Shifting Power Relations Research Articles

Making meanings out of me: Reading researchers’ and participants’ bodies through poetry

This article offers autoethnographic reflections on the experience of qualitative research that account for the embodied subjectivity of interviewing as a research practice and the embodied practice of research outside of a traditional ‘field’. The article reflects on the ways in which the author was underprepared for the shifting power relations and shared vulnerabilities within research interactions to be experienced in an embodied way. This article then reflects on the process of experiencing research in the body during the writing-up process. The article draws on data collection experiences and fieldwork notes from a research project on trans and intersex activist relationships undertaken by a trans researcher with a history of LGBTI+ and trans activism. Furthermore, this research project was undertaken by a disabled scholar who had to negotiate a complex web of access needs and decisions over in/visibilising disabilities in order to complete the research. This early career scholar experienced a lack of research methods teaching and training on the complexities of in-community/insider research for those who may be members of communities made vulnerable by society and a lack of training on the expectations of embodied fieldwork practice. This article does not offer teaching or support suggestions to fill this gap although those are illustrated in detail by Pearce’s (2020) ‘methodology for the marginalised’. Instead, the article invites early career scholars, and those teaching research methods, to imagine research and imagine fieldwork with embodied researchers in mind. The article uses poetry to take readers on a journey of the embodied research of one trans and disabled scholar in the hopes it may speak to other scholars with a range of diverse identities and experiences who may be made vulnerable by society and those who have the privilege of teaching them. The article uses poetry as a means to express these embodied reflections drawing on Richardson’s (1999, 2002) creative analytic practice of ethnographic poetry and Anderson’s (2001) embodied writing. The poetic reflections are offered as an interruption to the body of the text with an embodied poetry to touch the reader in a different way. Although these poems deliberately interrupt the body of the text, they can be read in their locations as reflections on their closest sections or a collection of poetic reflections after reading the article.

Rise or Recede? How Climate Disasters Affect Armed Conflict Intensity

Abstract Disasters play a key role in debates about climate change, environmental stress, and security. A qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) investigates how major climate-related disasters shape the dynamics of ongoing armed conflicts. Quantitative and qualitative data are presented for twenty-one cases across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. After climate-related disasters, 29 percent of these armed conflicts escalated, 33 percent de-escalated, and 38 percent did not change. Furthermore, only countries highly vulnerable to disasters experienced changes in conflict dynamics. Armed conflicts tend to escalate when the disaster induces shifts in relative power, whereby one conflict party (usually the rebels) subsequently scales up its military efforts. But if at least one conflict party is weakened by a disaster and the other lacks the capability to exploit this change, armed conflict intensity declines. Findings provide empirical support for a proposed power differential mechanism connecting climate-related disasters to armed conflict dynamics via short-term shifts in power relations between the conflict parties. Climate change can also act as a threat reducer by temporarily causing lower conflict intensity.

Understanding the Emerging Strategic Rivalries in the Bay of Bengal: Actors and Associated Policies

The Bay of Bengal (BoB), constituting a significant portion of the northeastern Indian Ocean, is considered to be the backbone of greater Indo-Pacific economic and communication systems. With the shifting power relations at the global and regional levels and subsequent emergence of competing state interests and policies around the greater Indian Ocean region, the Bay of Bengal is lately emerging as a new theatre of strategic rivalry. To understand the essence of this rivalry, it is imperative to recognize the key actors and their associated policies. Through systematic analysis of secondary literature, this paper primarily attempts to identify a number of regional (littoral) and extra-regional powers having direct and indirect interests in the Bay of Bengal region. The paper further discusses the associated policies of these actors which are linked to the Bay. Above all, the paper unfolds a clear understanding of the emerging strategic rivalry and its future dynamics.

Interpreting mismatches between linguistic and genetic patterns among speakers of Tanimuka (Eastern Tukanoan) and Yukuna (Arawakan).

Northwestern Amazonia is home to a great degree of linguistic diversity, and the human societies in that region are part of complex networks of interaction that predate the arrival of Europeans. This study investigates the population and language contact dynamics between two languages found within this region, Yukuna and Tanimuka, which belong to the Arawakan and Tukanoan language families, respectively. We use evidence from linguistics, ethnohistory, ethnography and population genetics to provide new insights into the contact dynamics between these and other human groups in NWA. Our results show that the interaction between these groups intensified in the last 500 years, to the point that it is difficult to differentiate between them genetically. However, this close interaction has led to more substantial contact-induced language changes in Tanimuka than in Yukuna, consistent with a scenario of language shift and asymmetrical power relations.

Making sense of the conceptual nonsense ‘trustworthy AI’

Following the publication of numerous ethical principles and guidelines, the concept of 'Trustworthy AI' has become widely used. However, several AI ethicists argue against using this concept, often backing their arguments with decades of conceptual analyses made by scholars who studied the concept of trust. In this paper, I describe the historical-philosophical roots of their objection and the premise that trust entails a human quality that technologies lack. Then, I review existing criticisms about ‘Trustworthy AI’ and the consequence of ignoring these criticisms: if the concept of ‘Trustworthy AI’ is kept being used, we risk attributing responsibilities to agents who cannot be held responsible, and consequently, deteriorate social structures which regard accountability and liability. Nevertheless, despite suggestions to shift the paradigm from ‘Trustworthy AI’ to ‘Reliable AI’, I argue that, realistically, this concept will be kept being used. I end by arguing that, ultimately, AI ethics is also about power, social justice, and scholarly activism. Therefore, I propose that community driven and social justice-oriented ethicists of AI and trust scholars further focus on (a) democratic aspects of trust formation; and (b) draw attention to critical social aspects highlighted by phenomena of distrust. This way, it will be possible to further reveal shifts in power relations, challenge unfair status quos, and suggest meaningful ways to keep the interests of citizens.

'Engaging on a slightly more human level': A qualitative study exploring the care of individuals with back pain in a multidisciplinary pain clinic.

Chronic low back pain is characterised by multiple and overlapping biological, psychological, social and broader dimensions, affecting individuals' lives. Multidisciplinary pain services have been considered optimal settings to account for the multidimensionality of chronic low back pain but have largely focused on cognitive and behavioural aspects of individuals' pain. Social dimensions are usually underexplored, considered outside or beyond healthcare professionals' scope of practice. Employing Actor Network Theorist Mol's concept multiplicity, our aim in this paper is to explore how a pain service's practices bring to the fore the social dimensions of individuals living with low back pain. Drawing on 32 ethnographic observations and four group exchanges with the service's clinicians, findings suggest that practices produced multiple enactments of an individual with low back pain. Although individuals' social context was present and manifested during consultations at the pain service (first enactment: 'the person'), it was often disconnected from care and overlooked in 'treatment/management' (second enactment: 'the patient'). In contrast, certain practices at the pain service not only provided acknowledgement of, but actions towards enhancing, individuals' social contexts by adapting rules and habits, providing assistance outside the service and shifting power relations during consultations (third enactment: 'the patient-person'). We therefore argue that different practices enact different versions of an individual with low back pain in pain services, and that engagement with individuals' social contexts can be part of a service's agenda.

The Community Teacher: How Can We Radically Reimagine Power Relations in Teacher Development?

ABSTRACT There is a paucity of conceptual scholarship on community teacher development initiatives that prepare community members to become teachers and are designed to shift power relations in teacher development systems. Community teacher development initiatives designed as equity and justice programs committed to broadening community members’ access to the profession create space for radical reimagination in order to reorient our perception toward what may yet be possible. Thus, this article endeavors to consider how teacher development designs can take up space to begin this work by: (a) examining themes in community teacher development research; (b) exploring how facets of power can function as critical conceptual tools for radically reimagining teacher development for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) community teachers; and (c) considering implications for teacher development designers and researchers committed to building community teacher development initiatives.

Assessing biodiversity policy designs in Australia, France and Sweden. Comparative lessons for transformative governance of biodiversity?

ABSTRACT Biodiversity decline undermines the conditions for life on Earth resulting in calls for transformative governance of biodiversity. Under the Convention on Biological Diversity, national biodiversity strategies provide the primary mechanism through which governments demonstrate their conservation efforts. With many countries due to develop new strategies under the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, it is timely to assess existing ones to identify policy design elements that could be ‘ratcheted up’ to meet the transformative agenda. This article analyzes and compares the policy designs of national biodiversity strategies in Australia, France and Sweden. We cover problem framing, policy goals, targeted groups, implementing agents, and policy instruments, to draw lessons on how national strategies can be designed to further support transformation of biodiversity governance. We identify elements in these strategies that can be used to inspire future ones: a negotiated framing of biodiversity and participatory processes in France, nested and integrated goals, targets and measures in Sweden, and an engagement with indigenous knowledge in Australia. However, to bring about transformative change, the analysis also shows the need for novel and fundamental re-designs to successfully target indirect drivers of biodiversity loss, shift power relations, and make biodiversity conservation a priority rather than an option.

Scaling the pandemic dispositive

Abstract This paper uses the notions of dispositive and scale to explore the emergence and transformation of pandemic signage, focusing on a subset of regulative signs, i.e. requests to wear a mask. Based on a crowdsourced dataset of pandemic signs collected in Hamburg, analysis examines the multimodal resources sign-makers mobilize to create mask-requirement signs and the change of these signs in the transition from the first to the second pandemic wave during 2020. The findings show that regulative measures within the pandemic dispositive are scaled, i.e. given a particular spatiotemporal validity that is shaped by shifting power relations between sign producers and their audiences. This scaling is dynamically iterated as mask-wearing regulation changes its scope across pandemic waves. The rescaling of directive acts such as face-mask requests is reflected in the multimodal makeup of regulative signs, whose linguistic, pictorial, and composition choices shift as mask-wearing regulations are extended to outdoor space.

Decolonizing conservation? Indigenous resurgence and buffalo restoration in the American West

There has been a recent surge of interest in “decolonizing” conservation and natural resource management fields. Most of this scholarship, however, speaks to colonialism on a global scale and does not address conservation within modern settler colonial states such as the United States and Canada. This project focuses on the reintroduction of buffalo (bison) in the American West as an example of how even conservation efforts that purport to include, value, and share Indigenous perspectives can ultimately uphold settler colonial relations of power. Using an Indigenous mixed-methodology approach, it interrogates the discursive construction of buffalo as “America's great conservation success story” and highlights the ways in which conservation has historically worked to support colonial projects of Indigenous erasure and dispossession. Some contemporary buffalo restoration projects seek to include Indigenous people as stakeholders and/or collaborators with unique cultural interests in buffalo, but these efforts do not always embody the material shift in power relations that Indigenous scholars have identified as a key component of decolonization. For Indigenous people, buffalo are more than a keystone species with cultural import; they are relatives whose well-being is deeply entwined with our own. For landscape-scale buffalo restoration projects to engage in decolonization, they must seek to not only repair the harm done to tribal nations through buffalo eradication but also work to support Indigenous resurgence by transforming structures of power.

Shifts in Power Relations across Group Work Activities for Gas Laws

Shifts in Power Relations across Group Work Activities for Gas Laws

Französische Österreichbilder—Österreichische Frankreichbilder ed. by Marc Lacheny et al

Reviewed by: Französische Österreichbilder—Österreichische Frankreichbilder ed. by Marc Lacheny et al Katherine Arens Marc Lacheny, Maria Piok, Sigurd Paul Scheichl, and Karl Zieger, eds., Französische Österreichbilder—Österreichische Frankreichbilder. Forum: Österreich 12. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2021. 274 pp. The open-access volume Französische Österreichbilder—Österreichische Frankreichbilder, which features contributions in both German and French, is an excellent example of how francophone Austrian Studies enriches the field with theoretically sophisticated projects that transcend traditional limitations of the Austrian cultural studies. It originated in a conference held in late 2019 held at the Brenner-Archiv (Innsbruck) and organized by a team from Innsbruck (Sigurd Paul Scheichl, Ulrike Tanzer, and Maria Piok) and France (Marc Lacheny, University of Lorraine in Metz, and Karl Zieger, University of Lille). Four of these organizers edited this collection, which includes two contributions beyond the original presentations. The volume and conference were designed to counter the prevailing German point of view in considering germanophone images of France, to highlight the often very different relationship that France has with Austria, and to chart France’s understanding of Austrian culture as different from Germany’s. The volume’s “Vorwort” (in both French and German versions) outlines the theoretical premises of imageology that guided this event, “die Analyse des Bilds, das von der Kultur eines Landes, des eigenen oder eines fremden, durch die Literatur vermittelt” (6). Such images are centers for investigations of shifting power relations across time and across political realignments. They also provide evidence that (in Paris, at least) Austrian cultures were understood as different from German ones and that Austrians saw French culture as significant for their own country. These editors acknowledge a need to move beyond the limitations of research into germanophone Austrian texts and hope that the volume spurs further studies of French-Central European cultural relations—scholars of “Austrian” culture cannot only use German, and scholars of Slavic and Balkan cultures need to track influences from western Europe. The first contributions set the tone for this impeccably researched and argued and well-written volume. Veronika Studer-Kovács’s essay on “Nationale Typologien in Le Plaisir von Abbé Marchadier (1747) und Matthias Geiger (1765)” presents an early French-Austrian engagement with national stereotypes. A French play (a political allegory) originally performed at the Comédie française was adapted in French by a Hungarian Jesuit to celebrate [End Page 208] Joseph II’s second marriage and performed in Catholic Hungary. Studer-Kovács carefully compares the original and the adaptation to uncover its complicated engagement with cultural power (especially class and language). This spectacular case study models how texts respond to cultural-political networks—imageology at its best as cultural-political-aesthetic studies. The next essays address “official” representations: Norbert Bachleitner and Juliane Werner discuss “‘La grande nation’ als Exportgut: Das Frankreichbild in österreichischen Schulbüchern des späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts,” surveying primary school texts produced after the 1869 school reforms, some with French authors as collaborators. These readers inculcated very specific images of a democratic France (and, unfortunately, of the glories and profitability of its colonial missions). We learn how school curricula and school systems were (re)organized, how schoolbooks created images of ethnic groups within the nation (Stämme), according to the principles of Völkerpsychologie, and how and when German and Austrian views of France diverged significantly. This essay is a model for critical text-based cultural studies. Mayer tracks Austria’s representation in the Diderot/d’Almenbert Encyclopédie. After carefully explaining all aspects of the project’s planning and execution, she uses statistical analyses of the Austria-related entries. How Mayer contextualizes entries helps to establish how and why the encyclopedia evaluated nations vis-à-vis France—a sophisticated example of what big data can show about culture. Norbert Bachleitner thoroughly outlines the activities of “Gérard van Swieten, censeur de la littérature française sous l’impératrice Marie-Thérèse.” The essay serves as a history of the censor’s office, the important players and their roles, explaining how censorship norms were established and enforced, what happened in censorship meetings, and how records were kept (including developments like the censorship...

From Resistance to Co-Management?: Rethinking Scientization in the Contestation of the Technosciences

Since the critique of science movements emerged in the 1970s, knowledge-power relationships in the technosciences have changed significantly. The mobilizations both of scientists to produce science for the people and of lay producers of knowledge and expertise have helped to remedy the perceived deficits of official science. STS research to date has abundantly and rather enthusiastically examined the forms and conditions of production of this critical, dissident, alternative knowledge, but few studies have looked at how scientific and political elites react to and engage with such knowledge-based mobilizations. Focusing on ways of governing techno-criticism, this article aims to contribute to filling this gap. It investigates the innovative capacity of social movements and public authorities as well as their capacity for renewal and ability to shift power relations in their favor, including in the inevitable crisis and scandal situations. Drawing on empirical evidence from a long-term sociohistorical study of the contestations over French nuclear complexes, I propose an analytical framework that distinguishes four historically situated modes of managing scientifically informed contestations of the technosciences. I conclude that scientized or expert activism can be most effective, including within top-down participatory settings, if it is accompanied by oppositional protest and even radical criticism.

A summative content analysis of how programmes to improve the right to sexual and reproductive health address power

IntroductionPower shapes all aspects of global health. The concept of power is not only useful in understanding the current situation, but it is also regularly mobilised in programmatic efforts that...

Centralizing and decentralizing governance in the COVID-19 pandemic: The politics of credit and blame

COVID-19 led to significant and dynamic shifts in power relations within and between governments, teaching us how governments make health policies and how health crises affect government. We focus on centralization and decentralization within and between governments: within government, meaning the extent to which the head of government controls policy; and between governments, meaning the extent to which the central government pre-empts or controls local and regional government. Political science literature suggests that shifting patterns of centralization and decentralization can be explained by leading politicians' efforts to gain credit for popular actions and outcomes and deflect blame for unpopular ones. We test this hypothesis in two ways: by coding the Health Systems Response Monitor's data on government responses, and through case studies of the governance of COVID-19 in Austria, Czechia and France. We find that credit and blame do substantially explain the timing and direction of changes in centralization and decentralization. In the first wave, spring 2020, heads of government centralized and raised their profile in order to gain credit for decisive action, but they subsequently tried to decentralize in order to avoid blame for repeated restrictions on life or surges of infection. These findings should shape advice on governance for pandemic response

Power Shift: The Global Political Economy of Energy Transitions

Energy transitions are fundamental to achieving a zero-carbon economy. This book explains the urgently needed transition in energy systems from the perspective of the global political economy. It develops an historical, global, political and ecological account of key features of energy transitions: from their production and financing, to how they are governed and mobilised. Informed by direct engagement in projects of energy transition, the book provides an accessible account of the real-world dilemmas in accelerating transitions to a low carbon economy. As well as changes to technology, markets, institutions and behaviours, Power Shift shows that shifts in power relations between and within countries, and across social groups and political actors, are required if the world is to move onto a more sustainable path. Using contemporary and historical case studies to explore energy transitions, it will be of interest to students and researchers across disciplines, policymakers and activists.

The missing builders: craftwork and crafty resistance in the “eco-metropolis” of Copenhagen

PurposeThe paper ethnographically explores modes of urban resistance emerging in tandem with climate change mitigation programs in Copenhagen.Design/methodology/approachBuilding on 11 months of fieldwork with a Danish construction enterprise, the paper examines the politics of urban climate change mitigation programs through the lens of a group of builders' struggles to rethink and resolve dilemmas related to environmental concerns in construction and urban development.FindingsBased on an analysis of a specific construction project connected to a larger urban climate change mitigation program in Copenhagen, the paper shows how the builders deliberately move between different perspectives and positions as they navigate the shifting power relations of urban planning. The paper argues that this form of crafty resistance enables the builders to maneuver the political landscape of urban planning as they seek to appropriate the role of “urban planners” themselves.Originality/valueTaking up recent discussions of “resistance” in anthropology and cognate disciplines (e.g. Theodossopoulos, 2014; Bhungalia, 2020; Prasse-Freeman, 2020), the paper contributes an ethnographic analysis of struggles between diverging and, at times, competing modes of engagement in urban climate change mitigation programs and thus sheds light on how professional actors negotiate the ambiguity of “sustainability” in urban planning.

Translating mental health recovery guidelines into recovery-oriented innovations: A strategy combining implementation teams and a facilitated planning process

Recovery is the focus of mental health strategies internationally. However, little translation of recovery knowledge has occurred in mental health services. The purpose of this research is to bridge the gap between recovery guidelines and practice by developing a new implementation strategy involving the formation of implementation teams made up of different stakeholders (service users, service providers, managers, knowledge users) and facilitating a 12-meeting implementation planning process. Sevenmental health organizations across Canada successfully completed the process of translating the guidelines into a recovery-oriented innovation that was implemented. Fifty-five implementation team members were interviewed upon completion of the 12-meeting process. Findings indicate that implementation team members perceived the structured planning process as positive. Nevertheless, the language of implementation science remains difficult to understand for a non-academic audience. Key elements of the 12-meeting process included the value of consensus building among implementation team members and the subsequent shifting power relationships. While working with diverse stakeholders came with certain challenges, the process in itself was a form of system transformation. This type of engaged planning process was a significant departure from the more top-down approaches to organizational change that staff were used to.

Urban Commoning: An Assessment of Its Aesthetic Dimension

The practice of urban commoning continues to tickle the imagination of activists and academics alike. Urban commoning’s aesthetic dimension, yet, has not been fully understood. This contribution seeks to fill such gap and approaches aesthetics in the literal sense: That which presents itself to sense perception. The article thus asks: To what extent may commoning practices that are dedicated to the disclosure of unheard voices (hence having an aesthetic dimension) shift urban power relations? This contribution takes its cue in Jacques Rancière’s theory of aesthetics and has the commoning experiment of Pension Almonde as its central case. Pension Almonde constituted a commons‐based, temporary occupation of a vacant social housing complex in Rotterdam, aimed specifically to undo the subordinate position of urban nomads and orphaned cultural initiatives. The article finally develops the distinction between a particular‐aesthetic dimension (making unheard voices merely perceptible) and a universal‐aesthetic dimension (shifting power relations) of urban commoning. Given the case’s lack of collective agency and external resonance, urban power relations remained in place.

Climate Extractivism: Avoiding The Pitfalls Of Extraction-Based Decarbonization

Mainstream solutions to the climate crisis are driven by the combined imperative for economic growth. The path to solving the climate crisis is through major shifts in power relations across borders, class, gender, race, and human/non-human divides. The current sense of the climate crisis is stronger than it has ever been with people having personal experiences with their lives being impacted by climate change. Recently increased development in ecological modernist ideology has the resource extractive industries deploying discourses of climate progress to justify new rounds and forms of extractions like seabed mining. Fossil fuel producers have long denied climate concerns. Fossil fuel companies are finding that lowering their carbon fossil fuel producers is becoming necessary for financing. Reducing emissions may achieve some climate-related goals, but this will not lead to an environmentally sustainable outcome. Learning from past mistakes of extractivism and reforming is not only the responsibility of countries but also of all parties involved.