Theoretical Conversation Research Articles

Hurricanes, reconstruction, and resistance: thinking through vulnerability in the Caribbean.

This paper critically analyses events that surrounded the reconstruction of the Colombian archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina islands after Hurricane Iota struck in 2020. Discussing the historical-structural and conjunctural dimensions within which the archipelago's history, various hurricanes, and reconstructions must be set, this paper draws on two theoretical conversations from Latin American and Caribbean critical thought and the critical humanitarian field that understand humanitarian governance as an 'arena of dispute'. Through mainly archival research of different sources, this paper assesses reconstruction and what it laid bare: structural vulnerability largely produced by the long lasting coloniality of power. In addition, it describes the active mediations and negotiations and the plethora of actions and repertoires in response to these centralised plans. Ultimately, we offer a vision whereby what is negotiated concerns not only the priorities and directions of the reconstruction, but also the design of a different future for the islands.

Optimizing a Novel Tracking System for Living Beings and Objects through Advanced Mathematical Modeling and Graph Theory

This study extends the formulation of a tracking system for both live items and living persons, and gives a thorough theoretical framework for an advanced tracking system. A large number of tracking systems in use today were created inside certain frameworks and designed to monitor in either infinite or restricted spatial contexts. The latter typically makes use of specialized technological instruments designed with tracking objects or living things in mind. Our contribution to this topic is the formulation of a system theory that both formulates and innovates the challenge of monitoring objects and living things. Graphical modeling is widely used in tracking, which is interesting because it makes it easier to create precise relationships between the objects that need to be tracked and other parts of the system. But our study argues that the best way to achieve a high-performing, contextually relevant, and flexible system in a range of scenarios is still to build a tracking system around graphs, both theoretically and practically. We provide a unique tracking method to further the discipline, based on the ideas of hypergraphs and graph learning. This method carefully examines the order between various linkages inside the system, allowing the system to fully use both direct and indirect relations. The way we formulate tracking is as a complex search problem on graphs and hypergraphs. In this case, the system's components—living things or objects—are represented by vertices, and the kinds of relationships that exist between them are indicated by edges. We present a governing law that facilitates different processing tasks, manages shared data across system parts, and defines the connections between vertices. Additionally, we provide illustrated examples covering single and multi-context tracking scenarios to support our work. These illustrations highlight how, in comparison to current tracking technologies, the suggested approach performs better theoretically. In addition to adding to the theoretical conversation, this discovery has potential applicability in a variety of tracking contexts

Contours of Racial Capitalism, Urban Geography, and Infrastructure

ABSTRACTRacial capitalism has received much attention within the social sciences over the past few decades, including fields such as urban geography and infrastructural studies. This state of the field identifies key contributions, highlights the latest developments, draws attention to limitations, and points to future directions. Given the concept's multiple iterations and lineages beyond Cedric Robinson's framework, there is a risk racial capitalism might become an empty signifier if more work is not done by scholars to define their points of departure, clarify the concept's theoretical reach, and expand empirical contributions beyond the U.S. heartland. To advance the racial capitalism body of work, current scholarship suggests theoretical conversations with postcolonial theory, decolonial thought, Indigenous studies, and feminist approaches. There is also a need to engage not only with other variants of racial capitalism, but also with earlier scholarship that investigates the interplay between race/racialization and space.

The pandemic of ‘the other half’: Patriarchy, capitalism and technology during COVID-19

This essay explores how patriarchy, capitalism and technology intersected during the COVID-19 pandemic: an ‘extreme contest’, thus able to provide especially sharp insights into empirical phenomena as well as theoretical conversations. Conceptualising patriarchy and capitalism as two dominant, intersecting societal logics, I consider their embedment into gendered processes of digital technology production, use and distribution, and how these specifically played out during the pandemic crisis. The essay starts with a set of vignettes capturing the heterogenous experiences of digital gender-based violence survivors, female tech workers and women lacking access to digital resources in COVID-19 times. I then move on to consider the extent to which existing theoretical accounts of the relationship between gender, technology and capitalism can illuminate such developments, and propose an original conceptualisation of how patriarchal and capitalistic injustices shape technological interactions. In so doing, I contribute to trans-disciplinary debates on oppressive societal logics, feminist and critical approaches to digital capitalism and techno-feminist perspectives on digital processes.

Thinking solidarity and translation together: Towards a new definition of solidarity

In a cross-disciplinary roundtable discussion on the feminist politics of translation,Judith Butler (Nagar et al., 2017, p. 113)aptly notes that “there can be no solidarity without translation, and certainly no global solidarity”. This article is the first dedicated attempt to definesolidarity from within translation studies: it redefines the concept to foreground the role of translation, understood as a hermeneutic, interpersonal and semiotic process, in solidarity development. The article is also the first to bring together scholarship on solidarity from philosophy, political science and sociology, on the one hand, and translation studies, on the other. I show that insights from translation studies supplement scholarship on solidarity in the other disciplines, where translation is largely overlooked. I also apply analytical categories from those disciplines to discussions of solidarity in translation studies and demonstrate the de factodifferent understandings of solidarity behind translation scholars’ use of the term, thus initiating a discipline-wide theoretical conversation on the concept. Moreover, upon noticing that the roleof translation in generating solidarity is not captured in any existing definition, I redefine solidarity as a sense of interconnection and commonality in difference –developed through caring, careful and inherently incomplete translation –that pursues inclusion and impels action towards common good. Finally, I signal how the definition can inform our understanding of the interlingual human translator as an active agent, adept at forging and facilitating solidarity.

Racial discrimination in post-Apartheid South Africa? The stories of Coloured people in Johannesburg, South Africa

Dominant theoretical conversations on experiences of racial discrimination are focused on how Black and other non-White people perceive and experience racial discrimination in White majority racial systems; however, research is scant on experiences of racial discrimination of racial minorities in Black majority social systems. This paper addresses this lacuna by exploring perceived experiences of racial discrimination of Coloured people in Johannesburg, South Africa, a racial minority in a Black majority country. Fourteen in-depth individual interviews were conducted with participants. Analysis of the interviews resulted in many interviewees claiming race-based discrimination in housing, employment, service delivery, political representation and education. A few participants, however, claimed that Black South Africans are also experiencing socioeconomic problems like Coloured South Africans. Racial discrimination theory and social exclusion theory are used as perspectives for the study. Based on the findings, I argue that the perceived experiences of racial discrimination of most of the participants of the study can be explained by three interrelated structural forces, namely legacies of historical racial exclusions, the neoliberal macro-economic order and government neglect.

Epistemic stitching of race, power, and modernity in recent work on white supremacy

This essay examines the recent anthropological literature on white supremacy. We argue that this ethnographic literature presents innovative approaches for a theory of race, power, and capitalist modernity applicable to anthropology as a whole. To highlight this literature's analytical contributions, we pursue a close but not exhaustive review of recent studies of white supremacy, showing how ethnographers have expanded an influential theoretical foundation by braiding together or “epistemically stitching” their work on white supremacy to a variety of other theoretical conversations in anthropology. We suggest this epistemic stitching—an important form of theory-building in anthropology that creatively ties together theoretical conversations and leaves evidence of that labor—provides important insights into the workings of white supremacy by drawing together critical theories of race with several different theoretical influences, from new materialism and critical anthrohistory to studies of empire.

Conceptual model of the participation of Mexican SMEs in the Stakeholder Capitalism of the post-COVID19 era

The crisis caused by COVID-19 was an event experienced globally and simultaneously, generating changes in the way people work, study, and carry out their social activities, giving the beginning of practical and theoretical conversations about the need to design and implement a new model of capitalism, oriented to the management of interest groups. The present work presents the theoretical and conceptual review related to the theoretical and conceptual constructs related to the contribution to the planet, people management, prosperity orientation, and governance factors that explain the participation of Mexican SMEs in interest group capitalism. Thus, it is shown that the process of adaptation to a "new normality" scenario will represent a factor of fundamental importance for social coexistence considering the risk represented by the effects caused by the new coronavirus, through the development of emerging strategies characterized by promoting the Adequate interaction between interested parties that constitute a model of capitalism that must equally weigh the social, economic, environmental and health dimensions for society in the long-term.

Vlogging gastronomic tourism: understanding Global North-South dynamics in YouTube videos and their audiences’ feedback

Gastronomic tourism is a developed research stream in tourism studies. Previous literature, however, has mainly shed light either on the micro-context of food itself or on meso-contexts such as heritage and regional food sourcing. Given this situation, previous research has called for examining this aspect of food tourism, aptly named the ‘cultural turn’ in food tourism. This paper adds to extant theoretical conversations by studying popular international gastronomic tourism videos. As the world becomes increasingly globalized and cultural products suffuse across borders, travellers, particularly those from the Global North, sample and judge local cuisine and this incurs reactions from onlookers. Watched by millions of people, vlogs provide a virtual immersive socio-cultural experience to a tourist site. In this regard, this article asks the following research question: how does the Global North-South divide manifest in vlogged gastronomic tours and what responses do such phenomena provoke among international audiences? Using the approaches of textual analysis, content analysis and sentiment analysis, this study explores the afore-mentioned research question using the canvas of nine gastronomic vlogging tours as played out on YouTube. The authors analyse the most popular food vlogs of all time and use a gamut of more than three hours of video (with more than 215 million views) and more than 128,000 comments. The results show how vlogs may provide authentic cultural experiences and how the Global North-South divide is ameliorated through vlogging gastronomic tours. The question is important not only helpful for guiding destination marketers and tourism service providers about the multifaceted aspects of a destination, but also for understanding how particular social phenomena can foster connections among different peoples.

Evaluating Everyday Politics in North Korea

ABSTRACT In North Korea, as elsewhere, there exists a society beyond the state, and an everyday life where government authority meets and mixes with the private sphere. Examining this sphere is crucial for a holistic understanding of North Korean politics, both in the past and the present, and this is the goal of this Special Issue. Our introductory essay reviews the diverse literature on everyday politics in North Korea and assesses patterns within it. Next, it proposes four theoretical considerations in the hope that they may lend common ground to those doing research on everyday politics in North Korea and facilitate more theoretically informed discussion. Researchers can use these areas – socialisation, surveillance, survival, and support – to situate their analyses more theoretically as they assess everyday politics in the DPRK. Each of the contributions to this Special Issue addresses some or all of these areas, which are intended to be a framework to bring the contributions, and by extension the broader topic of everyday politics in North Korea, into a deeper theoretical conversation.

Reimagining local worlds: Wen village conservation and regeneration by Amateur Architecture Studio

This article theorises the local world as a conceptual scaffold for future conservation and regeneration. It aims to catalyse a theoretical dialogue across the East and West to understand how ordinary places and lifeworlds are preserved, reproduced, and possibly reimagined. The local worlds discussed herein are conceptualised as the worlds of many, the worlds of relating, the worlds of structuring and the worlds of becoming. These four cardinal points present a source of open-endedness and futurity for contemporary architectural reinterpretation. The current article examines the characterisation of the Wen village conservation and regeneration project, led by the Amateur Architecture Studio in Zhejiang Province of China (2012–2016), as an architectural reimagination of local worlds, with a strong sensitivity to the ordinary places and lifeworlds of rural China and juxtapositions of new local worlds within old worlds. By piecing together the flows and fragments of the architectural process, this article shows how locally situated designs and dynamics have shaped the project in both its formation and afterlife, both ethically and contemporarily. Using close readings of popular and oral accounts from both architect’s and users’ perspectives, this article extends the case study by broadening theoretical conversations about contemporary architecture’s capacity to reimagine local worlds.

Empty Threats and Aid Weaponization: Understanding the International Response to Yemen’s Humanitarian Crisis

ABSTRACT Since 2015, international aid organizations have delivered over $23 billion in assistance to alleviate Yemen’s humanitarian crisis. Complicating this effort, however, is the fact that aid organizations must coordinate aid delivery with the Houthis, the de facto authority ruling 70 percent of Yemen’s population. Rather than allowing aid organizations to operate without interference, the Houthis have restricted their operations and weaponized aid for political purposes. This comes despite aid organizations’ threats to withhold assistance from the Houthis. Why do the Houthis continue to weaponize aid despite pressure and condemnation from the very organizations upon which they depend for assistance? I argue that the structure of humanitarian relief efforts makes it difficult for aid organizations to credibly threaten to cut off assistance to the Houthis, and that these empty threats do little to deter Houthi bad behavior. In developing this argument, this article contributes both to our understanding of the politics of Yemen’s civil war, as well as to theoretical conversations about the relationship between rebel groups and international actors.

Relationship course theory: An interdisciplinary integrative proposition to address the complexification of interpersonal relationships

AbstractResearchers have been observing a complexification of interpersonal relationships in contemporary societies. However, current theoretical perspectives on relationships fall short of comprehensively grasping increasingly diverse and fluid relationship types (e.g., friends with benefits, polyamory, living‐apart‐together, coparenting, etc.) and patterns of change. In an attempt to meet the need for more integrative and interdisciplinary theorizing, this paper introduces a first outline of relationship course theory to better comprehend the complexity of relationships. In contrast to previous theoretical perspectives that conceptualize relationships as a single trajectory, I posit that the course of a relationship is composed of multiple intertwined trajectories, each of which stemming from differentiated domains such as sexuality, friendship, love, family, domesticity, and occupation. These relationship domains constitute a metatypology from which to examine the multiple sets of meanings and temporalities that intertwine throughout the course of a relationship. I propose that relationships are defined based on the combination of relationship domains, with different iterations and permutations of these domains producing various relationship configurations. Furthermore, the theory defines three levels of relationship courses: Sociocultural (i.e., stories that circulate about relationships in given sociocultural contexts), interpersonal (i.e., stories that individuals co‐construct about the particular relationships they experience), and life courses (i.e., stories that individuals co‐construct about themselves as relational beings). This proposition will hopefully stimulate the theoretical conversation on the complexity of relationships and foster dialogue between researchers from different theoretical and disciplinary affiliations.

Harnessing the Digitalization for Society's Sustainable Development: A Call for Shared Theoretical Conversation about (DESI) and the Development of Arab Nations

The use of technologies and digital devices impose technical advancement to every country. Today, where everything in the world is about the "e", we may assume that the digitalization has spread its wings over all the spheres of life. Therefore, the socioeconomic growth parameters depend on the revolution of digitalization. This one has open new ways for developing the function of public services domain in interaction with community. Accordingly, societies are highly empowered by the use of "the need of now" built more connected and conscious comparatively to less digitalized countries. In fact, the digitalization seems to be the most significant feature to lead towards sustainable development. Which highlight the concept of " inclusive growth and economy" along its four major pillars «economy », « living conditions », « equality » and « environment ». That being the case, this paper aims to highlight up front the steps for digitalization to be held in a country considering its implementing conditions. Then, comparing the societies competitiveness level using the (Global Competitiveness Index) throughout shortcomings and good practices included in sustainable development concrete measures. After that, examining the (Digital Economy and Society Index) methodology in (EU countries) throughout its components (Economic, social and environmental) and discussing its possible implementation abroad under the lights of Hofsted's cultural performance dimensions. Subsequently, developing countries are under the scope for their citizens under the wall of poverty, unemployment and illiteracy building a strong bridge of connectivity with the nation. So that the metamorphosis from tremendous economic growth to prosperous nation be insured. All of that to make the world a better place.

Entre Madres y Comadres: Trans Latina Immigrants Empowering Women Beyond Marianismo

When social workers discuss the lives of Latinx individuals, it is often in the context of cultural values such as marianismo. Marianismo is linked to Catholicism and patriarchal values that reinforce traditional gender scripts for women. Although Latina feminists have challenged these values for decades, it continues to be paramount that social workers deepen their understanding of the lives of Chicanas and Latinas through critical theories. From this perspective, mujeristas and Chicana feminists who emphasize liberative work often use the term comadres, or comothers, to explore Latinas’ roles and relationships. The distinction between the traditional motherly role of marianismo and the collaborative and empowering role of comadres was evident in our feminist-informed study about the lived experiences of trans Latina immigrants who are activists and agents of change in their Southern U.S. communities. Our goal as Latina feminists is to include these women in the theoretical conversation as their experiences allowed us to expand our knowledge of these concepts. By reconceptualizing the mutually supportive role of Latinas in their communities, trans Latina immigrants and Latina feminists encourage us to see Latinas beyond the traditional and stereotypical gender script of marianismo.

Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age

Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age

REPERTOIRES OF CARE AND ACTIVIST SUSTAINABILITY IN U.S. SOCIAL JUSTICE ORGANIZING

Sociologists have a longstanding interest in how movements survive and how individuals persist in their activism over time (e.g., McAdam 1986; Downton and Wehr 1998; Corrigall-Brown 2011; Bunnage 2014). The role of care in activist sustainability stands out as a neglected domain for a better understanding of how movements maintain the human labor they need to survive. Some social theorists and on-the-ground activists have warned about the potentially individualizing and depoliticizing effects of “self-care” on movement culture. However, social justice movements, particularly racial justice movements, increasingly emphasize the role of healing, care, and the body in movement survival. Drawing on all 128 episodes of the Irresistible podcast (formerly the Healing Justice Podcast), its problematic founder, and its ultimate demise, I use a Black feminist framework that holds the tensions within political care to understand the conditional relationship between the functions and hazards of care within activism. Following and complementing Charles Tilly’s (1977) repertoires of contention, I develop this “repertoire of care” analytitoto better situate proliferating discourses of movement care within broader theoretical conversations around persistent activism and movement survival.

Introduction: Citational Politics in Medical Anthropology.

Introduction: Citational Politics in Medical Anthropology.

Osotua and decolonizing the academe: implications of a Maasai concept

In this paper, an Indigenous elder and non-Indigenous scholar together explore and reflect on attempts to grasp and work academically with the Maasai concept of osotua. We aim to take up this concept not as a piece of data to analyze, but as a partner in theoretical conversations. Osotua describes relationality, in the form of kinship, sharing, symbiosis, and accountability. It aligns and reinforces concepts and approaches of a variety of Indigenous knowledge systems and paradigms, as described by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. It also has clear parallels with academic theories, for example, in the ontological turn as well as new materialist and post-humanist approaches. Through these cross-fertilizations as well as by its original stance, it may provide novel ideas and practical incentives towards the decolonization of the academe, for example, by enhancing diversity and multi-vocality, while simultaneously inviting incentives to contextualize and reflect on “the self” as part of a dynamic inter-reliant community of academics. Specifically, we focus on the potential theoretical value and resulting practical impact of osotua for decolonizing higher education. A variety of scholars arguing for the decolonization of the academic system has pointed out and criticized the continuities between colonialism and neoliberalism, and outlined how both have influenced a university system where students are graded based on standards informed by specific dominant ontologies and epistemologies; scholars are judged on the number of publications in certain high-ranking journals; and universities are funded based on the quantity of students they “process” within a certain period. How would the perspectives on and dynamics of this system be affected if the symbiotic and nourishing reciprocity of all relationships involved became increasingly visible through the concept of osotua?

In Relation or Nah? A Review of Black Trans Feminism by Marquis Bey

In Relation or Nah? A Review of <i>Black Trans Feminism</i> by Marquis Bey