggests that the origin of the fear, its interactions with other emotions, and the emotional work performed by interviewees were other key factors shaping the impact of fear on their activism. In other words, we will discuss four main emotional sequences which take different directions depending on whether the fear stems from police violence, male violence, fear for one’s reputation or fear of exclusion. We will also look at the effects they give rise to: protective mechanisms, censorship, deepening knowledge and partial withdrawal from majority feminist circles. The article further addresses the fear of male violence which pushes many to become involved in the feminist movement. Combined with anger and emotional work to reduce its intensity, fear acts as a true driving force for action. Additionally, the article shows that factors which impede feminist activism are mostly related to a minority position in the movement and repeated anti-feminist threats.

THE JOINT SPATIAL PLANNING DATA MODEL

Abstract. In modern times, spatial planning activities have been the process of determining projections for future land use. Spatial plans produce decisions about space in many different fields, from construction to transportation and environmental, natural, and cultural protection. The right, restrictions, and responsibilities (RRRs) to use the land pieces whose physical borders and legal status are registered with the cadastral process are determined by the spatial plans in line with the national purposes, public welfare, and healthy urbanization objectives.Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) is a general-purpose data model introduced in 2012 with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards. LADM proposes standards for many data infrastructures and land administration systems. In this context, although it does not have complete recommendations within the scope of spatial planning. It is essential to make additions to version II. As a result of gradual studies, spatial planning processes and decisions can be presented in a data model and the model can be associated with the LADM standard structure and integrated into land registration systems. Since LADM offers a conceptual model, newly created packages must be designed in a conceptual data model. The conceptual model is a product of several stages. This study focuses on how can produce a conceptual model in which countries can share spatial planning data. The requirements of the model that achieves this aim are revealed by considering the conceptual model production stages. By evaluating the findings, how can obtained data which helping to design the classes, class relations, and attributes of the data model were searched. With the conceptual data model to be prepared in line with the requirements, it is thought that land management processes can be strengthened by providing integration with spatial plans in LADM-based land administration systems.

Reconstructing Marxian Theory of Ground Rent: Based on Japanese Development of Marxian Political Economy

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to reconstruct Marxian theory of ground rent in order to refurbish it as a fundamental theoretical framework of ecological Marxism. We make this attempt by the close examination of longstanding Japanese discussions on the rent theory among the Koza school, Rono school, and the Uno school, which have never been made available in English so far. By critically integrating Japanese preceding studies, Marxian theory of rent would be reinforced more effectively in analysing the class relation between the capitalist and the landowner, which is reflected in the formation of absolute rent. In addition, we use the price equations to formulate the rent formation and theoretically examine how the landowner performs as the third class. It is noteworthy that there is a case in which the conflict between the capitalist and the landowner takes the form of a confrontation about rent-seeking activities. In our two-sector model analysis, an intellectual property right in one sector can undermine the economic position of the landowners in the other sector, thereby fostering further destructive development of nature. Capitalist IP rent-seeking harms the environment not only directly but also through indirect causalities in the globally interrelated economy.

Increasing livelihood vulnerabilities to coastal erosion and wastewater intrusion: The political ecology of Thai aquaculture in peri‐urban Bangkok

AbstractMost livelihood research focuses on micro‐level decisions affecting occupations but fails to examine wider scale processes that shape markets, institutions, and thus livelihood choices. A political ecology framework can help address this gap by providing ways to analyse how multi‐scalar and extra‐local practices, policies, and discourses affect local‐level socio‐environmental outcomes. In the qualitative research reported here, that framework is applied to Tha Kam, a peri‐urban coastal sub‐district of Bangkok, where most residents are small‐scale aquaculture farmers. These farmers have experienced precipitous drops in incomes because of two major environmental changes: coastal erosion and wastewater intrusion. The causes are multiple and complex, and many originate not from practices within Tha Kham but from challenges present at a larger scale or that start upstream. The political and economic drivers of these problems stem from Thailand’s fragmented vertical and horizontal governance structure, unequal class relations in which smallholder farmers and peri‐urban residents are marginalised, and lack of accountability and representation. This combination of multi‐scalar factors and power imbalances has contributed to evolving injustices of peri‐urbanisation, all of which are profoundly geographical in their significance.

Репрезентация семантики слов общественный и социальный в толковых словарях русского языка

The article examines semantics of obshchestvennyy and sotsial'nyy based on the data of etymological, historical, explanatory Russian dictionaries (from the 11th to the 21st centuries). The aim of the work is to identify semantic similarities and differences of the lexemes in different historical periods. The research material is definitions and illustrative materials included in dictionary entries. Research methods are comparative and semantic. During the study the development of meanings for the lexemes was established. Sotsial'nyy at the Indo-European level is “allied”. The lexeme came to Russian from French as “relating to society” (1850s). Obshchestvennyy is of Slavic origin, from Russian obshchestvo, goes back to *obtjb “widespread around”, then Old Russian-Church Slavonic obshchiy “referring to all or a group of people”, “common”, then Old Church Slavonic ob'sht'stvo “community, kinship” and Russian-Church Slavonic “a set of people united by a common life way”, “a class of people; a gathering of people with a common intention or subject”. In the sources from the 11th to the 21st centuries obshchestvennyy almost never occurs. In the 18th century under the semantic influence of obshchestvo, meanings of obshchestvennyy are formed: “relating to the people”; “state, political, civil”; “belonging to a group, an association of people”; “associated with a group of friends”; “typical of the high society”; “relevant to the public”; “owned by all”; “general”. In the 19th century the basic meanings of obshchestvennyy and sotsial 'nyy contain the seme “society”, but the words also have differences. The first word implies an attitude towards society as a people, a state, and the second to its advanced part and to citizenship. Obshchestvennyy is also “appropriated to society”, “general”, “secular” (about a peasant community), and sotsial'nyy is “related to socialism”. In the 20th and 21st centuries the basic meanings of obshchestvennyy and sotsial'nyy are the same. However, obshchestvennyy is more often used in everyday speech, and sotsial'nyy in scientific. Obshchestvennyy in modern Russian emphasizes belonging to society, joint ownership of property in a collective, focus on meeting social needs. It also indicates the relationship and position of people in society, the expression of a position by society. Sotsial'nyy describes the structure of a class society and relations in it, as well as the participation of the state in its life. Sotsial'nyy has the semantic component “aimed at changing the social order”, which is recorded in dictionaries of the 20th century and is absent in the sources of the 21st century. Thus, the semantics of obshchestvennyy was formed in the 18th century. Its polysemy is explained by the fact that the root obshch- is original for Russian. The semantics of sotsial'nyy is based on French social,-e “relating to society”, is associated with sociality and socialism. Nowadays, the words are often synonymous with different stylistic connotations.

Violência no trabalho: dimensões estruturais e interseccionais

Abstract Introduction: violence is a historical and sociocultural phenomenon that accompanies humanity since its origin. In work contexts, violence has been the object of renewed attention in recent decades due to the incidence of serious problems affecting workers, such as suicides, criminality, and mental and behavioral disorders. Objective: to discuss the structural and intersectional dimensions of work-related violence (WRV). Methods: a theoretical reflection based on scientific literature was carried out. Results: debates on intersectionality enable us to understand psychosocial risks as a result of workers’ interactions with intertwined social processes that refer to power structures, notably cross-cutting relations of class, “race,” and gender, without prejudice to the incorporation of other axes of social differentiation that matter to subjects and to the analysis of work. Conclusion: WRV cannot be properly understood and faced without the evaluation of its different dimensions, the articulations between them, its plural and intersectional manifestations, and its systemic character in the capitalist mode of production.

Progressive politics and populism: Classes of labour and rural–urban political sociology—An introduction to the special issue

AbstractThis special issue analyses the prospects for a progressive politics against right‐wing populism and capitalism. Taken as a whole, its articles underline the need to understand progressive movements as encompassing agrarian, rural, and urban settings and as socially rooted among labourers and petty commodity producers that do not accumulate (classes of labour), which includes the majority of farmers. Most of the world's rural population now reproduce themselves to some degree in towns and cities, which necessitates further development of a rural–urban political sociology. Articles in the special issue discuss existing and potential organizations and networks of classes of labour. They point to the political potential of migrant populations to erode the social divisions of race, ethnicity, and nationality that capitalism and right‐wing populism construct to defend their interests. They contribute to understanding of why some members of classes of labour support racist nationalist populisms that pit them against fellow members of classes of labour. And they show why national contexts matter. Forms of capitalist government, including varieties of populism, are linked to world‐historical dynamics of accumulation and reproduction, as well as racialized class relations, and constrain routes to progressive politics in different ways. Analysis of them can inform counter‐strategies.

Material research in the design field: a gender gap analysis

Within the framework of technology, design and material production are profoundly influenced by the class relations of production. Artifacts and objects are no longer seen as separate from society, but as part of the social matter that regulates and holds the society together. The development and use of materials are also closely connected to the social systems in which they operate. To date we have few empirical observations in this regard, especially on the investigation of the female presence in the discourse of material design. The connection between material research and gender has recently become an issue of social and technological relevance, as there is a lack of data on women activity. In addition, the communicative aspect of the material design approach will be analysed through forms of social constructivism, which foresees people working together constructing artifacts, and their potential to enhance the perception of matter in its forthcoming dimension. This contribution aims to investigate the approaches of women designers to the innovation of materials. It will start from an historical perspective via figures such as the Italian architect Anna Castelli Ferrieri up to the new generations of women designers and researchers who consider specific factors for each study and observation, applying what is called the “clinical approach”. We will encompass selected examples of good practices of social sustainability through the inclusion of women in the field of material research and production. In addition, we consider the profound impact of contemporary good design practices, questioning what impact they have on social life and the environment, due to the relationships with our artifacts and habitat under the climate crisis. Overall, we propose that gender issues are finally embedded in the design discourse and some results are emerging.

The Travesti (Travesti (Transvestite)) Body in the Anthropocene Cultural Intersections

When we consider it as a cultural element, the body assumes a myriad of new social and political meanings in contemporary times. The progressive destruction of the planet, the deep inequalities and the complex class relations are inscribed in the body, by the body and with the body. We see these intersections in an especially relevant way when we consider the existence of travesti (Travesti (Transvestite)) s, people aligned with the feminine whose body exists at the border of the cultural constructions of sex and gender, and more specifically travesti (Transvestite) sex workers in Brazil. It is intended to theoretically elaborate some of the ramifications of this chaotic scenario and its links with the cultural production of the body, with emphasis on the travesti (Transvestite) body. For this, we will articulate the cyborg theory, by Haraway (2009); of rubble and contamination, by Tsing (2019) and the ethnography of Anjos Neto (2019).

Understanding the Modern World with Marx's Political Economic Critical Thinking

How relevant is Marxist economic theory to the problems of today’s world? Did those contradictions that Marx analyses in his Das Kapital disappear? The answer is clear: no, but they have now acquired a larger scale involving some new actors. The faster pace of economic globalisation at the end of the last century has been accompanied by the cross-border development of class relations. Resting on large-scale cross-border operations of transnational corporations, capital is now contributing to the formation of a transnational capita­list class. In today’s world there are new, contradictory relations based on a multitude of inherent contradictions, rendering the world situation more complex: the rich-poor gap brought about by the formation of the transnational capitalist class; the transnational capitalist class and the question of its global hegemony; and the relationship between the transnational capitalist class and the world system. All these factors are of economic nature but their impact goes beyond the economic sphere. The resulting hegemony of the transnational capita­list class pushes the world situation in the direction of economic politicisation and further political militarisation. It is clear that our world is still dominated by the capital, which was discussed by Marx in his critique of political economy. This approach still provides the basic framework for understanding and examining our era.