1,720,983 research outputs found
The wolf (canis lupus) as a symbol of an urban–rural divide? Results from a media discourse analysis on the human–wolf conflict in Germany
No full textGiven that wolves have been extinct in Germany for approximately 150 years, their return and growing population over the last decade has caused intense discussion and conflict. To develop a widely accepted and just coexistence between humans and wolves, a comprehensive understanding of the conflict is needed. There are indications that the conflict goes beyond dealing with the wolf population and marks a spatial–cultural divide between urban and rural areas. Nevertheless, the social dimensions of the human–wolf conflict in Germany have been little studied. The aim of this paper is to narrow this gap by means of a media discourse analysis including reader comments in order to provide insights into the constituent elements of this conflict. We conducted a qualitative content analysis. The sample comprises articles (n = 63) and reader comments (n = 515) over a period of one year (5/2018-5/2019) from six online periodicals in Germany. The results support the assumption of an urban–rural divide in terms of perspectives and values. The discourse indicates that rural actors who are most affected by the wolves’ vicinity have more negative attitudes towards them. At the same time, they feel abandoned and dominated by urban perspectives and politics. In addition, linkages to right-wing populist positions and conspiracy narratives that can be interpreted as a consequence of political alienation are found
Social-ecological transformation and COVID-19: the need to revisit working-class environmentalism
No full textThe ongoing COVID-19 pandemic points to unequally distributed vulnerabilities in society. Unevenly distributed disadvantages are also found in processes of a social-ecological transformation. The concept of working-class environmentalism arguably presents a way out of this deficiency through incorporating and focusing on working class and precarious people in processes of social change. We develop four theses for our argumentation to revisit working-class environmentalism and conclude that this would build social resilience for coping with future crises of the whole of society
Bt cotton, pink bollworm, and the political economy of sociobiological obsolescence: insights from Telangana, India
Get PDFAbstract After genetically engineered Bt cotton lost its effectiveness in central and southern Indian states, pink bollworm infestations have recently returned to farmers’ fields and have substantially shifted their vulnerability context. We conceive Bt cotton as a neoliberal technology that is built to protect farmers only temporarily from Lepidopteran pests while ultimately driving the further concentration of capital. Based on data from a representative survey of the three major cotton-producing districts of the state of Telangana (n = 457), we find that pink bollworm pest infestations are a shock to farmers that lead to severe losses in yield and income. Using the vulnerability concept as a framework, we embed our findings in a political-economic context by drawing on Harvey’s notion of accumulation by dispossession. We argue that Bt cotton includes an inherent sociobiological obsolescence that results in a systematic dispossession of resource-poor households while providing appropriation opportunities for other actors. Finally, reproduced hegemonic structures facilitate the accumulation of capital through a redistribution of assets from the bottom to the top of the agricultural sector. Claims that considered Bt cotton as a pro-poor technology were thus flawed from the outset
Preservation, modernization, and transformation: contesting bioeconomic imaginations of “manure futures” and trajectories toward a sustainable livestock system
No full textIn discourses on sustainability, its underlying conceptualizations and meanings, the role of imaginations and their influence on concrete social practices and mutually dependent sociomaterial structures have been overlooked. Therefore, our article uses Adloff and Neckel’s (Sustain Sci 14(4):1015-1025, 2019) conceptual framework to explore the role of imaginations in generating different trajectories from a concrete environmental problem, namely issues attributed to manure surpluses in Germany, to assess the hurdles and conflicting goals of a transformation toward a sustainable livestock system. Our study builds on qualitative, semistructured, and problem-centered interviews with both new innovation actors and incumbent actors in the current system. Our results show that different trajectories of “manure futures” exist, as we identify “preservation”, “modernization” and “transformation” as trajectories representing ideal types of change. We discuss the results in light of the theory of imaginations and reflect on the usefulness of the concept of imaginations for analyzing environmental discourses and practices. Furthermore, we find that normative framings of problems rather than factual knowledge describe contesting imaginations as barriers to sustainability transformations, a point that must be acknowledged when developing a sustainable livestock system. We conclude that contesting imaginations could result in conflicts that must be moderated as drivers for change yet could also point to transformations that are already underway
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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