The political is the personal: women’s participation in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement

This article examines women’s lived experiences as new activists in social movements. Taiwanese women – many of them housewives – joined the Sunflower Movement, a large-scale protest against a trade pact with China, and a related anti-nuclear movement in 2014. This study demonstrates how new women activists’ everyday political practices mutually construct the public and private spheres in the Taiwanese context. By ‘making private public’, these new activists use discourses of citizenship and maternalism to connect politics to social issues and daily life. Public participation makes these women feel empowered, and their daily actions transform politics from a set of formal, institutionalized practices to a practical fact of everyday life. This research also challenges the reproduction of a rigid private/public division in previous feminist scholarship that regards family and childcare as a separate realm that hinders women’s public participation. In a marked break from past accounts, these women don’t separate their caring responsibilities from their political actions. By focusing on new activists’ political action in and through their family and childcare, this research calls into question scholarly discussions that view maternalism primarily as a public discourse for mobilizing women or a visual strategy for collective protest. By considering the disruptive potential of all acts of mothering, this study paints a more complex and nuanced picture of women and mothers as protesters and reveals how activist women’s actions in the family and private social networks can be a central part of maternalist strategies’ radical potential.     

Beyond policy agenda-setting: political actors’ and journalists’ perceptions of news media influence across all stages of the political process

Although the relationship between politics and the media is a key topic in political communication research, the media’s role during times of routine policy-making has rarely been addressed. Furthermore, studies of routine policy-making have generally focused on one policy stage, usually agenda-setting, whereas few have analysed the media’s impact on the whole policy process. Still, the general view is that the news media matter in the early stages of the policy cycle but are non-influential during the formulation, implementation, and evaluation stages. This study queries these assumptions by taking a closer look at the news media’s influence on all stages of the political process at both the theoretical and the empirical level. A quantitative survey explored how members of the German Bundestag, administration officers, associations and NGOs, researchers, PR staff, and journalists involved with energy policy (N?=?338) perceive the media’s influence across all policy stages. The results confirm that media coverage does indeed strongly influence the political agenda. However, the subsequent formulation, evaluation, and termination of policy stages are also affected, with only the implementation stage being less susceptible to media influence. The different groups of political actors and journalists surveyed mainly agreed upon the estimations of the strength of the media effects.     

The making (and remaking) of a revolutionary plan: strategic dilemmas of the ANC’s armed struggle, 1974–1978

After the African National Congress’ (ANC’s) political and military structures within South Africa were destroyed by police repression in the mid‐1960s, there was a hiatus of a decade before the movement could contemplate resuming military operations within South Africa. By the mid‐1970s, the ANC found that the events that made this resumption possible also severely constrained its scope for action. While Mozambican independence gave the ANC a common border over which it could conduct attacks into South Africa, restrictions imposed by Mozambique’s government limited the ANC’s freedom to use the border in the same way that other African liberation movements had done in their struggles. This article argues that the ANC’s focus on military operations deep within the South African interior limited the ability of its rear bases to supply internal military units and thus made its army dependent on underground political structures for sustenance. The article explains how the absence of such structures resulted in significant casualties and contributed to the ANC’s decision to convene a review of strategy in 1978.     

Unraveling the enigma of Indira Gandhi’s rise in Indian politics: a woman leader’s quest for political legitimacy

This article employs Bourdieu??s notion of symbolic capital to explain how Indira Gandhi gained legitimacy in Indian politics. It reveals that, in spite of having belonged to the politically illustrious Nehru family, Gandhi suffered numerous indignities as a minister in the immediate post-Nehruvian period because the incumbent political elite at the time, the Syndicate, devalued the symbolic value of her family-name-based-capital of mass popularity. In the meantime, changes in the clientelistic relations between the landed and landless caste groups had created conditions for the failure of the Syndicate??s claim that their capital of popularity among politicians was the symbolic capital of the Indian political field. Aware of social changes taking place in the countryside, Gandhi took advantage of her access to the symbolic power of the state offices to classify the landless caste groups as garib (poor) in order to defeat the Syndicate electorally. Having established her capital of popularity among the masses as the symbolic capital of the Indian political field, she cemented its status by using her control over ruling party leaders?? access to state offices and simultaneously creating a new classification of a competent leader in the ruling party. This study contributes to the existing studies of leadership, especially leadership by women, and the legitimacy-gaining process by revealing the role of contest among the elite over the meaning of symbolic capital in creating or destroying their respective authority.     

Young people’s everyday political talk: a social achievement of democratic engagement

Everyday political talk is an important democratic activity. Research on young people has focused on the role of talk in political socialization. The overall question in this study is: What encourages or impedes young people to participate in everyday political talk? Politics has been described as a potentially unsafe topic. The study investigates young people’s own experiences of conversations in families, peer groups, and social media. The study applies a social interactional approach and understands political talk as a social achievement, related to norms and the management of self-identities. It is based on a multimethod approach comprising individual interviews, group interviews, and diaries. The group consists of 23 high school students (aged 17–18). The results show that the engagement in political talk is sensitive to the social settings. Norms make political topics expected or best to avoid. The family and peer groups are potentially important context for friendly talk, argumentations, exploration of opinions, and identities. The participants are in general more reluctant to express opinions in social media. The fear of face-threatening responses is one important aspect. The study suggests that political talk is an activity in which young people express, reveal, and carefully manage political self-identities.     

The pricking of a sacred cow: A suggestion for reform of the manuscript review process and the gatekeepers’ response

The paper examines the review process currently in vogue in the social sciences and contends that the process is in need of reform. The authors propose multiple submissions of extended abstracts as a possibility. The paper tests this alternative and presents an analysis of the results.     

Fabrication of a desired truth: the oblivion of a Naxalite woman in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) explores effects of the 1967 Communist Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal India. Irrespective of the glowing reviews the author earned for her truthful representations, the novel presents the pro-Communist uprising in a particular discursive regime that establishes a particular way of remembering and forgetting. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘subjugated knowledges,’ this essay seeks to examine the epistemic hegemonies and mainstream perspectives of the novel that have confined particular experiences and memories of the movement to the margins and rendered them unworthy of epistemic respect in the battle among power/knowledge frameworks. The novel reconstitutes a gendered history of the movement in which women’s story of engagement is spatiotemporally erased and reformulated. I argue that the genealogy of this particular oversight is rooted in the heteronormative capitalist ideology of the States that exercises discursive power over individuals to fabricate a desired truth.     

The Dark Side of Art’s Social Turn: Towards a Discourse on the Impact of Art’s Use of Social Forms Upon the Social

The recent “social turn” in art, in which art favours using forms from social life above its own, has been extensively discussed. Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud, Conversation Pieces and The One and the Many by Grant Kester, essays by Claire Bishop who supplies the term “the Social Turn,” and her recent publication Artificial Hells, are now as important to the field as the art they scrutinise. Ironically, however, when this discussion regards the implications of the “turn”, it habitually addresses the effects of this development from – and for – art’s point of view, overlooking the way in which artists’ inroads into social life may be differently regarded in the social realm. As much as this represents a failure to illuminate a particular area for knowledge, it also signifies a failure to take art’s revalorised commitment to the social to its ethical conclusion: such, from two perspectives, is the “dark side” of art’s social turn. This article seeks to mitigate these oversights. In particular, it looks at art in which an artist undertakes another person’s professional work. Considering the effects of this on those whose practices are appropriated, I propose a consultative approach, involving ethnographic and empathetic modes of address. Consequently, this article does not present an answer to the question it poses, “how do professionals in the social realm see art’s appropriations of their practices?” but rather, a framework for approaching that.     

The modularity of the ‘revolutionary’ repertoire of action in Egypt: origins and appropriation by different players

The Egyptian ‘revolutionary’ repertoire of action, that is to say the repertoire used by the protesters of January 2011, was characterized by a combination of several features: occupation of a symbolic place; ‘horizontal’ forms of organization; recourse to new electronic information and communication technologies (especially social networks); and rhetoric centered around universal values such as dignity, social justice, human rights, and democracy. This repertoire was born as a result of the merging of two parallel cycles of mobilization, which had actually started during the previous decade, one animated by activists from the educated middle class, and the other by workers struggling for economic and social reforms. After the fall of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, it demonstrated its extreme modularity, being appropriated by different players from all sections of the political spectrum, from the Salafist hāzimūn to proponents of the military power.     

From the enclave to hierarchy – and on to tyranny: the micro‐political organisation of a consultant’s group

No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

George Orwell, the concluding lines of Animal farm.     

The ruler’s game of musical chairs: Shuffling during the reign of Ethiopia’s last emperor

Dictators frequently shuffle their officials to break up potentially threatening cliques within their regimes. Yet, how they go about rearranging their officials is not well understood. Using network analysis and focusing on the last emperor of Ethiopia, this paper offers a systematic analysis of shuffling by tracing the movements of subordinates over the course of thirty four years. The results show that while officials where frequently shuffled, their movements were confined within clusters of different branches. Such circumscribed movements, I argue, represent the mechanism by which dictators reconcile the tradeoff between suppressing potential rivals and encouraging expertise for the proper functioning of the state apparatus.     

A children’s election—Dilemmas of children’s political participation

In this article, we explore how fifth graders (9–10-year-olds) and their teachers view children's participation in a parliamentary election for children arranged by Save the Children Norway in 2017. The participants draw on available discursive resources when making sense of children's political positions in society. In the discursive resources, longstanding tensions surrounding children, childhood and politics come to the surface. We conclude that although children's position in politics remains marginal, there are ways to move beyond the tensions to be able to imagine children as political actors.     

The regime’s worst nightmare: the mobilization of citizen democracy. A study of Podemos’ (aesthetic) populism and the production of affect in political discourse

In spite of not even being officially registered three months before the European Parliament Elections of 2014, the Spanish upstart party Podemos captured almost 8 percent of the vote, while barely nine months after its formation, in October 2014, social surveys were citing the party as the leading force in national politics. The overall purpose of this paper is to explore how Podemos’ aesthetic and its discursive strategies are being used to mobilize affect and create collective identities in the battle for political hegemony in Spain. I argue in dialogue with Laclau [2005. On populist reason. London: Verso], Errejón and Mouffe [2016. Podemos: in the name of the people. London: Lawrence & Wishart] that: (a) the articulation of a new political grammar and discursive conflicts in which the popular majority can identify themselves as subjects in opposition to an adversary ‘Other’ plays a central role in constructing ‘the people’ as a new form of political culture, especially in times of crisis whereby; (b) the notion of populism transgresses categories such as ‘oversimplification’ and/or ‘demagogy’ and can also be regarded in terms of exhibiting sensitivity to popular demands and participatory democracy. My findings show that welfare politics are not necessarily best communicated through traditional left-wing symbols, due to the left’s popular link with communism and political defeat; these having been repeatedly recounted by the media/culture industry throughout history. Indeed, many may share the idea of protecting a nation’s common social services without wanting to position themselves within a Marxist (leftist) framework. I point to the representative crisis as an affective crisis where there is a potential affective space to be filled. From here, I stress that resistance movements seem to need to learn the current media logic of conflict and recognition in order to mediate affect and produce identification.     

Children’s conceptions of the word ‘disabled’: a phenomenographic study

The aim of this study was to investigate the qualitative differences in children’s conceptions of the word ‘disabled’. Two hundred and thirty children, aged 7–12 years of age, were instructed to make a drawing of what came into their minds when they heard the word ‘disabled’. A brief written commentary on their drawing was also requested. The drawings and comments showed that the children had a positive attitude towards the word ‘disabled’. They drew and commented that a disability had medical causes, a technical device was a prerequisite for disabled people, a disability had social consequences and that a disabled person needed support. The children also explained that there were obstacles which impaired disabled people’s performance of activities. Access to some environments and being an active part of society was limited for some disabled people.     

The affective work of sound: the case of Pussy Riot’s noise

In recent years, the anti-Putin content of Pussy Riot’s work has received sustained scholarly attention. The author argues, however, that it is not only in content but also in force – in operationality of noise, in its capacity to act and incite – that Pussy Riot engaged with Russia’s regimes of power. Once Pussy Riot emerged as a feminist collective performing noisy interventions in public spaces and mapping them onto cyberspace, their performances were described as non-musical and aesthetically unpleasant based on negative stereotyping of noise. This article takes the ambiguous feeling of the non-musical as a point of departure and explores how sound was integral to the formation of Pussy Riot’s identity as noisemaker in the face of the Kremlin’s noise-abatement campaign associated with the moral project of silence. It builds on a philosophical framework proposed by Michel Serres and the latest theoretical developments in sound and affect studies to examine the urgency of Pussy Riot’s work in the contemporary political climate.     

The use of political motherhood in Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising and aftermath

ABSTRACT

Political motherhood, which uses traditional motherhood to mobilize and sustain women’s political participation, is understudied in political science. Women played a significant role in Egypt’s Arab Spring and its aftermath by “bargaining with patriarchy” and strategically using traditional motherhood to access the political sphere. In this article, we develop a theoretical argument based on the work of Gentry, Carreon and Moghadam and Amar. We illustrate it with examples drawn from news articles on women’s political activism and social media posts by Egyptian activists. Our argument explores how women’s agency and the larger political context in which women operate reveals how political motherhood takes the particular shape that it does. In the context of Egypt, we examine how the state’s choice to highlight women as “hypervisible” citizens, worthy of protection, backfired. Through a bottom-up political motherhood, women used their respectability as mothers in need of state protection against the state, thereby legitimizing anti-Mubarak and anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstrations and challenging these governments.     

Gender and Value Orientations—What’s the Difference!? The Case of Japan and the United States

This paper analyzes gendered social identity in Japan and the United States, countries with comparable postindustrial economic systems but distinct cultural traditions. Using national surveys (1995), we find gender differences in value orientations to be neither systematic nor consistent. They often disappeared after controlling for demographic and human-capital variables, though not so often for Japan. Other variables proved more important predictors of values than gender, although in different ways in Japan and the United States. We conclude by reassessing the use of the term gender in social research and the cultural meaning of gender relations by addressing the feminist concerns with issues of gender location.