University of Victoria Journals
Not a member yet
13485 research outputs found
Sort by
Here on We Love Radio: Hip Hop Culture and Black Expressionism in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing
No full textHip hop is a cultural movement that advocates for the collective strength of marginalized communities amid urban despair. As a ballast of Do the Right Thing, hip hop culture grounds its various characters and events as expressions of the black American consciousness. An essential component of the film which this paper addresses in the context of contemporary justice is the murder of Radio Raheem, an unarmed and innocent black man strangled by police. Taking up the lens of Saussurean linguistics, this article examines the function of hip hop culture throughout the film which radio (both the device and the waves) represents, fighting systemic racism as an agent of black expressionism and collective strength
Leadership & Ambition: Comparative Insights from France and Costa Rica’s Fossil Fuel Moratoria
No full textThis comparative analysis highlights the enabling factors for France and Costa Rica to pursue supply-side fossil fuel restraints (fossil fuel exploration and extraction moratoria). This study helps clarify the pathways to adopting these policies and looks at intrinsic and external factors motivating state behaviour. The presence of executive leadership commitment acts as international driver combined with the enabling material conditions of carbon free /renewable electricity systems coalesce to produce fossil fuel bans; while the pursuit of climate-leader status within the international context of climate change negotiations stands out as an external motivating factor
Belting the Beast: Trans-animality in The Faerie Queene
No full textEdmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is populated by hundreds of animal figures, many of whom are informed by a vast inherited tradition of medieval bestiary animalsymbolism. Taking these bestiary motifs into account and drawing from current trans and animal studies theory, this article shows how book three’s hyena-beast calls attention to the porousness of species boundaries and collapses animal-human hierarchies. This reading highlights the poem’s ambiguous attitude towards the bestial nature of both its animal and its human characters, and gestures towards a Spenserian eco-poetics which emphasises the possibilities for mutuality and collaboration to be found in the shared creatureliness of animals and humans
Migrant autonomies in Singapore’s Migrant Domestic Worker (MDW) Industry
No full textMy paper uses the case of Migrant Domestic Workers (MDWs) in Singapore to argue for a reconceptualization of the mobile commons in which migrant actors are the protagonists of oppressive labor regimes. Based on a scoping review of scholarly research and popular media sources, I pose two key questions about the mobile commons and acts of resistance by MDWs in Singapore and proceed to answer them with my research findings. I suggest that the personal agency embodied in the acts and strategies of MDWs must be understood within an asymmetrical live-in employment relationship that does not automatically allow for digital participation. I am interested in the question: What does the ‘mobile commons’ for MDWs in Singapore look like? Importantly, recurrent studies show that MDW acts and strategies to cope with oppressive labor regimes are deeply but not exclusively conditioned by the structural factors determined by governments, recruitment agencies, and individual domestic employers. Hence my follow-up question: How do the actions and strategies of MDWs in Singapore complicate and nuance the mobile commons? The state’s live-in requirement is the most significant structural factor conditioning the mobility of MDWs, by implication their forms of political practice. 
Transformations in Greek Migration Policy after 2015: Securitization Practices and Precarity of Refugees
No full textThe European refugee crisis of 2015 unveiled the incapacity of member states to act at a united front. Indeed, the innumerous refugee flows from Asia, mainly Syria, combined with unprecedented numbers of migrants from Africa, have prompted a series of diverse member-state responses, profoundly transforming European migration policy. The underlying procedures that relate to processes, such as the ongoing Revision of the Dublin Regulation, the European Agenda on Migration (2015), the EU-Turkey Deal (2016) and others, have tilted the migration policy apparatus of the EU towards security. This situation has not left Greece intact, as it was the entry point for those trying to reach Europe amidst the refugee crisis, resulting in Greece being transformed from a traditionally transit country, to a host one. A major trend that is observed in the Greek case (as well as in the EU) is that refugees tend to be securitized. This means that refugees have been perceived as a threat from several political elite actors, through the use of speech acts with the referent object being (mainly) societal security. As an outcome, the Greek migration policy has gradually adopted some excessive measures. What are the implications? Preliminary analysis shows that this practice has a direct impact on the precarity of refugees, contradicting an inclusive approach to migration. Hence, the contribution of this study is twofold. First, it seeks to unpack and present the transformation of Greek migration policies, during the post-2015 period. Second, this study, while briefly presenting key-data on the refugee flows, aspires to cast light on the impact the abovementioned existing transformations have on the precarity of refugees. 
Pedagogies of Time: “Editing” Textbooks, Timelines, and Childhood Memories
No full textDrawing on the concept of “pedagogies of time,” this article analyzes early literacy textbooks and our own childhood memories of temporal socialization in (post)Soviet Armenia, Georgia, and Latvia. While textbook analysis reveals purposeful socialization of children into modern linear timelines, memory stories interrupt these predetermined trajectories and shift attention toward multiple forms of temporalities that coexist alongside and entangle with each other. Using a speculative thought experiment, we “edit” a chronological timeline in one of the stories from early literacy textbooks as an attempt to simultaneously (re)write the dominant timespaces of socialist modernity and the way childhood appears there
Integrative Organized Hypocrisy? Normative Contentions within the EU and the Refugee Migrant Crisis
No full textIn 2015 and 2016, 2.3 million individuals applied for asylum in Europe, the highest number since the creation of the EU. The unprecedented strain on the Common European Asylum policies (CEAS), along with the asymmetric pressure on external border countries and the lack of unified support for border controls, highlighted the tensions between member-state sovereignty and regional competence. According to Lavenex (2018), the Refugee and Migrant Crisis (RMC) was first and foremost a crisis of governance, expressing doubts about the EU’s ability to “fail forward” into further integration in the long-run because of “organised hypocrisy”, an unintended organisational strategy deployed to cope with otherwise irreconcilable differences between normative aspirations and real-life actions concerning asylum. This article revisits Lavenex’s premise of European governance and organised hypocrisy and argues for a more optimistic outlook on European integration. Using the infrastructural Europeanism framework as identified by Pelizza and Loschi (2023), this article argues that despite the legal and legislative gridlocks that surround important issues such as asylum, European integration in relation to asylum is ‘failing forward’ in no small part due to organised hypocrisy and not in spite of it
One Hundred Years of US–Mexico Border Film
No full textThis essay examines the structure, content, and evolution of an emerging Border Film Genre derived from an examination of over one hundred years of film concerned with the US–Mexico borderlands and originating from both sides of the border. The task of this particular essay is to demonstrate how film themes change and evolve over time, based on evidence from the film catalogue. The essay examines examples of transition pertaining to: the changing representations of women in film; the difference between Mexican and American filmmakers’ portrayals of undocumented migration; generational shifts in bordertown racisms; and the catastrophic consequences of law enforcement’s loss of the war against drug cartels, including the ‘domestication’ of violence and the decay of communities occupied by cartels. 
Inventions of Acratic Lives: José Oiticica, José Oiticica Filho (JOF), and Hélio Oiticica’s “Antiart”
No full textBeatriz Scigliano Carneiro is a social scientist and researcher at the Nucleus of Libertarian Sociability (NU-SOL) research centre, Pontifical University, São Paulo, Brazil (www.nu-sol.org). She has authored Relâmpagos com Claror, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica: vida como arte, (2004), which is based on her PhD dissertation