Clarifying the role of belief-motive explanations in multi-stakeholder realist evaluation

In realist evaluation, where researchers aim to make program theories explicit, they can encounter competing explanations as to how programs work. Managing explanatory tensions from different sources of evidence in multi-stakeholder projects can challenge external evaluators, especially when access to pertinent data, like client records, is mediated by program stakeholders. In this article, we consider two central questions: how can program stakeholder motives shape a realist evaluation project; and how might realist evaluators respond to stakeholders’ belief-motive explanations, including those about program effectiveness, based on factors such as supererogatory commitment or trying together in good faith? Drawing on our realist evaluation of a service reform initiative involving multiple agencies, we describe stakeholder motives at key phases, highlighting a need for tactics and skills that help to manage explanatory tensions. In conclusion, the relevance of stakeholders’ belief-motive explanations (‘we believe the program works’) in realist evaluation is clarified and discussed.     

Writing resistance together

This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open‐ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some ‘dirtiness’ that is essential to writing, the article has not been language checked throughout by a native speaker of English.     

‘In England,they don’t call you black!’ Migrating racialisations and the production of Roma difference across Europe

This article draws on long-term fieldwork among Slovak Roma migrants, identifying processes through which a haunting figure of the Roma migrant emerges across Europe, to argue for more differentiated accounts of continuing and emerging forms of racialisation. It explores how the movement of Roma (whose bodies are marked by their racialised ‘darkness’ in Slovakia) to Britain granted them a temporary escape from this modality of branding while simultaneously exposing them to different categorisations within a re-configuring classificatory matrix. The article develops the concept of ‘migrating racialisation’ in order to empirically trace how historically developed forms of racialisation in Slovakia migrate across Europe through the movement of Roma and non-Roma migrants from Eastern Europe, as well as through particular forms of knowledge circulating within transnational fields constituted not only by Roma migrants themselves but also by various institutions for ‘managing’ or ‘researching’ ‘the Roma’. This concept allows us to analyse how the recent forms of racialisation simultaneously draw on heterogenous histories and nation-state formations, social conditions and sedimented bodily dispositions, which are re-adjusted to new social conditions, discourses and emerging forms of knowledge produced about Roma migrants over the last decade in British and European contexts.     

The event of death: Reflections on the dynamics of emotions and embodied resistance in the Moroccan Contexts of hirak (movement) and la hirak ((non)movement)

This paper studies the role of emotions in creating spectacular revolt situations. We underline the travelling competence of sentiments and their power in crafting trans-local moments of embodied resistance. In contemporary Moroccan society, the adaptation of the Bouazizian style of protest has been a reaction to the prevailing feelings of worthlessness gripping the common citizen. The images of wasted beings in the post-2011 atmosphere have been associated with instances of social insurgence, by individuals who attempt self-immolation, or citizens treated by figures from the centre (e.g. police, public figures) in a way that inculcate in them powerful feelings of abjection, after which they feel irreparably delinked from their sense of humanity. This paper seeks to demonstrate how practices of al-hogra (humiliation) have produced cultural forms of abjection that could also be traced in the way common people inferiorize one another in everyday life through the use of a terminology of trash. By disclosing people’s non-subtle armaments of protest (i.e. self-immolation), we contend that resistance and its various trances, as well as the emotions that prompt them, have their origin in the reality of the body, realistic visions of the body owner and his/her awareness of the potential for realization (through it). Hence we will examine how vulnerable people manipulate the three conditions of corporeality, corporealism and corporealization, to subvert the humiliation and symptoms of social death imposed on them by the regime.     

Mobile pensioners: retirement migrants’ perspectives of EU citizenship and free movement

The European institutions picture EU citizens as important actors in the process of transforming EU citizenship into a “tangible reality”. By knowing and practising EU citizenship rights, EU citizens are supposed to give meaning and depth to the otherwise hollow concept of EU citizenship. What EU citizenship means for mobile citizens themselves and how EU citizens practice and evaluate their rights (“lived citizenship”) is generally not a central theme in reports and studies on EU citizenship. In this article the value of EU citizenship will be discussed by applying a qualitative research approach and by focusing on retired EU citizens’ perspectives and practice of, in particular, free movement. This article applies a comparative approach and includes EU citizens who move or return from the Netherlands to Spain or Turkey after retirement. Four groups of EU citizens move between these countries: Dutch nationals who move to Spain, Spanish nationals who return to Spain, Dutch nationals who move to Turkey and Turkish dual-nationals who return to Turkey after retirement. This article shows that migratory background, country of origin, country of retirement and the way in which EU citizenship is acquired determine retirement migrants’ perspectives and practice of EU citizenship.     

Migration and the senses

Recent scholarship in the sociological subfields of culture and immigration offers several promising directions for studying how people experience the world in embodied ways and move through and across boundaries. Yet, the lack of overlap between fields has left numerous theoretical angles unexplored. In this review, I consider the limited existing scholarship at the intersection of migration and the senses. I discuss literature on the role of sensation during three critical moments of migration: movement, encounter, and return. These moments highlight the sensorially dislocating nature of travel, the felt politics of inclusion and exclusion, and the transporting power of embodied memories. These works dive deep into the everyday realities of bodies on the move that public and academic discourse has previously ignored. I conclude by briefly outlining exciting new directions to expand work connecting migration and the senses and suggest that we begin to explore globalized migrant sensibilities.     

Procedural (in)justice,emotions, and compliance

The procedural justice model has become widely recognized as a key crime prevention and reduction strategy, spurring its adoption across police agencies throughout the United States in an effort to address mounting concerns regarding police use of force. Recent critiques, however, have called attention to the need for greater examination of potential contributing factors that are underdeveloped in investigations of the procedural justice model, including the role of emotions. This article takes stock of interdisciplinary advancements to critically examine scholarly investigations exploring associations between procedural (in)justice, emotions, and compliance behaviors within the context of police-citizen interactions. In doing so, continued gaps are identified. Lastly, this article concludes by identifying future pathways and recommendations for the scholarly advancement of our understanding of emotions and their continued relevance to the procedural justice model.     

Needed: a new international for a just transition and against fascism

ABSTRACT

We urgently need a new global solidarity movement, but it will not be shaped like the old ones, with failing solidarity when it is most needed or at the service of anti-imperialist regimes. What we need, urgently, is a global movement for a just transition, combining social and environmental justice, as well as a strong movement against re-emerging fascism, in North and South.     

‘Are we to become a gender university?’ Facets of resistance to a gender equality project

Gender equality (GE) is something ‘we cannot not want’. Indeed, the pursuit of equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities for all women and men throughout a society freed from gendered oppression is widely visible in recent organizational GE initiatives. In practice, however, GE initiatives often fail in challenging gendered norms and at effecting deep‐seated change. In fact, GE measures tend to encounter resistance, with a gap between saying and doing. Using a GE project at a Swedish university, we examined the changing nature of reactions to GE objectives seeking to understand why gender inequality persists in academia. We used ‘resistance’ to identify multiple, complex reactions to the project, focusing on the discursive practices of GE. Focusing our contextual analysis on change and changes in reactions enabled a process‐oriented analysis that revealed gaps where change is possible. Thus, we argue that studying change makes it possible to identify points in time where gendered discriminatory norms are more likely to occur. However, analysing discursive practices does not itself lead to change nor to action. Rather, demands for change must start with answering, in a collaborative way, what problem we are trying to solve when we start a new GE project, in order to be relevant to the specific context. Otherwise, GE risks being the captive of consensus politics and gender inequality will persist.     

Scientists in the Resistance

In her recent piece, MacKendrick (2017) asks whether we are experiencing a “new wave of science activism” and outlines various visible and vocal forms of political action taken by scientists in recent months. Coming from a slightly different perspective, this piece looks at scientists as part of the broader Resistance—people working individually and in collectivities to challenge the Trump agenda. Building on analysis of data collected from a random sample of participants from the Washington, DC , March for Science, which took place in April 2017, I explore how participants at the March for Science compare to a broader sample of participants in the Resistance. Although they have some unique characteristics, my findings show that there are few statistically significant differences between participants in the March for Science and others participating in the Resistance. I conclude this piece by discussing the implications of these findings on scientists in the Resistance and science activism more generally.