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Staring out my window: Reflexivity and relationality in research in a Covid-19 world
Get PDFIn March 2020 I faced a research crisis. Like many PhD students, my project quickly fell apart and I was faced with writing a PhD on migration while stood still in London. In this article I explore the techniques I used to try to write about movement through conscious stasis and what this can tell us about the nature of fieldwork. I explore my attempts to answer these problems through experiments in autoethnography and communal storytelling. Both of these methods were attempts on my behalf to think through what it means to do ethical research in the face of a climate crisis and a pandemic. As such, I explore the ways in which using them changed my thinking not only about my project, but about the nature of research itself. I argue that moments of rupture such as COVID shine a light on the structuring of ‘normality’ in research. I write against a return to that normal. A normal that has justified extensive international travel in the face of a deepening ecological crisis, a normal that celebrated knowledge extraction and created material realities which governed ‘who’ the researcher could be
Social Capital: The Indian Connection
No full textWhilst no longer as prominent as it was at the turn of the millennium when being promoted by the World Bank, social capital still remains a significant, if fundamentally flawed, category within social science in general and development studies in particular. This chapter offers a critical account of social capital and, in particular, how its use in the Indian literature has both replicated common aspects and displayed others more specific to the Indian context. It shows the Indian literature’s bias towards the civil society, with economic, ideological and social power, trade unions, mass organizations, the state, and the conflicts over them, relegated to the background. The chapter then shows how this has changed in recent critiques highlighting the role of social capital in the reproduction of power relations and hierarchies, hindering inclusive development. The World Bank itself admitted that most of the criticisms of social capital were warranted and shifted focus to other developmental concepts such as empowerment, participation and other constituents of “good governance” in order to relieve the state from public investment. The chapter ends with a critique of the relationship between social capital and micro-finance points to World Bank–sponsored scholarship in behavioural economics and RCT becoming successors to social capital
How Do Movement Parties Learn Lessons of Defeat in Taiwan? The Case of the Green Party Taiwan
Get PDFIn this article we examine how Taiwan’s oldest movement party, the Green Party Taiwan, dealt with national electoral defeats in 2012, 2016, and 2020. We examine the theme of electoral defeat from three angles. First, we review the dominant post-defeat narratives that emerged to explain what went wrong in the campaigns. Second, we examine how these narratives guided the post-defeat reforms. Third, we consider whether the party can be said to have learned the right lessons of defeat. The analysis relies on a series of interviews with Green Party figures, party political communication material, and participant observation data
Introduction: Problematizing political communication theory and praxis in the Middle East and North Africa: Reframing Western-centric debates in times of excessive war
No full textEthical Living Through Stories: Encounters with Adab
No full textLiterature has for thousands of years served as a space in which people have negotiated the ethics of daily life. In the Islamic tradition, the broad concept of adab spans ethical instruction and literary culture. Literature classified asadab was intended to cultivate readers’ minds and characters. Similarly, the Chinese concept of wen represents the intellectual, cultural, and ethical foundations of society. Adab and wen offer ways to navigate complex social environments with respect and empathy, promoting harmony in multicultural societies. Such concepts remain highly relevant and valuable in today’s global world. In this book, Wen-chin Ouyang shows how our experience of adab stories has the power to transform both our personal relationships and society. She draws on classic Arabic stories from the famous Thousand and One Nights and compares them with tales from the canonical Chinese novels Three Kingdoms, The Journey to the West, and Water Margin. The book demonstrates how these stories tell us about ourselves, allowing us to define, test, and refine our ethics of living. More than this, they have the power to help us experience a profound contemplation of our lives on earth, linking us to our shared humanity and showing us how to live meaningfully
Smart water? Corporate experiments and hybrid hydraulics in India
Get PDFSmart water refers to digital and commercialized water governance, largely implemented in India through private sector projects. These projects build on ideas of market efficiency to render complex political, social, and material arrangements bankable through a technological fix. The paper traces the rise of smart water in Indian policy before analyzing an expensive and controversial project in Delhi. Corporate and donor participation in the construction of a “smart water model” consolidated and extended previous frameworks for market actors and ideas in urban services, despite persistent challenges. However, these infrastructural imaginaries are ill-suited to the hybrid hydraulic systems of South Asian cities which blur state, market, and social infrastructure and governance arrangements. In smart water projects, beyond wealthy demonstration areas, service improvements are limited while data, capacity and revenue accrue to private sector actors. By misrecognizing these dynamics, technological solutions over-promise while increasing risk and inequality. Nationally, rising numbers of projects normalize the model (now planned for hundreds of cities), reshaping policy, and raising concerns over water access, equity, and democratic governance
Queer Theory
No full textDetermined in their search for the otherwise-to-‘normal life’ produced by late capitalist extractions of knowledge and resources alike, both TWAIL and queer theory coalesced in the early 1990s through academic alliances of scholars who saw themselves, structurally and politically, on the margin of their disciplinary fields. Far from being deterred by such circumstances, TWAIL and queer theory scholars invested deeply in seeing that margin flourish, as a potent source of knowing and togetherness. This chapter offers an introductory description of that capacious margin, zooming in on an emergent field of queer TWAIL scholarship. Several recent edited collections, in French and English, are assessed first, leading up to a range of tendencies, tensions and transformations in individual queer Third-Worldist scholarship. These multifarious yet clearly interconnected works are set to challenge their own erstwhile methodological limits, as they contribute and continue to seek out new forms of coalitional knowledge production
Artificial Intelligence and the Militarisation of New Media in Egypt: Challenging the Role of Technology in Resistance
Get PDFThis paper explores the transformative role of technology, focusing on its dual capacity to both empower resistance and reinforce state control. It contrasts the potential emancipatory capacity of social media with the emerging usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI), focusing on its deployment as a surveillance technology in Egypt. In this context, its role highlights a contradiction, whereby technology that once enabled democratic participation during the 2011 thawra (‘revolution’) now threatens to undermine it. Drawing on Virilio's concept of "polar inertia" this analysis argues that the influence of AI on public discourse exacerbates entrenched power hierarchies, particularly highlighting the growing integration of military forces into governance structures. It foregrounds the significant ethical and political dilemmas posed by such dynamics, expanding the discourse on AI's implications within authoritarian contexts. Moreover, it underscores the need for adopting rigorous policies to promote equity and inclusive technological advancement
Methodologies for Change and Tensions of Tradition and Imagination: Producing Knowledge of Gender Possibility on The Outskirts of Legal Strategy
Get PDFGendered subjects are rendered legible in our political landscape when the law addresses them, and thus law plays an indispensable role in processes of change. Methodologies in gender work to theorise the nuance of lived experiences and individualism, but it is challenging for them to independently bring about change. Legal strategies, on the other hand, work to create and define the contours which shape global societies, but fail to integrate nuance into its analysis. This article argues legal strategies alone prove insufficient in bringing about meaningful change, especially as they pertain to the issues of gender and sexuality. Consequently, this article will thus reflect on the “situatedness” of law as a power tool, analysing the effects of its construction, and who gets to construct it. Moreover, it will analyse the limits of the law as a mechanism of enacting true change, illustrating how gender methodologies may imagine possibility beyond legal strategy
Rain later, good, occasionally poor: Rhetorical listening in the time of climate change
No full textThis chapter considers ways of listening across disciplinary, sectoral and cultural barriers in support of more culturally sensitive, inclusive approaches to development policy and practice. Responding to the growing appeal for creative solutions to the global climate crisis, it draws on Krista Ratcliffe’s framing of ‘rhetorical listening’ as a critical strategy to challenge prevailing hierarchies of knowledge about weather and climate adaptation. Arguing that weather forecasting practices are performative devices that give form to the ways in which perceptions of our worlds are shaped and enacted, the chapter applies the theatrical paradigm of ‘action replay’ – the repeated presentation of a scene but using different characters – to attune our listening to the spillages and overlaps between seemingly disparate weather practices. Ultimately, it asks how appreciation of both differences and similarities between climate ontologies may strengthen climate mitigation actions while simultaneously attend to climate-related socio-economic inequalities and biocultural rights
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