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Feminist geographies from the slum: violence, care, and place-making in contemporary Buenos Aires
No full textThe expression negra villera is widespread in Argentina. Although this derogatory term refers to a person’s skin colour, it is often used to denote social class. The term is also bounded to specific urban landscapes: the villas. In the Argentine social imaginary, these stigmatised territories epitomise poverty, ignorance, and crime. In the quote above, however, a woman is reclaiming the term negra villera, arguing that she is proud to be part of a collective of strong women and sexual dissidents. This movement, Feminismo Villero (slum feminism) started in 2018 in Villa 31-31 bis, the oldest villa in the city. Based on a year of participant observation, life-history interviews and digital archival research, my thesis explores how Slum Feminism contests the idea that feminism is not materially compatible with the urgencies and needs of low-income women and dissidents. Contrarywise, these material urgencies have served as a driver for explicitly feminist mobilisations. This thesis examines how material and affective aspects of that territory (the villa) shape this social movement, and how in turn, it contributes to progressively shape and transform the spaces of mobilisation. In my aim to explain this ‘feminism from the slum’, I focus on the relationship between territory and the movement, mediated by activists' everyday experiences of gendered violence. My research analyses how gender-based violence intersects with different geographical spaces and scales: the body; the home; the street, and the neighbourhood. The thesis contributes to the scholarship on geographies of social movements by re-centring the role of place (and particularly, territory) in social movements’ framing and everyday activism
Radicalized nationalists? Ideological contestation, the state, and populist Muslim belonging in Indonesia
No full textIndonesians have witnessed the emergence of multiple populist narratives within their mainstream political discourse. This includes the rise of a majoritarianism, whose advocates aim to ascribe privileged rights to sections of the country's Sunni Muslim majority based on ideas of nostalgic cultural loss and of economic and political disenfranchisement. Unsurprisingly, majoritarianism is deeply polarizing, and the previous government interpreted the rise of Islamic populist sentiment as both a direct threat to its legitimacy and as an existential challenge from religious “radicals.” My ethnography of male majoritarian activists in Eastern Indonesia offers a counterpoint to the specter of radicalized Muslims driven by an Islamic ontology. I argue that the interpretative framework through which majoritarianism has gained political currency depends on a rearticulation of Indonesian nationalism within the situated experiences of socio-conservative Muslims. They promote moral panic and offer a populist solution to perceived social breakdown. This provides a broader conceptual point to the anthropological study of populism. Populism does not rely on a singular political party or proven grievances. Rather, the ability to rearticulate the ethical boundaries of national belonging derives from an ability to capture the performative strategies through which the state renders itself visible in everyday life
Book review: Depletion. The human costs of caring
No full textShirin M. Rai, Depletion. The Human Costs of Caring.Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2004. ISBN 978-0-19-777772-5 (pbk) ISBN 753554 (hbk
Trade with nominal rigidities: understanding the unemployment and welfare effects of the China shock
No full textWe present a dynamic quantitative trade and migration model that incorporates downward nominal wage rigidities and show how this framework can generate changes in unemployment and labor participation that match those uncovered by the empirical literature studying the “China shock.” We find that the China shock leads to average welfare increases in most U.S. states, including many that experience unemployment during the transition. However, nominal rigidities reduce the overall U.S. gains by around two thirds. In addition, there are 18 states that experience welfare losses in the presence of downward nominal wage rigidity that would have experienced gains without it
Housing and inequality
No full textWe approach the literature on housing and inequality from two angles. One is the impact of unequal endowments on housing. The second is the “memberships” inequality associated with neighborhoods, namely, households’ location in a geographic and social context. We elaborate on these two angles of inequality and focus on three distinctive features of housing: consumption, capital, and location. For owner-occupants, capital and consumption are bundled together in a single good. For both renters and owner-occupants, housing consumption inequality, access to good neighborhoods, and housing wealth follow from unequal endowments. Housing can propagate inequality by enabling owner-occupants to use it as collateral for other investments or to secure higher returns to human capital investments through the better schools in better neighborhoods. We use this approach to analyze key aspects of housing and inequality, paying special attention to the impacts of racial discrimination and segregation
Nation branding: a contested field for contested identities
No full textWhen Nation Branding: Concepts, Issues, Practice met its readers in 2008, it was the first textbook to exclusively cover nation branding, a phenomenon described by Keith Dinnie, its author, as “exciting, complex, and controversial” (2008, p. 13). Although a few years later some academics predicted the potential demise of this practice (Aronczyk, 2013, p. 176), nation branding has continued to expand both academically and empirically. Discussions have become more complex, with scholars elaborating models to help practitioners while also discussing the social implications of these initiatives. Campaigns have in turn become a normalized element of foreign policy, tourism, and the economy, with governments around the world investing hefty sums of money in endeavors seeking to create and circulate a positive image of the nations they claim to represent. Not even the Covid-19 pandemic or recent armed conflicts have hindered national brands. Authorities in Iceland targeted audiences in lockdown, portraying their country as the perfect destination to visit once travel restrictions were lifted (Kaneva, 2023); China underlined its “vaccine diplomacy” as a means to boost its overseas reputation in science and international cooperation (Lee, 2021); and the Ukrainian government emphasized the bravery of its people in the face of the recent Russian invasion (Bolin & Ståhlberg, 2022). Nation branding consequently remains “exciting, complex, and controversial” among practitioners and scholars, with academics engaging in questions about its nature and practice in fields such as marketing, international relations, anthropology, cultural studies, and especially media and communications, alongside an ongoing stream of campaigns and promotional initiatives wrestling for attention around the world, like goods in a global supermarket of symbolic forms
Foreign doctors and hospital quality: evidence from the English NHS
No full textThis paper examines the relationship between hospital quality and the share of foreign doctors in the English NHS. Baseline findings suggest that heart attack mortality is higher in hospitals with greater shares of foreign doctors practising relevant specialties. Robustness tests and heterogeneity analyses indicate that this association is specific to Acute Myocardial Infraction (AMI) treatment and is driven by hospitals that are smaller, of lower-quality, and ill-equipped to provide optimal care. When explicitly considering for treatment type, AMI mortality does not vary with the share of foreign AMI specialists in hospitals capable to access certain treatment technologies within 150 min. Overall, the results suggest that higher AMI mortality is not caused by foreign-trained AMI doctors but instead reflects structural challenges and resource-driven hiring patterns in constrained hospitals, which tend to rely more heavily on foreign doctors to mitigate worse outcomes. Further research is needed to better understand the allocation of foreign doctors to underperforming hospitals and its implications for healthcare delivery
Cost-benefit of IAPT Norway and effects on work-related outcomes and health care utilization: results from a randomized controlled trial using registry-based data
No full textData from an RCT of IAPT Norway ("Prompt Mental Health Care" [PMHC]) were linked to several administrative registers up to five years following the intervention. The aims were to (1) examine the effects of PMHC compared to treatment-as-usual (TAU) on work-related outcomes and health care use, (2) estimate the cost-benefit of PMHC, and (3) examine whether clinical outcomes at six-month follow-up explained the effects of PMHC on work-/cost-benefit-related outcomes. RCTs with parallel assignment were conducted at two PMHC sites (N = 738) during 2016/2017. Eligible participants were considered for admission due to anxiety and/or depression. We used Bayesian estimation with 90% credibility intervals (CI) and posterior probabilities (PP) of effects in favor of PMHC. Primary outcome years were 2018-2022. The cost-benefit analysis estimated the overall economic gain expressed in terms of a benefit-cost ratio and the differences in overall public sector spending. The PMHC group was more likely than the TAU group to be in regular work without receiving welfare benefits in 2019-2022 (1.27 ≤ OR ≤ 1.43). Some evidence was found that the PMHC group spent less on health care. The benefit-cost ratio in terms of economic gain relative to intervention costs was estimated at 5.26 (90%CI - 1.28, 11.8). The PP of PMHC being cost-beneficial for the economy as a whole was 85.9%. The estimated difference in public sector spending was small. PMHC effects on work participation and cost-benefit were largely explained by PMHC effects on mental health. The results support the societal economic benefit of investing in IAPT-like services
Wartime internment in camps as a global practice and experience
No full textThis double special issue examines internment camps in the First and Second World Wars as exceptional wartime social institutions which were intended to isolate and segregate groups considered threatening or undesirable but also had the unintended effect of becoming zones of knowledge transfer. The studies of internment in the world wars presented here connect to a broader historiography around cultures of confinement, carceral practices, and camp societies in the modern era. The First World War established the paradigm for understanding modern mass internment on a worldwide scale, with “enemy civilians” becoming an increasingly significant category of internees. The Introduction discusses how the global turn in the study of wartime internment, detention, and imprisonment, enables scholars to understand the way internment experiences were conceptualised in different societies. What kinds of expertise about society were initially produced in and around the camps? How did internment affect the way individuals from these groups related to their host countries? To what extent is the history of incarceration also a history of population movements to multiple locations? Special attention is paid to the way internment turned national or imperial minorities into “globally circulating” populations, with nationalities such as the Germans, traditionally associated with state-forming “majorities”, appearing as minorities within different empires at war with Germany in both world wars. As such the special issue contributes to new approaches to internment studies, which include expanded geographies and the acknowledgment that global entanglements can be grasped through local sites and case studies
The next innovation revolution should be democratisation
No full textInnovators are most likely to be men from privileged backgrounds. Xavier Jaravel argues that democratisation and widening of access to innovative careers worldwide is key to boosting long-term growth and addressing today’s economic, environmental and societal challenges