Liberal Rhetoric Research Articles

Strategic easing of height restrictions: Unveiling the intersection of free market principles and colonial mentality in Hong Kong’s urban densification

ABSTRACT High-density housing development is considered a pragmatic response to the conflicts between land scarcity and population growth. Under the rhetoric of (neo)liberalism, the flourishing private housing market narrative was anchored throughout the last century, along with significant contributions from government regulations. The 1955 Buildings Ordinance, which eased height limits, laid the groundwork for Hong Kong’s high-density foundations. The existing historiographical literature examines this from a technical perspective. However, it overlooks the decision-making processes behind these regulations and their alignment with or deviation from free market principles. This study examines colonial archives to scrutinize the colonial government’s approach to building regulations, revealing that easing height restrictions was not merely a technical adjustment but a calculated response to broader economic and demographic challenges. It was a strategy to stimulate private housing development and manage population growth without significantly increasing government spending. This raises concerns regarding prevailing assumptions that the colonial government supported a free-market approach to housing rather than exploring the debates and deliberations that shaped these policies. By comparing colonial experiences in Hong Kong and London, historical analysis challenges the conventional understanding of Hong Kong’s urban development, thereby highlighting the contentious relationship between liberal economic policies and the colonial administrative framework.

The awkward rhetoric of Spanish liberalism

Abstract This article explores the ideological controversies around Spanish liberalism through the story of the Citizens party – from its rise in 2006 through 2023, after a sequence of electoral defeats that almost certified its demise. Born as a regional party in Catalonia with an anti-nationalist platform focused on linguistic policies, in national politics it fostered a liberal agenda. The article examines Citizens’ politics of language hiding the party’s liberal identity because of its association to right-wing outlooks. At its founding documents there was an amalgam of liberal and social democratic constitutional values inspiring the party’s political approach. No earnest question was made of their difficult accommodation, given their disparity at the policy level. In 2017 an internal debate arouse, and from 2019 a number of electoral setbacks accelerated it. By then the liberal language legitimizing its passage from regional into a national party had lost its civic appeal.

From After School Specials to After School Threesomes: Industrial Shifts in the Depiction of Sex on Teen TV and its Formation of the Sex Positive Teen Girl

A rash of teen TV shows that deal with stories and depictions of sex explicitly and graphically prove a marked change from the overtly pedagogical approach teen television shows of the past took to tackling controversial issues. Utilizing industry interviews to understand this shift, I argue that series include progressive rhetoric, specifically sex positive rhetoric lifted from the popular feminist movement, in their stories of teen sexuality in order to mitigate controversies that inevitably crop up in public discourse whenever teen sexuality is represented. In so doing, such series shape the potential and parameters of teen girl sexuality. This framing provides for a more capacious spectrum of sexuality for girls, namely in more nuanced and more frequent depictions of queer sexuality and sexually agentive girls. Yet it also highlights the dangers their sexuality poses living in a patriarchal world, subsequently upholding framings of caution and boundaries around girlhood sexuality.

Maqasid Al-Shari’ah and the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

Technological advancements in the twenty-first century, invigorated by the exponential growth of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, have ushered in a new era that provides many of us with amenities and comforts that were hitherto unattainable. But behind this progressive rhetoric of neo-liberalism, capitalism, and post modernism, artificial Intelligence development has also sparked an increasingly ambiguous ethical future, especially at the level of privacy, manipulations and others. This article provides a
 concise analysis of the concept of Maqasid al-Shari’ah and its relevance to AI ethics. This paper attempts to investigate the ethical contemporary challenges posed by the advancement of AI from the perspective of Maqasid-al-Shari’ah and ethic-based approaches. In this study, the qualitative approach was used to clarify the importance of Maqasid Al-Shari’ah and the ethics of artificial intelligence in light of the ongoing contemporary challenges. The article contends that Artificial Intelligence poses weighty ethical challenges related to privacy, manipulation and others which are vital values in Maqasid Al-Shari’ah. The paper concludes that ethical considerations should be incorporated into the development and usage of Artificial Intelligence. The paper paves the way future attempts to analyse alternative ethical paradigms for Artificial intelligence in general, based on a comprehensive Islamic ethic-based approach founded within the context of maqasid which can represent a constructive contribution to the worldwide discourse on the ethics of Artificial Intelligence.

From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution

During the Reign of Terror, the rhetoric of liberation served as cover for conquest. When it came to artistic masterworks belonging to ‘tyrannical’ regimes, revolutionary freedom justified confiscation. The painter Jacques Luc Barbier was one of many who provided a justification. Such masterpieces, Barbier said of paintings by Rubens, were ‘sullied by traces of servitude’ and in need of liberation. The revolutionary Temporary Arts Commission commissioned a convoy to retrieve other paintings, manuscripts and musical scores duly liberated by French troops in Belgium. Soldiers returned from Piedmont to great acclaim with works they had ‘conquered’ on foreign soil. Napoleon continued the plunder across Italy with similar confiscations, first authorized by the Directory and later justified as a fitting reward for spreading civilization. The role of music and musicians in this appropriation is a major theme of Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden’s From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution. ‘[M]usical “works” and composers’, she writes, ‘became cantered in a modern system of musical production destined to support nationalist, imperialist, and colonialist endeavors’. The examples she produces are telling. French musicians eagerly endorsed taking scores, manuscripts and instruments from other countries by force. Luigi Cherubini, the Italian-born Inspector of the new Paris Conservatory, imagined the core of its library coming from Italian cities. The ‘enemy’s contributions’, he wrote to the Director of Public Instruction, were ‘too important to be neglected’. The new musical order, writes Geoffroy-Schwinden, was complicit in an imperial project that would eventually encircle the globe.

Shifting roles of Women through the Lens of Indian Popular Media

The importance of mass media has increased as a result of the development of new communication technologies. By portraying only a portion of truth and via the constant repetition of the same visual and audio, the mass media affects our ideas of social reality. Although the form and content of the media have evolved significantly over the past years, the media has always supported the stereotypical perceptions of women and their social responsibilities. The news about women's struggles and the injustices committed against them has always cast a shadow over them and their social contributions. In a changing world, it is essential that the print and electronic media paint a fair picture of women's multifaceted lives and contributions to society. This study aims to provide a picture of how women are perceived in the popular media, primarily the Bollywood movies and soap operas based on an analysis of the shifting stereotypes in the media's projection of women. It contends that women and their issues are no longer marginalised in the media. However, outdated sex stereotypes have persisted in various forms. Women have become more and more of a commodity in the media as a result of its rising commercialization. The mainstream media, on the other hand, frequently co-opts and re-constructs progressive rhetoric on women's concerns in order to establish the hegemony of dominant socioeconomic classes. As a result, in the setting of a capitalist economy, it is much harder to change how women are represented in the popular media.

Neo-mercantilism in action: China and small states

This study investigates the relations between the People’s Republic of China and seven small European states with particular reference to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It highlights the gap between the rhetoric of economic liberalism and the realities of neo-mercantilism with Chinese characteristics. The article analyses China’s geopolitical strategy and its support of infrastructural projects abroad in relation to the “China Dream” as articulated by Xi Jinping. The impact of engaging with a more assertive China for smaller countries is examined. The article concludes that, increasingly, there is a distinction in the EU between liberal and illiberal democracies. China’s preference for bilateral relations with countries on the BRI is informed by its broader geopolitical aims that resonate well with the neo-mercantilist model. The impact of China’s stance seems to be more muted in the more democratic small nations and more pronounced in autocracies.

Assessing the Development Impact of the Sota Border Post Connecting Indonesia and Papua New Guinea

Although some studies have mentioned land use and land cover across the borderlands of New Guinea, there have not yet been a series of systematic studies that link the topic with the construction of the Sota border post (Pos Lintas Batas Negara–“PLBN Sota”). With reference to realism, liberalism and asymmetrical power relations, this study examines the development impacts of the Sota border post. A set of interdisciplinary mixed-methods approaches are used including geospatial and earth observation analysis, collation of bureau of statistics data as well as academic and grey literature review. Results provide a baseline land cover assessment for the study area surrounding the Sota border post. There have also been a range of socio-economic and biophysical impacts of the infrastructural and immigration capacities along the Southern borderlands of New Guinea. In terms of international relations, the presence of the Sota border post is expected to foster cooperation between Indonesia and PNG, decrease conflict, and promote stability in the border area. As a result, both realism and liberalism can be used as theoretical frameworks to understand the trajectory of developments along the borderlands. However, due to the asymmetries of power, the rhetoric of liberalism may be rendered less convincing.KEYWORDS:Asymmetries of Power; Indonesia and PNG; International Relations; Land Cover and Land Use Change; Sota Border Post

Does the Australian Labor Party care about climate change? A content analysis of ALP attitudes towards the environment from 2007 to 2013

ABSTRACT Australia is increasingly regarded as out of step in the global effort to combat climate change. Even the Australian Labor Party (ALP) Government, considered the climate-friendly alternative to the conservative Coalition, failed to deliver robust climate action from 2007 to 2013. This paper aims to validate the promising progressive rhetoric of the ALP Government from 2007 to 2013 to understand whether its commitment to climate action was genuine. It incorporates mixed methods to verify ALP attitudes to the environment and demonstrate the incidence of changing attitudes. This paper finds that the ALP deviated from ecocentrism in its framing of environment priorities towards a weak ecological modernisation approach to mitigation. This inconsistency suggests that climate change mitigation was an arbitrary priority for the ALP, rather than a cornerstone of its party platform.

Introduction toVisual Arts ResearchSpecial Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Introduction to<i>Visual Arts Research</i>Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Progressivism, Old and New: The Spiritual Moorings of Progressive Reforms.

With the tide of progressive reforms facing strong headwinds today, this essay offers a retrospective look at the progressive movement in the U.S.A. and reflects on the lessons to be learned from its triumphs and failures. The case is made that major advances in the progressive agenda came at historical junctions precipitated by dramatic events. The stretch between 1900 and 1920 saw the first wave of social reforms following the late nineteenth century recessions and upsurge in labor unrest. The New Deal took shape in the 1930s in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The Civil Rights movement burst onto the scene in the 1960s in the face of bitter attempts to shore up segregationist practices in southern states. And the 2020s spike in progressive activism gained momentum against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6 Capitol riots. Special attention is paid to the interfaces between Social Gospel theology and efforts to ground progressive rhetoric in what John Dewey called “common faith,” Robert Bellah “civil religion,” and Richard Rorty “liberal pragmatism.”

Friends or Foes? U.S. Women’s Perceptions of Racial Justice and the Black Lives Matter Protests during the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT Scholarship on the first waves of the Black Lives Matter protests (2013–2014) has emerged in recent years but little is yet known about women’s responses to the cycle of Black Lives Matter/George Floyd protests that occurred in the Summer of 2020. This study analyzed semi-structured interviews with a racially diverse community sample of 20 women and two nonbinary individuals who mostly identified as feminists (mean age = 34.05, SD = 13.11). To address the salience of BLM framing practices during an ongoing protest, this study explored an awareness of structural racism and reactions to the presumed goals and tactics of this antiracism social movement. We identified six themes in how this racially diverse sample responded to these protests against racism and police brutality: 1) Caricatures of BLM protestors as criminals; 2) Protests were too extreme; 3) Concern about the COVID risks and social context of COVID; 4) More education needed about race relations; 5) Protests were long overdue; and 6) Protests were effective and necessary. Implications for better understanding the rhetoric of white liberalism, solidarity within racial justice movements, and fragmentation or unity among women were explored.

Neoliberal Postmodernity and Hyperimperialism

The article describes transformation of the ideology of liberalism and the associated practices of economic domination at the transition stage from the socio-philosophical Modern paradigm to Postmodern paradigm.Aim. Identify the link between the rhetoric of modern liberalism, Postmodern paradigms and trends in the evolution of the world economic system.Tasks. Consider the historical conditions for the formation of liberal and neo liberal ideology; determine the place of neoliberal discourse in the ideological landscape of our time; correlate it with other relevant discourses that claim to explain economic, social and cultural processes; to analyze the features of modern practices of developed countries economic domination in relations with the others world countries.Methods. The article, using logical analysis, establishes the main features of modern liberal ideology, allowing us to talk about a new stage in the history of the liberalism development. Comparative analysis allows us to find out the points of liberalism convergence at this stage with other ideological directions in present time. However, statistical analysis reveals important economic factors impeding the reduction of the distance between developed and developing countries.Results. The study showed that to date, the liberal discourse has undergone significant changes, which allows us to talk about a completely new stage in the development of liberal ideology. On the one hand, it was significantly influenced by a general paradigm shift that affected the entire spectrum of socio-economic thought in the 20th century, which we define as an intensifying transition from the Modern paradigm to the Postmodern paradigm. On the other hand, the analysis of the historical path of imperialism and its inherent practices of domination also allows us to talk about its sig nificant transformation in the conditions of the post-industrial economy and the information society. Parallel consideration of these aspects (ideological and practical), the continuous correlation of theory with economic realities allows the authors to define such a complex concept as hyper imperialism. This term is proposed to be used to refer to a specific form of imperialism in a post-industrial manner. At the same time, the intrinsic inseparability of various types of expansion — economic, ideological and, more broadly, civilizational — is taken as its key feature.Conclusion. In the context of a large-scale socio-economic and ideological transformation of a global nature, the need for new forms and means of confronting economic hegemony and finding a path to independent economic and social development is increasing.

Objects of Empathy

Objects of Empathy

Exploring the intersectionality of culture, sacrificial offering, and exploitative prosperity gospel rhetoric in Africa

Research has well documented the evidence of the growth of prosperity gospel churches across the globe, but there is a dearth of studies that investigate the interface between culture and exploitative rhetoric among African prosperity gospel ministers. Examining the concept of making sacrificial offerings in the traditional African context, I theorize that culture has significant influence on the exploitative power of prosperity gospel ministers by the following considerations: the African tradition of consulting oracles for solution to spiritual and physical problems, the cultural practice of making sacrificial offerings to the gods in exchange for favor, and the poor socio-economic condition of many prosperity gospel adherents in Africa. This study highlights the use of the rhetoric of spiritual engagement and liberation for audience manipulation, examines the idea of the pure gift, proposes some ethical questions that should govern the prosperity movement, and underscores the need for scholarly engagement.

Men with Broken Backs and Other Infirmities: Unsettling Masculinities in Charles Mungoshi’s Fiction

Most of Charles Mungoshi’s fiction was written within a context of militaristic masculinities pre- and post-independent Zimbabwe, when the strong and healthy male body was valorised in Zimbabwean writing and life. His portrayal of men with physical infirmities, particularly spinal injuries, challenges the Chimurenga (war of liberation) rhetoric with its hypermasculine script that privileges the tough and healthy male body in service of the family and nation. Mungoshi’s calling on the corporeality of men’s bodies and the limits of physical ability exposes the conflicts and anxieties of maleness at a time when such “unmanning” was problematic and continues to be for some critics of Zimbabwean literature. Such critics view Mungoshi’s focus on men with infirmities as devoid of literary value, pessimistic, of little value to the liberation struggle and nation-building in post-colonial Zimbabwe. Yet through the trope of male bodily incapacitation, this paper argues, Mungoshi challenges a masculinism that demands that men should have strong bodies they can deploy to control familial and national space. By paying attention to the two languages that Mungoshi wrote in – English and Shona – this paper unpacks one of Mungoshi’s least acknowledged but most telling contributions to Zimbabwean writing – images of male infirmity that attempt to re-envision Zimbabwean masculinities.

Racism and silencing in the media in Aotearoa New Zealand

Racism in the Aotearoa New Zealand media is the subject of scholarly debate that examines how Māori (Indigenous Peoples of New Zealand) are broadcast in a negative and demeaning light. Literature demonstrates evolving understandings of how the industry places Pākehā (New Zealanders primarily of European descent) interests at the heart of broadcasting. We offer new insights by arguing that the media industry propagates a racial discourse of silencing that sustains widespread ignorance of the ways that Pākehā sensibilities mediate society. We draw attention to a silencing discourse through one televised story in 2018. On-screen interactions reproduce and safeguard a harmonious narrative of settler–Indigenous relations that support ignorance and denial of the structuring force of colonisation, and the Television Code of Broadcasting Practice upholds colour-blind perceptions of discrimination and injustice through liberal rhetoric. These processes ensure that the media industry is complicit in racism and the ongoing oppression of Indigenous peoples.

Creation of the Kingdom of Poland in the Discourse of the Russian Press

This article is devoted to the analysis of the rhetoric presented in the Russian press in 1814—1818 regarding the imperial policy in the newly annexed Kingdom of Poland. The aim of the authors is to show that it is necessary to separate the real policy of the Russian autocracy in this territory from the images created first by French publicists, and then repeatedly exaggerated by Russian journalists. It is noted that Alexander I in 1814—1818 appears on the pages of French publications as a tsar-liberator. It is shown that these stories were quickly picked up by Russian newspapers and magazines and, as a result, a paradoxical picture emerged: for several years the mass media convinced the Russian society that the Russian Tsar was the new Polish national sovereign. It is argued that this, of course, caused rejection in conservative circles and among advanced Westerners such as Vyazemsky or Turgenev. It is concluded that it is the dominant discourse that can be considered, on the one hand, one of the factors in the emergence of the Decembrist movement, and on the other, a “trap” for Alexander I, since the liberal rhetoric of the press over time began to diverge more and more from the real policy of the Russian autocracy.

Unmasking Corporate-Military Infrastructure: Four Theses

At our workshop at the inaugural Conference on Community Writing on the rhetoric of the corporate university, participants noted that the values espoused by community literacy “in the community” are being eroded at the university. Furthermore, they noted the underlying rhetorics of missionary zeal, whiteness, and privatization in community literacy and service learning work. The authors build on these critiques by examining two successive administrations at Syracuse University. The first presented a model of “engaged infrastructure” with progressive rhetoric but oppressive outcomes; the second shed the façade of community partnership for an explicitly corporate and militaristic vision of higher education. Through this comparison, the authors interrogate foundations that community literacy has been built on with the hope of opening new possibilities.

Социальные науки и глобальная турбулентность: перезагрузка мейнстрима

After the collapse of the bipolar world, the neoliberal mainstream emerged in the global hierarchy of social sciences, built on three axiomatic pillars: Western domination, capitalism (free market) and liberalism (the value of individual autonomy). Nowadays, one can more and more often witness criticism and disintegration of the mainstream, which claimed the universality of descriptions and legitimation of modern societies that have reached the end of history in the form of open-access liberal market democracies. The purpose of the article is to find out how transformations of the prevailing political and economic orders, configurations of the subjects of geopolitical dominance and their legitimate metaphors determine the direction of changes in the social sciences mainstream. The hypothesis of the research is that the prevailing principles of stratification and distribution of public resources will be less and less valuable and institutionally related to capitalism, market and democracy, since an appeal to the latter does not lead to an increase in the available opportunities for the majority of the population in practice. The global change in social ontology, the structure of economic reproduction and legitimate foundations of the political order bring about a drop in the credibility and relevance of mainstream concepts focused on the axiomatics of market values and liberal rhetoric. Intellectual attempts to restore the relevance of the neoliberal mainstream through the construction of local utopias (flat world, creative class, knowledge economy, etc.), the introduction of complementary concepts of civil repair (J. Alexander), sociocultural trauma (P. Shtompka), unworthy government (bad governance), dependence on previous development (path dependence) or gauge (N. Rozov) do not save from growing conceptual stretch. Formation of a society without tangible economic growth and a declining need for mass labor leads to the inevitable transformation of the mainstream. Alternative and peripheral theories that describe the contours of a global future mainly in non-market, non-capitalist and, possibly, non-liberal categories are becoming more influential. These are concepts that fix new formats for the distribution of public resources, less and less connected with the market, democracy and hegemony of the West, but increasingly – with rental mechanisms, distributive political regulation and differentiated value of different social groups for the national state. Acknowledgements. The article has been supported by a grant of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) and the Expert Institute of Social Research (“опн”). Project no. 20-011-31025 “Alternatives to Political Mainstream amidst the Crisis of the Global World Order”.