Unequal World Research Articles

What role can a homoeopathic psychiatrist play in restoring mental health in an unequal world?

World Mental Health Day, observed on the 10 October, is an occasion for the mental health professionals to dedicate themselves to bringing succour to the numerous persons suffering from mental health disorders. The World Mental Health Federation has declared this year’s theme as ‘Mental Health in an Unequal world.’ The call is timely considering the distress wrought on different communities due to the pandemic and the social and economic distress which has affected all sections of the population, albeit with different intensities causing differing impacts. The article explores the theme in the historical context and outlines the various concerns which mental health professionals should concern themselves with. It is a common knowledge that they are in short supply all over the world. Homoeopaths, due to their approach to health, disease and individuals are uniquely equipped to fill this gap and thus make a difference. There are very few examples, at the institutional level, where community-based activities addressing the mental health issues have been successfully undertaken and have made an impact. The article draws on the almost two-decade-long experience of the Department of Homoeopathic Psychiatry, Dr. M. L. Dhawale Memorial Homoeopathic Institute in this area, thereby illustrating the possibility of incorporating similar practices in the District Mental Health Programme. Clinical activity needs to be reported in peer-reviewed journals and initiating research in priority areas would help homoeopathy to be recognised as a discipline which can be a part of Integrated Mental Health Care for mental disorders.

Climate policy in an unequal world: Assessing the cost of risk on vulnerable households

Policy makers concerned with setting optimal values for carbon instruments to address climate change externalities often employ integrated assessment models (IAMs). In the past, these tools have relied on representative agent assumptions or other restrictive behaviour and welfare aggregations. However, there is an important trend in the economics of climate change towards including a greater degree of heterogeneity. In the face of global inequality and significant vulnerability of asset poor households, we relax the complete markets assumption and introduce a realistic degree of global household inequality. In contrast to the representative agent framework, we find that a household's position on the global wealth distribution predicts the identity of their most-preferred carbon price. Specifically, poor agents prefer strong public action against climate change to mitigate the risk for which they are implicitly more vulnerable. We find that the carbon tax fills the role of insurance, reducing the volatility of future welfare. It is this role that drives the wedge between rich and poor households’ policy preferences, even in the absence of redistribution. Taking into account the risk channel, we derive an optimal tax value four times larger than standard estimates from representative agent models.

Mental Health in an Unequal World - The Role of Social Determinants

The world, particularly in the past decade was shaped by events that exposed the drastic inequalities in modern-day societies. The social scientists and policy makers have looked at the interactions between these inequalities and health/illness. These interactions play a key role in the prevention, precipitation and treatment outcomes of mental health problems. The relevance of social determinants are often shaped by public policies that is a reflection of prevailing political ideologies. Adding to the problem is also a chronic underfunding in mental health creating a mental health treatment gap. Tackling these inequalities and understanding these social determinants, particularly in mental health and illness, will be key in the years ahead. The article will look to explore the social determinants, especially in the context of mental illness, in this unequal world.

Inequalities in the adaptive cycle: reorganizing after disasters in an unequal world

Natural hazards can trigger disasters that lead to the collapse and reorganization of social-ecological systems. This reorganization can involve systems transitioning to more positive trajectories. The Panarchy framework, which conceptualizes social-ecological systems as dynamic interrelated adaptive cycles, is a common conceptual framework for understanding system reorganization. However, it is unclear how inequalities, social mechanisms known to influence disaster recovery outcomes, shape a system's adaptive cycle post-disaster. Understanding the roles of inequalities can help develop social-ecological models to identify processes that build resilience into disaster recovery. We applied the Panarchy framework to inform propositions describing how inequalities can influence the reorganization of social-ecological systems after disasters triggered by natural hazards. We qualitatively analyzed a selection of case studies that discussed inequalities pre- and post-disasters and related these to adaptive-cycle system characteristics (i.e., potential, connectedness, and resilience). We identified three propositions: 1) The ability of groups to reorganize after a disaster varies across the inequality spectrum; 2) The reorganizing abilities of groups across the inequality spectrum impact one another; and 3) The presence of inequalities affect connectedness within the system. Incorporating these propositions into social-ecological system modeling can improve our understanding of how inequalities impact system reorganization. This information can support disaster recovery plans that strengthen a system's ability to enter a more positive trajectory post-disaster.

Urban equality and the SDGs: three provocations for a relational agenda

We live in an increasingly urban, increasingly unequal world. This is nowhere more evident than in cities of the global South, where many residents face deep injustices in their ability to access vital services, participate in decision-making or to have their rights recognised as citizens. In this regard, the rallying cry of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to ‘leave no one behind’ offers significant potential to guide urbanisation processes towards more equitable outcomes, particularly for the urban poor. Yet the SDGs have also faced a series of criticisms which have highlighted the gaps and silences in moving towards a transformative agenda. This article explores the potentials of adopting a relational lens to read the SDGs, as a mechanism to navigate these internal contradictions and critiques and build pathways to urban equality. In particular, it offers three questions if we want to place urban equality at the heart of the agenda: who owns the city; who produces knowledge about the city; and who is visible in the city? Drawing from the practices of organised groups of the urban poor, this article outlines the key lessons for orienting this agenda towards the relational and transformative aims of urban equality.

The Making of Global Inequality

This article is a history of postwar discourse on an unequal world. This discourse was profoundly shaped by new influences: quantitative data and an expanding inequality research infrastructure, the “birth of development,” decolonization, human rights, the global Cold War, and theories of the world as one integrated global system. Examining academic journal articles written in English, this article traces the emergence of global inequality in the aftermath of the World Food Crisis of 1972–1975. Originally, global inequality was as much about power as about income differentials, mainly referring to multiple inequalities between the so-called Third World and the First. However, even as the late 1960s and the 1970s saw an increased politicization of the discourse on an unequal world, global inequality did not become a key concept in the 1970s.

Remaking international higher education for an unequal world

AbstractPrior to the current global health crisis, the value, and benefits of international education for different social groups have been questioned. Critics of the internationalisation of education emphasise that international student mobility only favours the elites in society but has disadvantaged for those groups with less fortunate socioeconomic status. In view of the COVID‐19 pandemic, leading scholars in the field of international higher education believe that a broad‐based global crisis for higher education has emerged, of which one major consequence is intensifying inequality in education during and after the pandemic crisis. This article sets out against the COVID‐19 pandemic crisis context to critically examine whether and how Asian students would continue going abroad for studies. Special attention is given to those major factors that shape the destination choices of students and their desire for international education. Based on a survey on Asian students' overseas learning preferences, this article reflects upon the future of international higher education from the geo‐political and socio‐psychological perspectives. This article also highlights the major challenges that hinder international higher education development and draws crucial lessons from the impact of the COVID‐19 crisis on such a development.

Manufacturing Obedience: Coercion and Authority in Border Controls

This article reassesses the relationship between state authority and violence in the context of border controls. Drawing on empirical research conducted with immigration and police officers in the UK, I show that the use of force in this context give rise to distinctively complex ethical questions which shape institutional and individual practices, and is entangled with the legally and politically fragile authority wielded by frontline staff. Faced with a morally, socially and politically controversial mandate, these officers devise a range of strategies to either minimize or conceal the use of violence. In doing so, they sometimes fall into oxymorons and euphemisms that at once evidence the shady line between coercion and consent, and shed light on the some of the profound moral dilemmas they encounter in doing border work. These dilemmas, I conclude, speak of broader challenges to the exercise of state coercive power, and the negotiated, contingent and provisional nature of state authority in a globalized, postcolonial and profoundly unequal world. I also argue for the social and intellectual urge to integrate the study of immigration enforcement in contemporary debates of state penality.

The path to global equity in mental health care in the context of COVID-19

The theme of the 2021 World Mental Health Day is “Mental Health in an Unequal World”, highlighting unequal access to mental health care across the world. This situation has been further worsened by governmental and public responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The response of many high-income countries (HICs) and institutions to the pandemic has been the reverse of equity, exemplified by inequitable access to COVID-19 vaccines and widening inequities in wealth.1 A crucial consideration in this context is the imbalance in social and economic factors that shape onset and outcomes of mental health across communities and countries.

World Mental Health Day: prioritise social justice, not only access to care

World Mental Health Day (WMHD), which began in 1992, is focused on “Mental Health in an Unequal World” in 2021, encompassing issues of poverty and disparities due to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity. The theme underlines a need to address stigma and discrimination and human rights violations in the mental health sector and inadequate quality mental health services worldwide.

Killing asylum softly or leaving no one behind? The New York declaration and global compacts in a divided world

ABSTRACT This paper explores the competition and interrelationship between a cooperative approach to protection of refugees pursued through the United Nations – one that seeks to ‘leave no one behind’ – and externalization practices that deflect obligations for refugees. The New York Declaration and Global Compacts present a welcome contrast to discourses concerning a crisis in sovereignty. Nevertheless, the catch-cry of the SDGs, ‘leave no one behind’ which features prominently in these documents may serve to mask many states’ determination to provide just, or not even ‘enough’ [Moyn, 2018. Not enough: Human rights in an unequal world. Harvard University Press] for refugees on the premise that these others must be demobilized (in the case of refugees and asylum seekers) or contracted to do the humanitarian heavy lifting (in the case of host states).

Introduction: Critical Criminology for the 21st Century

Introduction: Critical Criminology for the 21st Century

Reopening Agaat: Afrikaans, Encyclopedic Narrative, World Literature

ABSTRACT This essay offers a meditation on Marlene van Niekerk’s 2004 novel Agaat as an encyclopedic (or, more exactly, a counter-encyclopedic) narrative, as defined – controversially – by Edward Mendelson in an influential 1976 polemic. It emphasizes Agaat’s historic specificity as a postapartheid novel par excellence: as one that does not instigate, but rather annuls an ethnic-national culture. In other words it considers the ways in which Agaat both fits and inverts Mendelson’s specifications and the ways in which these specifications have been challenged by recent critics. In doing so, the essay tests out the idea that the novel at its limits is paradoxical, not only in its simultaneously curatorial and destructive aspects, but also in the ways it both resists and invites translation. It reads Van Niekerk’s literary accomplishment in light of her understanding of the position of minority languages in a desperately unequal world and her attraction to (and recoil from) an outmoded, but also utopian notion of the shamanic possibilities of the mother tongue. It also reflects, from personal experience, on the ways in which the novel encourages, but also works against what Rebecca Walkowitz has termed “collective possessiveness” and “native reading.”

Hauntings Across the Divide: Transdisciplinary Activism, Dualisms, and the Ghosts of Racism in Engineering and Humanities Education.

In this paper, we report on an intervention across continents and disciplines that brought together differently positioned students in South Africa and the USA. A collaboration between our classes—an introductory Geographic Information Systems (GIS) class in South Africa and a composition class in the United States—was facilitated and investigated by us. The point of departure of the intervention was to service socially just and anti-racist pedagogies through experimentation. Drawing on posthumanist, feminist, and new materialist theory, we investigate the hauntings of several prejudices and stereotypical tropes that foster racism. We link the concept of hauntology to Plumwood’s (1993) theorization of dualisms. We then draw a cartography of geomatics education in South Africa, focusing on the subjectification of geomatics graduates in particular and engineering graduates in general. We then zoom to our collaboration, and focus on several interactions amongst the cohorts to show instances of hauntings that perpetuate anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and related silences. We find that analysis of dualisms can highlight racist hauntings, and can also provide guidance on how to flatten hierarchies. Our transdisciplinary activism allows us to harness the positivity of difference to trouble binaries. We conclude with some thoughts on pandemic pedagogy in an unequal world.

Phenomenological Variation and Intercultural Transformation: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology and Abu-Lughod’s Ethnography in Dialogue

"This paper develops phenomenological resources for understanding the nature of intercultural understanding, drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty in dialogue with feminist anthropologist Abu-Lughod. Part One criticizes Western framings of non-Western violence against women that render the experience of non-Western Others inaccessible. Part Two discusses how certain strains in Western feminism reinforce some of these problematic framings. Part Three offers a phenomenological account of our experience of other persons, and Part Four argues that intercultural understanding takes the form of a “variation” between one’s own and the other’s experience. Part Five explores the implications of this phenomenology of cross-cultural understanding for interpreting dynamic cultural transformations, and the politics of violence against women, in an interconnected and unequal world. Keywords: Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Lila Abu-Lughod; critical phenomenology; feminist anthropology; multiculturalism "

Emerging Conversations in Critical Internationalization Studies

In this paper, we introduce our special issue, “Internationalization for an Uncertain Future: Emerging Conversations in Critical Internationalization Studies.” In addition to reviewing the individual contributions to this issue, we also consider emerging areas of inquiry in the field of critical internationalization studies (CIS), and invite consideration of how the field might responsibly confront the challenges, complexities, and possibilities that emerge in efforts to imagine and practice internationalization otherwise in today’s complex, uncertain, and unequal world.

The Language of Pandemic Leaderships: Mapping Political Rhetoric During the COVID-19 Outbreak.

This article maps political rhetoric by national leaders during the COVID‐19 pandemic. We identify and characterize global variations in major rhetorical storylines invoked in publicly available speeches (N = 1201) across a sample of 26 countries. Employing a text analytics or corpus linguistics approach, we show that state heads rhetorically lead their nations by: enforcing systemic interventions, upholding global unity, encouraging communal cooperation, stoking national fervor, and assuring responsive governance. Principal component analysis further shows that country‐level rhetoric is organized along emergent dimensions of cultural cognition: an agency‐structure axis to define the loci of pandemic interventions and a hierarchy‐egalitarianism axis which distinguishes top‐down enforcement from bottom‐up calls for cooperation. Furthermore, we detect a striking contrast between countries featuring populist versus cosmopolitan rhetoric, which diverged in terms of their collective meaning making around leading over versus leading with, as well as their experienced pandemic severity. We conclude with implications for understanding global pandemic leadership in an unequal world and the contributions of mixed‐methods approaches to a generative political psychology in times of crisis. Highlights During a global pandemic, political leaders must adapt their rhetoric to local societal conditions. Our work affirms the importance of political governance that elevates strong institutions while empowering public cooperation, but cautions that these may be most readily enacted in more democratic and economically developed contexts. In poorer, less democratic settings, rhetoric emphasizing accountable governance should be responsive to bottom‐up grassroots efforts in local communities, in contrast to the tightening grip of top‐down militarized policing in states witnessing the opportunistic creep of authoritarianism during a period of societal disorder. Finally, rhetoric where leaders uphold global ideals underscore wider identities of international collaborations in a global crisis, in contrast to more insularizing nationalistic rhetoric.

Wildness, infinity and freedom

Biodiversity risks losing relevance in an increasingly urbanised, unequal and disembodied world. Beyond basic material needs, we might gain the greatest well-being from eudaimonia – the freedom to flourish and live meaningfully. Immersion in nature improves the fundamentals of eudaimonia: psychological, emotional and social health. This presents an opportunity to re-frame biodiversity from a passive entity needing to be saved by ‘good people’ to a catalyst in the quest to become good. Drawing on the capability approach, I propose that wild landscapes – defined as self-willed, ecologically complex communities comprising functioning ecosystems – are mediums that facilitate our search for meaning. Features of wild landscapes (organisms, habitats, structures) stimulate unique perception and experience that afford the elements of self-meaning (ideas, narratives, memories). Ecological processes (succession, disturbance, dispersal) generate dynamic perceptual experiences, which improves our ability to comprehend meaning by restoring cognitive functions and relational values. Functioning ecosystems continually create and permute features in space and time, instantiating ever-varying patterns from which to adapt meaning as our contexts and aspirations change. Wild landscapes thus provide infinite value for our freedom to become. As widening income inequity amplifies asymmetric power structures, increasing the agency of those who seek to improve society is one pathway to a sustainable future.

Making Better Numbers through Bioethnographic Collaboration

ABSTRACTIn this article, I describe my ongoing bioethnographic collaboration with a multidisciplinary team of exposure scientists in environmental engineering and health. First, I explain how and why integrating ethnography and number‐based disciplines is such a complex, time‐consuming, and worthwhile process, when ethnography produces a kind of excessive “big data” that is not easily enumerated. Then I describe three of our current bioethnographic projects that seek to make better numbers about how (1) neighborhoods, (2) water distribution, and (3) employment and chemical exposures shape bodily processes in a highly unequal world. To conclude, I reflect on how we might harness ethnographic excess for making better numbers and thus better knowledge, and also how bioethnographic collaboration inevitably transforms ethnography even as we insist on its excess. [collaboration, methodology, ethnography, big data, biomedical science]

Knowledge in an age of transition

Immanuel Wallerstein was one among those social scientists who constantly confront their analyses of the structures of injustice and inequality with the problem of the future. As a modern thinker, he provided rationalized forms of forecasting that proved correct previsions. He was right in anticipating the timing and configuration of the age of transition we are currently living, particularly as much as the pandemics informs global historical change and functions as a new social regulator across different arenas. Wallerstein engaged in the future as an expert as well as a public intellectual concerned about the present of world politics. This attitude is coherent with his understanding of global historical social change. For involving social theory into public debate may inform culture through knowledge and participate into ongoing transformations, in order to move towards a less unjust and less unequal world. This tension towards the future calls for a deep understanding of the political and transformative role of social theory in this age of transition, which can occur through the intellectual transgression of the spatiotemporal borders of modernity wherein social theory has given legitimacy to its own epistemological foundations.