Cross‐generational gender constructions. Women,teenagers and technology

Despite the supposed inroads of feminism, gender equality and new ‘democratic’ means of technological communication, adult women and teenage girls in the UK continue to emphasise what Valerie Walkerdine has termed the ‘habitual “feminine” position of incompetence’ (2006, 526). This article draws on two complimentary research projects in order to investigate the cross‐generational gender constructions women and teenagers articulate. Drawing on Negra's notion of a ‘cover story’ (2009, 44), this article suggests that we can read the claims and practices of the women and teenagers in terms of how they frame new ideologies of femininity. Further, the continual recourse to an essential feminine position of exclusion is detrimentally shaping not only technological use, but also the wider operationalization of gender in public and private arenas. Focussing specifically on the female populations of the research projects, we demonstrate how gender continues to emerge and be produced by women and girls in negotiated, but highly problematic ways. Rather than considering gender as a determining force, it emerges here as a carefully constructed tool for engagement, and as a distancing device facilitating a claim of, and towards, disinterest. The two projects suggest implications for future mediations and relations with new media technology; they also suggest that across generations, women are detrimentally fixing and restricting potential and actual performances of gender through the evocation of a more traditional femininity.     

Aging in Timorese Exile: (Im)mobilities of Care and Intergenerational Relationships

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses transnational care and border regimes in the context of the East Timorese exile in rural Indonesia. Drawing from multi-sited ethnographic research, it explores the ways older people cope with family separation and life in exile, their aspirations, when and how transnational care becomes “on hold”, and how they deal with the impossibility of meeting intergenerational and cultural obligations. Analyzing care using the lens of “circulation”, the paper attends to the asymmetries entailed in intergenerational relationships as well as to how uneven power relations of border regimes shape transnational care exchanges. In the context of “aging in exile”, the paper underlines the importance of understanding older persons’ narratives as they are linked with the ambivalences of other family members across generations. The paper argues that the forms of immobility withholding or limiting caregiving can transcend physical boundaries. They can include the social and emotional borders conflict-divided communities build against one another over time. These “imaginary” borders require us to think about the additional asymmetries entailed in precarious familial relations and how this affects the multiple meanings of care in the context of contemporary border regimes and amid enduring legacies of violence.     

Lost in Translation? Try Second Language Learning: Understanding Movements of Ideas and Practices across Time and Space

This article considers interaction, negotiation and exchange across the borders of systems of knowledge, be they disciplines, moral frameworks, cultures or ideologies, by focusing on “translation” and “second language learning” as epistemic tools. It does this by first elaborating the incommensurability thesis which is centred on the notion of untranslatability. The article then proposes an alternative “epistemology of interaction”, namely the “second language learning thesis” as more suitable for describing the movement of ideas and practices across space and time. It argues that whilst translation is embedded in difficulties of one-to-one mappability, and at times ignorant of its role in facilitating power relations, “the second language learning thesis” aims to (1) capture the socially constituted nature of borders, interactions, transgressions, exchanges (and raids); (2) draw attention to the different types and layers of second language learning (from “pidgins” to bilingualisms) and (3) lay bare, where possible, the asymmetric nature of interactions, including epistemological and linguistic hegemony. In so doing, it turns attention to “strategies of exclusion” and “strategies of inclusion” in the policing of borders between cultures and disciplines, whether they are separated temporally or spatially.     

Open Borders: Absurd Chimera or Inevitable Future Policy?

In the current climate of security concerns, the movement of people across borders is becoming increasingly criminalised. Yet there is a parallel political and economic reality in which borders are opening and the movement of people is being liberalised: zones of free movement such as the European Union expand; other bilateral and multilateral agreements include provisions for more fluid cross‐border movement; international trade negotiations seek to facilitate the flow of those providing goods and services; developing countries’ push for greater access for their citizens to the labour markets of the industrialised world; and a new class of “gold collar” professionals moves with increasing ease around the globe. This paper explores the possibilities of universal open borders as a future policy option. The author accepts realpolitik and understands that the free flow of immigrants is currently impossible, but also maintains that open borders are an inevitable long‐term consequence of globalisation, as well as a policy option for addressing North‐South inequalities and a moral touchstone for the global extension of human rights. The paper does not advocate for more migration, but instead explores the paradox that the creation of the conditions that would allow for the opening of borders is likely to reduce the incentives for emigration. The paper explores the policy changes needed to achieve open borders.     

Social scientists as technicians,advisors and meaning producers

In this paper, we are addressing three issues that are at the core of scholarly reflections about the societal role of social science knowledge: (1) Social scientists tend to follow – although this is not always a deliberate choice – one of three models that describe their role as the producers of practical knowledge. For the sake of simplicity we have called the three models the “model of the technician”, the “model of the advisor” and the “model of the meaning producer”. (2) Due to the need for social inquiry to adopt a particular, restrictive perspective of its domain, useful knowledge is a complicated matter. Hence the need to put into question a widely supported notion at least among social scientists: When asked about the reasons for the limited “power” of social science knowledge the response frequently is that the adequacy and practical usefulness of social science knowledge is a function of its capturing the full complexity of what indeed are complex social phenomena. (3) Social scientists often tend to lament the marginal impact their intellectual efforts have on society, and they look with great envy across the divide of the so-called two cultures, wondering how and when they will be able to achieve the same kind of success and prestige the natural sciences and technology appear to enjoy in most societies. However, this unhappy view systematically understates the actual power of social science knowledge, in particular its role as a mind maker or meaning producer.     

Public Scholarship and Community Engagement in Building Community Food Security: The Case of the University of Kentucky

The current call for public scholarship and community engagement by universities and disciplinary organizations has created opportunities to develop innovative ways to integrate research, instruction, and outreach. This article discusses a collaboration among scholars at the University of Kentucky and alternative agrifood movement organizations that has evolved as they pursue an alternative agrifood system in Kentucky. This collaboration made instructional programs in sociology and the honors world food issues track places in which both students and instructors can examine “problems” of the conventional agrifood system, conduct research, and develop collaborative relationships with community activists. We draw on Burawoy's discussion of public sociology and its interface with professional, critical, and policy sociologies. Supplementing our discussion with literature from social movements and science studies, we demonstrate how this integrated approach can render sociological knowledge and skills useful as critical support of alternative agrifood movements. We argue that the “experiential classroom” is an excellent site for the critical examination within the agrifood movements of oppositional culture. This, in turn, makes possible students' recognition of injustice in the existing agrifood system.     

"Deseos y Dolores": mapping desire, suffering, and (dis)loyalty within transnational partnerships

This piece considers the deseos -- wants, desires, needs -- and dolores -- pain or sorrow -- of individuals in US-Mexico transnational partnerships. For transnational Mexicans, “desire” manifests as diverse, even contradictory, expressions of emotion. Migration is intertwined with multiple desires within intimate relationships, but is also tied to suffering across borders. Conflicting articulations of deseos y dolores reveal gender politics as well as the broader socioeconomic inequalities that drive migration and result in the transborder movement that separates couples and family members in a transnational space.     

Leave the Fields without Leaving the Countryside: Modernity and Mobility in Rural,Ethnic China

Studies of internal migration in contemporary China frequently focus on the movement of rural people to urban centers, while studies of Chinese tourism concentrate on the mobility of urban travelers. These approaches to mobility coincide neatly with established understandings of modernity, despite the fact that the Chinese government has tried to promote certain forms of rural modernization without mobilization–hence the national slogan “leave the fields without leaving the countryside.” This article complicates the relationship between modernity and mobility in China by examining mobility from the perspective of returned migrants in rural, ethnic minority tourism villages. Through the analysis of five migrants' stories of travel, I explore the ordering of mobility, or how differing types of mobility come to be re-signified in times of immense social change and the consequences of these symbolic shifts on local understandings of ethnic identity and rural livelihoods. My argument builds on analytical frameworks of mobility in post-reform China by examining how mobility itself has been ordered in ways that reveal particular desire, inequalities, and power relations. By exploring how mobility both orders social relationships and how different forms of mobility, such as tourism or migration, come to be ordered in relation to each other, I draw attention to how mobility, and by extension immobility, generates the conditions of possibility for tourism village residents to make sense of the potential and paradoxes of rural, ethnic tourism development in contemporary China.     

Undoing raciolinguistics

In this commentary, we discuss common pitfalls associated with the study of race and language, focusing specifically on the recent emergence of raciolinguistics as a frame for these efforts. We examine how raciolinguistics can be taken up in ways that silo discussions of race from the rest of linguistics—as something that the “raciolinguists” do—such that careful study of issues including colonialism, power, and societal hierarchies is perpetually pushed to the margins of the field. We also consider how the nominalization of raciolinguistics can suggest that race and language are agreed upon objects in ways that reproduce troublesome essentializations. We show how a raciolinguistic perspective can resist such tendencies by continually interrogating the colonial reproduction and transformation of modern knowledge projects and lifeways across societal contexts, as well as by continually examining the fundamental nature of language, race, and power. We end with what we see as the implications of a raciolinguistic perspective for all of linguistics.     

Farm Boys and Wild Men: Rurality,Masculinity, and Homosexuality*

Abstract In this paper I explore cultural constructions of “rural gay masculinity,” focusing first on the stereotype of the “rustic sodomite” seen in a number of Hollywood movies; second, on the construction of an idyllic Eden in the gay imaginary; and third, on gendered and sexualized performances among members of the men's movement and the “radical fairies.” In doing so, I suggest how the rural/urban divide is meshed, in complex and distinct ways, with homosexual/heterosexual and masculine/feminine dichotomies in cultural texts and practices. Set against these representations, of course, are the lives of homosexual men born and raised in the country: I discuss accounts of the lives of “farm boys” as a way of contextualizing and complexifying the dominant modes of representation outlined. In all of these portrayals, “rural gay masculinity” is figured in distinct ways, especially in relation to urban effeminacy. I end by calling for further exploration of these issues in an effort to more fully theorize the cultural meanings and experiences of “rural gay masculinity.”     

Self‐Structure,Identity, and Commitment: Promise Keepers’ Godly Man Project

We address current debates related to identity theory and the organization of the self by examining how a sample of men involved in the Promise Keepers movement construct, maintain, and organize their identities. Our qualitative analysis shows that these men have undertaken a continuous project of gender identity work to become godly men. We find that the Promise Keepers movement provides these men with both the ideological and the organizational resources that enable them to sustain their godly man identity. This “master identity” becomes enmeshed with other identities and is used to modify and reorganize those identities, restricting potential identity conflicts. The result is a relatively harmonious self structure. More generally, we identify several criteria for defining the master identity concept and highlight its potential for advancing identity theory.     

Food Security: The Elaboration of Contested Claims to a Consensus Frame*

Abstract This article demonstrates Gamson's claim that behind the apparent agreement implied by “consensus frames” lies considerable dissensus. Ironically, the very potency of consensus frames may generate contested claims to the ownership of a social problem. Food security is a potent consensus frame that has generated at least three distinct collective action frames: food security as hunger; food security as a component of a community's developmental whole; and food security as minimizing risks with respect to an industrialized food system's vulnerability to both “normal accidents” as well as the “intentional accidents” associated with agriterrorism. We show that each collective action frame reflects internal normative variation identified here with Goffman's “keying” concept. These keys suggest power differentials in the endorsement or critique of dominant institutional practices. Each frame and associated keys reflect distinct sets of interests by collective actors, such as demands for substantively different applications of science and technology. The prognostic framing of the community food security movement coincidentally holds potential for reducing not only the accidental risks of productivist agriculture but also the uncertainty induced by the risk of terrorist exploitation of those vulnerabilities. The article explores power differentials and variable levels of oppositional consciousness as mechanisms by which keys generate contentious politics within frames while serving as potential bridges between frames. This contested ownership of food security has implications for the associated movements' and organizations' capacity to influence the structure of the agrifood system as well as the broader socioeconomic organization of rural regions.     

Stuck on a Muddy Road: Frictions of Mobility amongst Urban Toba in Northern Argentina

This article explores how the Toba, an indigenous group in the North of Argentina, shape places and an urban subjectivity in the frictions of their mobility between villages, the urban barrio (neighborhood), and the periurban bush. I argue that the experience of Toba moving to the city is better understood as frictions between the Toba desire to progress in the city, the organization of difference in space, and their multiple movements “back” to the villages. In addition, I analyze their contemporary hunting trips, which take urban Toba to the nearby bush, as a mobility that shapes a form of indigeneity engaged with access to both the city center and the bush. This practice confronts them with ranch owners and police but reconnects the barrio and the bush by traversing them. If frictions emerge between forces that trigger movement and forces that slow that movement down, in the frictions of mobility the Toba have at once shaped their position in the city and overflowed its limits.     

The “Pilgrim Question”: Regulating the Hajj in Late Imperial Russia

The goal of this article is to complicate the existing scholarly account of Russian policies toward the hajj, which heretofore have been studied primarily as an aspect of the tsarist state’s relations with Islam and empire building. This article demonstrates that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the hajj came to be understood by many educated Russians within and outside the government as a highly complex and contested “pilgrim question” which engaged a broad range of difficult issues: problems of governance, such as an aspiration for more effective regulation of increased mass mobility, identification of border-crossers and sanitary control, as well as issues of empire, socio-political and confessional order, and economic development. The essence of the “question” was how to order the travel of Muslim pilgrims to the holy places outside of the empire’s borders. Imperial expansion, the growth of the empire’s Muslim population, and the development of long-distance transportation all contributed to an increasing number of Muslim pilgrims from Russia. In response, and inspired by new conceptualizations of the role of a modern state in relation to its subjects, some Russian officials sought to take greater control of the hajj. By focusing on the Russian government and public debate on how to regulate the hajj, this article examines why and how educated Russians increasingly came to see the annual Muslim pilgrimage as a “question.” It discusses the different dimensions of this problem and what the proposed regulation entailed. Finally, the article suggests why the “pilgrim question” remained a contested issue in late imperial Russia.     

Making Movements Possible: Transportation Workers and Mobility in West Africa

This article concerns the social process of mobility control in four West African countries: Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and Ghana. Migration has long been an important aspect of West African social, cultural, and political life. This study explores everyday enforcement of international and internal mobility control, and the ways in which Africans respond to and resist the actions of security agents. I accomplish this using ethnographic evidence gathered when travelling over 10,000 miles in Burkina Faso, Mali, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire over a period of nine months. In addition, data were gathered through participant observation while crossing international borders 23 times in a sub‐region of West Africa, and participating in 169 security control checkpoints in total. This evidence is supplemented by 29 interviews with transportation workers across the four countries studied. Augmenting the traditional social science literature on migrant networks with an approach proposed by development economists, this article shows that transportation workers play an essential role in mobility control in West Africa. The theoretical insights derived here contribute to a larger project of bringing borders and transportation into the same frame of reference as migration in academic study. This project sees movement through interaction, rather than simply through the systems approach so commonly applied in the literature and shows that in the countries under study there exist unstated, implicit social norms among transportation workers, their clients, and security agents, which constitute a key mechanism for migration. These actors operate in a series of structured relationships, which can be described as institutionalised, and which create a series of important exchanges governing movement in the sub‐ region.     

“Isn't it ironic…!?!” Mobility researchers go sedentary: A group auto-ethnography on collective coping and care in pandemic times

We moved places and places moved us, until force majeure detained us on the spot. Signed-up to be hyper-mobile Ph.D.-candidates, we became hyper-reflective pandemic intimates. We moved together into a space that felt safe, OUR safe space. Suspended. Did the pandemic open this door, or had this space always existed, even back in the old days? Probably the latter, although we were not sensitive enough to perceive it, too busy to push the door, too lonesome to CARE. Not attentive to its possibilities, not imaginative of its POWER, too confident to be capable of succeeding alone. Even if we might have secretly wished for this space to exist. The present piece of work, and JOY, might be described by others as a “side-step,” a “hobby project,” a “shadow activity.” For us, it is a recollection of shocks and wonders, a sentience of precious, ephemeral instances that last. We are a group of eight early career researchers who study global mobility and labor migration from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. With prior international mobility experience, we left our previous countries of residence in 2018 to join an EU-funded research project, whilst being located in different European cities. One could classify us, for example, as highly qualified, privileged migrants. The present paper is the outcome of a collaborative, auto-ethnographic study, conducted in 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, when we suddenly were forced not to travel anymore. We got together online every week to “refaire le monde,” and we conducted virtual, dialogical self-interrogations and group reflections. Based on an emic approach, in line with Chang et al. (2013), we applied an iterative process of data collection and analysis. Our weekly conversations naturally emerged as a safe space for exchange and understanding, as we were facing similar situations, despite staying at different places. Suddenly, as the privilege of “always being on the move,” “always socializing and networking” disappeared due to closed borders and pandemic threats, we experienced anxieties and isolation and had to re-evaluate our perceptions on life, work, and international mobility. The very purpose and meaning of our broader research endeavors and employment perspectives suddenly faded away. We realized more than ever before, what it means to us to be allowed to move, to travel freely across continents.     

Should we go “home” to eat?: toward a reflexive politics of localism

“Coming home to eat” [Nabhan, 2002. Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods. Norton, New York] has become a clarion call among alternative food movement activists. Most food activist discourse makes a strong connection between the localization of food systems and the promotion of environmental sustainability and social justice. Much of the US academic literature on food systems echoes food activist rhetoric about alternative food systems as built on alternative social norms. New ways of thinking, the ethic of care, desire, realization, and vision become the explanatory factors in the creation of alternative food systems. In these norm-based explanations, the “Local” becomes the context in which this type of action works. In the European food system literature about local “value chains” and alternative food networks, localism becomes a way to maintain rural livelihoods. In both the US and European literatures on localism, the global becomes the universal logic of capitalism and the local the point of resistance to this global logic, a place where “embeddedness” can and does happen. Nevertheless, as other literatures outside of food studies show, the local is often a site of inequality and hegemonic domination. However, rather than declaim the “radical particularism” of localism, it is more productive to question an “unreflexive localism” and to forge localist alliances that pay attention to equality and social justice. The paper explores what that kind of localist politics might look like.     

Toward A Renewed Sociological Jurisprudence: From Roscoe Pound to Herbert Blumer and Beyond

This article, based on the Distinguished Lecture presented on August 21, 2001, at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Anaheim, California, proposes a synthesis of Herbert Blumer's macrosociological perspective on the race question with Roscoe Pound's philosophy and science of law (i.e., his so‐called sociological jurisprudence), Joseph Tussman's and Jacobus tenBroek's juridical methodology, and Philip Selznick's sociology of responsive law. The compound so produced will help to establish a foundation for a praxiological sociology of American constitutional law. The article focuses on the problem of legislative‐made “classifications” and their relations to the legitimate public purposes entailed in the enactment of statutes, laws, and decrees. Such classifications become problematic when they are said to be “underinclusive,” “over‐inclusive,” or both in seeking to effect their aims. Strategic research sites for this issue are racial and ethnic classifications that single out one or a limited cluster of racial or ethnic groups for special benefits (“affirmative action”) or restitution (“reparations”). Calling for a reinvigoration of Pound's pragmatic approach to sociological jurisprudence, I show how Blumer's analysis of the “color line”—when seen in relation to the original intent of the makers of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth post‐Civil War Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and, using Tussman's and tenBroek's showing of how such categorizations might be both methodically evaluated and applied to the challenged classifications—provides grounds for reconsidering whether the latter are instances of “reverse discrimination” and, hence, violations of the constitutional requirement of “equal protection of the law.” The science of law is a science of social engineering having to do with that part of the whole field which may be achieved by the ordering of human relations through the action of politically organized society. —Roscoe Pound, Justice According to Law We did not hold it necessary to wait for nature to put a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, and we shall not much longer hold it necessary to wait for nature to dig the legal canals that will give security to neglected human interests which clamor for recognition and protection. —Roscoe Pound, “Juristic Problems of National Progress”     

Gender, Class Aspirations, and Emerging Fields of Body Work in Urban India

If some research indicates that bodies are becoming central to the life projects of “new liberal Indian” women, public debates simultaneously reveal that their bodies are entangled in satisfying traditional and modern ideals of womanhood. There are few studies, though, that have looked into how women reconcile and make use of contradictory cultural signals surrounding their bodies that arise out of a rapidly changing gender and class structure. We draw upon both followers and critics of Bourdieu to show that bodily concerns and undertakings of 48 urban Indian women, and the ways in which they resist and embrace cultural demands on their bodies, vary by social class locations. The women in the study who were most keenly aware of “options” embedded in thin or fit bodies were the ones who could take advantage of new careers and styles of living that the global economy was bringing to their doorsteps. In contrast, women who saw limited prospects for social mobility were unconvinced of the symbolic value of a thin body and rejected appearance concerns on the ground that it interfered with their mothering responsibilities. We conclude that while the fit body has indeed emerged as an important site of self-making for the modern Indian woman, the degree to which she sees costs and benefits involved in the bodywork of losing weight depends on her class location.     

Translating Racial Genomics: Passages in and Beyond the Lab

While qualitative studies of science have traditionally focused on sciences as bounded cultures, or cohesive communities that operate in well-defined research settings, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) helps to envision the complex processual formation of scientific associations across a diverse array of social entities and sites. Using the case of race and health disparities research in genetic science, this article explores how ANT’s emphasis on agentic symmetry, and the translation of interests between humans and nonhumans, makes visible the multiplicity of agencies and research institutes that, guided by the US federal government’s Directive No. 15, marshaled genomics to construct race as a social problem. It also examines the multiplicity of methodological strategies such an analysis entails. Here, qualitative analysis of government regulations, policy councils, funding mechanisms, scientific practices, and statements from key scientists in elite biomedical positions is used to show how it came to be that racial governance became an “obligatory passage point” for scientists, and, in a second movement, that genomics became an obligatory passage point for conceiving large-scale analysis of racial stratification. Yet, going beyond current conceptions of ANT, I consider how tracing translation in and beyond the lab can expose a third multiplicity: the multiplicity of obligatory passage points in a given network. I argue that ANT, taken to its logical end, involves study of a plurality of mutually reinforcing actors that co-constitute one another and synergistically push collective agendas.