Canadian Journal of Sociology
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Publication and Citation Patterns in the Social Sciences and Humanities: A National Perspective
No full textFrom the perspective of non-Anglophone countries, accountability, liability, and capacity of scientific research is often related to the process of internationalization. The article explores the effects of this process on the example of publication and citation patterns of Serbian scholars. Results of the analysis are mostly in line with the common conceptions about the differences among scientific disciplines. Authors in social sciences and humanities have manifested more nationally oriented publication and citation behavior, tendency to cite older literature, and stronger preference towards non-journal literature. However, huge individual differences among scholars and some inconsistencies between their publication and citation patterns, reveal a form of latent conflict between the accustomed publishing behavior in social sciences and humanities and the new dynamics of knowledge production. This conflict obscures the notion of typical or expected behavior of scholars in certain disciplines and has important implications for research evaluation. Scholars in social sciences and humanities were not so eager and successful in shifting their communication to the international arena. For them, national journals still play a crucial role in the “local” information exchange. But the question is how one transitional country that is facing serious structural challenges and weak economy can afford to support “locally relevant” research projects and whether national journals have become a mere tool for an ungainly customized research evaluation in the social sciences and humanities
Building a Reputation in Global Scientific Communication: A SWOT Analysis of Spanish Humanities Journals
No full textThis paper analyses the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOTs) faced by Spanish humanities journals and explores the role these journals play as tools for the transmission of research against a global academia. The dataset is comprised of the replies to twenty semi-structured surveys that were administered among ten editors of Spanish journals in the area of the humanities and ten Spanish humanities researchers with extensive publishing experience in national and international journals. Main findings are discussed in terms of internationality, predominance of English and Spanish as scientific languages, research assessment, visibility, credibility, quality assurance, editorial expertise or open access. Moreover, they point at far-reaching implications for both parties, compelled to seeking academic acceptance and researching credibility in today’s global scholarly communication while at the same time supporting the national science system through publication in national journals
Power, Space, and Place in Early Childhood Education
No full textThis paper addresses early childhood educators’ perceptions on how power relations are shaped by interactions between themselves, children, and the material environment. In a qualitative three-phase case study I explored educators’ perceptions on how power relations are enacted within one preschool classroom in Southern Ontario, and how power relations are affected when educators conceptualize the environment through the perspective of space and place. Drawing on reconceptualist theory in early childhood education, children’s spatialities, and Michel Foucault’s work on power in society, I suggest that power circulates between bodies and spatialities, in the complex interactions between individuals and the physical spaces they encounter. The findings suggest that while early childhood educators may understand intuitively the demarcation between space and place, external constraints – real or perceived – are barriers to change. I argue that shifting philosophical and pedagogical stances in early childhood education have resulted in two binarized positions, where philosophy and pedagogy are frequently understood as either child-centred, or teacher-directed orientations and that troubling the binary by thinking with place can help refigure power relations between educators and young children. The conceptual distinction between thinking of early childhood classrooms as space or place is significant and I argue that viewing the environment as place is one possible way educators can reconceptualize traditionally hierarchical and binarized power dynamics between themselves and young children
We’ll Deal with it Later: African Nova Scotian Women’s Perceptions and Experiences of the Police
No full textThis case study explores the experiences of African Nova Scotian women in relation to the police. Three semi-structured interviews were conducted with Black women living in a rural Nova Scotian community with a well-documented history of confrontations between the police and the Black community. Interviews explored their experiences with the police, their community’s experiences with the police, and their relationship with the police. My analysis revealed that participants did not trust the police, felt targeted by the police, and did not feel protected by the police. Their perceptions of the police were shaped by their own interactions with the police – often as Black mothers – and the experiences of the Black men in their lives in rural Nova Scotia. Some had engaged in active resistance and protection of their community. This article explores how anti-Blackness affects Black women directly and indirectly, contributing to the existing scholarship about over-policing of Black communities
Castañeda, Ernesto, A Place to Call Home: Immigrant Exclusion and Urban Belonging in New York, Paris, and Barcelona.
No full textMedia, Symbolic Violence and Racialized Habitus: Voices from Chinese Canadian Youth
No full textThis study examines how Chinese Canadian youth perceive media representation of Chinese people and how that perception affects their identity construction. Drawing on Bourdieu and interview data with thirty-six first- and second-generation Chinese Canadian youth in Alberta, we discuss three themes of symbolic violence that Chinese youth experience in the media field. We argue that media-initiated symbolic violence not only reproduces and reinforces racism institutionally and systemically but also contributes to the evolvement of a racialized habitus among Chinese Canadian youth. It affects Chinese Canadian youth’s construction of a positive Chinese identity, and at the same time their perceptions as “real” Canadians in the country that they view as home
Almost at Home in South Sudan: International Christian Humanitarians and the Theopolitics of Recognition
No full textIn this study, we examine the experience of international Christian humanitarian aid workers and who work in South Sudan. From interviews with thirty people in east Africa and north America, we derive a relationship between Christianity as our participants understand it, and their modalities of encountering “the other” – the people of South Sudan, who may seem different and unfamiliar, yet who must be met as part of religiously motivated life and work. In terrain of South Sudan, we argue that our participants enact a theopolitics of recognition, in which their emotional and practical connections to the people they serve are triangulated through God. This theopolitics operates almost entirely at the individual level, as personal encounters and work are mediated by the assumption of a shared relationship to God. The people of South Sudan are recognized as both familiar and strange, because they share a posited connection to the divine with humanitarians from the global north. We argue that this recognition is different from other ways of encountering the other found in literature ranging from feminist theory to international development. This study thus adds to scholarly knowledge of faith-based organizations and global humanitarianism. We also argue that while the theopolitical modality makes possible certain kinds of ethical action, it may close off other forms of action based in broader political critiques of global relations of power