Theoretical Engagement Research Articles

Natural wine: do consumers know what it is, and how natural it really is?

Abstract Natural wine is a small but rapidly growing sector within the wine industry. Expertise in the field has been advanced by wine experts and professionals, while publications to aid in further understanding the topic lag behind. This manuscript highlights the need to develop more rigorous methodologies to better understand the market segment of natural wine, its consumers, and their composition and behaviour. Moreover, it calls for a deeper theoretical engagement with the notion of natural wine, which positions it among other sustainable and ecological certifications, including organic, biodynamic or sulphite-free. This would allow researchers to advance from the current state of knowledge, which continues to limit our ‘practical’ capacity for advice to policy makers but not to winemakers and marketers. These theoretical and methodological developments would allow scholars to catch up with debates being held by different social actors in the natural wine scene, including winemakers’ and consumer associations, bloggers, writers and professional marketers.

Geographies of transition—From topical concerns to theoretical engagement: A comment on the transitions research agenda

This viewpoint takes stock with the ‘geography of sustainability transitions’ (GOST) as it is presented in the transitions research agenda. GOST has been a relatively recent addition to transition theorizing, addressing the need for greater sensitivity and attention to the scales, spatialities, and context-specific factors that shape transitions. In our view, the agenda represents a rather narrow perspective on GOST, which is geared to two empirical themes, namely urban transitions and transitions in developing countries. While these are relevant and topical issues, the section lacks sufficient acknowledgement of the increasing engagement of geographers with transitions studies and the theoretical approaches they have brought to bear on the field. This short commentary thus aims at complementing the agenda paper by outlining a theoretical research agenda that is emerging in this field, framed around the conceptualization of scales, places and spaces in which transitions unfold.

Situated transformations of women and gender relations in small-scale fisheries and communities in a globalized world

The need to uncover, interrogate, and integrate women’s contributions to fisheries in research and development has never been clearer. As coastal and fisheries management continues to look to the Sustainable Development Goals and the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication, as frameworks and mandates, gender equity and equality have become a central concern. To fill the still existing gap of documentation and theoretical engagement, in this thematic collection, we gather together voices from researchers and practitioners from around the world, with one overarching common approach of using a gender lens to examine the relationship between humans and aquatic resources. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s classic feminist concept of situated knowledges, we examine the many and varied approaches researchers are using to engage with the intersection of gender and fisheries. Beginning and ending with two reviews that examine where gender and fisheries has come from, and where it is going, this thematic issue includes case studies from 10 countries, engaging in the topic at various scales (individual, household, national, institutional etc.), and using multiple methodological approaches. Taken together, these pieces explore the mechanism by which women’s contribution to fisheries are overlooked and provide direct evidence to contest the persistent invisibility of women in fishing, fisheries labor, and fisheries decision-making. Going beyond the evidence of women’s contributions, the authors go further to examine different coastal contexts, intersectional identities such as age, and explore gender transformative approaches to fisheries development.

Editorial

American Religion 1, no. 1 (Fall 2019), pp. 1–4 Copyright © 2019, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.1.1.01 Editorial Welcome to American Religion, a journal dedicated to remaking what we think about when we think about religion, to remapping common ideas of what “America” means, and to reinvigorating a sense of possibility for how the two interact with and inflect one another. Two decades into the twenty-first century, now, the center of intellectual gravity in the subfield we call “American religion” remains intimately bound with problematic legacies of US exceptionalism. Forged in a Protestant creation myth, “American religion” has historically legitimated and provided succor for Manifest Destiny, empire, and the living ideologies that undergird them. It too often relies upon narratives of diversity and religious freedom in the attempt to mitigate such problems, though doing so just as often reaffirms and vivifies this exceptionalist narrative and its legacies of violence and domination. “American religion,” in this way, is American religious history; American religious history, in turn, is Church History, broadcasting a narrow yet powerful configuration of American religious identity as normative—an authorized narrative. This exceptionalist legacy proves comforting and even lucrative for the public dissemination of “American religion,” despite the fact that twenty-first century scholars (and their publics) in increasingly hemispheric and global contexts already work beyond such myths—and indeed do so in ways that trouble the conflation of “America” and the “United States.” American Religion takes exception to these exceptionalist legacies. We maintain that the most exciting explorations of American religion operate in defiance of exceptionalist narratives and outmoded historical paradigms. By blurring, troubling, ironizing, demurring from discursive norms surrounding “religion in America,” we affirm our mission to take exception to American religious American Religion 1:1 2 exceptionalism, establishing a forum that challenges regnant assumptions regarding the subfield. The journal provides a space for authors and readers who seek to transform historical assumptions surrounding American religious studies--its methods, geographies, demographics, sources, pedagogies, languages, archives, and dispositions. We welcome as collaborators and co-conspirators all scholars, artists, readers, writers, activists, teachers, and engaged citizens who are committed to these and related intellectual pursuits. “Taking exception” should not be understood solely as a contrarian stance. By taking such exception and, in the process, resisting older legacies of church history, diversity, and religious freedom, we also agree to a great deal more: capacious understandings of the Americas and their people in US, hemispheric, and transnational contexts; a broad intellectual scope that pushes beyond the merely historical to consider questions of bodies, material culture, law, artistic expression , gender, race, sexuality, and so forth in appropriate historical contexts as well as the present tense; and a commitment to critical inquiry and theoretical engagement with these categories and the category of religion in ways that illuminate unknown or unimagined dimensions of religion and American culture. In all of these ways, American Religion strives for nothing less ambitious than to become the outstanding and field-defining venue for the academic study of religion in the Americas. Practically speaking, the journal blends older forms of scholarship with new possibilities. The core of every issue of American Religion features peer-reviewed research articles. These critical, in-depth studies create a body of knowledge based on expertise. In addition to providing a space of intellectual synthesis and exchange for established scholars, they also serve as currency for graduate students , junior and contingent scholars, and independent scholars who are making their way in American religious studies. We also recognize those scholars who may not have seen themselves as working on “American religion” or those who do not feel seen by the field. Many of our colleagues find themselves encouraging students and junior scholars engaged in what they recognize as cutting-edge research, yet wonder how such vital work might become recognized as appropriately “Americanist” for purposes of employment and tenure in religious studies if it does not cohere with or replicate the dominant strain of American religious studies. American Religion provides a forum for these authors and their research, aiming in the process to reshape the meaning of “American religion” as a subfield of academic inquiry. The articles...

The Electronic Monitoring of Offenders in Context: From Policy to Political Logics

The electronic monitoring (EM) of offenders is a subject that has been researched widely within criminology. Theoretical engagement with this instrument has been limited, however. The criminological literature, in fact, has focused primarily on empirical assessments of EM’s financial and technical aspects, as well as on the legal implications of EM and its impact on reoffending. Against this backdrop, this article provides a critical examination of EM, focussing on how policy construes this penal measure, using Scotland as an example. In addition, drawing on Foucault’s notion of governmentality, this article explores and problematizes the political logics (neoliberal, nationalist and techno-communitarian) which inform EM policy in the context of Scotland. The final section shifts the focus from exposing the political milieu within which EM policy emerges to contesting its possible effects, thereby extending the political critique of EM policy. The overarching aim is to contribute toward a nuanced political assessment of EM, while presenting directions for future engagement with this subject.

Créativité linguistique dans la poésie surréaliste (I)

At the beginning of Surrealism there was a theoretical and practical engagement with language. This topic is presented in two parts in this review and is based on the author’s book Der Leser des Surrealismus. Untersuchungen zur Kommunikationsasthetik, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1977. The first part of this article discusses the search for a new language, the discussion of language as objective or device, and language games as a challenge to the reader.

The Flourishing and Challenging Field of Animal-Human History

This is a book review of: Hilda Kean and Philip Howell (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019. 560 pp When I was doing my PhD at the University of Sussex in the early 1990s, I remember being approached by another postgrad in the School of English and American Studies: “Are you the person doing the PhD on bear baiting?” he asked. When I answered in the affirmative, he noted: “It’s nice that people can still do PhDs like that.” He could only conceive of what I was doing as antiquarian—a gathering and marshalling of facts, nothing more. A few years later, on finishing my PhD, I found myself on the job market, getting long-listed for some posts and short-listed for fewer, and failing to find employment. What I need, I recall saying to a friend, is for a job on bear baiting to come up. Something along those lines did actually appear—not quite bear baiting, but a post at Bath Spa University College (as it was called then) on the early modern period with a particular interest in human relationships with the natural world: if I can’t get this job, I remember thinking, I’ll never get a job. I managed to get it, and have—fortunately—been employed ever since. It felt like a one-off back then to see a job with that focus, but things are changing, and have changed quite rapidly. As Kean and Howell’s (2019) new collection shows, not only are there a lot of people working in the field of what they term “animal-human history” (the footnotes and references here offer a substantial and extremely helpful sense of the amount of work in the field), the range of work taking place is varied, in relation to disciplinary direction, focus, and theoretical engagement. All of these elements are visible here.

Making our invisible racial agendas visible: Race talk in Assessing Writing, 1994–2018

Abstract “Writing” is far from the only construct relevant to writing assessment research. The construct “race” is arguably crucial for the field’s considerations of human diversity, difference, and inequity. To examine how race has been constructed within the field, this paper provides a content analysis of explicit race talk in Assessing Writing (1994–2018). Drawing on insights from critical race and Whiteness theories, this study examined a corpus of 304 articles and found 68 containing explicit talk of race, which were characterized by four trends: scholars discuss race in the contexts of examinee/examiner perceptions and preferences; patterns in assessment performance; and the textual content of students’ writings or assessment documents; but most commonly, they engage with race in more marginal or circumstantial ways, referencing race without analysis (e.g., in literature reviews, calls for future research). Additionally, “race,” “ethnicity,” and “racism” seemingly have never been explicitly defined within the journal, potentially contributing to denotative uncertainty and confusion. These findings suggest that future research could benefit by more consistently clarifying its race constructs; disaggregating data with an attention to racial fairness; deepening historical and theoretical engagements with race; diversifying the voices and interpretations that circulate in the field; and turning toward intersectional justice.

Policing Reality: Urban Disorder, Failure, and Expert Undoings

AbstractThis article intervenes in discussions about the circulation of policing knowledge and the politics of expertise. As part of a broader conversation about transnational reconfigurations of state power, critical scholars have drawn attention to the influence of global policing “models” and “private” experts in shaping policy. They show how such figures and forms of knowhow symbolically enforce urban order and dispossess marginalized communities under conditions of neoliberal crisis. While incisive, these approaches can unduly portray expert authority as boundless and unassailable. This article argues that a sustained theoretical engagement with questions about controversies and failure opens up fruitful avenues to unsettle the perceived smoothness, inevitability, and omnipotence of experts in relation to politics and governing. Drawing on insights from actor-network theory (ANT), it situates deference to global experts as interventions that seek to enact and police the terms of “reality” concerning urban order. This approach allows us to better understand how such interventions work but also how they misfire and come undone. These claims are developed through a close reading of UK Prime Minister David Cameron's attempt to solicit policy advice from renowned global “supercop” William Bratton in the aftermath of the 2011 England riots.

The Cultural Fabric of Rabindranath Tagore’s Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism

The paper explores into the concept of cosmopolitanism in Rabindranath Tagore’s Philosophy. Though Tagore couldn’t travel fully with his critique of nationalism and the entire extent of the debate, which determined India’s destiny later, the authenticity of Tagore’s perspective foresaw the most decisive themes of coexistence of our times symptomatically for us, such as, the criticism of nationalism and transnationalism, religion as humanism, the idea of cosmopolitan freedom and education as encounter with nature etc. The paper argues that Tagore’s concept of cosmopolitanism is composed of his philosophies of humanism, religion, art and aesthetics and the critique of nationalism. The discussion that is carried out in the paper though briefly examines some of the major works of Tagore. It looks at the theoretical engagements of some of the major contemporary thinkers made with Tagore’s thought, especially with his idea of cosmopolitanism. The paper, as it affirms the contemporaneous nature of Tagore’s concept of cosmopolitanism, however, suggests a new dimension that it adds to the philosophy of cosmopolitanism

Space syntax theory and Durkheim’s social morphology: a reassessment

ABSTRACT In outlining their influential architectural theory of space syntax, Hillier and Hanson acknowledge its affinity to Durkheim’s sociological considerations on the spatial-morphological basis of social life. In doing so, space syntax theory promised to address the then woefully under-theorized relationship between society and space, specifically by emphasizing the agency of spatial-morphological arrangements. Given the Durkheimian inspiration, it is surprising that sociology has been so silent on the subject of space syntax. This lack of dialogue may be explained by the gestation of space syntax research within the specialist disciplinary silo of architectural theory, as well as by the default sociological assessment that formal methodologies of spatial analysis – such as those associated with space syntax – sustain a discredited fallacy of physical determinism. Yet, intellectually this situation is unfortunate: while sociology overlooks how space syntax theory has advanced the Durkheimian understanding of spatial morphologies, space syntax theory misses an opportunity to update and broaden its notion of social processes. In response, we revisit Durkheim’s social morphology and review the strengths and deficits of Hillier and Hanson’s consideration of Durkheimian theory. We identify how difficulties arise because of an over-reliance of space syntax theory on the structural-functionalist macro-wing of the Durkheimain tradition. To address this issue, we prepare the ground for a theoretical engagement between space syntax and the micro-sociological branch of Durkheiminan scholarship, and show how this tradition offers a more coherent means for translating the spatio-morphological insights of space syntax theory into contemporary debates in the sociology of space.

Rational trust in resilient health systems.

The 2014-15 Ebola epidemic in West Africa highlighted the significance of trust between the public and public health authorities in the mitigation of health crises. Since the end of the epidemic, there has been a focus amongst scholars and practitioners on building resilient health systems, which many see as an important precondition for successfully combatting future outbreaks. While trust has been acknowledged as a relevant component of health system resilience, we argue for a more sustained theoretical engagement with underlying models of trust in the literature. This article takes a first step in showing the importance of theoretical engagement by focusing on the appeal to rational models of trust in particular in the health system resilience literature, and how currently unconsidered assumptions in this model cast doubt on the effectiveness of strategies to generate trust, and therein resilience, during acute public health emergencies.

Resituating Africa’s Urban Informal Food Sector

The complex dynamics of the informal food sector in urban Africa are poorly understood. Urban informal food systems are beginning to receive attention from scholars and policymakers, but the notable absence of detailed empirical information and necessary theoretical engagement with their emergence, structure, and operation has thus far limited efforts to understand the central role that they play in urban development processes. This Special Issue brings together a diverse collection of case studies from seven countries across the Global South—China, Jamaica, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda—to explore these dynamics by placing Africa’s urban informal food sector in comparative international context. This introduction provides an overview of how this Special Issue contributes to debates about the origins of informal food economies in cities in the Global South, the potential of the informal food sector to contribute to inclusive urban development, the relationship between informal food vendors and the state, and interactions between formal and informal food systems, all of which have important implications for theorizing urban governance and development in Africa and beyond.

On Strategy and Tactics: Marxism and Electoral Politics

The rise of Syriza and Podemos alongside debates amongst Egyptian and other socialists about participation in parliamentary elections has reignited considerable interest across the international left about the issue of parliamentary elections. It is hard to imagine a more apt moment for the publication of August Nimtz’s study of Lenin’s practical and theoretical engagement with this subject. While praising Nimtz’s scholarship, this essay challenges his interpretation of the relationship between strategy and tactics in Lenin’s thought and the position of elections therein. It concludes with an attempt to unpick what is of general significance in Lenin’s engagement with electoral politics from more local details of interest only to scholars of Russian history.

The Embodied Turn: Making and Remaking Dress as an Academic Practice

Fashion is a field fundamentally enmeshed with bodies and materiality. After the global and material turns for history, I contend that we are now experiencing the “embodied turn”: a development that recognizes the processes of doing, making and remaking, and reconstructing as a fruitful methodology with quantifiable, academically valid results. The pioneers of material clothing reconstruction changed dress history and fashion studies. From their lead, new generations of scholars are extending the original approaches, while historical re-enactors using their findings are now an established global community.This article explores how remaking the clothed past can yield unique and useful research insights. How is the embodied methodology of making and wearing reconstructed clothing being done, and in innovative ways? Which directions might this take us; and how do new technologies advance the possibilities of enquiry using reconstruction? My discussion of these questions offers broad-ranging examples of the scholarly search for embodied or experiential dress knowledge to be discovered through re-making the past. I draw on personal experience of re-creating historical clothing, and current doctoral work examining what can be learnt from experimental archaeology to suggest “experimental history” is an equally valid concept. The article also outlines the need for dress and fashion scholars’ more extensive theoretical engagement with methodologies of re-creation.

Richard Rorty, Homo Academicus Politicus

Abstract This article explores Richard Rorty’s status in academic political theory in the decades after his conscious departure from disciplinary philosophy. Rorty found a receptive audience in this pluralistic field, and he became a point of orientation in a number of ongoing, research-agenda driving conversations, if often as an extreme example against which interlocutors could define themselves. In like fashion, Rorty refined his own self-conception as a patriotic liberal ironist in the course of his political theoretical engagements. I offer a sketch of political theory’s landscape as a contrast to the reductivism and esotericism Rorty criticized in disciplinary philosophy, and survey his presence in the field over the years substantively, qualitatively, and quantitatively.

Practitioner as the Imaginary Father of Public Administration: A Psychoanalytic Critique

This article critiques the ideological position of the practitioner in public administration research based on Lacanian psychoanalysis. A review of empirical focus of public administration research reveals that the practitioner serves as an imaginary ideal for researchers and provides them with the semblance of a “useful” disciplinary identity. Public administration researchers spend all their efforts trying to pander to this mythical practitioner who is supposed to save the helpless public. That is also the reason that the discipline is invested in cleansing the image of the practitioner by covering up or downplaying the negative aspects of administrative praxis. Lacanian psychoanalysis further suggests that despite this idealization, the practitioner neither possesses solutions to public problems nor can resolve the identity crisis of public administration. More importantly, this disciplinary ideal comes at the cost of limited theoretical and empirical engagement with the public, which has been marginalized in public administration research. Giving up this foundational fantasy, however, will require a fundamental reorientation of our disciplinary identity and research focus. Three critical operations (skepticism of grand imaginaries, direct engagement with the public, and a less judgmental research agenda) are cautiously suggested as a starting point in this regard.

Politicising the landscape: a theoretical contribution towards the development of participation in landscape planning

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we engage with the topic of public participation in landscape planning. Academic discussions and policy rhetoric tend to build on a conceptualisation of landscape as a democratic entity, yet practices of participatory landscape planning often fall short of these ideals. Most scholars approach this rhetoric-practice gap from procedural and normative positions, defining what makes a successful participatory process. We take an alternative approach, scrutinising the role of landscape planning theory in participatory shortcomings, and reveal how poor substantive theorisation of ‘the political’ nature of landscapes contributes to the difficulties in realising participatory ideals. We engage theoretically with the political dimension, conceptualising and explaining the implications that differences, conflicts and power relations have for participation in landscape planning, that is, politicising the landscape. This theoretical engagement helps bring about a much-needed realignment of substantive theory, procedural theory and practice for developing participation in landscape planning.

Intimate Entanglements: Affects, more-than-human intimacies and the politics of relations in science and technology

This article introduces Intimate Entanglements by proposing three interrelated shifts that result from juxtaposing experiences with different world-making practices at the intersection of care, technoscience and theoretical engagements with affect theory and Science and Technology Studies (STS). The first shift positions intimacy as not only relevant in STS but also as a more general epistemic concern of social scientific enquiry. The second shift is an exploration of the heterogeneous materiality of the intimate and, in particular, of its more-than-human constituencies. The third shift both reclaims and speculates about other politics of relations, including practical challenges (not only conceptual) to the way we do research. The article shows that the beings entangled, the materialities involved, the affects conveyed and the extension of the intimate all come to matter when science and technology is critically analysed, and that they challenge the traditional limits and geographies of the intimate. The paper also argues that this has important political implications for science and technology studies. By countering the invisibilisation of ‘intimate work’ through its usual association with the emotional and the domestic, the article contests the ready-made framing of the intimate as bound to the interpersonal, corporal and private. In so doing, the authors make visible the politics of relations that scientific and technological settings silently enact.

Epistemic witnessing: theoretical responsibilities, decolonial attitude and lenticular futures

Pillow explores complexities of witnessing in research linking theoretical oppression to inadequate, arrogant witnessing. Weaving narrative and reflection, Pillow considers what is engrained in theoretical oppression and reviews trauma studies engagement with witnessing as a case example. Thinking with feminist, queer and decolonial scholars, Pillow argues for epistemic witnessing based on ethical onto-epistemological responsibility driven by decolonial attitude and reparative reading. The essay is written in five phrasings, which may be read consecutively or randomly, and concludes with ideas for epistemic witnessing as reparative lenticular archives for past–present–futures.