Certainty,Fairness, and Balance: State Resonance and Environmental Justice Policy Implementation1

Little research has examined how and why institutional context and framing dynamics shape the institutionalization of movement claims into the state’s formal policies, and what the implication of these processes might be for movements attempting to mobilize on the same conceptual terms after institutionalization. In this study, I explore the role institutional context and framing play in the institutionalization of movement claims in a case: the implementation of environmental justice policy in the California Environmental Protection Agency from 2002 to 2007. I ask: How and why were aspects of the environmental justice frame institutionalized into regulatory policy while others were not? I use ethnographic field methods and content analysis of archival data to answer this question and offer two contributions to previous research. First, I add to previous scholarship on the environmental justice movement by identifying the character of newer problems faced by movement actors as they engage in regulatory policy processes with opponents in the United States. Second, I extend social movement framing theory by developing the notion of “state resonance” to understand how and why a collective action frame is institutionalized and implemented in regulatory policy.     

‘Germany Has Become Mohammedan’: Insurgency,Long-Distance Travel,and the Singapore Mutiny, 1915

Abstract

The mutiny that took place in Singapore in February 1915 is usually dismissed as a footnote in the history of empire. One reason why it is marginalized is because the mutiny does not conform to a politics that seeks the formation of an independent territorial nation-state as its inevitable conclusion. This article returns to that initial moment of insurgency to argue that the mutiny offers a unique window into the political imaginaries of British Indian soldiers, seen as military migrant workers. A close reading of soldiers’ letters against the Rowlatt Committee's Sedition Report suggests a politics of equality and emancipation uncontaminated by the desire for national liberation. Two kinds of insurgency thus become visible: international space as an unsettled zone of attraction and desire and a nascent political subjectivity that rejects the disciplines of imperial military labor. The primary causes of these transformations, I argue, are the insurgent effects of long-distance travel.     

Home(land) Décor: China Adoptive Parents’ Consumption of Chinese Cultural Objects for Display in their Homes

American parents of children adopted from China frequently consume Chinese cultural objects for display in their homes. While parents defend this consumption for display as an effort to validate their children’s ethno-cultural origins, they also reveal how it signifies and solidifies their own identifications with Chinese culture. As part of a larger research project examining China adoptive parents’ evolving “Chinese” identities, this paper asks: Which parents “become ‘Chinese’” through the consumption and display of Chinese cultural objects, and why? To answer this question, I conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 91 Americans in the China adoption process and ethnographic fieldwork at two different field-sites: Families with Children from China (FCC) Chinese cultural celebrations and Chinese culture camps organized by/for China adoptive families. Focusing on the emergent and personal meanings that parents give to Chinese cultural objects, I demonstrate how these meanings both structure parents’ consumption and yield a display differential. In doing so, I reveal that white European-American parents and mothers are most likely to engage in this consumption and display, thereby amending the three types of ethno-cultural identity consumption represented in the literature. Specifically, I expose the central role of race in ethno-cultural identity consumption; demonstrate that the collective category of reference for ethno-cultural identity consumption is not always an ethnic category (in this case, such consumption refers to a gendered category); and illustrate the ways in which global ethno-cultural identity consumption both appeals to and satisfies distinctly local constructs.     

INSTITUTIONALIZING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: The Dual Strategy of the Korean Women's Movement

Since the 1990s, scholars have paid attention to the role of social movements traversing the official terrain of politics by blending a “contention” strategy with an “engagement” strategy. The literature often highlights the contribution of institutionalized social movements to policymaking and sociopolitical change, but rarely addresses why and how specific social movement organizations gain routine access to formal politics. Using the Korean women's movement as a case study, I analyze the conditions for movement institutionalization. As I perceive it as the consequence both of social movements' decision to participate in government and of the state's desire to integrate such movements into its decision‐making process, movement institutionalization appears when the three factors are combined: (1) pressure from international organizations, (2) democratizing political structures, and (3) cognitive shifts by movement activists toward the role of the state.     

Fashion as consumer entrepreneurship: Emergent risk culture,social network markets,and the launch of Vogue in China

China has a reputation as an economy based on utility: the large‐scale manufacture of low‐priced goods. But useful values like functionality, fitness for purpose and efficiency are only part of the story. More important are what Veblen called “honorific” values, arguably the driving force of development, change and value in any economy. To understand the Chinese economy therefore, it is not sufficient to point to its utilitarian aspect. Honorific status‐competition is a more fundamental driver than utilitarian cost‐competition. We argue that “social network markets” are the expression of these honorific values, relationships and connections that structure and coordinate individual choices. This paper explores how such markets are developing in China in the area of fashion and fashion media. These, we argue, are an expression of “risk culture” for high‐end entrepreneurial consumers and producers alike, providing a stimulus to dynamic innovation in the arena of personal taste and comportment, as part of an international cultural system based on constant change. We examine the launch of Vogue China in 2005, and China's reception as a fashion player among the international editions of Vogue, as an expression of a “decisive moment” in the integration of China into an international social network market based on honorific values.     

Poor People in Poor Places: Local Opportunity Structures and Household Poverty*

Abstract Accounts of poverty generally fall into either “individualist” or “structuralist” camps. Often these are seen as irreconcilable and incompatible competing perspectives. This paper integrates individualist and structuralist accounts of poverty by examining the relationship between “person poverty” and “place poverty” in nonmetropolitan and metropolitan labor markets, using a multilevel framework. I fashion a general model of poverty production and allocation, drawing on the labor market ecology perspective. After a discussion of this perspective, I develop a multilevel framework for analyzing data from the 1990 Census PUMS‐L sample, STF‐3c, and other sources to show how compositional and contextual factors affect households' likelihoods of being in poverty. These multilevel models also allow us to estimate the degree to which labor market conditions influence the magnitude of household labor supply characteristics. Results suggest that both compositional and contextual factors contribute to the metro‐nonmetro difference in poverty rates, and that the effects of employment vary in accordance with labor market characteristics.     

Why populism?

It is a commonplace to observe that we have been living through an extraordinary pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist moment. But do the heterogeneous phenomena lumped under the rubric “populist” in fact belong together? Or is “populism” just a journalistic cliché and political epithet? In the first part of the article, I defend the use of “populism” as an analytic category and the characterization of the last few years as a “populist moment,” and I propose an account of populism as a discursive and stylistic repertoire. In the second part, I specify the structural trends and the conjunctural convergence of a series of crises that jointly explain the clustering in space and time that constitutes the populist moment. The question in my title is thus twofold: it is a question about populism as a term or concept and a question about populism as a phenomenon in the world. The article addresses both the conceptual and the explanatory question, limiting the scope of the explanatory argument to the pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist conjuncture of the last few years.     

Daytime dads and do-it-all dads: Understanding lead-dad families

One of the factors that perpetuates gender inequality is the inequitable division of household labor, and particularly the division of childcare labor. Even when women are employed outside the home, many remain primarily responsible for household duties and childcare. There is little research on the household division of labor and childcare in lead-dad households. I use the term “lead dad” to refer to a father, with or without an outside job, who takes primary responsibility for the household and children. This research explores how different lead-dad households operate, examining how two types of lead-dad households handle childcare and household chores, and what this means for the mother's domestic workload. From interviews with married or cohabitating heterosexual parents of children under five where fathers do most of the childcare, I find that lead-dad households come in two forms: some dads do-it-all and some do not (daytime dads). The key difference between do-it-all dads and daytime dads is that do-it-all dads take care of almost all household chores and childcare. Meanwhile, daytime dads' primary focus is on taking care of the kids while mom is at work. However, even in households where dads “do it all,” moms are still heavily involved in the cognitive labor required to operate a household (e.g., planning playdates and scheduling summer camps). These findings have important implications for the study of the household division of labor and parenting expectations of mothers and fathers, exemplifying how gendered expectations do not necessarily swap when lead-parent roles are reversed.     

Shame and Cognitive Strikes: What Would it “Really” Mean for Queer Psychoanalysis to Enter the Perverse?

Clinical psychoanalysis and queer theory have at their core a deep exploration of sexuality. Although the link between shame and sex has generated a strong theoretical reflection (Butler, 1993; Dimen, 2013; Saketopoulou, 2013, 2014; Sedgwick, 1993; Stein, 1997, 2012; Straker, 2007), shame is in this literature primarily a threatening affect in need of psychic elaboration. In contrast, I look at shame as a critical and surprising intervention provoked by the analyst. I argue that analysts perform in their work not only psychic labor but also “excessive” nonverbal states which challenge the established boundaries of the analytic relationship. I show that such moments function as “cognitive strikes,” which can be productively deployed by analysts to reap their benefits.

The aim of my argument is to show that the analysts “enter the perverse” when they momentarily stop processing difficult mental states. According to the professional ideal of “mentalization” (Fonagy & Target, 1996), psychoanalysts are put in the position to permanently do cognitive work. Yet refusing this demand offers the analyst the freedom to shift the relationship between a paid laborer and a beneficiary of therapeutic work. I theorize these noncognitive acts of “excessive shame” to expand on and criticize theories of queer performativity such as Judith Butler’s and Eve Sedgwick’s. The first contribution of this article is to draw the attention of clinicians to queer work that theorizes the emergent materiality of affects. The second contribution is to ask queer psychoanalytic theorists to take seriously the potential of surprising interventions which interrupt the demand to incessantly perform mental labor for their clients.     

The social dynamics of the “Nigerian Taliban”: fresh insights from the social identity theory

Although the ongoing terrorism of the “Nigerian Taliban”, widely known as “Boko Haram”, in northeastern Nigeria has elicited numerous works, there is yet to be an analysis that adequately accounts for the social dynamics of the group’s identity and belonging in the Nigerian polity. This paper is the first systematic attempt to draw on the social identity theory to develop a conceptual discourse that explains the relationship between religion in Nigeria as a force of mobilisation as well as an identity marker, and to show how its politics, practice and perception are implicated in the resilient insurgency of Boko Haram. Along the way, the paper considers the social dynamics of poverty and relative deprivation in northern, especially northeastern, Nigeria, and their contributions to the escalating terrorism of Boko Haram.     

Enchanted: Harry Potter and magical capitalism in urban China

“Pottermania”, or the crazed transnational consumption of the most popular children's fantasy fiction series in publishing history, has swept across urban China. It took place along with the rapid emergence of the country's middle‐class culture since the 1990s, marked primarily by a robust consumer revolution constructed as both reality and global dream. Even before China's official membership in the World Trade Organization began, Harry Potter (translated into Chinese) had been widely popular in affluent urban centers, bringing a foreign cultural impact that accompanies the economic tidal waves promised by the accession to the WTO. This essay explores the relationships between local consumption of a transnational cultural text/intertext and the formation of an emerging social imaginary about the urban Chinese middle class. It suggests that the Potter series promotes an alternating valorization and critique of capitalist consumption, which provides young Chinese readers, growing up in the midst of a consumer revolution, with a dialectic of enchantment. It is argued that this enchantment presents a productive tension with which to theorize the current moment of Chinese consumerist capitalism.     

A Note on Animal and Political Economy in Quesnay

In this article, I argue that François Quesnay’s physiocratic writings on economics entail the working through not only of formal principles of circulatory flow developed in his earlier physiological writings on “animal economy” but also the construction of a model of political economy that depends directly on an animal economy understood as the efficient administration of animal labor. Although the contradictions of this model already foreshadow those of today’s dominant model of economic administration, I argue that Quesnay’s economic writings nonetheless contain an invitation for us to rethink the connection between the economic and the ecological domains.     

Union Organizing and Labor Outreach in the Contemporary United States

Despite their long decline, labor unions increasingly find themselves in the news. From the spirited debate over income inequality, to fights over minimum wage and the unlikely mobilization of fast food workers at the very bottom of the American labor market, labor issues are of great public interest. In this article, I review scholarship on contemporary union organizing and outreach activity. This work suggests that while innovative organizing and outreach strategies, sometimes lumped together under the rubric of “social movement unionism” and “alt‐labor,” are demonstrated to be effective in advancing union causes, only a handful of unions appear to have the will and resources to utilize them. Moreover, while the implementation of new organizing and outreach strategies has been uneven and has not boosted union membership nationally, organized resistance to unions, from court rooms to state legislatures, has increased substantially.     

USING GENDER: THE PERSONAL,INTERPERSONAL, AND EMOTIONAL STRATEGIES OF DOMESTIC LABOR

Traditional research on domestic labor has conceptualized work done in support of the home as one of the quintessential ways of “doing” gender. New directions in gender and ritual theory raise the possibility that domestic labor may also be about strategy, usefulness and intentions. Through interviews with 24 married couples, I explore the subjective experiences of men and women as they “do” their domestic labor. I find that while husbands and wives are continuing to do gender as a response to interactional accountability demands, they also “use” domestic labor as a vehicle through which they (1) reciprocally craft their gender identity, (2) symbolically communicate with their spouse, and (3) garner emotional energy. Furthermore, the men and women strategically mobilized specific tasks that are most useful in achieving these goals inside their unique dyadic schemas. Through these narratives, I explore the possibility that men and women not only do gender but they can use gender as well.     

The Dual Strategy and Gender Policies of the Women's Movement in Korea: Family Headship System Repeal through Strategic Innovation

Abstract

Social movements sometimes successfully attain their goals by implementing policies and laws that represent their claims. Movement leaders raise issues susceptible to enactment as policies or laws, exploit legally and institutionally assured resources, and even participate at times in governmental policymaking and parliamentary lawmaking processes. This engagement strategy maximizes a movement's power to achieve its goals only when it is combined with the conventional activities of mobilizing collective action and forming dense networks across movement organizations to pressure the state. Based on the case study of Korean women's movements and their efforts to abrogate the patrilineal succession of family headship, I argue that movement activists' strategic innovation of blending “institutional politics” with conventional “movement politics”—that is, pursuing a dual strategy (Cohen and Arato 1992) and evolving into “movement institutionalization”—is critical to accomplishing gender policies and laws that, at least institutionally and legally, ensure gender equality.     

New theories of nicotine‐psychosis link challenge the old

For some time, the link between cigarette smoking and schizophrenia has been clear. For decades, it has been assumed that this was due to one of two causes: “reverse causation” (smoking relative to the illness, by self‐medication or institutionalization) or by confounding (such as social factors or cannabis use).     

Student Migration: Evidence from Chinese Students in the US and China

This article is based on the analysis of a pair of cross‐national parallel surveys on Chinese students, respectively inside the People's Republic of China and in the US. Specifically, it makes comparisons between two cross‐sectional groups: 1) Chinese students in a PRC university who intend to study abroad (with a subset that stated that the United States is their top destination), versus 2) Chinese students already at a US university. Building on a “motility” concept while using an “Intellectual Migration” conceptual framework and chi‐square and logistic regression analyses, it demonstrates that Chinese students' possibly returning to the PRC are significantly influenced by their gender, college GPA, family finance, assessment of China's current and future development. The results on outmigration or return migration intentions are presented, and it concludes with some policy implications and future research directions.     

All Ages and None: Commentary on Helene Moglen's Ageing and Transageing

Helene Moglen's article is especially welcome, given the paucity of psychoanalytic reflection on ageing. She usefully describes possible ways of managing the losses of ageing through accessing the multiple, decentered self-states embedded in our personal histories. However, I have some queries on her use of contrasting psychic topologies. In particular I wonder whether she is sometimes in danger of seeing images of former selves as being associatively “recovered” in the work of mourning that might be better seen as the more illusive “production” of presumptively anterior contexts and states of mind in the present. I also question how successfully Moglen's positioning of her notion of “transaging” somewhere between “transgender” and “transsexuality” serves to loosen up the vicious binary between “young” and “old. I would appreciate closer attention to the dreaded “feminization” of old age, noting the toxic sexism permeating cultures of ageing. Nevertheless, Moglen offers an excellent opening into this troubling topic.