A history of Chinese global Internet governance and its relations with ITU and ICANN

The Chinese contribution to global Internet governance debate has been studied mainly by focusing on the governmental perspective. This study was aimed to provide a broader view by analyzing the participation of Chinese academics and civil society in two of the most important Internet governance international organizations: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Based on historical material and in-depth interviews conducted in Geneva and Beijing, the findings show the evolution of Chinese Internet governance at the global level and suggest the following: first, the Chinese agents in the global debate on Internet governance support a multi-stakeholder perspective; second, although seldom engaged in the decision-making process, the Chinese agents involved in the global governance identify ITU as the more credible international organization in coordinating global governance; third, the Chinese agents have an ambivalent approach to Chinese participation both in ITU and ICANN. Finally, the findings of the study reported in this article contest the understanding that Chinese Internet governance is isolationist in nature.     

To be Karen in the Thai–Burma borderlands: identity formation through the prism of a human rights discourse

Current debates on Karen identity have tended to focus on the development of a nationalist construct of a pan-Karen community. This article moves beyond this notion to explore a Karen identity that is being recast in the form of a human rights discourse where the Karen construct, adapt, and reify the social aspects of their political identity in order to establish a claim to a political self, where they protest the persecution and discrimination waged against them as well as larger claims around governance and political representation. This human rights discourse is framed by increased emphasis in the Thai–Burma borderlands on a human rights framework to address Burma’s ongoing conflict. Such an argument has the potential to move current debates beyond the more militant ethno-nationalist discourses of the Karen identity and develop an adequate framework for the practices of identity, which occur among displaced Karen in the Thai–Burma borderlands.     

Energy transition on the rise: discourses on energy future in the German parliament

In this paper we describe energy policy discourses and their story-lines in German parliamentary debates, and trace their evolution over the past decades. Through content analysis and coding with MAXQDA, changes in the discourses and in the use of story-lines by different political parties are analyzed. Our study shows that while the concept of a transition towards a nuclear-free, renewables-based energy system became hegemonic within three decades, the discourse itself underwent major changes. Energy Transition was de-radicalized and became part of a discourse of Ecological Modernization, thus aligning with mainstream economic logic. There are still considerable differences in the story-lines narrated by parliamentarians about pathways to Energy Transition and its effects. Discursive struggles into the meaning and the means of the transition project continue, suggesting that discourse structuration is far from complete.     

The resonance of moderate feminism and the gendered relations of austerity

During the tenure of the UK Conservative‐led coalition government (2010–15) austerity policy was rolled out in response to the global financial crisis of 2007–08. In this article a discourse analysis of mainstream newspaper representations of austerity, which appeared throughout this period, is undertaken using the principles of Cultural Political Economy (Jessop 2004). Three key questions are posed: 1) How is gender drawn upon to render austerity intelligible? 2) How do these discursive constructions contribute to the reproduction of particular ideas regarding contemporary gender relations? 3) What do these gendered austerity discourses reveal about the institutionalisation of particular forms of feminism? A critical gender discourse which emphasised equality appeared alongside constructions of gender that reproduced problematic assumptions. Made meaningful in this way, austerity, as a strategy for restoring pre‐crash social arrangements, also restored particular aspects of gender relations. This is theorised as the product of the successful institutionalisation of a hegemonic, moderate liberal feminism prior to the financial crash. The findings contribute to debates within feminist scholarship about the dynamics of gender inclusion and extend our understanding of the associated implications for feminist critique.     

Affective virtuosity: Challenges for governance feminism in the context of the economic crisis

This article explores the possibilities and constraints for feminist knowledge production and diffusion, and its influence over policy making and public debate in the context of austerity and neoliberal governance. By analysing the process in which a group of Finnish academic feminists used their expert position to influence government policy in 2015–2017, the article illustrates the strategies they adopted to engage in political debates and how they negotiated the new political landscape. The research material was derived from two years of action research and participant observation and is considered through the theoretical lens of governance feminism. The article makes a distinctive contribution to extant theories of governance feminism, by drawing upon theories of affects and ambivalence as a complement to governance feminism's focus on discourses and co‐optation. We coin the term affective virtuosity to highlight the importance of affect in feminist knowledge production and diffusion, and in shaping the various perspectives available to feminist scholars in encounters with politicians and policymakers.     

Capitalism as a social movement: the corporate and neoliberal reconstructions of the American political economy in the twentieth century

This paper examines the ways in which social movements based among leading capitalists have remade the US political economy. In the first part we examine the period from the late 1880s through the 1920s, sketching the emergence of a hegemonic movement that accomplished the re-embedding of capitalist social relations during the corporate reconstruction of American capitalism. In the second, we examine the disembedding of capitalist relations during the contemporary neoliberal era. The paper makes three major arguments. First, capitalists not just subaltern groups resort to collective action outside of institutional channels of authority and power. Second, during organic crises the movements of capitalists will join with movements of subaltern groups to create hegemonic projects, whose disparate supporters are articulated by discourses. Third, the concept of ‘social movement’ itself should be understood as a constituent part of a larger social formation and not sealed off from features of capitalism and the state. Indeed, hegemonic social movements have reconstructed the larger landscape that social movement theory normally takes for granted as a background. In applying this approach to the contested topic of neoliberalism, we argue that it was not primarily a class-based coup, a policy, ideology, or culture shift but a discourse that united elements of the left and the right as well as a ‘historic bloc’ with homes in both major parties. During both periods subaltern groups played an important role in the hegemonic movements that created corporate capitalism and later neoliberalism.     

The Polish Parliament and the Making of Politics through Abortion: Nation,Gender and Democracy in the 1996 Liberalization Amendment Debate

The collapse of communism across East Central Europe was marked by a renewal of debates around reproduction, with abortion debates surfacing in Romania, Germany and Poland. Reproductive politics and more specifically abortion debates typically come to the forefront in times of crisis or societal transformation. Struggles over women's reproductive rights in Poland, as evidenced by continuing debate around the legal status of abortion, are in this postcommunist context intimately related to and bound up with ongoing symbolic and concrete re-definitions of Polish nationhood, identity and citizenship. Focusing on the connections between discourses of Polish nationhood, gender and democracy, this article offers a detailed and critical engagement with debate in the Sejm (the lower chamber of the Polish parliament) during the second reading of the 1996 liberalization of abortion amendment. Using a discourse analysis methodology, the article argues that abortion is a symbolic issue through which anxieties about postcommunist reform are raised, nationalist pasts and futures are imagined and through which political projects are articulated.     

Ready Rhetorics: Political Homophobia and Activist Discourses in Malawi,Nigeria, and Uganda

Since the late 1990s political leaders in several African countries have pursued legislation to expand criminal penalties for same-sex sex. Yet, much of the research on efforts to expand criminalization of same-sex sexualities in Africa has focused on individual country cases, neglecting the role of national and transnational sociopolitical contexts and economic flows. Focusing on discourses present in news media data from 2000 to 2014 in three African countries pursuing regressive policies targeting homosexuality—Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda—we examine: 1) the different antihomosexual discourses and constellations of actors that emerge over time; 2) the linkages among antihomosexual discourses and other social or cultural logics that allow individuals and collective actors to make sense of antihomosexual discourses in a particular historical moment; and 3) the relationships among discourses vying for power in a given discursive field. In these data we observe episodic public debates around homosexuality that engage different arguments and constellations of actors over time. The intensity of public debates has increased since the mid-2000s in each country, and debates reflect strong linkages among transnational and national actors. Ultimately, we contend that the particular debates occurring around the regulation of same-sex sex in Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda reflect larger conflicts over social change, political power, and global status hierarchies. We conclude with implications for the study of homophobia and LGBT movements in sub-Saharan Africa.     

Ordinary Usage of New Media: Internet Usage via Mobile Phone in Japan

Abstract:  This paper, by analyzing Internet usage via mobile phones in Japan, aims to clarify an aspect of information behavior in present-day Japanese society.
Many discourses on the mobile Internet in Japan, either positive or negative, emphasize its novelty and describe this new media as an exotic phenomenon. These discourses can be divided into two categories. The nationalistic discourses and the moral panic discourses. Both types of discourse have built certain images of social influences of the mobile Internet in the future. However, it would be unwise to conclude that those images of the mobile Internet express the reality of this new medium, simply because they lack empirical ground.
With these points in mind, based on the result of our national survey conducted in 2001, we would like to show the actual status of use of the mobile Internet and discuss that the ordinary usage is a critically important realm to understand the process of social reception of the mobile Internet. As our data shows, although the actual usage of the mobile Internet is not very conspicuous, it gives us a chance to understand how the mobile Internet has been integrated into our everyday lives.     

Playing at work: Understanding the Future of Work Practices at the Institute for the Future

This paper analyses the latest management assumptions and theories of playing at work, by examining how management strategies, especially relating to new media, invoke elements of play to create distinct and competing genres of discourse. After a brief overview of the latest management crisis of innovation, we will provide a few definitions of play, followed by a short summary of where play and other competing dialogues converge and overlap at worksites historically. This context will then enable us to present an ethnographic account of play at work at a non-profit forecast research firm known as the Institute for the Future, a site where notions of play are linked to a number of business and cultural discourses about the future of new media and presented in full relief. What we find is that while elements of play exist, the discourses that arise from it do not necessarily belong in the realm of play at all. Instead, notions of play at work are tied to wider historical frameworks acknowledging earlier 1960s American counter-cultural appeals for new values in management and worker self-actualization, and linked to a process for transforming that renewed impulse into the service of a networked economy in the 1990s.     

Nurturing the Seeds of Restorative Justice

Abstract

Communities are looking for community-building responses to the issue of crime. Traditional social and political discourses have presented only two responses to crime, “get tough” or rehabilitate offenders. An alternative view has begun to emerge in community criminal justice discourse and practice. Restorative justice emphasizes the restoration of relationships and community peace that are damaged by the harm of crime, and the repair of these social injuries. This article presents the findings of a pilot study that was conducted to assess a community's openness to restorative justice principles.     

Muslim Women,Moral Visions: Globalization and Gender Controversies in Indonesia

Since 1998, Indonesia’s democratization has produced contentious public debates, many of which revolve around issues of gender and sexual morality. Yet such controversies not only often focus on women, but also involve women as participants. This article examines how Muslim women activists in two organizations adapt global discourses to participate in important public sphere debates about pornography and polygamy. Indonesia’s moral debates demonstrate an important way in which global discourses are negotiated in national settings. In the debates, some pious women use discourses of feminism and liberal Islam to argue for women’s equality, while others use Islam to call for greater moral regulation of society. My research demonstrates that global discourses of feminism and Islamic revivalism are mediated through national organizations which shape women’s political activism and channel it in different directions. Women’s political subjectivities are thus shaped through their involvement in national organizations that structure the ways they engage with global discourses. The Indonesian case shows not only that the national should not be conflated with the local, but also demonstrates the significance of national contexts and histories for understanding global processes.     

Roma and the politics of double discourse in contemporary Europe

ABSTRACT

The article analyses the politics of ‘double discourse’ in relation to Roma that has evolved in contemporary neoliberal Europe. On the one hand, the double discourse promotes the integration, rights and equal opportunities of Roma, on the other, it denies recognition of, and ways to address, enduring structural violence and rising social insecurity. The article argues that the politics of ‘double discourse’, as a neoliberal approach towards Roma, is structured by two contradictory discourses that speak to different audiences, using duplicitous approaches to create anti-Roma consensus and maintain the critical difference and subordinated position of the racialised Romani populations in Europe. By studying the representation of Roma in the cases of so-called 'child theft' in Greece and Ireland, and in the recent ‘refugee crisis’, the paper identifies and discusses three dimensions of contemporary neoliberal double discourse: racialised de-Europeanisation, neoliberal undeservingness and (dis)articulation of citizenship.     

Social Capital and Internet Use: The Irrelevant,the Bad,and the Good

The social effects of Internet use have been a major concern for social scientists and society alike. How the Internet affects social capital has been a hot topic in sociology and other social sciences: Is the Internet reinforcing and complementing social capital? Or is it isolating people and diminishing their social capital? Social capital is here defined as the resources that are embedded in one's social ties. This article reviews the literature on the subject, looking at three perspectives: one that suggests no relationship between the Internet and social capital, a second that suggests a negative relationship between the Internet and social capital, and a third that suggests a positive relationship between the Internet and social capital. I conclude by showing that despite the prominent dystopian view of the Internet in the public and in some academic discourse (and the moral panic associated with it), research supports a positive relationship between Internet use and social capital. In addition, I discuss new trends and directions for future research.     

Invisible Barricades: Civil Society and the Discourse of the WTO

Concerns about the legitimacy and accountability of international institutions have prompted a sizable literature on the potential of civil society to help democratize global economic governance. Attention has primarily focused on the institutional factors impacting civil society participation in global governance. In this article, however, I point to the existence of yet more fundamental barriers operating at the level of discourse. I use critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze the discourse of the World Trade Organization (WTO), focusing on a key text in which it attempts to engage directly with the concerns of civil society, supported by a broad range of additional data sources, including documentary materials, interviews, and observation. Drawing on the case of the WTO, I argue that the discourse of global governance institutions can itself act as an ‘invisible barricade’, preventing the meaningful inclusion of civil society in policy debates and deliberations.     

Internet and the Political Public Sphere

The article addresses the main theory of the political public sphere generally, and the role of the Internet and Internet‐based media in the theory specifically. It first reviews briefly the initial social research on the Internet in the 1990s concerning political participation. After a presentation of Jürgen Habermas' theory of the contemporary public sphere, it proceeds to discuss the main problems concerning the Internet as a platform or infrastructure for public debate: segmentation and concentration. It argues that a general conclusion is that the public sphere differentiates and become more complex. A key task for future research, it argues, is to investigate the complex connections between Internet publics and mass media publics.     

The price of salt☆: the capable self in the face of heteronormative marriage pressure in the discourses of the “post-90s” Chinese lesbians

This article presents two sets of recorded interview data in which young Chinese lesbians (i.e. born in the 1990s) performatively negotiate a capable and neoliberalized identity in narrating how their relationships are threatened by heteronormative marriage pressure. In applying discourse analysis to examine aspects of performativity and agency in the data, this study determined the ways in which the participants made use of language to index different ideologies. The findings suggest that the discursive strategies adopted by the “post-90s” lesbian subjects in dealing with marriage pressure reflect the influence of both neoliberal and nonliberal ideologies in contemporary China. The strategies demonstrate neoliberal reductionism because structural pressure was reduced to practical problems that could be settled by personal agency. They also demonstrated the nonliberal elements of Chinese sociocultural values because subject positions which are typical in heteronormative discourses were used to normalize lesbian practices. However, the participants’ discourses index new desires that are specific to this generation, which has significant exposure to global queer ideologies. Thus, the results indicate that in response to marriage pressure, a capable and neoliberalized lesbian identity could be constructed at the intersection of sociocultural heteronormative ideologies, neoliberal values in contemporary China, and global queer discourses.     

Role with the punches: the construction and representation of Amir Khan as a role model for multiethnic Britain

This article examines the rapid rise to fame of teenage British Asian boxer Amir Khan following his silver medal at the 2004 Olympic Games, and provides a critical discourse analysis of the way that he was subsequently constructed and represented by politicians and the media as a role model for multiethnic Britain. The analysis demonstrates that in the periods directly after both the 2004 Olympic Games and the 7 July 2005 London bombings, the majority of discourses about, and representations of, Khan were inextricably related to contemporary debates around multiculturalism, national identity, and religious extremism and/or deviance amongst young British Muslim men. This article argues that despite the ostensibly positive portrayals of Khan as an individual, a broader, more critical reading of these texts uncovers how they actually reproduce the contradictions and problems inherent to New Labour's policies on citizenship, community cohesion, the ‘war on terror’ and ‘diversity management’. The article concludes that the almost ubiquitous configuration of Khan as a positive role model is in danger of obscuring the continued existence of discourses and practices of racism and social exclusion in contemporary Britain.     

“A Community of Communities”– Catholic Communitarianism and Societal Crises in Ireland, 1890s–1950s1

Abstract This article argues that discourse on community as a socio‐political problem needs to be located within historical, institutional, and socio‐structural contexts if it is to be properly understood. In particular, it suggests that the role of religion in promoting forms of communitarian discourse and practice needs to be given greater attention than it has hitherto received within the social sciences. The article pursues this argument through examination of the religious discourse on community cultivated and promoted by the Catholic Church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By providing an analysis of its role in Catholic responses to three major socio‐political crises in Ireland between the 1890s and 1960s, the paper suggests that not only does socio‐religious discourse on community constitute a powerful alternative to secular social‐scientific discourses, but that such discourse is particularly effective in helping to constitute specific groups as communities, given favourable sociological conditions.