Scalar Perspective Research Articles

Hong Kongers and their languages: bordering, scale and identity

Abstract In this paper, we examine discourses about border and scale in the context of Hong Kong’s relationship with mainland China. We argue that, as the physical and political borders between Hong Kong and the mainland are eroding, other forms of bordering practices – such as linguistic borders – become more salient and contested. We draw on selected thematic analyses of a corpus of 70 articles from Hong Kong English media, as well as socio-historical analyses that have widely circulated since Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China, in order to examine how the construction of “Cantonese” and “Mandarin” is managed against anxieties about Hong Kong’s potential loss of distinction and fears of becoming “just another Chinese city”. In this process, both borders and scales become key terrains of negotiation and function themselves as ideological resources in debates about Hong Kong’s identity and future, as certain distinctions take on reduced or pronounced meaning from particular scalar perspectives. Amid an ongoing reframing of what it means to be “Chinese”, examining language ideologies in Hong Kong contributes to our understanding of how national and linguistic categories achieve or reframe their social meanings.

Eurasian Regionalism from the Perspective of Scale

Abstract This article argues that the analytical concept of scale can provide researchers with a more holistic, entangled, and decolonised research perspective on Eurasian regionalism. By drawing on the socio-spatial analytical perspective of scale, I show how we can overcome theoretical biases and conceptual divides in and between the entangled fields of ir and Eurasian studies.1 A scalar perspective helps to dissolve these biases and divides by de-essentialising Eurasia as a region and conceptualising it as a contested, constructed and contentious political geography, formed by powerful actors who use the notion of ‘region’ to further their political interests. One virtue of a scalar perspective is that it reveals the multidimensional character of Eurasian regionalism and its connectedness with the global, depending on the imaginaries activated, the vested power interests pursued, and the regional, inter-regional and international networks created in a specific issue area.

Space, scale, and global politics: Towards a critical approach to space in international relations

AbstractSpace matters for global politics but the treatment thereof in International Relations (IR) has been uneven. There is broad interest in spatial aspects across many research communities but only a nascent theoretical discussion and little cross-field communication. This article argues for a fuller engagement of IR scholars with sociospatial concepts and proposes a spatial approach to global politics based on four essential dimensions: a spatial ontology, the constructedness of space, a scalar perspective, and the interaction of materiality and ideas. As one possible way of integrating these aspects into a more specific concept, the article elaborates a framework of spatial practices and uses the example of Arctic Security research to illustrate the upsides of such a spatial approach for IR research.

Perceiving (non)standardness and the indexicality of new immigrant Cantonese in Hong Kong

In this paper we argue for a fractally recursive model of (non)standard Cantonese to account for the indexicalities of language use associated with “new immigrants” and the complex indexical fields at work in Hong Kong. Our empirical data come from a Hong Kong noodle shop's social media advertisement, its use and enregisterment of a way of speaking associated with female migrants of a lower socioeconomic status from mainland China, and viewers' online reactions to this. We demonstrate that the viewers evaluate this mediatised “new immigrant” Cantonese as indexical of both standardness and non-standardness, of locality, outsiderness and national power - all depending upon the scalar perspective they take within a fractally recursive system.

Heritage, geographical scale and didactic potentiality: Students and teachers' perspectives.

Heritage and space establish reciprocal relations that have been studied for decades. On the one hand, heritage has been described as an inherently spatial phenomenon. On the other hand, places are defined according to the attributes that make up their identity, among which heritage is a fundamental instrument. On the basis of the idea that education plays an important role in the socialization process, transmitted by the inherited culture, to integrate each subject within the specific community, and the notion of scale as the closest to heritage, we defined as general objectives to determine the relationships between geographic scales, heritage perspective and the didactic potential granted to heritage, within the framework of the construction of collective identities, and to contrast the perspectives of students and teachers regarding the geographical scale, heritage and their didactic potential, deducing implications for educational practices. In order to answer to these objectives, we carried out a non-experimental quantitative research, with a relational-predictive objective. Specifically, we used a survey method, being the context the whole of the local scale (Fuente Álamo, Murcia, Spain) and acting as participants all students and teachers of Secondary Education (n = 459) linked to social sciences. They answered the Test on Didactic Potentiality of Heritage according to Scale (TDPHS), and its information was analysed through different procedures (Spearman's correlations, descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney U…), using the statistical programs SPSS. The results show, on the one hand, that the scalar perspective scores are generally low, heritage perspective is consistent with the consideration of the scales, and the perceived didactic potential in relation to heritage is related to the importance given to each of the scales; and, on the other hand, the contrast in the perspectives of students and teachers regarding the geographical scale, heritage and their didactic potential is minimal.

The (im)possibility of sociolinguistic hybridity: Power and scaling in post‐soviet, transnational life

AbstractThis paper contributes to disentangling hybridity from assumptions about marginality, resistance and the dissolution of boundaries in sociolinguistic scholarship. To do so, it examines how speakers make certain types of hybrid identities (im)possible through their discursive practices of scaling. Focusing on post‐soviet, Central Asian migrants in the United States, I demonstrate how their discourses on ethnolinguistic identity rely on multiple scalar perspectives, which (re)make boundaries in different ways that (dis)allow for hybrid identities to emerge. I show that speakers engage in such discourses in order to navigate their marginal transnational positionings, and that their emergent hybrid identities do not ensure resistance to national norms or transcend categorical boundaries. These empirical observations, I argue, have implications for conceptualizing the relationship between power, marginality and hybrid forms more broadly.

Bichas, ganchos y territorios de la droga en Bogotá: toporrepresentaciones de una forma de esclavitud

La reflexión expuesta en el documento aborda al habitante de calle (hombres y mujeres, niños, niñas y adolescentes, adultos mayores), en una perspectiva multidimensional y escalar, marcando como propósito la caracterización de las relaciones entre consumo de bazuco —bichas— (base sucia de coca, conocido como crack en otras latitudes), espacios de vida, imaginarios y representaciones-toporrepresentaciones en el contexto de Bogotá-Colombia. Esto como una propuesta analítica y metodológica para su estudio, con foco en la configuración de una forma de esclavitud vinculada con la adicción y la dependencia a psicoactivos.Desde un enfoque cualitativo, se recurre tanto a la implementación como al análisis de mapas mentales, en calidad de expresiones e imágenes de las experiencias espaciales y de las simbologías de la vida cotidiana de estos sujetos; estos mapas permiten comprender otros elementos no evidentes ni unificados en los perfiles individuales de sus historias de vida. Con ello, al unificar sus narraciones y grafías, se llega a evidenciar la instrumentalización de la que son objeto por su consumo de drogas, en una red muy estructurada, horizontal y verticalmente, de tráfico y microtráfico de sustancias psicoactivas (spa), que se nutre, entre otras, de las condiciones y saberes de la trashumancia por la ciudad propia del habitante de calle. Así, en una condición dual de consumidores y expendedores, son convertidos en un eslabón estratégico para el funcionamiento de los ganchos (marcas registradas para el bazuco) y los territorios de las drogas que se han configurado en el medio urbano de Bogotá con grandes macroexpendios (el antiguo Bronx, por ejemplo), otros subsidiarios y unos últimos micro a nivel barrial, para tener, de tal forma, un robusto mercado en cada sector, que garantiza una oferta efectiva en cualquier radio de demanda de la capital, como se visualiza en el mapa construido para estos fines.En suma, estos patrones pareciesen no ser aislados, pues, por el contrario, pareciesen estar replicados en otras ciudades, guardando las proporciones y particularidades, lo que impone la necesidad analítica de volver la mirada a la sociología del sujeto y su salto al enfoque colectivo en torno a una población con realidades distantes a los marcos de las políticas públicas y sociales.

Planejamento ambiental e a perspectiva escalar: uma abordagem geográfica

Este trabalho tem como objetivo refletir sobre a escala geográfica, analisando-a com fundamento em suas contribuições para o entendimento do planejamento ambiental no contexto atual, e a partir de sua ótica, identificar possíveis articulações escalares no âmbito da Geografia. Como procedimentos metodológicos foram realizados levantamentos bibliográficos de obras e autores que discutem estes temas. Os resultados obtidos permitiram identificar que no âmbito da discussão do planejamento ambiental na perspectiva escalar, sociedade e natureza possuem apreensões escalares diferenciadas, resultantes de ritmos e dinâmicas distintas, relacionando-se com diferentes territórios no movimento interescalar e multiescalar. E o movimento dinâmico e recíproco entre seus elementos concretos e abstratos, se correlaciona e se inter-relaciona, constituindo-se diferentes perspectivas escalares. Em todo e qualquer planejamento sempre há uma proposta de intervenção/ação política que remete a uma concepção escalar do mundo social, nem sempre favorável a toda sociedade. Esta situação pode ser revertida, garantindo-se que planos e planejamentos necessitam ser elaborados nas escalas locais e com a participação da população.

‘Let us make Zimbabwe in my own name’: Place naming and Mugabeism in Zimbabwe

This article adopts a scalar perspective to explore the social construction of cultural geographies that communicate a political ideology that the Mugabe regime created in Zimbabwe. It examines scale-related politics as a governmental institutional political practice which the Mugabe regime executed in order to create and institutionalise a Mugabe personality cult in Zimbabwe, widely known in the literature as Mugabeism. In Zimbabwe, the name Robert Mugabe features the most in the cultural landscape when compared to any other Zimbabwean political actor. This cannot be politically innocent or neutral. Toponymic inscription is critical in creating politically charged linguistic landscapes which communicate intended political agendas. Place names are part of the linguistic tokens that constitute the linguistic landscape. The general public’s conceptualisation of reality is partly shaped by information that comes to them in visual form. This article deploys the three facets of scale, as they relate to the components of the built environment, namely size, level and relation. Through adopting a scalar lens, this article interrogates toponymic strategies that the Mugabe regime employed in order to spatialise Mugabe’s political power.

Production Environments of Digital Innovations: a Scalar Perspective on Cultural Legitimacy in Zambian Coding Networks

Abstract The rise of digital innovations is critical to many people and organizations in the Global South. By looking at programmers and their associated networks as digital production environment, this article aims to shed light on digital innovation processes to get a better understanding of those networks’ inherent characteristics. With analyzing coding networks in Zambia’s capital Lusaka, the study combines cultural legitimacy as a perspective from innovation scholars with scale. The case study is built on Geels’ and Verhees’ (2011) conceptualization of frames that stakeholders use to promote technology, and shows how members of coding networks produce and push legitimacy. Looking through the lenses of scale at perceived plausibility and salience of the production of frames, a variety of promoted frames around technology in connection to their actor’s credibility, empirical fit, and macro-cultural resonance are identified. Further, the research identifies influence structures within coding networks effecting their members scope of actions.

Southeast Asia's transboundary haze pollution: Unravelling the inconvenient truth

This paper examines the political intricacies inherent in the management of Southeast Asia's transboundary haze pollution. It argues for a scalar perspective in understanding the complexities of the haze problem. The so‐called ‘inconvenient truth’ is unravelled by teasing out some issues in the national and regional political ecologies, and the challenges of synchronising co‐operation at the national, regional and global scales. Discussion shows that the ‘environment’ takes on different meanings at each scale, and both Indonesia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) need to recognise this in order to engage more effectively with the transboundary environmental issue. Specifically, inadequate management of forest resources in Indonesia, ASEAN's principle of ‘non‐interference’ and a lack of a holistic ecosystem perspective are amongst some of the interconnected issues addressed. The paper calls for a greater awareness of structural weaknesses in the management of forest resources and a change in ASEAN's environmental paradigm to a more holistic ecosystem perspective that prioritises not just environmental and human health, but also a healthy and sustainable ecosystem.

Translanguaging, place and complexity

Prevalent approaches to classroom languaging and bilingual education interpret the practices of multilingual groups of people through a monolingual lens that obscures the fluid languaging and semiotic practices of contemporary communities who engage in dynamic semiotic and linguistic practices, rather than ‘add’ one language to another in the form of a double monolingualism. The paper examines the arguments for and constraints upon a translanguaging paradigm as a pedagogic strategy in classrooms and it considers how translanguaging practices have different consequences in Southern settings as contrasted with Euro- or North American contexts. The paper critically examines a spatiotemporal or scalar perspective on language-linked social inequalities and language-evaluation processes in school as an account for why the fluid language practices characteristic of everyday interaction and of certain kinds of learning-helpful interaction in classrooms do not transfer to a rationale for translanguaging becoming the norm in schooling. The research finds that innovative and emerging translanguaging practices happen ‘under the covers’ as it were, and make learning possible under constrained conditions. Researching classroom practices as a rhizometically assembled network of actors, materials, resources and practices, in their complexity and particularity, helps us to concretely identify possible points of attack to tackle persisting educational inequality.

Semantic constraint on preposition incorporation of postverbal locative PPs in Mandarin Chinese

AbstractOther than subcategorized argument locative PPs (e.g. 放在桌子上fàng zài zhuōzi-shàng‘put on the table’), the postverbal position in Modern Mandarin Chinese can only be filled by limited types of adjunct locative prepositional phrases (e.g. 跳在桌子上tiào zài zhuōzi-shàng‘jump onto the table’). Among these postverbal adjunct locative PPs, only a small set of PPs permits the incorporation of the preposition into the preceding verb to form a V-P compound (“preposition incorporation”), yielding their previous prepositional object to surface as the object of the compound verb V-P. Previous studies claim that adjunct phrases which quantize an event, such as event delimiters, may behave like arguments (“the delimiter hypothesis”). Yet, our observations find that adjunct locative PPs that are not event delimiters (e.g. directional 向xiàng/往wǎng‘toward’ PPs or non-directional 在zài‘at’ PPs) can also allow their prepositional object to appear as the verbal object. This thus calls for a modification of the widely-accepted delimiter hypothesis. We argue that the semantic characterization of the postverbal locative PPs permitting PI can be generalized as being associated with the denotation of a scalar result. Specifically, we understandresultfrom the perspective ofscale structureproposed in recent studies and argue that in addition to delimiting an event (that is, introducing a closed scale to the event from the scalar perspective), such PPs can also either add directional information (an open scale) to the event that they modify, or further specify scalar information for the event denoted by the VP. This work not only provides a unified analysis of most types of preposition incorporation that involve the postverbal locative PPs in Mandarin Chinese, but is also the first study that provides a comprehensive analysis of the scalar properties and functions of Chinese locative PPs. Our findings from the Chinese data will also contribute to the cross-linguistic semantic generalization of internal adjuncts and the domain of extended direct case assignment.

Crisis events and the inter-scalar politics of humor

Although humor is generally associated with innocent amusement, in the case of crisis events it has various psychological, social and politically charged effects, both negative and positive. In times of crisis humor functions as a technique for neutralizing emotionally charged areas and by that means provides hope. On the other hand, in contemporary society there exist sensitive socially restricted and culturally dependent boundaries beyond which humor is not permitted to extend. This article discusses how humor becomes politicized when it functions as a part of crisis events, both as a trigger for crises and as a strategic tool to manage them. Specific attention is paid to the impact of spatiality by dissecting how the links between crisis and humor change when the scalar perspective shifts and how different spatial levels interact when humor becomes political. ‘Body’, ‘local’, ‘regional’, ‘national’ and ‘global’ are important spatial abstractions across which the socio-political meanings connecting humor and crisis events become produced.

Language Policy and Language Ideology: Ecological Perspectives on Language and Education in the Himalayan Foothills

Ethnographic research in the Kumaun region of North India highlights different perspectives on this multilingual context and on national‐level policies. Language policies that explicitly or implicitly minoritize certain linguistic varieties influence local discourses about language and education but are also interpreted through the lens of local language ideologies. Ecological metaphors and different scalar perspectives illustrate the complex relationship among languages as speakers of an unrecognized language reinterpret policy and express value for linguistic diversity.

El desarrollo espacial de las comunidades Chachapoyas bajo la dominación colonial inka y española

The Chachapoya have come to be seen as a peripheral cultural entity in relation to the broader pre-Columbian Andes. While the material culture associated with the Chachapoya developed prior to AD 1000, it is unclear how uniform this process was on a regional level. In the pre-Columbian Andes, the development of centralized and partitioned monumental architecture has been commonly used as evidence for social and political transformations. Furthermore, the incursions of the Inka and Spanish conquests likely imposed radical changes in the labor, economic, and religious practices of conquered ethnic groups, yet little work has addressed how social practices changed under different regimes. This paper utilizes a scalar perspective to understand the implication of these changes for the Chachapoya region. To better understand the development of Chachapoya communities, this paper addresses the significance of centrality for one such community, Purun Llacta de Soloco, and the role that the construction of its architecture and changes to the surrounding settlement rendered in its social and political development.

The world urban system from a multifunctional and multiscalar perspective: a gridded cartogram as a model of spatial representation

ABSTRACTThis paper aims to show the current spatial organization that characterizes world urban system from a multifunctional and multiscalar perspective. Methodology, the assessment of the urban system was economic in nature traditionally, taking into consideration some of the most important events, such as transnational corporations, financial flows and advanced services, among others. However, it is now more common to see those approaches that interpret globalization from a more holistic perspective, where many evidences have a place: on the one hand, cultural services because of the development and consolidation of the ‘cultural economy’, ‘consumption society’ and leisure time; on the other hand, air transportation as statistic parameter of global air flows in the presence of the new mobilities paradigm. In addition to these functional approaches, the result of the analysis seeks to describe a world urban system from a scalar perspective. It means that the goal is not only to determine the major cities, but those other ones that undergo parallel processes of globalization with respect to the global cities, characterized by their more functional specialization. World urban system is mapped using a gridded cartogram which shows its unbalanced and hierarchical organization.

Transverse traceless gravitational waves in a spatially flat FLRW universe: Causal structure from dimensional reduction

This work was mainly driven by the desire to explore, to what extent embedding some given geometry in a higher dimensional flat one is useful for understanding the causal structure of classical fields traveling in the former, in terms of that in the latter. We point out, in the 4D spatially flat FLRW universe, that the causal structure of transverse-traceless (TT) gravitational waves can be elucidated by first reducing the problem to a 2D Minkowski wave equation with a time dependent potential, where the relevant Green's function is pure tail -- waves produced by a physical source propagate strictly within the null cone. By viewing this 2D world as embedded in a 4D one, the 2D Green's function can also be seen to be sourced by a cylindrically symmetric scalar field in 3D. From both the 2D wave equation as well as the 3D scalar perspective, we recover the exact solution of the 4D graviton tail, for the case where the scale factor written in conformal time is a power law. There are no TT gravitational wave tails when the universe is radiation dominated because the background Ricci scalar is zero. In a matter dominated one, we estimate the amplitude of the tail to be suppressed relative to its null counterpart by both the ratio of the duration of the source to the age of the universe $\eta_0$, and the ratio of the observer-source spatial distance (at the observer's time) to the same $\eta_0$. In a universe driven primarily by a cosmological constant, the tail contribution to the background FLRW geometry after the source has ceased, is the conformal factor $a^2$ times a spacetime-constant symmetric matrix proportional to the spacetime volume integral of the TT part of the source's stress-energy-momentum tensor. In other words, massless spin-2 gravitational waves exhibit a tail-induced memory effect in 4D de Sitter spacetime.

As contribuições de Davidovich e Bahiana ao debate das escalas geográficas no Brasil

The theoretical debate about the geographical scales had increased during the last two decades, especially in the Anglophone context but without great interest of the Brazilian geography. This article seeks to reread two Brazilian publications of the 70’s and 80’s that develops some points about this subject, although they are frequently forgotten by the national literature. Some recent reflections made in the Anglo-Saxon context will be used as a contrast. The scalar perspective over the history of geographical thought, the emphasis in the coexistence of different scales in each parcel of the reality, and the perspective of the geographical scales as outcomes of spatial processes are some of the original contributions of these two. Finally, I want to reinforce the importance of a renew and an update of the discussion concerning the geographical scales in Brazil, once that this scales are constitutive elements of the thoughts and of the actions, making them important and efficient instruments of power.

‘A citizen of all the different bits’: emotional scaling of identity

Scale is a debatable term in the humanities and social sciences. Conceptualized in human geography as spatial categories of thought, as the arenas where social processes occur, as bounded political-economic frames or as unhelpful binaries privileging either the local or the global, scale intersects a significant body of geographical research. The unfolding and intermeshing of topological connections that help to share moments and experiences are important sources for the differentiation, renewal and recalibration of individual identities, but they often work as co-components to scalar identifications. Engaging with the recent discussion on scale and the upsurge of emotional geographies, I seek to understand how people contextualize space through situated scalar perspectives and how they realign and recognize their identities through embodied emotions. The analysis of the empirical material, that comprises 23 focus groups with locally and universally-orientated civic organizations in Finland and England, focuses on the ways people use landscapes and communities as emotional signposts in their scalar identification. I argue that scale is a situated category, whose spectrum individuals negotiate through the performance of social discourses and cultural practices. In such negotiation, people scale their identity narratives to overcome or emphasize the distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘others’.