Shifting Power Relations Research Articles

Funding Contemporary Children’s Television: How Digital Convergence Encourages Retro Reboots

ABSTRACTContemporary children enjoy abundant supplies of television made especially for them, delivered across multiple platforms by a range of providers that includes public service broadcasters, pay-television services, and subscription video on demand services. Although digital regimes undermined longstanding funding models for children’s television and reduced the production of local content in the United Kingdom and Australia, the demands of new market entrant subscription video on demand services striving to establish themselves in global markets have increased the value of the intellectual property of children’s screen content. ITV Studios’ 2015 re-make of the 1960s Supermarionation series, Thunderbirds, is used here as a case study to illustrate how convergence has contributed to a culture of re-booting in children’s television, a genre for which consumer products have long been used to underpin program production costs. Importantly, the licence fees paid by subscription video on demand services—Netflix had a $5 billion programming budget in 2015—have begun to provide additional, significant sources of funding for production budgets, while also ensuring the rapid visibility of program brands in global television markets, particularly the United States. New means of multi-platform distribution also erode the centrality of traditional broadcasters to program commissioning and funding. While this shift in power relations between broadcasters and producers may be welcomed by the production sector, the increasing importance of global subscription video on-demand services in the funding of contemporary children’s television poses a threat to locally produced, culturally specific television for children.

Sujeição e agência em situações de violência contra as mulheres: trajetórias de superação e ressignificação

In this paper we analyze some aspects related to the problem of violence against women from a qualitative research completed recently (2016) with women living in Goiânia, Goias, who have gone through contexts of violence triggered by their partners – boyfriends or husbands. We explore the meanings attributed to the experiences, attentive to the subjective processes that signal a break and a reframing of the situation of violence suffered by the women, the research subjects. The study focuses on specific characteristics and similarities in the analyzed trajectories and allows to conclude that: (i) despite the relative delay in understanding the context of violence in its early signs, (ii) assigning idiosyncratic traits to partners such as explosive behavior or jealousy and (iii) the reluctance and hesitation to seek help at moment of violence, this group of women managed to give a new meaning to their lives, indicating a desire to overcome what they went through, something already or very close to the outcome in the narratives of them all. Their overcoming points to a shift in power relations, as stressed by feminist studies dealing with the issue of violence. The notion of subjectivity as agency and not only as a subjection leads to the possibility, at least in some contexts, of resistance and freedom of action. It is about this dyad, subjection/agency related to the issue of violence against women, this article aims to deal with. Keywords: violence against women, gender, subjectivity, agency, feminism.

Analysing the significance of silence in qualitative interviewing: questioning and shifting power relations

In this article we analyse the significance of silence in qualitative interviews with 36 individuals interviewed about high-risk, illegal activities. We describe how silence expresses a dynamic power relationship between interviewer and interviewee. In the analysis, we focus on two different types of silence: ‘silence of the interviewee’ and ‘silence of the interviewer’. We analyse how silence functions as an interviewee’s resistance against being categorized as ‘social deviant’, how an interviewer may use silence strategically, and how silence stemming from an interviewer’s perplexity constructs significant data. We conclude that silence constitutes possibilities for interviewees and interviewers to handle the complex power at play in qualitative interviewing either by maintaining or by losing control of the situation.

Stigma, violence and HIV vulnerability among transgender persons in sex work in Maharashtra, India

Among marginalised groups in India, HIV prevalence is highest among transgender persons; however, little is known about their HIV vulnerability. This study describes transgender sex workers’ experiences of stigma and violence, a key driver of the HIV epidemic, and explores their coping responses. In-depth interviews were conducted with 68 respondents in Maharashtra state, India. Findings show that respondents face pervasive stigma and violence due to multiple marginalised social identities (transgender status, sex work, gender non-conformity), which reinforce and intersect with social inequities (economic and housing insecurity, employment discrimination, poverty), fuelling HIV vulnerability at the micro, meso and macro levels. Several factors, such as felt and internalised stigma associated with psycho-social distress and low self-efficacy to challenge abuse and negotiate condom use; clients’ power in sexual transactions; establishing trust in regular partnerships through condomless sex; norms condoning violence against gender non-conforming persons; lack of community support; police harassment; health provider discrimination and the sex work environment create a context for HIV vulnerability. In the face of such adversity, respondents adopt coping strategies to shift power relations and mobilise against abuse. Community mobilisation interventions, as discussed in the paper, offer a promising vulnerability reduction strategy to safeguard transgender sex workers’ rights and reduce HIV vulnerability.

Shadow Systems, Risk, and Shifting Power Relations in Organizations

Shadow Systems, Risk, and Shifting Power Relations in Organizations

Intergenerational Space

Book Reviews 187 Intergenerational Space Robert M. Vanderbeck and Nancy Worth, Editors (2015) London: Routledge, 342 pages $171.00 (hardback); ISBN 978-0-415-85531 Quoting the introduction of Intergenerational Space, this book aims to offer insight into the transforming relationships between younger and older members of society (p. 0). The book reveals how different generations negotiate access to each other’s lives, the tendencies toward increasing age segregation, and the ways that members of different age groups could be encouraged to keep in touch. The majority of contributions to the book come from the UK, with chapters from the US, Africa and Asia. No less than 35 authors are engaged in this volume. The collection originates from the conference Intergenerational Geographies: Spaces, Identities, Relationships Encounters at the University of Leeds (UK) in May 2012. In their introduction, the editors explain the urgency of the book. They refer to a widespread discussion on the “clashing’’ of the older and the younger generation. Worries about the lack of intergenerational solidarity are mentioned in reference to issues like social welfare, climate change and the housing market. In Geography, research thus far has mainly been focused on specific age groups, with the field of children’s geographies likely the most advanced. In addition, the number of studies on the elderly has increased. According to the editors, this “bookend” focus makes adulthood as a position and life stage somewhat underconceptualized , and more importantly the interrelationships between different age groups have been only marginally explored. Most of the geographical literature does not combine an interest in both the young and the old. This volume is meant to change that situation. The first of the book’s five sections starts with a focus on intergenerational spaces. How are intergenerational spaces experienced by both young and old, what problems occur, and how can these spaces be better designed? One of the empirical examples comes from a high-rise public housing estate in Singapore where shared venues for children and older people were built that stimulated new encounters between children and their grandparents. The second section treats intergenerational relationships through the lens of memories. Adults’ memories contain many examples of intergenerational contacts when they were young, but also of “missed” chances and barriers to meet people from another generation. Part three considers the negotiation of values and beliefs between different generations. This is, of course, daily practice in families, where parents and children are in a constant process of redefining each other’s positions. When children grow older they often “accuse” adults of “living in different times,” which can create some level of misunderstanding and prejudice. One of the book’s chapters concludes that it can be helpful to start dialogues between generations as this often reduces mutual prejudgments. Section four focuses on issues around education and care. These are domains in life where different generations meet and where the younger generations are frequently confronted with asymmetrical power relations. In their Book Reviews 188 position as adults, caretakers and educators are typically the ones who determine what has to be done by the youngest generation. However, it is also increasingly the case that younger people are taking care of their parents and other older members of society, which is accompanied by shifting power relations between age groups. The last section of this volume focuses on the world-wide process of aging. Elderly people are growing in numbers in many countries, which is challenging people to create better environments for the elderly. Like children, however, the elderly are often defined as out of place. They feel vulnerable in a world that places the greatest value on “being young.” The chapters in this last section reveal diverse solutions to the marginalization of aged people in today’s society from technology to housing. The book by Vanderbeck and Worth shows that it can be valuable to connect different age groups both in research and policies. It is empirically rich and offers some interesting theoretical concepts. It opens the reader’s eyes to the benefits of an intergenerational approach in urban planning. Building a child-friendly city can be very favorable for many older people as well as the other way around...

Redressing the balance: Inverted hierarchies in the tourism classroom

The research evaluates a collaborative case study to co-create the curriculum for a tourism undergraduate module. In three course design team (CDT) meetings, students selected and discussed topics and learning styles. Qualitative analysis revealed that the students involved strove to be independent learners. They favoured active learning styles and ‘non-vocational’ aspects of tourism. However, university bureaucracy represents a block in the design process. The paper concludes by advocating a more equal relationship between students and tutors. This involves a shift in power relations, inverting traditional hierarchies in which teachers act as gatekeepers of knowledge and students are passive recipients.

The power of symbolic capital in patient and public involvement in health research.

BackgroundPolicy‐makers and health research funders increasingly require researchers to demonstrate that they have involved patients in the design and conduct of research. However, the extent to which patients and public have the power to get involved on an equal footing is dependent on their economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital.ObjectiveTo explore power relations in patient and public involvement (PPI) in research, particularly how patients may wield symbolic capital to develop a more equal relationship.MethodsNarrative interviews with a maximum variation sample of 38 people involved as patients, carers or public in health research, analysed thematically.FindingsSymbolic capital may be demonstrated in a range of ways (sometimes alongside or in the absence of other forms of capital): illness experience, technical illness knowledge and the challenging outsider. Symbolic capital is unstable and dependent on others for recognition and legitimacy. Nonetheless, participants identify a gradual shift in power relations over time.Discussion and conclusionsResearch into PPI has been conceptually and theoretically poor, limiting our understanding of its mechanisms and wider contextual elements. Our findings demonstrate the importance of reflecting on the forms of power and capital wielded by the health research community, and of acknowledging the way in which PPI is challenging the status quo. As one of the first papers to conceptualize how different forms of symbolic capital operate and their critical role in challenging the balance of power, our findings may help researchers better plan their PPI activities and reflect on their own power.

Shifting power relations in New Zealand child welfare policy: The process and implications of the 2014 amendment to s13 of the CYP&tF Act

INTRODUCTION: The Vulnerable Children (VC) Act 2014 amended section 13 (s13) of the Children, Young Persons and their Families (CYP&tF) Act 1989 to re-emphasise the principle that the welfare and interests of the child should be the paramount consideration in child protection proceedings. This study examines the policy process behind the amendment, and investigates its possible implications, in particular its impact on the power relationship between the state and family/whanau.METHOD: Data was collected from semi-structured, confidential interviews with 10 key informants. Key themes were identified using thematic analysis. This was supplemented by document analysis of published and unpublished government papers, consultation papers and local and international research.FINDINGS: The policy process that preceded the decision to amend s13 of the CYP&tF Act was controlled by a small policy elite that failed to consult broadly on either the need for the amendment, or its impact on vulnerable children and families. Government gave little consideration to the implications of the policy change, and the policy process used to develop the amendment lacked the characteristics of rational, comprehensive, policy development. No evaluation or monitoring of the policy change has been put in place, despite the known risk that it may result in an increase in unnecessary removals of children from their families/whanau.CONCLUSION: The s13 amendment, while appearing minor, has significant implications for vulnerable children and families and is part of a fundamental re-balancing of power relations in New Zealand’s child welfare policy.

Plurilingual posters in a multilingual city: reader positioning and power negotiation

ABSTRACTThrough the study of plurilingual posters for pop concerts, musical performances, sports events and other cultural and entertainment events, this paper investigates language status and functions, motivations of linguistic choices, discourse practice and social practice in three distinct institutional contexts, and takes the multilingual Chinese society of Macao as a case study. The distribution and representation of languages in posters show the shifting power relations and display the reader positioning in situations of language contact between Traditional Chinese characters, Simplified Chinese characters, Portuguese, English, and written Cantonese. This paper draws on critical discourse analysis to study the realization of commercial, governmental and civic power through a diverse and plurilingual discourse genre. It shows that although governmental authority is still invested in the colonial language of Portuguese, it is not immune from the marketization associated with the language of commercial capital, English. The analysis also indicates that the plurilingualism evoked by governmental authority situates monolingual readers in formal and respectful positions with respect to other languages, commercial ventures seek to earn money by entertaining readers less formally, and civic associations cultivate their readership in flexible ways in accordance with the target sector of the community.

I Spy with my little eye - Full Copy

"Scientia potentia est" – knowledge is power. Many people seem to read this phrase, attributed to Francis Bacon, as a mission statement. If knowledge is power, then it is easy to understand why people demand more transparency and why at the same time surveillance increases. Transparency and surveillance are means to acquire knowledge and information. For centuries, governments have been surveilling their people to ensure that they behave according to their wishes. Similarly, the people are demanding more transparency with regard to the activities of their governments in order to hold their governments accountable for their actions. However, it needs to be understood that the argument that transparency only empowers people and automatically leads to societal betterment is amounting to mere oversimplification. Potential shifts in power relations depend on the sort of power, as well as on its direction and magnitude. Therefore, power in this joint volume needs to be understood as a very flexible term with many contingent forms. Each form of power and of power relations needs to be seen in the individual and divergent context of each contribution.

Seeking new glory (d)haze: A qualitative examination of adventure-based, team orientation rituals as an alternative to traditional sport hazing for athletes and coaches

Upon entry to university, students are commonly exposed to hazing events during Frosh Week, as they pledge to join a fraternity or sorority, move in to their dormitories, and join campus clubs and groups, including marching band and varsity sport teams. As Hoover elucidated in his comprehensive study of NCAA athletes, 80% of that population took part in some form of hazing on their varsity team, of which only 20% were identified as being a “positive” experience. Furthermore, by the time athletes enter university, it is conceivable that up until that point, they will have been involved in no less than five hazing ceremonies. This qualitative study introduced adventure-based alternative orientations that included activities such as rock climbing and canoe tripping to men's and women's collegiate varsity athletic teams. These teams had previously been identified as using traditional hazing ceremonies involving, for example, sexualized games and alcohol. Themes that emerged from the interviews with athletes and coaches focused on the transformative effects of the alternative orientations, facilitating a greater sense of cohesion, diminishing team hierarchies, and shifting power relations, effectively democratizing the event and humanizing first year athletes. Participants also shared ways in which alternative orientations played a role in fostering deeper interpersonal relationships rooted in communication and shared identity which they described as facilitating team success.

On the importance of power struggles in the diffusion of social innovations

Diffusion of social innovations has become a key theme in social innovation research. In this paper I argue that the importance of power relations and opposition against social innovations should receive a more central position in this line of research. Using detours to the related fields of Science and Technology Studies and Transition Studies, the significance of (shifting) power relations in the diffusion of innovations is underlined. Through a historical case study on the institutionalisation/diffusion of women’s suffrage in the Netherlands (1883-1919) it is shown that power struggles and shifting power relations are also key for the successful diffusion of a social innovation. With this paper I aim to bring power and empowerment to the agenda of social innovation researchers. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31637/epsir.16-2.1

Night as Fragmenting Frontier: Understanding the Night that Remains in an era of 24/7

AbstractSocial scientists have previously understood the night through a frontier metaphor. This has pitched night as an empty or lightly inhabited space into which the urban, capitalist day has been expanding. The contemporary increase in nocturnal research has complicated this picture, showing an increasing multiplicity of complexly lived, structured and experienced nights across the globe. This paper looks to retrieve the concept of night as frontier by drawing on postcolonial theories to generate a more subtle conceptualisation of ‘frontier’, while also arguing that recent research reveals that this frontier is now fragmenting. By exploring research into a series of core themes – artificial light at night and darkness; night‐lives; and global nights – I then explore what such an understanding of night allows us to say about current research. As nocturnal social science continues to mature, a more critical eye will need to be paid to the complexity of shifting power relations and identities within this fragmenting nocturnal frontier.

Shifting Power Relations in Sustainability Transitions: A Multi-actor Perspective

This paper contributes to understanding transition politics by conceptualizing (shifting) power relations between actors in sustainability transitions. The authors introduce a Multi-actor Perspective as a heuristic framework for specifying (shifting) power relations between different categories of actors at different levels of aggregation. First, an overview is provided of how power and empowerment have been treated in transition research, and remaining questions are identified on who exercises power and who is empowered by and with whom. It is argued that theoretical frameworks and empirical analyses in transition studies lack precision when it comes to distinguishing between different types and levels of actors. In response, a Multi-actor Perspective (MaP) is developed, which distinguishes among four sectors (state, market, community, third sector), and between actors at different levels of aggregation: (1) sectors, (2) organizational actors, and (3) individual actors. The paper moves on to specify how the MaP contributes to understanding transition politics specifically in conceptualizing shifting power relations. Throughout the paper, empirical illustrations are used regarding public debates on welfare state reform, civil society and ‘Big Society’, as well as more specific empirical examples of community energy initiatives.

Right Language to Release the River of Health in the Medical Industry.

Performance artist Laurie Anderson appropriated an idea from beat writer William Burroughs a few years back. Language, Anderson sings, is a virus.1 The words we choose lock in ideas and discharge reverberations. They subtly evoke personal, professional, and societal power relationships. Language is a virus.By extension, changes of language can shift power relations. The removal of a conquest name of a former US president from the highest point in the northern part of the western hemisphere is a case in point. US President Barack Obama re-anointed Mt McKinley as Mt Denali, the name used by the indigenous people whose descendants still live in its presence.2 The act replaced a European surname linked to cultural suppression and colonization with one that honors the first human inhabitants.The renaissance of indigenous medical practices is effecting a similar renaming of what many view to be the high point in the development of medicine. “Traditional medicine” has for decades been misused to describe biomedical and industrial practices that are less than a century old. Better to qualify this medicine with “conventional” or “bio-.” Let “traditional medicine” indicate practices that carry the weight of history. These choices move toward right language.

A Feminist Political-Economy Narrative Against Austerity

:These notes offer a feminist reflection on austerity as an aggressive neoliberal policy based on principles of faith in neoclassical economics and having dramatic social effects on living conditions and a disastrous regressive influence on the distribution of incomes and equality. The focus is on how to use a feminist perspective to introduce a change in the narrative based on women’s experiential knowledge of human vulnerability, caring relationships, and unpaid domestic work. This narrative change requires a political subject capable of shifting power relationships and willing to do so, and also a sound theory that can bring to the surface structural connections and tensions in the economic system, including those inherent in the capitalist production and social reproduction relationship. The transnational political feminism is presented here as a subject of perspective. With regard to theory, we propose combination of the classical macro-founded surplus approach, reappraised by Piero Sraffa, and of the Smithian micro capability approach developed by Amartya Sen. Both approaches explicitly challenge the neoclassical paradigm. The surplus approach does it with regard to functional distribution (set at the institutional and political level), and the capability approach does it with regard to a multidimensional individual, embedded in a social context. Both approaches are extended to include the fact that the responsibility of adapting real lives to profit and financial rent falls increasingly on women’s shoulders, discharged into the household.

The Anarchy of Globalization: Local and Global, Intended and Unintended Consequences

Globalization is full of contradictions, creating homogeneity alongside differentiation. Classes become more differentiated while products become more homogeneous. Globalization has stimulated growth in China, while it has contributed to dysfunctional financialization, which largely disregards the productive side of the economy. This article emphasizes globalization as a shift in power relations in which corporations require powers that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago, while government power is becoming restricted to the point that globalization is creating a form of unchecked corporate anarchy.

Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany by Damani J. Partridge (review)

Reviewed by: Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany by Damani J. Partridge Mayanthi L. Fernando Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany. By Damani J. Partridge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Pp. xiv + 196. Cloth $26.00. ISBN 978-0253223692. We know the conventional story. On October 9, 1989, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched around the city center of Leipzig, many of them shouting “Wir sind das Volk”—“We are the people.” It was the largest demonstration in the GDR’s history, and it set in motion the “peaceful revolution” that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, and the end of the Cold War. In the dominant liberal narrative of German unification, Leipzig is part of a story of unfolding freedom. Partridge’s book tells a different story. In Leipzig, he notes, the demonstrators’ chants quickly changed to “Wir sind ein Volk”—“We are one people.” That linguistic shift, Partridge contends, did not merely signal the demand for the reunification of a fractured nation. It also signaled a transformation in the conception of citizenship from one based on universal rights—liberty, equality, justice—to one based on belonging to an essential German nation. Leipzig foretold the coming of a new Germany, not as a space of freedom but as a space of violence and exclusion. The crux of Partridge’s argument is that the freedoms offered by new German citizenship—to travel, to consume, to live private lives—are contingent on the subjection of non-Germans, increasingly targets of surveillance and policing, border control, social discrimination, and harassment. “From the perspective of noncitizens,” Partridge writes, “1989 was the beginning of a new violence” (3). Anchoring the book analytically are two key concepts. First, “exclusionary incorporation” describes a system in which “the presence of noncitizens is formally recognized but there is no chance of equal participation” (2). The liberal state cares for its citizens’ education, employment, health, and housing; noncitizens are defined by a lack of such solicitude. Patridge’s second concept of “noncitizenship” “opens up a space for thinking about how the foreign subject is incorporated into social and political life without being totally excluded” (23). Here, Partridge joins political theorists like Wendy Brown (Regulating Aversion, 2008), Patchen Markell (Bound by Recognition, 2003), and Etienne Balibar (with Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 1991) in muddying the distinction between exclusionary and inclusionary practices of the liberal nation-state. All point to the myriad ways in which the liberal state reinforces national identity and state sovereignty by including minorities within it, though never as full citizens. Importantly, Partridge argues that exclusionary incorporation proceeds not only through formal laws and policies but also through popular culture and everyday social life. Partridge is at his best when tracing exclusionary incorporation in the everyday, giving ethnographic life to the operation of liberal citizenship in Germany. He is particularly attuned to the way that state power works through ordinary social relations and the everyday guardians of the nation-state’s boundaries—teachers, taxi [End Page 709] drivers, and other “street bureaucrats”—who maintain and manage exclusionary incorporation. In one chapter, for example, Partridge describes how relationships with Black men, and the consumption of the eroticized Black male body, allowed White German women from the East to become normatively German. Like other chapters, this one draws on multiple evidentiary sources—interviews, participant observation, films, magazines—to map the complex entwinement of race and sex, inclusion and exclusion, everyday practice and state law, as well as the shifting power relations that underpin the construction of Germanness. In contemporary Germany, formal legislation makes it almost impossible for Africans to immigrate legally. However, encounters between German women and African men in everyday spaces like dance clubs interrupt the law’s boundary drawing, giving White German women the power to make noncitizens into legal residents by entering into intimate relationships with them. At the same time, Black noncitizens remain outsiders, since “Black male bodies can be incorporated if White women see them as beautiful and if they successfully perform hypersexuality” (81). Exclusionary incorporation mobilizes the noncitizen to produce the normative citizen: the Black noncitizen’s...

Technology and Restructuring the Social Field of Dairy Farming: Hybrid Capitals, ‘Stockmanship’ and Automatic Milking Systems

AbstractUsingAutomaticMilkingSystems (AMS) as an example we use the work ofBourdieu to illustrate how technology can be seen as restructuring dairy farming practices, what it is to be a dairy farmer, and the wider field of dairy farming. Approaching technology in this way and drawing upon the ‘thinking tools’ ofPierreBourdieu, namely field, capital and habitus, the article critically examines the relevance ofBourdieu's thought to the study of technology. We expand onBourdieu's types of capital to define what we have called ‘hybrid’ capital involving human‐cow‐technology collectives. The concept expresses how new technology can shift power relations within the dairy field, affecting human‐animal relations and changing the stock person' habitus. Hybrid capital is produced through a co‐investment of stock‐keepers, cows and technologies, and can become economically and culturally valuable within a rapidly restructuring dairying field when invested in making dairy farming more efficient changing farmers' social status and work‐life balance. The article shows howAMSand this emergent hybrid capital is associated with new but contested definitions of what counts as ‘good’ dairy farming practice, and with the emergence of new modes of dairy farmer habitus, within a wider dairy farming field.