Wave Of Scholarship Research Articles

Arminius Rex: On the Postcolonial Uses of Imperial Languages in, and beyond, International Law

Despite its aspirational name, our discipline has slowly come to understand that ‘international’ law is anything but international. Increasingly, new waves of scholarship have dissected the famous image of the ‘invisible college’, revealing many of its implicit biases and hierarchies in terms of gender, race, or nationality. A promising example of this is the recent surge of interventions that question international law’s Anglo- or Franco-centric past, present, and future. This rising chorus of voices challenge the relevance of French or highlight the violence involved in making English a global lingua franca. While one can sympathise with this critique from a postcolonial perspective, I have grown increasingly wary that some of these contributions end up pleading for an essentialist understanding of local languages in their quest to undermine imperial tongues. Instead, in this essay, I draw from the Germano-Roman mythical figure of Arminius to reflect on the postcolonial uses of imperial languages. Instead of reclaiming the vernacular, I suggest that critical and postcolonial international legal scholars can strategically inherit the legacies of hegemonic languages for anticolonial purposes. Just as Arminius drew from Latin and Rome, the Négritude movement siphoned from French – and even Postcolonial Studies were themselves forged in the crucible of British rule over Egypt and India. We too, I argue, can attempt to use the master’s tools to dismantle his house, at least temporarily.

Religion, Spirituality, and the Workplace: A Review and Critique

Religion and spirituality strongly influence how most people experience the world, and opportunities to integrate faith and work abound. Yet research on religion, spirituality, and the workplace continues to have somewhat limited impact on mainstream organizational psychology and organizational behavior research. We review the most recent generation of research in this area. We describe high-level trends in the literature and summarize consistent patterns of results linking these constructs with usually beneficial attitudinal, behavioral, and other types of criterion variables. We identify four challenges that hamper progress in this area of research: conceptualizing and measuring core constructs, finding coherence amid theoretical diversity, integrating multiple levels of analysis and explanation, and navigating religion and spirituality in organizational practice. All of these challenges point to paths forward that may usher in a new wave of scholarship using meaning systems as an integrative framework, and practices that foster inclusion, integration, and both individual and organizational well-being.

MOBILIZATION OF THE “OTHER” IN SLOVENE NATIONAL IDENTITY DURING THE 2015 REFUGEE CRISIS

In the aftermath of the 2015 European refugee crisis, a wave of scholarship has considered Eastern European populist leaderships to explain these states’ policies toward refugee influx. This article challenges these accounts by contending that relationship between influx of foreign nationals in the name of migrants into a national homeland and deteriorating national perceptions deserves greater attention to understand social strife within Slovene society against the flow. To this end, it examines Slovene intelligentsia’s policy of construction of Slovene national identity and its stereotyping Balkan ‘Other’ during the breaking up of Yugoslavia. Concretely, it applies postmodern approach that identities are fluid and benefiting from modernist theories on nationalism to explain deteriorated perceptions of post-communist Slovene society toward distinct Slovene national homeland in the time of refugee influx. The article finds that Slovene national identity that was constructed during the secession from Yugoslavia under the influences of europeanization and globalization has been re-constructed during and aftermath of the 2015 refugee crisis and the Other of Slovene identity mobilized or changed from the Balkan to the Middle East and Islam and that can be investigated through developments, a) changing perceptions of the Slovene nationals, b) Slovenia’s new asylum law, c) collaboration of Slovenia and the Balkan states d) discourses of prominent Slovenes and social media groups.

:The Making of a Roman Imperial Estate: Archaeology in the Vicus at Vagnari, Puglia

:<i>The Making of a Roman Imperial Estate: Archaeology in the Vicus at Vagnari, Puglia</i>

Ancient Racists, Color-Blindness, and Figs

Interrogating received knowledge is constitutive to any critical project, and recently there has been a wave of scholarship which argues for locating the origin of racist-thinking prior to modern Europe—even prior to the Common Era—without any real consideration of the potential dangers accompanying such a seismic redefinition. By expanding “racism” to include potentially any pre-modern xenophobic or ethnicist atrocity, even well-meaning scholarship dilutes the peculiar injustice of modern Europe’s most successful epistemological weapon. As a result, we lose any criteria to distinguish ubiquitous oppressive projects from specifically racist-projects of hegemony and domination. However laudable its intent, such scholarship falls prey to methodological, epistemological, and practical errors that hamstring the ameliorative impact of contemporary anti-racist work while ironically diminishing racism’s impact. For if every conflict is racist, then contemporary colorblindness is correct: if white supremacy isn’t particularly white, then racism is a distinction without a difference.

Synagogues in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods: Archaeological Finds, New Methods, New Theories and The Synagogue in Ancient Palestine: Current Issues and Emerging Trends

Synagogues in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods: Archaeological Finds, New Methods, New Theories and The Synagogue in Ancient Palestine: Current Issues and Emerging Trends

Consolidating a research agenda for vaccine mandates

A workshop on mandatory vaccination was pitched to the World Public Health Congress in 2019 and the resultant special issue was pitched to Vaccine in 2020. During this project, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed vaccine policy to the forefront of global public health policy, and the imposition of vaccine mandates prompted a new wave of scholarship in the field. This introductory article employs the heuristic of Lasswell’s (1956) policy cycle to synthesise the findings of the articles in the special issue. It considers the temporal lifetime of mandates and highlights findings regarding: the emergence of mandates as a policy option, public support and policy instrument design, what matters in the implementation of mandates, and what we can learn from evaluating them. The second half of the paper categorizes the included papers in terms of what aspects of mandates they study and the methods they employ to do so, in order to formulate a guide for future researchers of vaccine mandates. Scholars study either speculative or existing mandates – research can address several stages of the policy cycle or just one of them, ranging from attitudinal research to implementation studies and impact studies. Historical and contextual studies that take deep dives into a particular mandate are a much needed resource for studying emerging mandates, too, and scoping and framework- building work will undoubtedly be valuable in understanding and appreciating the wealth of knowledge production in this growing field. This special issue can serve as a roadmap for a consolidation of this interdisciplinary research agenda, and provide a helpful resource for decisionmakers at this historical juncture.

Ethnicity and Violence in Weak States: Understanding the Mechanisms

In the past decade, political violence research has been deeply shaped by the "ethnopolitical exclusion" model of conflict, a research tradition that emphasizes the group-level mechanisms connecting ethnic identity to conflict processes. This review article examines three recent books that represent a new wave of scholarship that studies how different social, political, and institutional processes give rise to ethnically-organized violence. These works make several notable contributions. They move beyond static, structuralist approaches for understanding the emergence of ethnic "grievances" and focus attention on the dynamic processes and state policies that amplify or curb the political salience of ethnic appeals. They also shed new light on the nuanced role that ethnic demographic distributions play in the onset and termination of intrastate conflict.

Aristotle’s New Clothes: Mechanistic Readings of the Master Teleologist

Abstract Aristotle has traditionally been cast as the arch-enemy of all things mechanistic. Given the dichotomy long thought to exist between mechanistic and teleological schools of thought, there is a satisfying irony in discovering veins of apparently ‘mechanistic’ thought within the work of the definitive teleologist. Several waves of scholarship in the past century have argued, from different angles, for mechanistic interpretations of Aristotle’s natural philosophy. The present generation is no exception: in the last decade, Jean De Groot, Monte Johnson, and Tiberiu Popa have variously argued that a mechanistic vein can be found in Aristotle’s work, despite his undeniable teleological credentials. This paper explores the assumptions—some of them open to question—that accompany such advocacy. It will urge some terminological refinements, and turn a skeptical lens on some aspects of these projects. Nonetheless, it will stress that they open promising lines of inquiry, avoiding some of the limitations of earlier ventures into this territory.

Reimagining the World: Decolonisation and the Promise of Development

The 1975 World Conference on Women marked the beginning of the United Nations Decade for Women. The conference report, written soon afterwards, underlined that ‘the issue of inequality that affects the vast majority of women of the world is closely linked with the problem of under-development which exists as a result not only of unsuitable internal structures but also of a profoundly unjust world economic system’. This type of holistic and more radical understanding of (under)development has usually been lost in mainstream accounts of the history of development as a colonial endeavour or as a Western-imposed set of values and templates rooted in modernisation theory. A recent wave of scholarship, however, has sought to recover the agency of the ‘Global South’ in the history of internationalism and development, uncovering the plurality of internationalisms and the variety of political imaginaries that shaped twentieth-century ideas of development.

The history of public health in the modern Middle East: The environmental–medical turn

AbstractThe field of Middle Eastern history began as an attempt to understand how Europeans came to dominate the region. As a result, when medicine and the environment were discussed, they were used to highlight European technological and scientific advances in these fields, and describe the processes through which Islamic medical and scientific concepts were replaced. The first wave of scholarship on the history of medicine in the region focused primarily on 19th‐century Egypt, where the state sponsored the development of a public health system to protect military readiness and combat epidemic diseases such as cholera and plague. This article highlights recent scholarship in the history of health, medicine, and the environment during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and illustrates how this lens (the “environmental‐medical turn”) provides new perspectives on the social and political history of the Middle East. I argue that the environmental‐medical turn provides a new avenue for locating illiterate members of society—the peasant and middle classes—in the archive; by exploring moments of crisis leading to protest and rebellion, and examining data revealing hardship and suffering, Middle Eastern historians can explore the complex roots of social and political events, and historians of medicine and the environment can include the region in transnational and comparative studies.

The Status of Status in World Politics

ABSTRACTWhat is status? How does it work? What effects does it tend to have? A new wave of scholarship on status in international relations has converged on a central definition of status, several causal pathways, and the claim that the pursuit of status tends to produce conflict. The authors take stock of the status literature and argue that this convergence is not only a sign of progress, but also an obstacle to it. They find that the consensus definition conceals critical contradictions between standing and membership, that its causal pathways are promising but often in tension with each other, and that the literature may be overlooking the ways in which status can help states avoid conflict and promote cooperation under certain conditions.

Changing writing/writing for change

AbstractThe political potential of unconventional and even transgressive forms of writing in management and organization studies has been invigorated in recent years through an explicit connection with feminist theories, ideas, and practices. The results have been a new wave of scholarship that brings together the personal, the political, and the theoretical as a means to intervene in masculine orthodoxy of organizational writing. This intervention seeks to change what and how we understand organizational phenomena, with an ultimate goal of transforming practice toward a more equal and egalitarian future. We introduce five papers that responded to a call to explore the intersections between change and academic writing, as well as an exploration of alternatives to dominant masculine academic writing styles. Such writing, we aver, might facilitate change not just in the academy, but also in organizations and by extension, society.

A New Wave of Research on Civilizational Politics

AbstractA new wave of scholarship has made major advances in how we understand the politics of civilizational identity by drawing powerfully from conceptual tools developed over the years to study other forms of identity. What unites this wave is treating civilizations not as distinctive “things” that might “clash” but as meaningful social imaginings. This growing body of work is far from monolithic, generating alternative theories that should structure scholarly debate going forward. Central issues include whether civilizational identity is primarily elite led or mass driven, whether it inherently involves conflictual human impulses, what the role of religion and values are in driving it, what its relationship is to nationalism, and how similarly we can expect the countries and people who share civilizational identity to behave. We also find emerging debates on what this newly conceptualized civilizational identity explains in contemporary world politics. Social scientists are now only beginning to apply important tools of social science to this question, with even public opinion research in its infancy. Early findings suggest civilizational identity may be shaping not only elite foreign policy making but also patterns of domestic politics, including the recent rise of populism and levels of democracy and authoritarianism more generally.

Bridging the gap: the case for an \u2018Incompletely Theorized Agreement\u2019 on AI policy

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) raises a wide array of ethical and societal concerns. Accordingly, an appropriate policy approach is urgently needed. While there has been a wave of scholarship in this field, the research community at times appears divided amongst those who emphasize ‘near-term’ concerns and those focusing on ‘long-term’ concerns and corresponding policy measures. In this paper, we seek to examine this alleged ‘gap’, with a view to understanding the practical space for inter-community collaboration on AI policy. We propose to make use of the principle of an ‘incompletely theorized agreement’ to bridge some underlying disagreements, in the name of important cooperation on addressing AI’s urgent challenges. We propose that on certain issue areas, scholars working with near-term and long-term perspectives can converge and cooperate on selected mutually beneficial AI policy projects, while maintaining their distinct perspectives.

Source Note: The Textual Record of Climate Change at Sea

Abstract Anthropogenic climate change is today transforming Earth’s oceans with alarming speed, imperiling the fate of all of us on land. Preindustrial and overwhelmingly natural climate changes were, in the Holocene, far smaller in scale and speed than those of today. Yet they too reshaped the oceans and thereby powerfully influenced historical societies. This short essay aims to inspire a new wave of scholarship on the social impacts of past climate change at sea by introducing environmental historians to the rich and still largely underexploited treasure trove of sources that make such work possible. It describes these sources and their relative merits; explains how they can be used to identify, or “reconstruct,” periods of past climate change; and shows how they may be used to reveal human responses to those changes. It devotes special attention to the preindustrial period, for which scholarship is especially scant, and to textual evidence from archives in Europe and North America, which is plentiful as early as the seventeenth century. Uniquely, it shows how these sources may be used to write environmental histories of the oceans.

Children in the biblical world: The next generation of childhood and biblical studies

AbstractResearch on children in the bible and biblical lands has continued to reveal more children and more voices. This essay begins with an overview of two entry points into the subject, looking first at the field of childhood and religion, and second at the field of children in the bible and biblical lands. Concentrating on the second entry point, the essay moves to a discussion of the recent volumes embracing literary criticism as well as scholarship on children in material culture and biblical texts through a comparative lens. This essay includes a discussion of the next wave of scholarship: those scholars recently finished with or currently working on dissertations, and those scholars reassessing previous works on children in the bible. It ends with an eye to the future, thinking about naming the field and how scholarship on children in the bible will continue to evolve.

‘We have the same enemies’: Simone de Beauvoir and the silent feminism of C. Wright Mills

ABSTRACT During the last two decades, there has been a surge of interdisciplinary interest in the writings of the radical twentieth-century sociologist C. Wright Mills, and one of the central issues in this wave of scholarship has been the Mills’ relationship to feminism and the place of sex and gender in his social theory. Contemporary scholars assert that Mills was largely ignorant about feminism or even hostile to it and that his social theory basically ignores issues of sex and gender. As this essay shows, the existing consensus is fundamentally mistaken. Mills’ social theory of sex and gender and his emerging critique of patriarchy were heavily influenced by the ‘silent feminists,’ Shira Tarrant's name for the leading women social scientists and philosophers of the 1930s and 40s. Though an analysis of Mills’ Character and Social Structure and White Collar, I show that Mills’ anti-essentialist conception of gender was inspired by the work of anthropologist Margaret Mead, sociologist Viola Klein, and psychoanalyst Karen Horney. Likewise, through an analysis of Mills’ review of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, I show that not only is his critique of Beauvoir rooted in his readings of the silent feminists but also that Beauvoir’s influence on Mills’ thought can be traced through his most popular works, The Power Elite and The Sociological Imagination.

The rhetorical works of the school of Gaza

Abstract This paper surveys the rhetorical works of the so-called School of Gaza of the late fifth and early sixth centuries in light of the recent wave of scholarship on the School. It focuses on themes, rhetorical genres, and structural features. The Gazan repertoire includes “real life” orations, declamations, dialexeis, progymnasmatic pieces, and oratorical paratexts such as preliminary dialexeis and protheōriai. The paper seeks to provide a map to this important but neglected body of texts, synthesizing recent scholarship and adding some of the author’s own observations along the way.

What, if Anything, Can the History of Emotions Learn from the Neurosciences?

The last decade has seen a wave of scholarship on both the history of emotions and the affective and social neurosciences. Both disciplines promote the view that emotions serve partly cognitive and goal-driven functions and are thus susceptible to change. Differences are, however, marked in understanding the nature of the change in question. Is it rooted in social constructivism or neuroplasticity? Are these two paradigms mutually exclusive or compatible? Is it even possible or intellectually sound to utilize ‘laboratory-produced’ and isolated data in historical studies? Nevertheless, in light of recent research on the connections between the history of emotions and the neurosciences the article suggests that the interplay between the historical and brain-scientific knowledge may be more fruitful than has previously been understood. Thus far the implications of the critical and social brain sciences for the history of emotions remain to be worked out. This article proposes an intellectual move from linguistically defined constructivism towards a more corporeal understanding of emotions with a constructivist element. This leads us theoretically towards an understanding of emotions as biocultural, historically changing experiences and intellectual concepts, which, however, possess certain transcultural continuities. The article highlights the intrinsic and dynamic relationship between pan-human characteristics and cultural, normative and temporal variance in emotions. However, the article explores the methodological difficulties and dangers of applying specific brain-scientific data to historical study. The difficulty arises mainly from the academic distance between the history of emotions and the neurosciences.