Post‐socialist language ideologies in action: Linking interview context and language ideology through stance

Changes associated with the post‐socialist period in Albania have complicated the legacy of language ideologies grounded in Ottoman‐era and socialist‐era politics. In this article, I analyze two metalinguistic interviews with young adults in the Albanian capital of Tirana in order to investigate the status of standardizing and anti‐standardizing language ideologies while also raising a methodological question regarding interview context and researcher role as persistent issues in sociolinguistic research. As acts of evaluation, language ideologies can be linked to interactional positionings and alignments via stance, which is significant for understanding aspects of identity and context in the interview. I argue that this framework provides a better understanding of interview dynamics than previous style shifting approaches, as any explanation of differences in interview interactions must simultaneously consider macro‐level influences of ideology and micro‐level interactional developments.     

Another Colonialism: Africa in the History of European Integration

Today's European Union was founded in a 1950s marked by its member states' involvement in numerous colonial conflicts and with the colonial question firmly entrenched on the European and international agenda. This notwithstanding, there is hardly any scholarly investigations to date that have examined colonialism's bearing on the historical project and process of European integration. In tackling this puzzle, the present article proceeds in two steps. First, it corroborates the claim that European integration not only is related to the history of colonialism but to no little extent determined by it. Second, it introduces a set of factors that explain why the relation between the EU and colonialism has been systematically neglected. Here the article seeks to identify the operations of a colonial epistemology that has facilitated a misrecognition of what postwar European integration was about. As the article argues, this epistemology has enabled colonialism's historical relation to the European integration project to remain undetected and has thus also reproduced within the present EU precisely those colonial or neo-colonial preconceptions that the European partner states, in official discourse and policy, falsely claim that they have abandoned.     

Love's Cruel Promises

The paper argues that citizenship needs to be understood as a multi-layered construct, in which one's citizenship in collectivities in the different layers - local, ethnic, national, state, cross- or trans-state and supra-state - is affected and often at least partly constructed by the relationships and positionings of each layer in specific historical context. This is of particular imporance if we want to examine citizenship in a gendered non westocentric way. The paper explores some of the central issues which affect contemporary citizenships, in particular those relating to constructions of borders of boundaries, starting from the boundary between 'private' and 'public' and then looking at state borders and collectivities' boundaries. The effects on citizenship of the new modes of communication and transport, as well as the contradictory expansions and defensive closures of people's identities states are also explored.     

The Interviewee and the Research Interview: Analysing a Neglected Dimension in Research*

L'entrevue de recherche est généralement examinée du point de vue du chercheur. Contrairement à la recherche activiste, qui accorde beaucoup d'carimportance à l'opinion du participant, les constructivistes ont ajouté une nouvelle perspective en démontrant comment l'entrevue de recherche est à la fois collaborative et génératrice de significations. Notre étude livre une analyse plus explicite de l'entrevue du point de vue de l'interviewé. Selon une étude portant sur les Canadiens qui migrent à l'intérieur du pays, la signification pour l'interviewé de l'entrevue qualitative est expliquée plus en détail. Nous discutons la motivation qui pousse à la participation en nous fondant sur les concepts de validation d'carexpériences et sur un processus appelé progression réflexive, qui met en lumière le déroulement d'carune entrevue selon la perspective de l'interviewé. The research interview is usually discussed from the vantage point of the researcher. While activist research has drawn attention to the voice of the participant, constructivists have added a new perspective by showing how the research interview is both collaborative and meaning‐making. Our study provides a more explicit analysis of the interview from the perspective of the interviewee. Based on a study of internal migrants in Canada, the meaning of the qualitative interview for the interviewee is more carefully explicated. We discuss motivation for participation using the concepts of event validation and a process called reflexive progression to illuminate what happens in the interview from the interviewee's perspective.     

Of Roots and Wings: Letting Go of the College‐Bound Child

This article examines how parents experience the process of “letting go” of their college‐bound children. The focus of our analysis is on how the parents evaluate the meanings of their children's leaving home and adopt strategies to facilitate the process for both themselves and the departing child. Our analysis is based on interviews with thirty sets of parents. The interview materials allowed us to recognize and then parse the paradoxical task faced by parents of fostering “attached individuation” for both themselves and their children. We address four broad and persistent themes that emerged from our conversations with parents. First, we consider how parents manage the range of sometimes‐conflicting emotions generated by the letting go process. Second, we analyze the content of parents' worries as a good unobtrusive measure of how they understand the transition to college as a ritual marker in their children's lives. Third, we show how negotiations about geography—about proper distance from home—in choosing a college reflect efforts to impose a measure of gradualism into the letting go process. Fourth, we report on how parents theorize the impact of a child's departure on family relationships in general.     

Beauty in the Community

Metacom's War, also known as King Phillip's War, sets a pattern of national expansion through displacement of native people that echoes throughout American history. Helping students further understand this war through the examination of Mary Rowlandson's primary document provides educators and students with an opportunity to delve deeper into the complexities surrounding the convergence of cultures in colonial America. In this article, I provide an overview of the context that led to the conflict between the native populations and the European settlers. Additionally, I highlight passages from Rowlandson's narrative that are relevant to upper-elementary students. The passages are accompanied by questions to assist students as they examine the primary source for a deeper understanding of the people who strove to survive in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Examining primary sources is one piece of the multifaceted process of historical understanding. In this article, educators learn the historical content of the period and a structured process for their students to examine the primary source.     

Toward Fortress Capitalism: The Restrictive Transformation of Migration and Border Regimes as a Reaction to the Capitalist Multicrisis

The article develops the concept of “fortress capitalism.” The concept has two dimensions. First, it describes those elements within today's migration and border regimes that aim to control the mobility of the global working class in repressive ways. Second, it designates a dystopian future scenario, in which these repressive elements have massively expanded. Such a formation might develop as part of a twenty‐first‐century fascism. Based on historical materialism and critical theory, the article makes four points. First, it asserts that migration regimes are being transformed toward a new level of restrictiveness. Second, it argues that fortress capitalism complements theoretical motives that emphasize the uncontrollability of migration. Third, it contends that migration and border regimes in their emergence, dynamics, forms, and effects are closely linked to the intersectional dynamics of global capitalism as a whole. Fourth, it points out that global capitalism fundamentally depends on border regimes to regulate its contradictions.     

In pursuit of social meaning

Meaning and Linguistic Variation: The Third Wave in Sociolinguistics is a collection of works published in a variety of edited collections, journals, and conference proceedings. It also includes one unpublished conference paper. The collection traces the (ongoing) development of the concept of social meaning in language variation in 11 different papers. These are contextualized with personal reflections on variationist sociolinguistics and the profession of linguistics that frame each paper. This review article highlights some of the key themes in the collection: As well as social meaning itself, issues with style, clustering of variables, peripheral and core members of communities, and agency are discussed. Eckert's innovative proposal that variables can be differentiated on the basis of their relative “interiority” is considered, as is the assertion that linguistics transcends the referential properties of language to include the expressive and moral.     

Repeated Reinterpretation of Civil Society: On the Intellectual Context of Niklas Luhmann's Sociological Theory

This article explains the intellectual context of Niklas Luhmann's sociological theory. Although Luhmann's theory is well known for its highly abstract features, this does not mean that the theory results from his references to the latest general systems theory, which has been the primary focus of previous literature. That said, no social theory is produced in a vacuum. Even if a theorist attempts to construct a general sociological theory to explain every social phenomenon, that theory is necessarily influenced by the theorist's prejudices. Therefore, social theory must be contextualized both to estimate its biases and to limit its scope. This study shows that Luhmann's systems theory is constructed through a struggle with the issues of his day. First, it notes that the question of how to conceptualize modern civil society was widely shared by German intellectuals from the late 1950s to the 1970s and that the question created a certain discourse field. Second, Luhmann's theoretical conception is contextualized in that field of discourse, and the central role of both the concept of functional differentiation and the concern with border maintenance in his theory-building is explained in comparison with the work of contemporary intellectuals. To deepen our analysis, this article reconstructs Schmitt's interpretation and criticism of civil liberalism and describes Luhmann's struggle with it. Finally, by analyzing the Gesellschaftswissenschaften of Robert von Mohl, one of the founders of civil liberalism, this article argues that Luhmann's sociology can be characterized as an attempt to rehabilitate civil liberalism.     

On the Centrality of Action: Social Science,Historical Logics,and Max Weber's Legacy

This article draws attention to the fundamental centrality of “action” – i.e. symbolically constituted behavior – for the historical and social sciences. The work of Max Weber and contemporary American historian and theorist William H. Sewell, Jr. are examined, so as to shed light on the debate concerning social science's central subject matter as well as on the implications of this work for sociological and historical theory. The examination of Sewell's view leverages the importance of the concept of action underlying Weber's concept of “social action.” Weber's position on action and social action is of great interest not only to general theory but also to the field of cultural sociology, which has neglected to develop systematically upon the theoretical purchase Weber offers to it.     

Children's Perceptions of Their Parents' Divorce

The purpose of this study was to explore children's perceptions of their parents' divorce. One hundred and thirty two children, ranging in age from 5 to 19 years, responded to 13 questions of an open-ended interview; 92 of these children, ranging in age from 10 to 19 years, also responded to a 69-item structured questionnaire. For both measures, interest was directed on the extent to which age; sex; level of lacus of control, interpersonal knowledge, and intelligence; and length of parental separation were related to children's responses. The general tone of children's responses to both measures was positive yet realistic; children did not, in short, view their parent's divorce as an overly distressing experience. This finding supports the validity of the two measures. Moreover, the nature of children's responses was rather consistently related to age and level of both locus of control and interpersonal knowledge in the openended interview, and to age and level of locus of control in the more structured questionnaire. The extent to which children both perceive themselves as having a major cause in their life experiences and understand the dynamics of interpersonal relations, then, significantly influences their perceptions of their parents' divorce.     

Painting in a Different Kind of Void

The reception of Forrest Bess's work has primarily portrayed the artist as a “visionary” without external influence. By doing this, critics have downplayed the historical and cultural moment of Bess's productions and, subsequently, the well-developed interpretive models available from the history of art. This essay positions Bess and his work within the New York School of painting and its critical discourses of gendered metaphors and heteronormative formal evaluation. Recognizing how the artist participated in the conventions of vanguard painting of this time period offers new insights into Bess's singular style. Bess's works reveal the blind spots created by the visual grammar of Abstract Expressionism in his attempts to figure his repressed same-sex desires.     

Is Vygotsky Relevant? Vygotsky's Marxist Psychology

This article explores the connections between Vygotsky's psychology and Marxism, arguing that his was a “Marxist psychology” in its “historical foundation”: a specific conception of history. This conception of history is evident in Vygotsky's analysis and diagnosis of the crisis in psychology. The creation of a Marxist, general psychology was the historical task that was defined by this crisis, and his developmental psychology was the historical project of such a psychology. In his practice of the methodology of this general psychology, Vygotsky recounted “child history”: the history of the genesis of mind. The conception of history evident in Crisis throws new light on Vygotsky's texts on child development: They tell a history of the objective tendencies of consciousness, of the dialectical processes of sublation, and of self-mastery. As Vygotsky interpreted the higher mental functions, they are manifestations of the child's ability to master himself or herself as a consequence of the “social moment” of consciousness. In fostering these functions, one shaped a human consciousness capable of free and deliberate choice.     

'If we only had some of what they have' Ralph Ellison in Wales

Abstract

During his period as a merchant marine in the Second World War, the African American novelist Ralph Ellison was stationed in Swansea, Wales. His short story 'In a Strange Country', collected in Flying Home and Other Stories (1998), is based on these Welsh experiences, and there are two other unpublished Welsh-based stories among the Ellison papers at the Library of Congress: 'A Storm of Blizzard Proportions' and 'The Red Cross at Morriston, South Wales'. This article considers these stories as a basis for exploring the cultural and historical connections and correspondences between African Americans and the Welsh. In drawing inspiration from Ellison's critical writings, the article seeks to substantiate a genuinely comparative, transatlantic approach to literary and cultural texts. This approach leads to an exploration of the ways in which the diversity of the Welsh experience – manifested in language, politics and cultural practice – led Ellison to meditate in new ways on the issues of race, nationhood and identity that he would later famously address in Invisible Man.     

Trusting in God and His Earthly Masks: Exploring the Lutheran Roots of Scandinavian High-Trust Culture

In recent years, the high level of trust among Scandinavians in general and Danes in particular has attracted considerable international interest. The article unearths the rooting of Danish trust culture in Lutheran soil arguing for the influence of Lutheran theology and social teaching on Danish society from the Reformation onwards as a key to understanding its historical background. It identifies central social imaginaries of trust in Luther's work and trace their impact on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Danish Lutheran confessional culture by analyzing texts written by the influential theologians Erik Pontoppidan (1698–1764) and Niels Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783–1872).     

CALL FOR PAPERS

In this article historical patterns and recent trends in black migration in the United States are examined. The purpose of the article is two‐fold: (1) to examine historical changes in the volume and rates of migration between the southern region and nonsouthern regions; and (2) to determine the relative impact of migration types on the South's changeover to net in‐migration during the 1975–1980 migration interval.

The findings of this study indicate that the reversal of the historical pattern of net out‐migration of blacks from the southern region occurred two decades after the turnaround for the general population. The southern region changed from sizable net out‐migration for blacks during the period before 1970 to net in‐migration during the 1975–1980 migration interval. The changeover was due to a substantial decrease in the number of both southern‐born and non‐southern‐born blacks leaving the South. There were also increases in the rate of in‐migration into the region among both return migrants and nonsouthern migrants. The single most important factor influencing the turnaround was a decrease in the number of southern‐born blacks migrating out of the region. This finding is contrary to much current speculation about the role of return migrants in influencing the South's changeover to net in‐migration for the black population.     

The Invention of Prestige: People on the Mountain and the Politics of the National

People on the Mountain (Sz?ts 1941) enjoys special standing in Hungarian film historiography: critics have hailed its use of real locations, deep humanity and sympathy for the downtrodden, and saw in it a precursor of Italian neorealism. This article argues that celebrations of the film's humanity and claims of its position apart from the ideologically inflected films of the period are misplaced, and that such critical readings are simply not justified by the historical context. Further, People on the Mountain is in fact the product of a state-controlled film industry and claims of the film's kinship with neorealism are greatly overstated. The article concludes by demonstrating that, contrary to accounts of unfavourable official reception, the film was very well received by industry bosses and state officials and links its reception to the film's use of a radical nationalist discourse which claimed for Hungarians precedence in Transylvania.     

Agile Materialisms: Antonio Gramsci,Stuart Hall,Racialization, and Modernity

This article investigates why Gramsci's theories and concepts have a discrete relevance to the study of race and ethnicity in contemporary contexts. Two theoretical points emerge from the investigation. First, through Gramsci's work, Hall's approach to the structural/cultural theory problem provides an important mediation for theoretical approaches to race. Hall is then able to demonstrate that the racialization of labor and the coercion of workers in colonial and neocolonial contexts, with regard to the “global south” was the rule and not the exception. Second, through an historical and discursive approach, I demonstrate how Gramsci's analysis of politics and political strategies took race into account. I contend that Gramsci's perspective on race facilitated Hall's ability to deploy Gramsci's theoretical framework and concepts.     

A Luta Kontinua (The Struggle Continues)

This article examines how East Timorese women's contributions to the resistance against the twenty-four-year Indonesian occupation (“the Resistance”) have been marginalized within the veteran's valorization scheme (veterans' scheme) established in the post-conflict period. Drawing on interviews with politicians, veterans and members of women's organizations, we show that although women played significant roles within the Armed, Clandestine and Diplomatic fronts, for the most part they have not been recognized as veterans within the veterans' scheme. Instead, the scheme has reinforced perceptions of women's roles as wives, mothers, homemakers and widows, rather than as political actors, suggesting that the return to “peace” in Timor-Leste has been accompanied by the strengthening of patriarchal traditions and the expectation that women return to “traditional” roles. We argue that the failure to recognize women as veterans is problematic both for East Timorese women and society as a whole. It represents a lost opportunity to recognize women's agency and potentially to improve their social status in society. It also narrows the way in which the independence struggle is remembered and represented and further promotes a culture of “militarized masculinity” that elevates and rewards men who show the capacity to use violence.     

Understanding Persistence in the Resistance

Since Donald Trump's inauguration, large‐scale protest events have taken place around the United States, with many of the biggest events being held in Washington, DC. The streets of the nation's capital have been flooded with people marching about a diversity of progressive issues, including women's rights, climate change, and gun violence. Although research has found that these events have mobilized a high proportion of repeat participants who come out again and again, limited research has focused on understanding differential participation in protest, especially during one cycle of contention. This article, accordingly, explores the patterns among the protest participants to understand differential participation and what we refer to as “persistence in the Resistance.” In it, we analyze a unique data set collected from surveys conducted with a field approximation of a random sample of protest participants at the largest protest events in Washington, DC, since the Resistance began at the 2017 Women's March. Our findings provide insights into repeat protesters during this cycle of contention. The article concludes by discussing how our findings contribute to the research on differential participation.