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Blurred Responsibilities of Disaster Governance: The American Red Cross in the US and Haiti
Get PDFThe influence of private actors, such as non-profit organizations (NPOs) and firms, has been increasing in disaster governance. Previous literature has interrogated the responsibilities of states towards citizens in disasters, but the roles of private actors have been insufficiently challenged. The article politicizes the entangled relations between NPOs, states, and disaster-affected people. It proposes the Rawlsian division of moral labor as a useful, normative framework for interrogating the justice of disaster governance arrangements in which ‘liberal’ states are involved. Liberal states have two types of responsibilities in disasters: humanitarian and political. The humanitarian responsibilities imply provision of basic resources needed for the capacity to make autonomous choices (domestically and abroad), while the political responsibilities imply provision of the institutions needed for the liberal democratic citizenship (domestically). Through this analytical lens and building on the wealth of existing scholarship, we illustrate the disaster governance role of the American Red Cross in the United States (a 2005 hurricane) and in Haiti (the 2010 earthquake). Where, in Rawlsian terms, United States is interpreted as a ‘liberal’ society, Haiti is framed as a ‘burdened’ society. The article proposes five points to consider in analyzing disaster governance arrangements under neoliberal regimes, structured around the division of humanitarian and political responsibilities. The article illustrates how NPOS are instrumental in blurring the boundaries between humanitarian and political responsibilities. This might result ultimately in actual vulnerabilities remaining unaddressed. While the Rawlsian approach challenges the privatization and lack of coordination in disaster governance, it is limited in analyzing the political construction of ‘burdened’ societies
IT-Oriented Infrastructural Development, Urban Co-Dependencies, and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Politics in Pune, India
Get PDFExisting scholarship on postcolonial urbanisms has judiciously analysed the role played by the state and private capital in the expansion of global information-technology clusters and exclusive high-tech knowledge enclaves that have emerged across different metropolitan fringes in India and in the wider global South. However, much of this scholarship has focused primarily on the antagonisms wrought by the ‘expulsion’ of local rural populations from their lands and livelihoods, at the hands of the neoliberal state and global capitalist elites. In contrast, there is not enough research on how diverse local communities and subaltern actors emerge in place, and help organise, support and sustain these modern infrastructural spaces well after the initial moment of their establishment. Citing this important gap in our knowledge, this article argues for the need to move beyond some of the adversarial accounts associated with the overarching logics of postcolonial capitalist accumulation and new suburban development in the global South, to focus instead on the complex ‘afterlives’ of these modern high-tech suburban spaces. Drawing on ethnographic data from Pune city in Western India, and an emerging IT and IT-enabled services (IT and ITeS) outsourcing hub, the article reveals that contrary to popular perceptions of high-tech clusters as sovereign spaces for transnational capital, these sites are, in fact, constitutive of their multiple ‘outsides’—which include diverse forms of informal and illegal economies and labour. To evidence these claims, the article highlights different examples of ‘urban co-dependencies’ which have in situ emerged in Pune’s new urban fringes, to meet the growing gaps in demand of essential public services in these areas. The article then proceeds to show how Pune’s local micro-political cultures, including the numerous instances of territorial conflict and collaboration between so-called elites and subaltern actors at the local level, continue to ‘co-shape’ the typologies and the temporalities of local land use, planning and development that takes place in India’s new urban fringes. This paper attempts to expand this discussion in digital geographies by exploring their interaction with uneven urban development and planning in cities of the global South. At the centre of its enquiry are ‘high-tech’ urban clusters located at the fringes of Pune (a Tier-2 metro city in western India), that include several large and small, highly securitised software technology parks, associated industrial zones, glitzy shopping malls and luxury residential condominiums, bordered by an ever-shrinking reservoir of vacant and un-built ‘village’ land. Instead of cataloguing the genealogy and evolution of ‘technology-parks’ or ‘knowledge corridors’ as ‘spaces of sovereign exception’ (Gonzalez-Vicente, 2019), this paper theorises large urban IT-clusters in Indian cities as constitutive of ‘a multiplicity of normative orders’ (Mezzadra and Neilsen, 2019, p.152), which intersect with the multiplicity of economic actors, labour forms and practices – whether they be formal or informal, legal or illegal, sustained or provisional. Through this, the paper emphasises the need to emplace these global infrastructural spaces and zones within a grassroots conception of co-dependent urbanisation and highlight rootedness of these modern infrastructural spaces or zones within urban social networks, territorial collaborations and contestations among heterogeneous urban actors and their everyday micropolitics
Urban Connective Action: The Case of Events Hosted in Public Space
Get PDFIn the past decade, significant transformations have influenced the governance of urban public spaces. There has also been a growth in new public spheres associated with digital media networks, informing and influencing the production and regulation of urban space. In this article, we explore the role of digital and social media as a form of connective action supporting public campaigns about the privatisation and erosion of public space in the Scottish city of Edinburgh. We draw on analysis of Twitter data, interviews and observations of offline events to illustrate how a broad coalition of actors utilise online and offline tactics to contest the takeover of public space, confirming that that the virtual and the physical are not parallel realms but continuously intersecting social realities. Finally, we reflect on the extent to which digital media-enabled connective action can influence the orientation of urban controversies debates and lead to material change in the way urban public space is managed and regulated
The Hybrid Space of Collaborative Location-Based Mobile Games and the City: A Case Study of Ingress
Get PDFStructural changes in the way we live and interact in cities are occurring due to advances in mobile communication technologies affecting everyday practices. One such practice, at the forefront of digital technology adoption, is digital gaming or play. Location-based mobile games (LBMGs), such as Pokémon Go and Ingress have surged in popularity in recent years through their introduction of a new mode of play, employing mobile GPS and internet-enabled technology. Distinguished by their embedded GIS, LBMGs can influence how people play, interact with and perceive the city, by merging urban and virtual spaces into ‘hybrid realities.’ Despite the popularity of such games, studies into how LBMGs affect urban dweller interactions with each other and the city have been limited. This article examines how the digital interface of the large-scale collaborative LBMG Ingress affects how players experience and use the city. Ingress is a collaborative hybrid or location-based game that uses GPS location information from smartphones, Google maps, and Google POI to create virtual gameplay environments that correspond to and interact with other players and the city. The methodology cross-references the MDA framework from game studies (Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics) within the urban mobility, sociability and spatiality characteristics of the hybrid realities theoretical framework. In this article, we explore how Ingress (re)produces hybrid space through deliberate design of interface game elements. By applying this analytical approach, we identify the game mechanics and their role in producing a hybrid gameplay environment with impacts on social and mobility practices altering the perception of and engagement with the city
Why Are Scientific Experts Perceived as Trustworthy? Emotional Assessment within TV and YouTube Videos
Get PDFDue to the rise of the Internet, the effects of different science communication formats in which experts appear cannot be neglected in communication research. Through their emotional and more comprehensible communication ‘sciencetubers’—who frequently differ from the stereotypical image of scientists as white, old men—may have a considerable effect on the public’s perceived trustworthiness of scientists as well as their trust in science. Thus, this study aims to extend trust and trustworthiness research to consider the role of emotion in science communication in the context of emerging online video content. Therefore, perceived trustworthiness was examined in an experimental online survey of 155 people aged 18–80. We considered different potential influencing variables for trustworthiness (expertise, integrity, benevolence) and used six different video stimuli about physics featuring scientific experts. The video stimuli varied according to format (TV interviews vs. YouTube videos), gender (male vs. female), and age of the experts depicted (old vs. young). The results suggest that: (1) Scientific experts appearing in TV interviews are perceived as more competent but not higher in integrity or benevolence than sciencetubers—while scientists interviewed on TV are regarded as typical scientists, sciencetubers stand out for their highly professional communication abilities (being entertaining and comprehensible); (2) these emotional assessments of scientists are important predictors of perceived trustworthiness; and (3) significantly mediate the effect of the stimulus (TV interview vs. YouTube video) on all dimensions of perceived trustworthiness of scientific experts
Reconsidering Journalist Safety Training
Get PDFSafety training courses and manuals are designed to provide journalists with guidance to assess and mitigate risk. In this article, we ask whether content of such training and guidance is informed by actual threats and risks relevant to journalists working in the field. Departing from our own previous research about threats and dangers faced by journalists working in conflict zones or covering dangerous beats, and a review of the literature addressing the issue of safety manuals for journalists, we evaluate the content of five safety-training documents. Of these, two are descriptions of internationally-focused safety courses, two are safety manuals produced for a national audience, and one is a handbook focusing specifically on safety for women reporters in the Arab region. The purpose is to identify various aspects of safety addressed in training and manuals offered to locally and internationally-deployed journalists—and illuminate how they may differ in focus and approach. Through a comparison of the content of the selected manuals and course descriptions, we conclude that these trainings and manuals to some extent address specific variations in context, but that detailed attention towards gender differences in risk and other personal characteristics are not given equivalent weight. The international training focuses excessively on physical environment issues (such as those of a ‘hostile environment’), while the manuals with national or regional focus are practice-oriented and largely take a journalistic point of departure. We argue that training and manuals can benefit from considering both these aspects for risk assessment, but recommend that addressing journalistic practice and personal resources is fundamental to all journalist safety training since it is at the personal, practical, and media organisational levels that the mitigation encouraged by these trainings can happen
Populist Disinformation: Exploring Intersections between Online Populism and Disinformation in the US and the Netherlands
Get PDFThe discursive construction of a populist divide between the ‘good’ people and ‘corrupt’ elites can conceptually be linked to disinformation. More specifically, (right-wing) populists are not only attributing blame to the political elites, but increasingly vent anti-media sentiments in which the mainstream press is scapegoated for not representing the people. In an era of post-truth relativism, ‘fake news’ is increasingly politicized and used as a label to delegitimize political opponents or the press. To better understand the affinity between disinformation and populism, this article conceptualizes two relationships between these concepts: (1) blame attributions to the dishonest media as part of the corrupt elites that mislead the people; and (2) the expression of populist boundaries in a people-centric, anti-expert, and evidence-free way. The results of a comparative qualitative content analysis in the US and Netherlands indicate that the political leaders Donald Trump and Geert Wilders blame legacy media in populist ways by regarding them as part of the corrupt and lying establishment. Compared to left-wing populist and mainstream politicians, these politicians are the most central players in the discursive construction of populist disinformation. Both politicians bypassed empirical evidence and expert knowledge whilst prioritizing the people’s truth and common sense at the center stage of honesty and reality. These expressions resonated with public opinion on Facebook, although citizens were more likely to frame mis- and disinformation in terms of ideological cleavages. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the role of populist discourse in a post-factual era
Electoral Behaviour in a European Union under Stress
Get PDFIs electoral behaviour affected by the current challenges of the EU and, if it is, through which channels and mechanisms? This study offers a cross-national analysis together with a broad understanding of both the crisis phenomenon and electoral behaviour. To investigate this research question appropriately, we first distinguish at the most general level between the two main behavioural alternatives at play when it comes to electoral behaviour, namely abstention and vote choice. Second, and no less important, we differentiate between the mechanisms that mediate the relationship between the ‘EU under stress’ and electoral behaviour, namely egocentric and sociotropic economic voting motivations. Drawing on data from the European Election Study 2014, our article provides important insights into the study of electoral behaviour in an EU under stress. First, we are able to show that the multiple crises that have hit the EU have the potential to determine both turnout and the decision to vote for a Eurosceptic party. Second, different mechanisms are in play for each of the two behavioural alternatives: Turnout is clearly related to egocentric determinants and thus depends on individuals’ personal exposure to the financial crisis. Conversely, the decision to vote for a Eurosceptic party is based on a different mechanism. Voters—without necessarily being personally affected by the crisis—have a higher propensity to vote for a Eurosceptic party if they perceive their country to be threatened by such an EU under stress. These findings add to a better understanding of the EU’s multi-level democracy
Tweeting Power: The Communication of Leadership Roles on Prime Ministers’ Twitter
Get PDFThis article examines the communication of leadership roles by prime ministers Justin Trudeau and Theresa May on Twitter. I argue that tweets from prime ministers implicitly communicate information about how prime ministers lead and what their job entails: what I call role performance and function. I develop an inductive typology of these leadership dimensions and apply this framework to Trudeau and May’s tweets in 2018 and 2019. I find first that Trudeau is a much more active Twitter user than Theresa May was as prime minister, attesting to different leadership styles. Second, both use Twitter primarily for publicity and to support and associate with individuals and groups. Trudeau is much more likely to use Twitter to portray himself as a non-political figure, while May is more likely to emphasize the role of policy ‘decider.’ Both prime ministers are framed much more often as national legislative leaders rather than party leaders or executives. Finally, May’s tweets reflect her position as an international leader much more than Trudeau’s. Assessing how prime ministers’ tweets reflect these dimensions contributes to our understanding of evolving leader–follower dynamics in the age of social media. While Twitter has been cited as conducive to populist leaders and rhetoric, this study shows how two non-populist leaders have adopted this medium, particularly in Trudeau’s case, to construct a personalized leader–follower relationship
Paradoxes of Universalism: The Case of the Swiss Disability Insurance
Get PDFSocial policies rely on specific expectations vis-a-vis their beneficiaries, who have to abide by certain eligibility criteria or behavioral standards to access the benefits or services provided. As such, they draw boundaries between the deserving and undeserving, which results in the following paradox: While social policies claim to be universal, they actually exclude potential beneficiaries by imposing on them the compliance with these eligibility criteria and behavioral standards. In other words, purportedly universal social policies may have exclusionary effects, in the form either of selectivity (street-level bureaucrats select what they perceive as legitimate beneficiaries) or of self-exclusion and non-take-up (people entitled do not claim benefits or services). Based on the case of the Swiss disability insurance, this article explores the extent of, and the reasons underlying, the paradoxes of universalism within active social policies. It relies on a mixed-methods research design, combining sequence analysis (showing the selectivity of active reforms regarding people’s access to disability benefits) and in-depth interviews. The conclusion of this article suggests that not all forms of universalism are equally exposed to such paradoxes and proposes a hypothesis to be explored in further research: The more requiring and precise in terms of eligibility criteria and behavioral standards social policies and activation strategies are (hard universalism), the higher the risk that they lead to selective practices in contradiction with their universal ambition. By contrast, fuzzier eligibility or behavioral criteria (soft universalism), which allow for adjustment to individual circumstances, may lead to more genuinely universal and inclusive social policies