Suchergebnisse

This article asks what it means to habituate a queer orientation in a world permeated by digital connectivity. In doing so, it takes media phenomenology away from the mundane towards the momentous, drawing on queer phenomenology, and existential media studies. Using life-narrative interviews with sexual minorities in Russia, the article sheds light on the "work of queer habituation" in a straight world, and the contemporary significance of digital media technologies within this process. Digital media's ability to multiply space is defined a key feature which offers sites to "stay with" the disorienting experience of queer dispositions. Through longer periods of discrete "queer digital dwelling," individuals who have been associating their queer desires with ontological threats are able to find space for existence and existential security. By locating others in close proximity, some are also allowed to appropriate local territory in ways that make it more livable.

A university campus is a critical site to analyze the day-to day experiences of custodial staff and to examine the practices janitors employ to manage the negative social attitudes commonly associated with their positions. Building on service work literature, this paper asks how janitors create more value and meaning within low-status jobs. With data collected from in-depth interviews, observations of worksites at a public university, and in the janitors' local union office, I argue that within higher education institutions, janitors find ways to add value to their jobs in two ways: taking on non-compensated roles such as parental surrogates or university historians and participating in various types of resistance on a personal and/or community level. Participating in these processes, the janitors themselves report feeling more fulfilled in the job, and they establish the importance of their work, beyond the broom and mop.

Abstract'Financialization' refers to a variety of processes characterized by the increased prevalence of financial actors and logics in contemporary capitalist societies. Borrowing from Mills, I suggest that financialization may fruitfully be understood as the institutionalization of a financial vocabulary of motive. Mills argues that the type of reasons we give and the type of reasons we accept as legitimate varies, dependent on the social setting. The financial vocabulary of motive requires actors to motivate their actions by analogical extension of key concepts, ideas and paradigmatic problem solutions from modern finance theory. Analysing documents and 44 oral history interviews, I study the implementation of Solvency II—a European regulatory framework for insurance capital that transforms how insurers evaluate their assets and liabilities. To prevent the immediate failure of insurers' traditional business models, insurers had to re-articulate past practices in the language of financial risk management.

The World Bank is an international financial institution responsible for issuing loans, grants, aids, etcetera to states and multinational corporations for the purpose of carrying out reconstruction and development projects and investments, respectively. Several criticisms have trailed the World Bank's project financing, especially with regards to the conditionality of economic restructuring usually imposed thereto. However, in 2013, the World Bank realigned its goal toward reducing poverty to less than 3 percent by 2030. Mechanisms such as the Poverty Reduction Strategic Paper (PRSP), Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO) were created toward this end. It is in view of the foregoing that this paper examined the impact of World Bank assisted projects on poverty alleviation. This paper concluded that for the Bank to achieve its goal at the set date, a purposive approach must be adopted to ensure the participation of the various stakeholders in the poverty alleviation process.

The Western defeat in Afghanistan was due to an inadequate process of strategic reflection informed, first, by an overestimation of the attractiveness of the Western political agenda to Afghans and, second, by overconfidence in the effectiveness of its military approach. As a corollary, popular support for the Taliban was underestimated. The insurgents possessed a degree of what we term strategic cohesion—a sociopolitical and military embeddedness within society—that produced a far stronger strategic effectiveness than we could replicate in our Afghan allies. Furthermore, a military-professional mindset underestimated the degree to which political considerations permeated the battlefield. The political effect of military actions was insufficiently integrated into strategic practice. Specifically, the linchpin officer in staff planning and field operations in Western armies struggled to act as what we term strategic colonels. In both respects, the war continues to offer important lessons for Western involvement in future conflict, including with Russia and China.

Abstract
Fake news and conspiracy theories are current problems that are increasingly influencing political and social processes. In particular, whether and how legal action should be taken against them, for example, on internet platforms and social networks, is a matter of current debate. Philosophers already discussed the legal relevance of truthfulness at the Enlightenment, where the basis of modern legal systems was drafted. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, argued for an unconditional duty of truthfulness, which is why he has been accused of a rigorous view even today. I will present a less rigorous interpretation, in which lies are always ethically reprehensible but can only be prosecuted if they violate an external legal good. That means, based on Kant's Philosophy, fake news cannot be forbidden in general. However, fake news that inevitably leads to legal damage must be prosecuted, such as inciting violence or giving bad medical advice.

Abstract
The introduction to the special issue on 'Digital Platforms in Contemporary India: Transformation of Quotidian Life Worlds' focuses on the ways in which everyday interactions in contemporary India have changed since the arrival of digital platforms. Locating these changes within their specific contexts, the essays in the special issue examine the new circulatory assemblages and representational tropes that emerge through interactions between diverse platforms and their various users. In particular, the essays trace the different ways in which bodies, mobilities, and platforms are entangled in everyday life in an unfolding phenomenon. This introduction outlines the new spatiotemporal shifts catalyzed by the platformization of everyday activities in India, drawing connections among the various essays in the special issue. The introduction attempts to map these shifts as part of a two-way process, which acknowledges that the resulting transformations also have the potential for reimagining the existing logic of platforms.

Reflection refers to an activity or process in which our lived experience is recalled, considered, and critically evaluated. Reflective practice is an increasingly accepted methodology for professional development. Such practice develops an ability of continuous learning while creatively applying current and past experiences along with reasoning to unfamiliar events as they occur. Reflective practice helps doctors to maintain their professional competence on existing knowledge, attitude and behavior. Narrative writing, in this regard, is one of the several ways of reflective practice in which practitioners regularly write reflections about their situation, thought, and action. The reflective practice, also known as 'Narrative medicine', has been widely used in medical field. Such practice of narrative medicine can lead to produce more 'humane' doctors who can improve the treatment satisfaction in both, the doctors and patients. Hence, narrative writings can improve the treatment and increase the professional competence of the doctors.

Detroit is in the midst of a contemporary urban renewal project that is being carried out through green gentrification. The displacement of residents is happening through the discursive and political management of the water system, which produces conditions that leave residents with few options for remaining in the city. In this article, I explore how resource management, particularly water and wastewater infrastructure, has been used to degrade the political efficacy of Black Detroit residents. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis of news articles and government reports, I argue that in recent years the city of Detroit has developed a wasting economy. This political-economic structure relies on the coupling of deconstructive and constructive processes that promote the withering of citizenship in order to make way for radical racial transformation in access to and control over the city.
Keywords: Green gentrification, environmental racism, infrastructural violence, embodied metabolism

This study explored the influence of proactive personality on employee radical creativity along with the role of teams' domain knowledge and employees' role clarity as moderators of this relationship. We distributed a survey to obtain data from 290 supervisor–employee dyads in
China, and tested our hypotheses via a conditional process analysis. The results show that the moderating effect of domain knowledge on the positive relationship between proactive personality and employee radical creativity was nonsignificant. However, role clarity had a significant moderating
effect on the moderating role of domain knowledge in the relationship between proactive personality and employee radical creativity; that is to say, the relationship between proactive personality and radical creativity was most strongly positive when both teams' domain knowledge and employees'
role clarity were at a high level. These findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical significance.

This visual autoethnography aims to understand how the significant event of moving house forces us to consider the materiality of our lives and the intimate relationships we have with our belongings. Situated at the intersection of anthropological studies on the home and materiality, this study looks at the ways these fields interact to reveal new conceptions of responsibility over the social life of things. Using autoethnographic methods, this research is embedded in my personal embodied experience of moving house, with particular emphasis on the sensory and subjective elements of this process, as highlighted through photographs and descriptive vignettes. This study delves into the decisions behind whether we keep, throw away, or pass on our things, interwoven with discussions around our moral obligations to the material lifeworlds of our stuff. It explores how our possessions reflect our relationships, our heritage, and ourselves.

This article introduces the Peace Negotiations in Civil Conflicts (PNCC) dataset, which identifies whether a state-party and rival non-state armed group is in the formal negotiation phase of a peace process. The PNCC goes beyond recording instances of peace talks by offering a conceptual framework to identify when a government-rebel group dyad is at risk of formal negotiations. It explicitly considers issues central in event-history modelling, including censoring and the observation period. The PNCC also provides detailed information on negotiations, including the date and location of peace talks, and whether negotiations were bilateral or through mediation. The PNCC is the first source to distinguish mediated and non-mediated civil conflict negotiations under a single framework. Structured over the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset with global coverage for 1975-2013, the PNCC is integrable to commonly used civil war datasets.

AbstractBackgroundPeople with intellectual disabilities are at risk of experiencing stigma and require the skills and confidence to deal with stigma in their daily lives.MethodDevelopment and piloting of a 5‐session manualised psychosocial group intervention designed to increase the capacity of people with intellectual disabilities aged 16+ to manage and resist stigma. Ten pre‐existing groups (N = 67) in third sector and education settings participated. Interviews with participants (n = 26), facilitators (n = 9) and significant others (n = 7) 2–4 months after the intervention assessed perceived impact.ResultsPerceived benefits of the intervention for participants included increased understanding, improved connections with others, drive for advocacy, increased activity and self‐efficacy, and opportunity to process difficult events and emotions. Differential impact depending on individuals' pre‐existing self‐advocacy skills was noted.ConclusionsThis early‐stage study indicates that further evaluation is merited to examine feasibility and outcomes of the STORM intervention.

This paper traverses the relationship between wo/man, metal, and the more-than-human world. Drawing for new materialisms, specifically Bennett's (2004, 2009) notion of (metallurgic) thing-power and IJsseling's (1997) conceptualization of mimesis, we entangle our (posthuman) perspectives with scenes from a popular science fiction show, The Mandalorian. Specifically, we are interested in how a fictional metal with extraordinary vibrant properties, known as beskar, reflects/mirrors aspects of identity articulation and formation for the show's main protagonist, Din Djarin. Using a (mimetic) narrative approach, we constructed two composite narratives around two scenes depicting the aliveness of beskar in different ways. We also make an argument for the further interrogation into the way that metals are mined, manufactured, and manipulated and how these processes factor into the making and un-making of what it means to be human in a more-than-human world.

The Ergenekon trials were among the most controversial issues in the recent political history of Turkey. It is still worth reconsidering the liberal, nationalist, and socialist-left circles' variegated responses to the subject matter. The first two were doomed to fail since each attached itself to one side of the intra-state struggles. Although the socialist left's approach was enlightening in many ways, there is a significant shortcoming in its theoretical references to explain the inherent transnational rivalries. An alternative research agenda offered by the Amsterdam School could enrich its conceptual toolkit in more comprehensive ways. To evaluate this potentiality, we need to engage in two conceptual problems regarding the theory: 1) Could the concept of state-class be helpful to analyze the political economy of Turkey's Ergenekon trials? 2) Could any key social/class force be distinguished to shed light upon the transnational aspect of the process?