Sociopolitical Intervention Research Articles

The End of Liberal Peacebuilding

The End of Liberal Peacebuilding

Respect the power of the beast: an ecocritical analysis into interspecies relationships in Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City

ABSTRACT The picturebook Tales from the Inner City (2018), created by Shaun Tan, encompasses various surreal mysteries about humans and animals. His stories represent a sociopolitical intervention, beyond the conventional purpose of animal/object representation serving humanistic allegories and show animals as autonomous beings finding their long-ignored place in the world. These imaged stories stretch literature’s ability at interactions between humans and animals. Tan’s experiment with new styles of reading calls for a reconfigured rhetoric. An interdisciplinary approach of ecocriticism and biopolitics creates sufficient grounds to examine the boundaries of what is human/animal. It questions the centrality of humans in literature. This article uses the biopolitical readings of Mario Ortiz-Robles as he moves beyond allegorical readings of animal tropes, the companion species of Donna Haraway as she observes animal/human relations, and Frank Serafini’s methods at interpreting visual aspects of picturebooks. This paper looks at the selected tales – ‘Fox’, ‘Eagle’, ‘Hippo’, ‘Lungfish’, and ‘Frog’ to examine how Shaun Tan transforms humans in body and dreams through forceful encounters with animals, thus repositioning the power dynamic in human/animal relations.

Challenges in Government Inter-Organizational Information Integration in the Context of Measles Rubella Vaccination in India

Most of the countries are heading to Government 3.0 with the advent of Information Communication Technology (ICT). Information Integration has to be done with the support of different stakeholders for an effective e-Governance ecosystem. The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and high-end processors had solved the issues to some extent. But the socio-political intervention is making the Government Inter-Organizational Information Integration (GIII) difficult when information turns into misinformation. Misinformation in social network sites (SNS) is increasing alarmingly and is also affecting the healthcare sector. The study is focused on the trends in decreasing vaccination rates in India during the vaccination drive. Twitter data, news reports, and social media posts during the MR vaccination program in India are taken into consideration for the analysis. The vaccine hesitancy is also associated with political, religious, Psychological, and Economic factors. Government 3.0 has got its power to overcome the misinformation in the healthcare programs.

V. Sambasivan’s populist Othello for Kerala’s kathaprasangam

Through the verve and beauty of V. Sambasivan’s (1929–97) recitals for Kerala’s kathaprasangam temple art form, performed solo onstage to harmonium accompaniment, Shakespeare’s Othello has become a lasting part of cultural memory. The veteran storyteller’s energetic Malayalam-language Othello lingers in a YouTube recording, an hour-long musical narrative that sticks faithfully to the bones of Shakespeare’s tragedy while fleshing it out with colourful colloquial songs, verse, dialogue and commentary. Sambasivan consciously indigenized Shakespeare, lending local appeal through familiar stock characters and poetic metaphor. Othello’s ‘moonless night’ or ‘amavasi’ is made bright by Desdemona’s ‘full moon’ or ‘purnima’; Cassio’s lover Bianca is renamed Vasavadatta, after poet Kumaran Asan’s lovelorn courtesan-heroine. Crucially, Sambasivan’s populist introduction of Othello through kathaprasangam marks a progressive phase where Marxism, rather than colonialism, facilitated India’s assimilation of Shakespeare. As part of Kerala’s communist anti-caste movement and mass literacy drive, Sambasivan used the devotional art form to adapt secular world classics into Malayalam, presenting these before thousands of people at venues both sacred and secular. In this article, I interview his son Professor Vasanthakumar Sambasivan, who carries on the family kathaprasangam tradition, as he recalls how his father’s adaptation represents both an artistic and sociopolitical intervention, via Shakespeare.

Psychosocial rehabilitation experiences of women victims of armed conflict in Montes de Mar\xeda, Colombia

BackgroundAfter 9 years of the ground-breaking social policy Law 1448 of 2011 -Victims Law- and its extension until 2030, the Colombian State and other stakeholders have made several efforts towards granting the right of integral reparation for more than 9 million victims that are recognized in the Colombian transitional context. Psychosocial rehabilitation is a Victims Law’s reparation measure whose objective is to re-establish the psychosocial, physical and mental health welfare in the individual, familiar and community levels. This study aims to understand the experiences of psychosocial rehabilitation of women victims of armed conflict in Montes de Maria and the underlying social intervention paradigms that guide the Law’s implementation.MethodsBased on a qualitative design with a phenomenological approach, narrative tools and thematic network analysis permitted to give voice to the women participants. Individual narrative interviews were conducted with 12 women victims and a focus group with eight of them was used as a triangulation strategy.ResultsAlthough the Victims Law is oriented by a sociopolitical intervention paradigm, the stories of the women’s victims of Montes de María mainly evidenced non-sociopolitical interventions with humanitarian assistance towards revictimization and State abandonment. As a coping mechanism towards the State negligence encountered, women strive to overcome psychosocial trauma by developing agency and community resources for the resignification of the traumatic experiences and peacebuilding.ConclusionsFor the Victims Law to achieve its integrality aim, the psychosocial approach should be implemented through all its measures but remains absent in Montes de Maria. The diversity of victim’s individual and collective initiatives that were found, can contribute towards transformative and participatory psychosocial intervention with community’s resources. Women victims can perform as advisors and collaborators in the implementation of individual and collective reparation, which remains as an opportunity for psychosocial rehabilitation and peacebuilding. Further monitoring and evaluation of the law with a territorial and differential perspective is required to respond to the victim’s needs.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson

Performative Retrieving of Tradition for Socio-Political Intervention: A Study of the Protest Theatre of Dario Fo

Theatre provides Dario Fo with a unique vantage point through which he vents out his thoughts on issues of class, justice, equality and lays bare in his performances that are comic, derisive, and outspoken people’s discomfort with the prevailing order. They are an indictment of the establishment’s perceived apathy and neglect of the oppressed groups. He does not let the zany spirit of his performances to overshadow his art but redirects it in a constructive and meaningful way.

Maffeo Pantaleoni on labour exchange: bridge between neoclassicism and Fascism

This article examines Maffeo Pantaleoni’s views on labour exchange and their transition. Pantaleoni’s theory shared the neo-classicist antinomy that, despite the emphasis on agent subjectivity, disregarded the variability in the content of labour resulting from worker subjectivity towards labour performance and employer countermeasures. Consequently, Pantaleoni espoused the neoclassical principle that takes for granted the market determination of capitalistic labour exchange without socio-political intervention. The transition of Pantaleoni’s outlook on actual labour issues reflected the gulf between his faith in this principle and realities. Thus, Pantaleoni’s perspective on labour exchange functioned as a bridge between neoclassicism and Fascism.

Feminism in Cyprus: women’s agency, gender, and peace in the shadow of nationalism

ABSTRACT This article explores the ways in which feminist and women’s agency is articulated in the Cypriot context through the paradigms of nationalism, peace, and conflict. It does so to broaden our understanding of gendered and peace agency in troubled and divided societies, in which complex and conflicting discourses meet. Analyzing data from interviews with feminist and women’s groups’ representatives, it examines how nationalism and women’s approaches to gender, politics, peace, and conflict enable or restrict feminist and women’s agency. It finds that a strategic essentialist approach has initiated a reconfiguration of gender(ed) power relations, women’s agency, and peacebuilding processes. It argues that when this approach is combined with feminist theory and praxis and the employment of transnational peace paradigms, the possibilities for feminist and women’s agency increase, as long as feminist scholarship and grassroots activism inform each other through dialogue. Therefore, it highlights the nuanced and complex dialectic between essentialist and anti-essentialist feminist gender discourses. Moreover, it challenges theories that posit a rigidly hierarchical relation between local and transnational gendered and peace agency paradigms, by demonstrating their malleability and reciprocity. Thus, it contributes to the debate about the modalities and possibilities of feminist sociopolitical intervention in nationalism- and conflict-ridden contexts.

Accelerating Progress towards Reaching Sustainable Development Goals

There is time bond succession from Millennium Development Goals to Sustainable Development Goals from 2015 as a defined point of demarcation. This is an ultra short sociopolitical intervention in order to transform society into a healthier state. This is an unnatural process that depends on will and resources. As the country is in political transition it would be an opportunity to assure to implement programs and plans early ahead.

Curating contemporary art in the framework of the planetary commons

Within the expanded field of contemporary art, there is an increasing sense of urgency to engage with the politics of ecology in the face of accelerating environmental crises and widening social inequality. In recent years, much of contemporary art’s response to socioecological issues has been framed by the concept of the Anthropocene. However, the notion of the Anthropocene has been criticised for its limited political agency and direction, indicating that there is a need for alternative interpretative frameworks. This paper proposes the notion of the planetary commons as a tactical and interpretative framework for curating art-led projects in the realm of eco- and geopolitical concerns. It discusses my curatorial interests and role in several interdisciplinary art projects that have engaged with the Polar Regions and Outer Space. It outlines artistic strategies, including critique, inquiry, representation and sociopolitical intervention, and how the projects address issues of spatial politics, environmental stewardship, and local-global governance structures. I argue that the perspective provided by this framework enables meaningful knowledge crossing different disciplines and reveals insights into the complexity of governance in the global system, highlighting the roles that art and cultural practices can play in shaping our understanding of complex societal-environmental-technological assemblages.

Social Policy in Germany: The Dual Model of the Social State

In the Federal Republic of Germany the exercise of social policy is based on the corporatist-conservative model and its particular form of dual organization, with the participation of state and non-state agencies being institutionally determined. A brief historical overview of the creation of the social state in Germany is initially presented, along with the effect of the historical facts, the political and socioeconomic characteristics of the German system so that the composition and the operational philosophy of the dual form of the corporatist model can become clear. Next, the analysis centres on the structures, and the way in which the principles and organizational characteristics of the dual model of sociopolitical intervention are setup based on the provisions of its institutional framework of operation. The ulterior objective is to comprehend the main elements that define the administrative and executive synergy between the state and specific agencies of the social sector that contribute to the operation of the dual organizational model of the social state in Germany.

Vulnerability’s Ambivalent Political Life: Trayvon Martin and the Racialized and Gendered Politics of Protection

This article explores the way vulnerability gets mapped onto some bodies and not others. It discusses how sociolegal frameworks of vulnerability have both significantly transformative and anti-democratic ramifications for feminist social justice projects. Vulnerability—as a bodily condition, basis for relating, and methodology for socio-political intervention—charts how social inequalities are produced and dismissed. It is a source of possibility and risk. Part 1 outlines a progressive framework of vulnerability methodologies, interweaving poststructuralist theories of relationality and feminist legal theory with queer and transnational women-of-color feminisms. Current poststructuralist and legal frameworks, however, often sidestep how political recognition of vulnerability can function as a mode of regulation, where the affects accompanying precariousness are directed toward antidemocratic policies. Part 2 therefore argues that vulnerability methodologies have ambivalent political ramifications, licensing forms of protectionist violence as well as drawing attention to systemic forms of precarity. It explores the racialized and gendered politics of vulnerability and protection undergirding the role of stand-your-ground laws in Trayvon Martin’s murder and George Zimmerman’s trial, highlighting the ambivalent ways sociolegal frameworks recognize some forms of vulnerability and write others out of existence. Part 3 concludes by discussing the practices that progressive vulnerability approaches should embrace and avoid.

Struggling within and beyond the Performative University: Articulating activism and work in an “academia without walls”

Synopsis In many regions, the past decade has been characterised by significant transformations of models of organisation and evaluation of academic work. These include processes of extensification, elasticisation and casualisation of academic labour, and the institutionalisation of regimes of “performativity” (Ball, 2003), enacted by apparatuses of measurement and auditing (Burrows, 2012). These interacting trends are having significant impacts not only on academic working conditions, but also on opportunities for sociopolitical intervention outside the academy. This article draws on an ethnography of Portuguese academia, and on debates about the “toxic” (Gill, 2010) and “careless” (Lynch, 2010) nature of contemporary academic cultures, to analyse the current (im)possibilities of articulating activism and academic work. I argue that in the present day “academia without walls” (Gill, 2010) this articulation is extremely difficult, but we must reject conceptualising that difficulty as an individual challenge, and reframe it as a structural problem requiring – urgently – collective responses.

Reconceptualizing International Intervention: Statebuilding, ‘Organic Processes’ and the Limits of Causal Knowledge

This article examines the transformation in the conceptual understanding of international intervention over the last two decades. It suggests that this conceptual shift can be usefully interrogated through its imbrication within broader epistemological shifts highlighting the limits of causal knowledge claims: heuristically framed in this article in terms of the shift from policy interventions within the problematic of causation to those concerned with the management of effects. In this shift, the means and mechanisms of international intervention have been transformed, no longer focused on the universal application of Western causal knowledge through policy interventions but rather on the effects of specific and unique local and organic processes at work in societies themselves. The focus on effects takes the conceptualization of intervention out of the traditional terminological lexicon of International Relations theory and instead recasts problems in increasingly organic ways, suggesting that artificial or hubristic attempts at socio-political intervention should be excluded or minimized.

Camera activism in contemporary People's Republic of China: provocative documentation, first person confrontation, and collective force in Ai Weiwei's Lao Ma Ti Hua

Ai Weiwei's film Lao Ma Ti Hua (aka Disturbing the Peace, 2009) is one of the most influential activist documentaries that emerged during the aftermath of Sichuan earthquake in 2009. The film relates to Ai's ‘Public Citizen Investigation Project’, which gathers many volunteers to explore the substandard ‘tofu construction’ of school buildings that took thousands of children's lives when they collapsed in the earthquake. In August 2009, Ai's group went to Chengdu court to support another independent investigator, writer, and environmentalist Tan Zuoren who was prosecuted for subversion of state power. The night before the trial, Ai was beaten by secret security agents and the group was stopped from going to the court. The film subsequently records the group searching for an official explanation from the authorities. Whilst acknowledging the power of the film in constructing a collective political subjectivity, and the discursive effect through screenings and discussions raised, this paper focuses on the very action of proactive, activist documentation of one's witness to engage with fellow participants as well as viewer followers through digital camera. Under the theoretical framework of participatory culture, I propose the term camera activism to understand the camera-enabled individual participation into activism as a form of socio-political intervention. The paper also analyses some of Ai's problematic actions as a charismatic celebrity, which sometimes overshadow and obscure the complexity of resistance by Chinese individuals within China, thereby neglecting full recognition of the complex collective forces which support Ai. Nevertheless, ‘camera activism’ demonstrated in the making of Lao Ma Ti Hua reflects, and has the potential to reshape, the political landscape in twenty-first century China. The cinematic highlight of ‘I’, confronting and eye-witnessing what happens through the utilization of digital technologies positions ‘camera activism’ as an important part of China's iGeneration cinema culture.

Social and ethical dimension of the natural sciences, complex problems of the age, interdisciplinarity, and the contribution of education

In view of the complex problems of this age, the question of the socio-ethical dimension of science acquires particular importance. We approach this matter from a philosophical and sociological standpoint, looking at such focal concerns as the motivation, purposes and methods of scientific activity, the ambivalence of scientific research and the concomitant risks, and the conflict between research freedom and external socio-political intervention.

Fraudulent Bodies/Fraught Methodologies

Critical Responses Fraudulent Bodies/Fraught Methodologies Daphne A. Brooks What do we do with the narratives, the authors, the spectacular figures that resist facile categorization in nineteenth-century studies? From the racially unmarked tales produced by Black women activists to the political outsider memoir of a traveling hairstylist, the subjects of the essays included in this issue of Legacy challenge long-standing definitions of race literature and complicate our understanding of the scope and range of nineteenth-century Black women's literary aesthetics. Wayward and unwieldy, the texts and figures discussed here incite debates about authenticity—discursive, generic, and racial—and force us to improvise new critical methodologies that disrupt narrow binaries (fake vs. real, legitimate vs. fraudulent). The innovative and forward-looking essays collected here encourage us to reexamine the critical methods that we use (or fail to invoke) in our readings of texts and figures that defy conventional categorization in nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies. In short, each essay demands that we reconsider what kinds of criteria we trust. Each essay here triggers thoughtful reflection on how we formulate historical and cultural narratives about race and what kinds of historical and cultural documents we rely on to build a Black literary canon. Likewise, all of the critics here generate edifying ways to navigate textual and historical excesses and opacities. They critically re-interrogate the sociopolitical utility of racially indeterminate characters who fall outside the putative bounds of nineteenth-century Black women's fiction. They reevaluate conventional "tragic mulatta" strategies of characterization. And they challenge constrictive analyses of nineteenth-century Black women's narratives that reproduce essentialist readings of the texts as well as their authors. Poised to make a crucial intervention in how we [End Page 306] think about the production of Black texts as well as Black identity formations in nineteenth-century culture, the Legacy essays in this special issue present new approaches to reading Black(ened) cultural marginalia in the archives. The wayward bodies in this issue encourage epistemological speculation, and they create the kind of "lacuna" that DoVeanna Fulton reads in her exploration of racially indeterminate figures in the fiction of Frances E. W. Harper. Fulton's work illustrates the value in "open[ing] up" texts "for multiple and varied engagements by different reading communities" (Fulton, this issue). Her essay recovers the sociopolitical resonances of these kinds of anomalous literary figures who refuse recognizable strategies of racial categorization, and she makes plain the specific sociopolitical intervention that Harper's text creates by signifying on and disrupting the segregated culture of social reform movements. Similarly, Xiomara Santamarina locates the waywardness in the narrative and authorial politics of Eliza Potter's A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, a text that manifests a kind of social and political indeterminacy resulting in its canonical marginalization in nineteenth-century African American letters. Santamarina demonstrates the multiple ways that Potter articulates a socially oppositional and economically independent self in her narrative. On the one hand, this scholar's interpretation aligns Potter's work with other circum-Atlantic Black female entrepreneurs and travelers such as Mary Prince. On the other hand, Potter emerges in Santamarina's study as somewhat akin to her unconventional contemporary, the racially ambiguous actress Adah Isaacs Menken. Like Menken, Potter displayed a "lack of reference to racial injustices," "peripatetic" impulses, and a professed "desire to see the world," qualities that have resulted in her work's consistent exclusion from rigorous critical studies of nineteenth-century African American and women's literatures (Santamarina, this issue). Yet, Potter's text clearly warrants further analysis as an early literary work that reinforces Claudia Tate's important claim that "the racial protocol for African American canon formation has marginalized desire as a critical category of black textuality by demanding manifest stories about racial politics" (5). This study of Potter challenges us to consider new methodological approaches to (re)reading the politics of desire in heretofore under-theorized nineteenth-century archival texts. Both Eric Gardner's and Cherene Sherrard-Johnson's essays negotiate new strategies of reading texts by authors whom some might call "racial outsiders." Gardner's critical recovery of novels by Levina B. Urbino and Laura Preston [Louise Palmer...

Facing racism and the moral responsibility of human rights knowledge.

Anthropologists working in arenas of human rights advocacy must be prepared to negotiate dilemmas of human responsibility. Those focusing on racial discrimination as a breach of international human rights conventions must contend with trends in social research that feed into politically consequential claims that neither race nor racism exist as significant social facts. An examination of the global sociocultural and geopolitcal landscape, the human rights system, and models of change reveals that contemporary racism in both its marked and unmarked varieties warrants anthropologists' critical scrutiny and, depending on individual epistemological and political inclination, sociopolitical intervention.

Good Nights Out: Activating the Audience with 7:84 (England)

John McGrath is recognized as a leading practitioner and theorist of popular and political theatre, in large part due to his work with 7:84 (England) and 7:84 (Scotland), but also through the contributions he has made to the debate surrounding this form of theatre, as summed up in his publication of A Good Night Out in 1981 and of The Bone Won't Break in 1990. McGrath has also written numerous articles, including those to be found in TQ19, TQ35, and NTQ4, in which he documents the work of the 7:84 companies and discusses the defining characteristics, ideological perspective, and potential for socio-political intervention of political theatre. Here, Nadine Holdsworth looks specifically at the importance of the audience as it related to 7:84 (England) in the 1970s and 1980s, and identifies some of the strategies employed by the company to attract and maintain a radical working-class audience. Nadine Holdsworth lectures in Theatre Studies at De Montfort University and has recently completed her doctoral thesis on McGrath and the 7:84 (England) Company, from which this research is derived. She has also catalogued an extensive archive on the company which is held at Cambridge University.