Socio-political Meaning Research Articles

Modelling Chinese contemporary calligraphy: the WRITE data model

Abstract This article presents the WRITE data model and dataset, a comprehensive collection of Chinese contemporary calligraphic data, utilizing Linked Open Data (LOD) principles. Calligraphy plays a pivotal role in Chinese culture, reflecting national identity and cultural transformations. The objective of this study is to enhance understanding and provide new tools for exploring Chinese contemporary calligraphy through LOD. The WRITE data model comprises artistic, linguistic, and socio-political-economic aspects. The WRITE data model, developed collaboratively with domain specialists, represents four collections: Contemporary Visual Art, Performance, Graffiti, and Decorative and Applied Arts. Metadata describing the artworks is structured by reusing and extending the Wikidata model. Complex relations are established between artworks and contextual elements, (e.g. people, exhibition history, organizations, and literary works). The artistic and linguistic metadata recorded over the ‘calli-writing units’ provide insights into shared and diverging characteristics with traditional calligraphy. Traditional and contemporary calligraphy practices are compared, highlighting how contemporary calligraphy challenges traditional rules. Two case studies demonstrate the formalization of specific items in the WRITE collection, showcasing the study of graffiti art’s socio-political meaning in China and the multidimensional nature of musicalligraphy performance. The WRITE dataset and data model contribute to advancing knowledge and understanding of Chinese contemporary calligraphy, offering valuable resources for artistic analysis and interdisciplinary research.

Contesting monuments, challenging narratives: Divergent approaches to dealing with the colonial past and its legacies in Lisbon, Portugal

Portugal was the longest modern European imperial power, yet the dominant historical narrative is characterised by a celebration of the ‘Discoveries’ and a denial of colonial violence. This is visible in Lisbon's public space, dotted with monuments and statues glorifying the imperial past, while occluding less convenient histories. Especially since 2017, more attention has been given to Portugal's colonial past in public debates. Various initiatives have stimulated discussions about this past, while highlighting socio-cultural issues connected to these histories that continue to affect Portuguese society today. These have contested certain monuments and the narratives they embody, as well as created alternative narratives regarding the public space and cultural memory. This article compares a selection of recent interventions that contest monuments and dominant narratives about Portugal's colonial past. We look at the ways in which certain spaces and monuments become zones of contestation, and how such contestation not only contributes to changing dominant narratives, but also to resignify such spaces and structures. Our goal is to shed light on the variety of agents working towards a change of narrative regarding Lisbon's public space and memory, while reflecting on the socio-political meanings surrounding the presence and absence of monuments related to the colonial past.

'We Still Living': The Digital Media and Fake-talk around COVID-19 in Tanzania

In Tanzania, as COVID-19 emerged and became a pandemic, many claims about the fakeness of virus-related news began to appear in the digital media. These claims, or what I refer to as ‘fake-talk’, served to expose and discredit ostensibly false information and distinguish it from real news. However, I suggest that these instances of ‘fake-talk’ have a deeper sociopolitical meaning. Analysing posts collected between August 2020 and May 2022, I argue that such instances are performative acts of citizenship, whereby Tanzanians enacted and embodied ‘good’ citizenship when ‘fake news’ appeared to criticise their country and its leaders. This fake-talk, the paper shows, follows a pattern in Africa of criticising Western science and medicine, and can therefore be understood as an example of a specific form of postcolonial citizenship. Additionally, the paper reveals that claims about fakeness do not necessarily discredit the entities referred to as ‘fake’. Instead, in the very process of decrying something as ‘fake’, fake-talk can create a spectacle. Further attention still may be directed to it when fake-talk gives rise to moral and legal concerns that require intervention.

The self-reflexivity in transnational literature: Re-writing the migration in female migrant writers.

The main aim of this paper is to discuss the socio-political meaning of the transnational literary production made by female migrant writers. Thus, it analyses their role in the framework of the 'hybrid' literary production of the 21st century in Europe, such as Spain and Italy. Moving away from the idea of national literatures, this paper investigates literature as a geographical and emotional inquiry point and friction between languages, ideas, practices, literary institutions, female authors, and female voices in today's markets. Hybrid literature written by first and second-generation migrants and displaced people is part of a huger concept of transnational literature, which breaks down with the idea of national identity and transiting towards a new conceptualization of hybridity in the literary production, also based on the translation of writings to other languages. The research question is about the relation between the transnational literary works, written by migrant women, and the social change. Based on the conceptualization of the Bhabha's 'third space', I will analyse the relation between the positioning of female migrant writers of 21st century and the role of hybridity. The preliminary findings show, firstly, the idea of reconceptualising it appears in light of the complexity of migrant people's realities and sex-gender differences. By adopting an intersectional lens, focused on the dialectic between gender and race/ethnicity and class, this paper analyses the tensions embedded in the re-positioning of four female migrant writers and their transnational experience (self)reflected in their writings. The present research contributes to the scientific knowledge in the field of cross-cultural literary studies, crossed with the migration study, through questioning the changing gender role and relations in transnational migrant literature. In addition, the findings show that today's reflection on 'third space' theory in the diasporic literature seems an idea to be refined when migrant women are involved.

Individual differences in psychological rigidity and beliefs about system fitness predict attitudes about social determinants of disaster risk

Although events triggered by phenomena such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and landslides are routinely referred to as “natural disasters”, scholars have long argued that they are not natural at all; rather their disastrous consequences are a result of sociopolitical decisions surrounding the accumulation of risk. In the current work, we seek to understand who is more likely to accept or reject the importance of risk reduction by examining two constructs:1) perceived blamelessness in the face of disasters, and 2) lack of support for disaster risk reduction. Across two studies (combined n = 1732), higher perceived blamelessness and lower support for risk reduction via socio-political means were reliably related to individual difference measures of psychological rigidity as well as beliefs about socio-economic system fitness. Specifically, higher levels of system justification, belief in a just world, fair market ideology, need for cognitive closure, intolerance of ambiguity, social dominance orientation, and right-wing authoritarianism were consistently related to lower likelihood of assigning human blame for disaster damages as well as less endorsement of socio-political interventions to stem disaster risks. Both blamelessness and intervention-avoidance were also related positively to political conservatism. Importantly, observed relationships remained significant after controlling for political ideology which correlates with each of the measured variables. We argue that observed relationships between individual difference variables and support for risk reduction policies around natural hazards that are not reducible to co-relationships with political ideology may be particularly important to consider when crafting successful interventions.

The cultural politics of civic pride through Hull UK City of Culture 2017

PurposeThis article explores the cultural politics of civic pride through Hull's year as UK City of Culture (UKCoC) in 2017. It unpicks some of the socio-political meanings and values of civic pride in Hull and critiques the ways in which pride, as an indicator of identity and belonging, was mobilised by UKCoC organisers, funders and city leaders. It argues for more nuanced and critical approaches to the consideration and evaluation of pride through cultural mega events (CMEs) that can take account of pride's multiple forms, meanings and temporalities.Design/methodology/approachA multidimensional, mixed methods approach is taken, incorporating the critical analysis of Hull2017 promotional materials and events and original interviews with a range of stakeholders.FindingsThe desire for socio-economic change and renewed identity has dominated Hull's post-industrial sense of self and is often expressed through the language of pride. This article argues that UKCoC organisers, cognisant of this, crafted and tightly controlled a singular pride narrative to create the feeling of change and legitimise the entrepreneurial re-branding of the city. At the same time, UKCoC organisers overlooked the opportunity to engage with and potentially reactivate the political culture of Hull, which like other “left behind” or “structurally disadvantaged” places, is becoming increasingly anti-political.Originality/valueThrough the case study of a relatively unresearched and under-represented city, this paper contributes to cultural policy literatures concerned with critically assessing the benefits and shortcomings of Cultural Mega Events and to a more specific field concerning Cities of Culture and the political cultures of their host cities. This paper also contributes to an emerging literature on the centrality of pride through the UK's post-Brexit Levelling Up agenda, suggesting that pride in place is becoming figured as a “universal theme” of the neoliberal city script.

CIVIL LAW AND CIVIL PROPERTY IN THE LIBERTARIAN THEORY OF LAW BY V.S. NERSESYANTS

The article is devoted to the study of the methodology of the doctrine of civilization of the Russian jurist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences V.S. Nersesyants - the author of the libertarian legal theory of law. Civilization is a post-socialist system - a transitional period from socialist property to civil and all other types of property. Its main concepts are civil law and civil property. Their origin and semantic meaning are investigated with the help of a comparative historical analysis of the concept of property rights in the most authoritative theories of the XIX-XX centuries. The legal understanding of Russian thinkers is considered in the context of a pan-European one. It is noted that the basic concepts of civilization represent a new stage of scientific and philosophical understanding of property rights. The author of this article comes to the conclusions: 1) libertarian-legal theory is the result of a dialectical synthesis of classical and non-classical types of legal understanding; 2) in the methodology of V.S. Nersesyants, there is a clear distinction between legal and socio-political meanings in the understanding of property rights. Such differentiation of meanings was absent in previous theories of the twentieth century. Individualized civil law has a legal nature. It stems from the principle of formal equality. V.S. Nersesyants theoretically develops this principle and interprets civil law as equality of opportunities for all citizens in gaining actual freedom. The analysis of the concept of “civil property” is made, which allows it to be attributed to socio-political categories: the origins of civil property are in the nationalization of socio-economic resources, it is octroized by the state, and recognized by it as inalienable. V. S. Nersesyants considers it as an alternative to the bourgeois one in the “transition period”, especially for those who are not ready for some reasons, including ideological ones, to accept for themselves the strict rules of the capitalist market game.

IMAGINARY PARLIAMENTS: EXCAVATING THE METAPHOR OF CONSENSUS WITHIN BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGIES

Blockchain technologies function partly according to consensus algorithms and protocols. Beyond a practical means of allowing these technologies to function, they can also be considered to have imagined affordances that “emerge between users’ perceptions, attitudes, and expectations; between the materiality and functionality of technologies; and between the intentions and perceptions of designers” (Nagy and Neff, 2015, p. 5). In the case of blockchains, these affordances are attached to representing social trust and decentralizing electoral processes. As such, blockchain technologies have been intimately woven into discourses that imagine the future of governance, transparency, and democratic decision-making. But how has this happened? In this paper I identify that at the root of these discourses is the ambiguous concept of "consensus" and that socio-political meanings of consensus have be re-written as a set of technical operations. Through a combination of metaphor analysis and content analysis of canonical computer science papers and news articles, I demonstrate how the oscillation between technical and political meanings became the basis of the celebratory discourses around blockchain technologies. Through this analysis I demonstrate how computer scientists used a metaphor to guide technical development, and then this metaphor took on a foundational aspect of the socio-political value of the technology in the form of visions for decentralization, autonomy, and democracy.

The self-reflexivity in transnational literature: Re-writing the migration in female migrant writers

The main aim of this paper is to discuss the socio-political meaning of the transnational literary production made by female migrant writers. Thus, it analyses their role in the framework of the ‘hybrid’ literary production of the 21st century in Europe, such as Spain and Italy. Moving away from the idea of national literatures, this paper investigates literature as a geographical and emotional inquiry point and friction between languages, ideas, practices, literary institutions, female authors, and female voices in today’s markets. Hybrid literature written by first and second-generation migrants and displaced people is part of a huger concept of transnational literature, which breaks down with the idea of national identity and transiting towards a new conceptualization of hybridity in the literary production, also based on the translation of writings to other languages. Based on the concept of ‘the location of culture’ and the conceptualization of the Bhabha’s ‘third space’, I will analyse the relation between the positioning of female migrant writers of 21st century and the role of hybridity and the reconceptualization of the ‘third space’ in their literary production. The preliminary findings show, firstly, the idea of reconceptualising it appears in light of the complexity of migrant people's realities and sex-gender differences. By adopting an intersectional lens, focused on the dialectic between gender and race/ethnicity and class, this paper analyses the tensions embedded in the re-positioning of four female migrant writers and their transnational experience (self)reflected in their writings. The present research contributes to the scientific knowledge in the field of cross-cultural literary studies, crossed with the migration study, through questioning the changing gender role and relations in transnational migrant literature. In addition, the findings show that today's reflection on ‘third space’ theory in the diasporic literature seems like an idea to be refined when migrant women are involved.

Analysing the sacred landscape in the Iberian Culture: GIS, caves and ritual performance

Sacred spaces, such as Iberian caves, with liminal location and character, had important ritual significance and socio-political meanings for their communities. Through the Geographical Information Systems –GIS– techniques, we can analyse these sacred spaces in context. In this paper, by using a regional study as an example, we show the main analysis undertaken with gis, such as visibility and mobility, considering diverse variables and formulas. This will allow to develop comparative perspectives with other similar Mediterranean contexts. A first approach to the sacred landscape of the Iberian Iron Age territory of Edeta, in Llíria, València, is presented, analysing two ritual caves in context: Cueva del Sapo and Cueva Merinel, located on the southern border of the territory and frequented between the fifth and the second centuries BC. By using diverse models, we propose access routes to them, with the final objective of thinking about the effort and symbolism that a ritual journey linked to these natural sacred locations would imply.

Between the Mythical and the Ironic: An Analysis of the Imaginative Structure of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

ABSTRACT The essay applies Northrop Frye’s theory of the imaginative structure of literature to the study of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. Frye’s theory not only helps us to notice well-established structural patterns in Atwood’s work that echo the literary classics, but it also sheds light on the larger, socio-political meaning of the trilogy. Crucial to this meaning is the ending of the trilogy with its surprising narrative shift from an essentially realistic story of survival to a fairy-tale-like conclusion. Frye’s theory allows us to see this conclusion as reflecting a turn into the mythical fictional mode, which, however, fits the overall imaginative structure of the trilogy. Even more importantly, Frye also helps us to understand the visionary function of the ending, which may be interpreted in the light of his notion of the myth of concern.

Narrating the Infant: A New Look at the Films of James and Joyce Robertson

James Robertson’s early films of hospitalized children, particularly A Two Year Old Goes to Hospital (1952), are frequently cited in histories of child psychoanalysis and child psychiatry. Much less is known about the later phase of the research he undertook with his wife, Joyce Robertson, into substitute mothering and the nursery setting. This project was documented in the film series Young Children in Brief Separation ( YCBS) (1967), in which the Robertsons acted as foster parents to four children temporarily separated from their mothers. They made a contrasting film, John, about a young boy’s nine-day stay in a residential nursery, where the effects of discontinuous care on the child’s mind are starkly revealed. Drawing on the concept of the narrative self, this article examines the YCBS series for the first time in the historical literature, exploring the films’ clinical and socio-political meanings. In this new account of the Robertson films, cinematic storytelling becomes a means of exposing, and militating against, psychological fragmentation in the mind of the child, carer and film-viewer.

Analysing Meaning Potential in Verbal Art: A Discourse-functional Perspective on Faiz Ahmad Faiz

This paper aims to explore the construal of socio-political meanings in Faiz Ahmad Faiz with a focus on his artistry work titled ‘mujh se pahli si Mohabbat’ to help unfold higher patterns of organization at the level of transitivity choices to reflect the underlying perspective.Drawing on the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) for the transitivity analysis (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014) the study highlights the meaning potential encoded through the process types. As referred above, the selected poem comprises twenty-nine clauses that were written originally in Urdu language but for the ease of the readership, the transliterated text is adopted from Hasan (2009). She (ibid) proposes a theory of verbal art that extends the higher level of linguistic patterns to encode sublime meaning potential. The analysis shows that apparently, the poem appears to express the plight of circumstances but it is a tragic tale of misery and despair propounded at the crossroad of love and revolution. The findings also reveal that the dominant process type in the poem is the existential one with the male protagonist narrating the tale of socio-cultural agonies and the subsequent is the material process type which posits the significant meaning potential regarding inflicting pain in apolitical turmoil.

Women's voluntary work in the community: a question of recognition and rewards

ABSTRACT In South Korea, the state has played a minimal role in social provisioning, and as such, care provisions have been dependent on women's unpaid labour. Women's unpaid labour, especially in terms of voluntary activities, has played an important role in the sustenance of the community. However, women's voluntary work is often devalued as a free and readily available resource in public policy. Over the last few decades, a series of innovative policies on building community and promoting social economy have been implemented in South Korea to address problems of low economic growth, an ageing population, and polarisation of the society owing to neoliberal restructuring. While Korean women played pivotal roles in these innovative community-building projects, the sociopolitical connotations of their voluntary work, including appropriate public recognition and rewards, have rarely been discussed. This paper examines Korean women's role in the government-funded neighbourhood community-building project (Maeulmandeulgi) in South Korea. Reviewing public documents and survey data, this paper identifies existing gaps between policy discourses and practices, and examines their causes and fallouts, including rising discontent among community activists over these gaps. The paper also discusses the sociopolitical meaning of women's voluntary work for community building and the kind of changes that would be necessary to recognise and reward suitably women's voluntary work in the community.

Art as Symbol of Power and Control among the Yorùbá

The Yorùbá are popular for the peculiar art forms, which include woodcarving, textile design, metalwork, cloth weaving and embroidery, beadwork, costuming, pottery, architectural ornamentation, mural paintings, body beautification among others. The Yorùbá artists produce unique forms in these diverse areas of art. These forms often bear visual renditions of symbolism that are pregnant with socio-political meanings. This paper is, therefore, aimed at examining the symbolism of power and control among the Yorùbá found on some of the art forms. This is with the view of understanding the belief of the people about power and its control in the development of the Yorùbá nation. Photographic data for the paper were gathered from written literature and fieldwork. Formal and contextual methods were employed in the analysis of the data. In the course of analysis, oral traditions such as songs, proverbs, etc. were used. It was found out that the exercise of socio-political power in the Yorùbá society is a product of their belief system and philosophy as expressed in their art forms.

Saving Innocence

In this essay I explore salvation narratives in abortion and adoption dialogues, including the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, to highlight the complex ways such stories function to divert attention from state regulation of families in support of a white supremacist, patriarchal agenda for the nation. I argue that these stories emphasizing salvation function as a way of hiding intersections of racism, misogyny, and homophobia driving this conservative social vision. Drawing on interdisciplinary narrative analysis, I consider laws and policies as stories about how society should function. In a "color-blind" legal system race cannot be an explicit consideration, yet exploring family laws in relation to each other, in a larger context of sociopolitical meaning, helps us see the ways in which all these social narratives function together as what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham calls the "metalanguage of race."

“Possible Worlds” and the Meanings of F. Dostoevsky's Providence in the Messianic Receptions of the ХХth Century

The article analyzes the specifics of the receptive impact of the artistic Messianic concept of F. Dostoevsky, which influences providential contexts in the cultural philosophy of the ХХth century. The possibility to identify the features of the artistic embodiment of the Russian Messianic problems in cultural philosophy and literature of the ХХth century determines the relevance of this study. The analysis of the strategy of modeling possible worlds in Dostoevskys work, which referentially determines the development of Russian utopian / dystopian providence, determines the novelty of the study. The concepts of the Christological axiosphere, which reflects Dostoevsky's Messianic concept, determine the most important coordinates of the providential receptive trends of the ХХth century. They are objects of analysis in the article. It is proved that the semiotics of messianic motifs in Russian literature of the XXth century is connected, first of all, with the Abrahamic religious context, which is built into the most complex providential concept of the anthropological Christology of F. Dostoevsky. According to the principles of fractal logic, the writer generates the Abrahamic canon in the key messianic world-modeling metametaphors. Dostoevsky's messianic pretext is referentially manifested in Russian literature of the twentieth century - in the work of Russian Symbolists, who understand the Messiah as a divine-existential personality, in the works of writers of the late XXth century, who interprete the messiah as a collective personality - a substitutionary sacrifice. In our opinion, the chiliastic aspiration of messianic Christology and anthropology is also connected with the influence of Dostoevsky. However, we should talk about the dissipative variability of messianic concepts due to the contextual reference of messianic ideas of eastern origin, in particular, the Zoroastrian, Sufi and Islamic contexts are found. The artistic idea of messianism in Russian literature of the XXth century can also be considered as a semiotic sign system that reveals historiosophical and socio-political meanings, modeling the tendencies of anthropologization and ontologization of the literary process.

“Science theatre makes you good at science”: Affordances of embodied performances in urban elementary science classrooms

AbstractSchool science continues to alienate students identifying with nondominant, non‐western cultures, and learners of color, and considers science as an enterprise where success necessitates divorcing the self and corporeal body from ideas and the mind. Resisting the colonizing pedagogy of the mind–body divide, we aimed at creating pedagogical spaces and places in science classes that sustain equitable opportunities for engagement and meaning making where body and mind are enmeshed. In the context of a partnership between school‐ and university‐based educators and researchers, we explored how multimodal literacies cultivated through the performing arts, provide students from minoritized communities opportunities to both create knowledge and to position themselves as science experts and brilliant and creative meaning makers. Four theoretical perspectives (social semiotics and multimodality; dramatizing and the embodied mind; dismantling master narratives for minoritized peoples; and the relationship of knowledge production and identity construction) framed this multiple case study of classes of elementary and middle school students who made sense of and communicated science concepts and practices through embodied performances. The study provided evidence that embodied science representations afford students abundant opportunities to construct science knowledge and positionings that support engagement with science, whether performed on a small scale in classrooms, or for the whole school through a large‐scale science play. Embodied dramatizing led to opportunities for collective meaning making as student‐performers coordinated across various movements and modes in order to represent ideas. Multiple enactments of the same concept nurtured the development of multi‐dimensional scientific, sociocultural, and sociopolitical meanings. During embodiments, students positioned themselves and others in ways that allowed expanded science identities to become possible, intertwined with other salient identities. By treating children's bodies as sites of knowledge, imagination, and expertise, integrating performing arts and science has the potential to facilitate the development of connections among ideas and between self and ideas.

Racial Identity, Group Consciousness, and Attitudes: A Framework for Assessing Multiracial Self‐Classification

AbstractMultiracial self‐classifiers are the fastest‐growing racial population in the United States. While their rise signals a departure from norms of hypodescent, little is known about the sociopolitical meanings attached to multiracial labels. Here, we develop a theoretical framework for understanding multiracials’ sense of racial group identity, linked fate, and racial attitudes. Examining a national opinion survey that samples more than 1200 multiracial adults, we compare the identity and attitudinal profiles of the two largest multiracial groups in the United States—White‐Asians and White‐Blacks—with those of their component monoracial groups. We find that while White‐Asians and White‐Blacks often distinguish themselves from their component races, on balance, the assertion of dual racial membership signals greater solidarity and/or affect toward the minority race. These findings suggest that members of these multiracial populations are likely to align themselves relatively more with their minority background than with Whites on political issues that are racial in nature.

Exploring Sociopolitical and Religious Meanings from a BBC News on a Terror Attack: A Functional Linguistic Analysis.

This study is a functional grammatical analysis of BBC news on a New York attack where eight were killed by a man driving a truck by the application of Halliday’s Systematic Functional Grammar (SFG). By analysing the systems of grammar at the clause level, I show that the text at the discourse level makes different meaning across the news. Sayfullo Saipov, an immigrant who came to the US in 2010, has developed negative actions such as killing eight people, hurting 11, aiming at innocents, striking cyclists, hitting a school bus, injuring adults and children, and in all of his actions eventually “the innocent” are affected as a goal. Another significant goal i.e. “note” was found which shows his cohesion with the so-called Islamic States. Nevertheless, they are using the name of “Islam” but they don’t know or they don’t follow the script of Islam or at least the basics of Islam, it proven by the killer are all actions because according to The Holy Quran” killing a single innocent is even strongly prohibited in Islam, it is like killing the whole humanity. Identifying and attributing processes have identified here “The attack” as a “terrible” incident which is done by the attacker and attributing processes ascribe “bad qualities” of carriers (the attacker). The Killer is the highest number of “Actor” in terms of the transitivity process, which means he is in a “destructive power”. The police are the second-highest “actor” who performs some physical actions such as shooting the driver, arresting the driver, taking the attacker to hospital. The situation was going to get ugly by the killer’s actions and for this reason; the police accomplish these professional actions to make meaning of “safety of innocent”. The killer is a “single” person but his negative actions convulsed the whole city even whole country, and all big names like President, City mayor, police commissioner immediately were made get involved into “verbal actions” interfering, and reacting, saying, commenting etc. Thus the study frets out some significant meaning through grammar choices in the news genre in question.