Cultural Studies in Black and White

Political intervention is deeply etched in the history and theory of Cultural Studies. The vehicle of intervention is typically understood as textual and the measure of success as ‘has it changed the world?’ This graphic and textual essay argues for and enacts thinking of and practising intervention more innovatively and more modestly: as equally extra-textual, and as a site for experimentation in the folds among theory, practice, and the quotidian. The author’s original black and white charcoal and pastel images are paired with text to explore the potential for an articulation of the visual and the textual to engage, convey, actualize, and produce concepts and insights of Cultural Studies. In evocative images and accessible language it enacts a new mode of engaging the theory and practice of Cultural Studies, specifically engaging concepts of articulation and assemblage, movement and things, questions of identity, the importance of affect, the power of transformation, youth cultures and resistance, The Black Lives Matter movement and matters of race, the struggles of women, the challenge of overcoming culturally engendered hatred of difference, and the difficulties of negotiating change in the precarious circumstances of contemporary culture.     

Fighting in the Dark: Ideology and State Formation in Post‐Colonial Burma

Extant major approaches to states and revolutions privilege the role of state practices and the character of war‐making in shaping modern state‐making in the Third World. Bringing the role of ideology into this analytical landscape of state‐making, this paper advances an alternative claim that ideological practices shape modern state structures and practices as well as the dynamics of political contention between the state and the revolutions. First, I argue that that intra‐movement ideological dynamics within the nationalist movement can have a profound impact on the structure and practices of the state. Using the writings of the party leaders, memoirs and official publications of the Burmese communist party, I maintain that subtle and specific ideological differences amongst the Burmese leftist movements generated organizational splits and internecine conflicts in the nationalist struggle, which exerted profound influences on the structures and practices of the Burmese state Secondly, relative ideological positions of the state and the revolutionary movements play an important role in shaping the dynamics of contention between the state and revolution. For example, an intimate web of ideological affinity between the nascent Burmese state and the Burmese leftist movements shaped the context and content of political contention between the state and these movements in the post‐colonial Burma. To address these issues empirically, the first part of the paper examines the formation and cementation of organizational linkages amongst Burmese leftist nationalists during the anti‐colonial struggle. The second part of the paper addresses specific and subtle ways in which ideological character and practices of the Burmese state and the Burmese Communist party shaped state practices and state structures in modern Burma as well as the dynamics of political contention between the state and the revolutionary movements.     

中国青年文化景观的形成轨迹与引导理路

中华人民共和国成立以来,特别是改革开放以来,青年文化发展出现服从与反思、解放与迷茫、理性与矛盾勾勒的变迁图景,也反映出新时代青年文化的发展趋向。新时代的青年文化景观既具有青年文化的预见性与超越性、进取性和建构性、理想性和生活性等共性特征,又突出表现为雅俗共赏、进退有度、家国兼顾的时代特性。新时代,应注重从个人追求与社会理想的统一、独立思想与过硬本领的统一、青春热情与社会担当的统一几方面入手,突出政治引领、思想引领、责任引领在青年文化引导上的关键作用,推动青年文化持续向前发展。     

Globalization and the built environment in Kuwait

This paper discusses the impact of globalization on the built environment and the tension between the forces of globalization and localization as exemplified in the case of Kuwait. It claims that globalization has been active in the countries of the Gulf area since the middle of the 20th century when they witnessed rapid development and change that permitted globalization and localization processes to be more evident and magnified than in other parts of the world. The aim of this paper is to analyze manifestations and consequences of globalization and localization processes in the built environment in Kuwait by tracing the rapid transformation of the built environment in Kuwait during the second half of the 20th century. The paper claims that the clash of styles that exists in the built environment is a product of the tension between globalization and localization processes, and that the dichotomy between the cultural forces currently shaping the built environment, i.e. modern-traditional, Islamic-Western, and local-international, is the result of this tension. While some architects attempt to integrate the local architecture into global cultural trends, others try to revive the traditional architectural style to protect the local identity and heritage. The resulting built environment is chaotic and lacks identity and sense of place. The paper concludes that the processes of globalization and localization are inseparable and that they coexist, like in many other parts of the world, in continuous state of change and interaction. There is a need for an alternative understanding of what global architecture can be; one that understands the essential need to preserve and respect diversity as well as house seemingly disparate philosophies of space, people, and their interactions with and within the built form. This approach should be reflected in professional practice, education and building regulations that govern the production of the built environment.     

规训与抵制:大学生视觉形象重构

传统影像建构出大学生的消费者、服务者、普通人形象,却在悠远的宏大叙事向日常生活实践的转向、新媒介、城市空间等面向中被当代大学生解构和重构。这三个面向统合在青年亚文化中。并为大学生进行自身形象的视觉建构提供了技术和思想准备。政治话语与娱乐诉求的分离、日常生活审美化的趋势与商品利益的幕后操纵所形成的合力,询唤着当代大学生的时尚表现者和身体抵抗者形象的视觉建构:时尚的区分与整合功能使大学生实现自我认同和社会归属,同时内生抵抗主流意识形态的力量而建构身体抵抗者形象。抵抗的实质其实是大学生与媒介和商品合谋,当代大学生的视觉建构与大众媒介的商业利益相互邀约、彼此验证,携手建构出媒介暗自得意、大学生自觉另类、社会秩序和谐稳定的"整体的生活方式"。     

Peers/strangers/others? The youth of Dagestan in search of group identities

The article discusses the map of youth cultural scenes in Makhachkala, the capital of the Republic of Dagestan, and the third largest city in the North Caucasus region of the Russian Federation. The uniqueness of Makhachkala’s youth space is associated with the specific geopolitical and cultural circumstances of the history of the republic. This is set against the context of post-Soviet transformation: rising unemployment and severe inequality; the revival of Islam; radical changes in the gender regime, the ethnic and religious composition of Dagestanis; and a complicated political agenda involving the struggle with radicalization, and the growth of a terrorist threat. Thus, we consider it important and timely to study the local youth socialities, which exist in such a contradictory context. The research that underpins the article is focused on two opposing youth scenes in Makhachkala: street workout (inscribed in the context of the local patriarchal regime), and the anime community (symbolically resisting the pressure of social ‘normativity’). Using the theoretical concept of cultural scenes and a case-study approach (in-depth interviews, participant observation, community mapping), the potential to categorize youth that are not centred (that is, who are outside the ‘core’ of the capitalist world-system) is critically considered through the opposition between subcultural and mainstream groups. The key aim of the article is to demonstrate the importance of using the construct of the ‘other’ (that which is alien or dangerous) as the main way to define the more subtle (often latent) structure of group identity and cultural capital of a community. This also describes the intra- and inter-group solidarities and the value conflicts of youth in a complex and contradictory local urban environment. In this case, the process of growing up and the socialization of youth involve the selection of different strategies of acceptance and resistance to the social order, the structure of normativity and images of success.     

Physical demands during the hauling of fishing nets for artisan fishing using rafts in beach of Ponta Negra, Natal--Brasil

The current article aims to analyse the activity and the repercussions in the health of the artisan fishermen who use rafts in the urban Beach of Ponta Negra in Natal - RN, with emphasis on the physical demands at the step of hauling the nets from the ocean. It has been taken as a reference the methodology of Work Ergonomic Analysis-WEA. 21 fishermen participated in the study (50% of the population). It was used applying observational techniques and methodologies (open and sistematic observations and simulations) interactional ( social and economic questionnaire, conversational actions, verbalizations, self confrontations and collective analysis) and health assessment (static postural assessment, movement flexibility of flexo extension of the shoulder and the ischiotibial muscle, lumbar region and hang grip. Applying the diagram of painful areas and the Nordic Questionnaire of mucleskeletal symptoms). The results were submeted to restitutions and validations with the raftmen. The hauling of the nets represents a high muscleskeletal risk, joining physical effort, adopting forced postures with the rotation of the spine and movement repetition, mainly flexo extension of vertebral spine, aggravated by the demand of strength fo the stabilizing muscles of the human body to keep the poise. The impacts of the activity of the fisherman of Ponta Negra, related to postures and strength demand were observed in the postural assessment and are related to the activity.     

Reform and the process of economic restructuring in rural China: a case study of Yuhang,Zhejiang

Chinese reforms initiated at the end of 1970s have brought a profound change to its rural economy. The rapid economic growth and restructuring over the last two decades spurs the interest of many scholars in studying the nature and process of change in rural China at different scales and from a variety of perspectives. Using Yuhang in Zhejiang Province as a case, this study reveals dynamic processes and operating mechanisms of rural economic changes at a local level, and the interweaving relationships among the state, local governments, and peasants under the reformed institutional framework of rural development. The political economy of decentralisation and liberalisation, local government initiatives, and spontaneous coping strategies of peasants have penetrated the entire process of economic growth and restructuring, as evidenced in the displacement of the agricultural sector and in the shift of the role played by township enterprises, villages enterprises, and household enterprises in Yuhang. The pattern of change unveiled in the case of Yuhang neither confirms nor denies entirely the experience of the Sunan, Wenzhou, or Zhujiang models studied extensively in the literature. What is involved in this restructuring process at the local level are the changing relations between peasants and the land, individuals and collectives, and peasant workers and rural enterprises.     

ORIENTALISM RECONSIDERED: ISRAELI MEDIA AND THE ARTICULATION OF RESISTANCE

Questions of the relation between race and nationality are at the centre of Israel' defence narrative and its violence, its deployment of blood and domination of land and bodies. Usually, the discourse of violence in a nation' logic involves images of penetration to borders and land. However, this essay is about internal violence, about the reproduction of the state not through land, but through bodies, and babies, narratives and memory, knowledge and censorship. To understand this case is to reconsider questions of how Orientalism, as a practice of knowledge and of violence works. The author revisits the concept of Orientalism thereby relocating the different ways in which it internally works within the Israeli nation state. To illustrate her claim, she finds it useful to locate parallel features in the discourse of the Gulf War and the image of Saddam Hussein, created by Western media, and the discourse of the kidnapped Yemenite babies scandal and the image of Rabbi Uzi Meshulam, created by Israeli media. Both cases involve questions of violence, resistance and Western domination. In the author' analysis, she focuses on the complexity in which Orientalism functions when the state demarcates people and identities rather then land and borders. It will be shown how concepts of violence, race and nationalism are reproduced through the media discourse of the kidnapped Yemenite babies at the junction of social conflict and resistance. A sample of newspaper reports on the Yemenite babies affair during the resistance of Rabbi Meshulam are examined, known in Israel as the ‘The Fortification in Yahud’. The author' analysis is also based on her experience as an investigative reporter covering the Yemenite babies affair, and first hand observation of the resistance of Rabbi Meshulam.¹     

后现代思潮对我国青少年的影响与对策

出于反思"现代性"而出现的后现代主义,目前已经发展成"带有西方色彩"的全球性社会思潮。它反对理性主义、整体主义、中心主义,主张多元价值取向,注重人文关怀,具有否定的全面性与不彻底性、价值取向的无中心性、传播形式的灵活性与多样性、行为表现的随意性等特点。后现代主义在一定程度上有助于培养我国青少年的批判性思维,有助于青少年的天性成长,但也往往易于模糊青少年的是非判断标准,侵蚀青少年积极有为的责任担当,诱使青少年养成享乐主义的生活习惯。为此,需要从强化社会主义核心价值观的引领作用、加强对西方后现代思潮的理论研究、加强人文精神和心理健康方面的教育、引领网络与大众传播方向等方面做文章。     

Race and Ethnic Relations: The Conflict Continues—A Review Essay*

This essay review examines a number of recent publications in the sociology and psychology of race and ethnic relations. Emphasis is placed on the limits of research in the area during the past twenty years and on the significance of the authors' personal and professional orientations in the selection and treatment of the subject Research is hampered as well by the highly visible absence of a coherent general body of theory in sociology and by the growing fragmentation of the field as well as the increasing influence of ideological divisions in the discipline and within the organizational structures through which it functions. Qualitative differences among the several volumes are indicated and discussed.     

Economic growth and female labour: the case of Israel

This article aims to demonstrate the relation between the participation and location of women in the Israeli labour force and economic-structural processes central to the development of the Israeli economy. It begins with a discussion of the main features of the economic growth of Israeli society, indicating the implications of these features for female labour. The overall pattern of female participation in the labour force is then discussed, noting the main shifts in this pattern and their significance, followed by a more detailed presentation of the position of women in a number of economic branches–the textile and clothing industries, education and welfare services, finance and trade. The sexual division of labour is further examined according to the difference between Ashkenazi and Oriental women of first and second generations. Finally, a concluding discussion assesses the significance of women to the economy and the implications of their position within the economy to their future prospects.     

THE HI/STORIES OF HONG KONG

This paper examines the formation of modernity in three colonialist epics of Hong Kong and the recent historical and fictional works that aim to rewrite the history of the ‘local’. Adopting a challenge-response structure, the paper argues that the colonialist epics construct a monolithic discourse of modernity-as-progress via the amnesia of conflicts, tensions, and processes of domination and negotiation in the rural and everyday space of colonial Hong Kong. It is stressed that to piece together the above anomalies is not an attempt to restore a pre-given ‘native’ to but rather an endeavour to examine how the ‘local’ as divergent historical agents shaped and has been shaped by the political, social, and economic environment of Hong Kong and the larger world outside. This can be called a model of dialectics composed of an internal dialectic and a dialectic of articulation. In this regard, with the benefit of the rapprochement of history and anthropology and a non-linear view of history, this paper is a historical bricolage of the anomalous history of Hong Kong, aiming to destabilize the Hong Kong historical grand narrative. Through rethinking the impact of the colonial experience, this paper hopes to liberate alterity and diversity in historical interpretations and imaginations.     

重塑改革创新动力，再造转型发展优势——2010年上海改革形势研究报告

当前上海发展面临着国际经济形势不确定性加大、环境资源矛盾增强、结构性调整压力增大等国内外因素的倒逼,创新驱动和转型发展将成为上海推进新一轮改革的重要动力。因此,在2010年各项改革成果的基础上,上海要将2011年作为改革的攻坚年,充分发挥改革推动转型发展的重要作用,围绕转型发展中的突出矛盾和问题,聚焦重点领域和关键环节,加大改革力度,率先形成有利于科学发展和经济发展方式转变的体制机制,开创改革的新局面,为“十二五”的良好开局和新一轮改革奠定基础。     

Teaching and Learning Theory For Family Therapy Practice: On The Art and Craft of Balancing

As with all practice knowledges, family therapy theory sits in a complicated relationship to practice. This paper offers a set of reflections exploring challenges of teaching and learning theory for, and about, practice in family therapy. The importance of teaching particular frameworks of practice sits in tension and balance with the importance of the common factors of therapeutic change, and the inseparability of the use of self and the use of particular practice knowledge. Passion and commitment to particular ways of working is held in balance with the need for flexibility and the freedom to think independently. Discipline and focus is balanced with creativity and the room for integration. A number of balancing practices are identified in the art and craft of teaching, and the contextual issue of power and vulnerability in the teaching and learning relationship is acknowledged. Finally, the three ‘Rs’ in teaching and learning family therapy practice theory are drawn out – reflection, the recursiveness of theory and practice, and the reflexivity of self in relation to context and knowledge.     

"Disease Incarnate": Biopolitical Discourse and Genocidal Dehumanisation in the Age of Modernity

Abstract  This paper traces the development of the concept of the outgroup as a biological threat, and the relationship of this concept to the practice of genocide. The biopolitical discourse which emerged in the modern period made the practice of genocide conceivable, and constructed genocide as justifiable and as necessary. Two developments in the modern period are highlighted: firstly, the conception of the boundaried and ethnically homogenous nation-state, and secondly, new biological theories about race, and about the spread of disease. Discourse emerging from the biological sciences dehumanised outgroups both literally and metaphorically. This dehumanisation, in combination with the ideal of the homogenous nation-state and the new technologies of population, provided a justification and a motivation for genocide, and a model of implementation. Conceptions of the nature of dehumanisation as a process are examined, with specific reference to the role of language and metaphor, and to concepts of hygiene, purity and contamination. Particular attention is paid to eugenics and Social Darwinism, to the role of physicians in genocide, and to the relationship between medical and military vocabularies. The features of this discourse, its persistence, and its commonality in otherwise widely different genocidal episodes, are exposed through an examination of four twentieth-century genocides (Armenia, Nazi genocide, Cambodia, and the former Yugoslavia).     

An analysis of the basic population structure of Shanghai Municipality

This paper analyzes the changes in Shanghai's population structure over the last 30 years in the 4 aspects of age structure, sex composition, urban and rural composition, and labor and employment structure. In 1953 those of the 0 to 6 age group accounted for 21.2% of the total population; in 1957 the group represented a proportion of 24.6%. Since the 1960s, especially after the 1970s, the family planning program gradually took effect, and the birthrate of the entire municipality fell drastically. The number of school-age children in 1979 was 1 1/2 times more than the same age group in 1953; there should be no worry that population control may result in a shortage of manpower to meet the needs of the work force and the armed forces either toward the end of this century or at the beginning of the next. The economy in China is underdeveloped, production and technology remain at a low level, average wages for employees are low, and for a long time the low living standard of the people has shown little sign of improvement. The problem is mainly manifest in the following areas: 1) distribution of the work force in heavy and light industries is not sufficiently rational, 2) the distribution of the work force between captial construction and transport and communications on the 1 hand and the national economy on the other is out of proportion, 3) the distribution of the work force between commerce, service trades, and public utilities on the 1 hand and the national economy on the other is disproportionated, and 4) the distribution of the work force between undertakings of culture, education, scientific research, health, and medical care on the 1 hand and economic construction on the other is improper. How to control population growth and adjust parts of the population structure to suit the national economic development poses a problem that calls for further in-depth study and analysis to resolve it step by step.     

“微博忙人”现象折射青年社会心态

“微博忙人”现象的流行,是社会现实和网络传播的合谋：即空虚浮躁的社会心理、网络恶搞的泛滥及微博的普及;从传播的内容来看,被赋予了现代生活元素,反映了当前青年群体中的生活方式和流行文化。从这一网络现象的流行机理、传播内容分析入手,可见当前青年群体讲求个性创新、崇尚“娱乐至上”的社会心态和价值取向。应该理性地认识和看待这一社会文化现象,以更好地把握青年的成长特点和思想趋势。     

Experience as horizon: Koselleck,expectation and historical time

This article explores and develops the concept of the horizon as a figurative and analytical device used to negotiate the relations between experience, everyday life and historical time. Its central focus is Reinhart Koselleck’s application of the concept, though it also draws on the work of Karl Mannheim (through his distinction between conjunctive and communicative experience) and Raymond Williams (through his concept of structure of feeling) in order to add to and refine Koselleck’s use of the term in examining the temporal structures of experience and expectation. Our sense of historical time is generated through the tensions between experience and expectation, everyday life and social process. These are, of course, historically variable and contingent. During the course of modernity and late modernity, experience and expectation have become increasingly divergent. Their separation has profoundly affected how we think about historical time in relation to everyday life and the span of a generation and a lifetime. It also turns the conception of history as historia magistra vitae on its head, with modernity increasingly forced to fund itself ethically out of its own transient present. The article discusses the main aspects of these changes and how they have altered the balance between the space and horizon of experience and expectation. It attends both to the need to examine historical concepts in terms of their various meanings and implications, and to the ways in which the particular concept of the horizon can help illuminate the consequences of accelerating time in the conditions of modernity and late modernity. The diminution of historical understanding in relation to everyday life is seen as among the most serious of these consequences.     

Carnal Connections: On Embodiment,Apprenticeship, and Membership

This article responds to the special issue of Qualitative Sociology devoted to the author's book, Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (vol. 28, no. 3, summer 2005). Four themes are tackled: the positioning of the inquirer and the question of social acceptance and membership; the dynamics of embodiment(s) and the variable role of race as a structural, interactional, and dispositional property; the functioning of the boxing gym as miniature civilizing and masculinizing machine; apprenticeship as a mode of knowledge transmissioin and technique for social inquiry, the scope of carnal sociology, and the textual work needed to convey the full-color texture and allure of the social world. This leads to clarifying the conceptual, empirical, and rhetorical makeup of Body and Soul in relation to its triple intent: to elucidate the workings of a sociocultural competency residing in prediscursive capacities; to deploy and develop the concept of habitus as operant philosophy of action and methodological guide; and to offer a brief for a sociology not of the body (as social product) but from the body (as social spring and vector of knowledge), exemplifying a way of doing and writing ethnography that takes full epistemic advantage of the visceral nature of social life. Response to the special issue of Qualitative Sociology on Body and Soul, vol. 28, no. 2, Summer 2005.