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.     

Screening/Meaning: Hollywood’s Long Career in India

This article provides a brief and concise account of Hollywood’s long engagement with cinema and the audience in India. The focus is on the new phase that this complex relationship has entered, with Hindi films being produced under the direct and total control of Hollywood-based producers and financiers, on an experimental basis.     

Anarchist/syndicalist and independent Marxist intersections in post-apartheid struggles,South Africa: the WSF/ZACF current in Gauteng, 1990s–2010s

ABSTRACT

South Africa has a long-established independent left, outside the big traditions of nationalism and Marxism-Leninism. Post-apartheid its fortunes have varied considerably, as space opened up for movements to the left of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, but opportunities declined as the state increased its legitimacy, penetration of civil society, and systems of patronage. This paper looks at cooperation, competition and convergence on the independent left, with particular reference to independent Marxists (mainly the well-established Trotskyist tradition) and revolutionary anarchists and syndicalists (a movement that revived in the 1990s). These intersections have taken place in study groups, popular education, student struggles, and post-apartheid social movements and unions, and indicate the vitality and fragility of the independent left, and the ongoing importance of cooperation and overlaps, as well as of long-standing divisions over theory and strategy. Particular attention is paid to Keep Left, the Socialist Group, the Democratic Socialist Movement, and the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front.     

Stepping Back in Time in Xi'an

AS a metropolitan resident who is used to seeing towering buildings, an incessant stream of vehicles and people, I've always longed to have a taste of an ancient civilization, which is vigorous but exquisite, bold but elegant, natural but mysterious. I realized my dream when I went to Xi'an, a capital with a history of over 1,000 years. Xi'an was once the capital for eleven dynasties, including the Zhou, Qin, Han and Tang. This is the place where China's ancient civilization developed. Ancestors at Banpo created exquisite painted pottery; the Western Zhou Dynasty (about 1,066-771 B.C.) saw the height of the splendors of the bronze culture; the Qin Emperor Shi Huang (Qin Dynasty, from about 221-206 B.C.)     

Children's Engagement as Urban Researchers and Consultants in Aotearoa/New Zealand: Can it Increase Children's Effective Participation in Urban Planning?

Children conducting research and engaging in ‘adult’ domains such as urban planning challenge perceptions of children as merely ‘adult becomings’ — perceptions which, along with lack of pathways for participation, have largely excluded children from effective participation in the public realm. This paper considers two urban participatory projects in Aotearoa/New Zealand: in the first, children (10–13 years) researched peer perceptions of Auckland city life; in the second, they were consulted by Auckland Council on the redevelopment of a city square. We reflect on processes and outcomes, and the extent to which facilitating such projects may increase children's meaningful participation in urban planning.     

Exploring parent–child communication in the context of threat: immigrant families facing detention and deportation in post-9/11 USA

This paper explores whether and how documented and undocumented migrant parents communicate with their children about the threats posed by the intensified enforcement of 1996 and 2001 US immigration reforms; whether parents facing potential detention and deportation plan for the care of their children; and whether their children learn from other sources about detention and deportation. The focus of this paper emerged in the context of a multiyear participatory and action research (PAR) process as one effort to understand the multiple meanings and divergent perspectives on parental–child communication that arose among and between participants and coresearchers. The aim is to better understand, in parents' own voices, their embrace of and resistance to direct communication with their children about the threat of deportation. Data are triangulated from in-depth interviews with 18 Central American immigrant coresearchers (Study 1), responses of 132 Latino/a immigrant parents to a survey with open-ended questions (Study 2), and conversations in a series of community meetings and workshops. Findings confirm the importance for advocates, service providers, and researchers to understand migrant parents' decisions about communication within the context of family and community values; gender expectations; lived and psychological experiences of being criminalized; and strategies to manage daily challenges of living without documents while parenting US-citizen children.     

“My Two Homes”Children’s Picture Books and Non/Normative Imaginaries of Home in Post-Divorce/Separation Families

Abstract

In spite of a burgeoning interest in children’s home lives, we know little about the meaning and experience of home for children living in post-divorce/separation families who often spend time in more than one parental home. As a starting point, in this article I analyze the way in which thirteen “therapeutic” pictures books for younger children aged 3–8 represent home for such children (and their parents) through their text and images. I argue that the books contain four dominant tropes of domestic transition through their representation of the disruption, journeys, thresholds, and materialities of home. However, at the same time, the books also present the ordinariness of domestic home life in post-divorce/separation family life with a counter-narrative of the mundane time spent being together and gender-neutral parental care practices at home.     

Continuity or rupture? Roma/Gypsy communities in rural and urban environments under post-socialism

The aim of the article is to contribute to existing research and debates on social change associated with the post-socialist transformation in Eastern and Central Europe. It does so by drawing attention to and examining the diversity of ways in which such change has been lived through and reflected upon by members of Roma (Gypsy) communities living in urban and rural environments. Drawing on ethnographic research amongst excluded and segregated Roma in the ‘ghettos’ of Czech cities and in rural ‘Gypsy settlements’ in the Slovak countryside, the author notes a striking difference between how members of these communities, belonging to the same extended families, lived through and reflect upon the post-socialist transformation. While the members of the Roma communities living in Czech cities perceive the post-socialist transformation as one of the most dramatic ruptures in their life trajectories, the rural Roma do not seem to have been affected as deeply and dramatically, and their life trajectories seem to be framed by different events than those directly associated with the market transition. The paper analyses and explains the social and historical conditions that (co)produce the sense of rupture or continuity in the life trajectories of members of Roma communities exposed to urban and rural environments.     

Listening in a Way that Recognizes/Realizes the World of ‘the Other’

Freshmen in an orientation course at a state university answered questionnaires about their peer mentors' listening and how well their peer mentors help them balance dialectical tensions of socialization. Results showed that perceived directive and emotional listening help the protégé manage these tensions. Perceived emotional listening discriminated between high and low levels of liking and relational closeness but was only a slightly better predictor of reducing the protégé's socialization tensions. Both types of perceived listening responses are important to effective mentoring: emotional listening helps protégés form positive relationships with their mentors and directive listening meets protégés' expectations.     

The lesbian community and FTMs: détente in the butch/FTM borderlands

In 1998, Dr. Jacob Hale wrote about a 'borderland' between butch lesbian identity and FTM masculinity, suggesting a 'demilitarized zone.' While the intervening years have brought no 'demilitarized zone,' the border may not have a long future. Converging trends in identity among the younger generation in their teens and twenties suggest this, such as changing meanings of 'lesbian' and 'FTM,' the blending of sexuality and gender, and understanding these as personal, rather than identity, differences. The socio-historical circumstances that gave power to anti-trans feminist attitudes and trans rejection of lesbian identity are disappearing. This is not to say that we are 'post-lesbian' or 'post-transsexual,' but the tension between identities, the need to distinguish clearly between them, and the arguments about who is 'really' lesbian or 'really' FTM may be of supreme unimportance to the next generation. Time will tell.     

A Study of the Pragmatic Adaptation of the Teachers' English/Chinese Code-switching in Class

Since 1970s, as a unique linguistic phenomenon, code-switching has aroused Chinese and foreign linguists' attention and gained their emphasis. On the basis of Jef Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, by utilizing Yu Guodong's Adaptation Model on English/Chinese codeswitching, the study is aiming to explore the pragmatic adaptation of English/Chinese code-switching in college English class.     

Overlooking/Looking Over Neoliberal Immigration: Amnesty Policy in the ‘Nation of Immigrants’

In the self-proclaimed ‘nation of immigrants’, a struggle for power plays out in US immigration law. This article examines such a struggle in the context of rising neoliberalism. As president Ronald Reagan set out to revolutionize America with the deregulation of the economy, privatization, and the globalization of capitalist democracy, pundits claimed that the country was experiencing a Mexican illegal immigration crisis that pivoted on Mexican women's fecundity and abuse of social services. Yet along with punitive provisions, the first US law to directly address undocumented migration, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) included an amnesty programme widely praised as a democratic watershed for the undocumented. Consequently, ‘multicultural’ immigrant men and women seemed to be embraced, while in the same breath disciplined through discourses of respectability and criminality that secured both a pool of cheap immigrant labourers and minoritized citizens. More specifically, two strains of ‘nation of immigrants’ discourse that circulated around amnesty during the law-making process affectively (and effectively) framed America as the globally exceptional guarantor of democratic rights, inclusivity, and equal access to economic opportunity for citizens. On one hand, discourse that welcomed and celebrated an abstracted immigrant subject who was free to succeed on the basis of individual hard work was coded as the epitome of Americanism. On the other hand, discourse that welcomed explicitly racialized and gendered immigrants who were free to succeed on the basis of their hard work was coded as emblematically American. In this case respectable tokens of multiculturalism (i.e. immigrants of colour and especially immigrant women of colour who upheld traditional family values) evidenced American inclusivity. This article argues that both strains of ‘nation of immigrants’ discourse naturalized a relationship between citizenship, freedom, and free markets and thus powerfully masked the exploitative social relations key to neoliberal economic arrangements.     

Desiring security/securing desire: (Re)re‐thinking alterity in security discourse

Abstract

This essay rearticulates historical and contemporary security discourse as a politics of desire bound to a masculinist and racialized notion of Selfhood. The Persian Gulf War and the Canada/Spain Turbot War are presented as case studies which typify how the securing of desire through warfare proceeds from an idea of the desirous rival a Other. The essay counters Guardian and Lananian narratives of a desire which emanates from a sense of lack, and leads to violence, with Levinas's understanding of desire as central to, rather than disruptive of, an ethical relation with alterity.     

Media/Crime/Millennium: Where Are We Now? A Reflective Review of Research and Theory Directions in the 21st Century

This paper aims to provide a reflective – and selective – review of key developments in media and crime research and theory from the vantage point of the new century. Writing primarily as a criminologist, though with a background in sociological theory and research, information studies, and cultural analysis, I will seek to identify some of the turning points and questions that emerge from what is a recently rejuvenated and expanding field. For the last decade media/crime research has been able to draw on an exciting array of multi‐disciplinary sources of inspiration in a way that has not happened before, and suggests new – intellectually complex – challenges for future work.     

Variations in horizontal and vertical individualism-collectivism in four regions of Mexico / Variaciones en el individualismo-colectivismo horizontal y vertical en cuatro regiones de México

Cultures can be analysed through cultural syndromes (shared patterns of beliefs, attitudes, norms, roles and values organized around a theme). One of these syndromes, individualism-collectivism, distinguishes collectivist cultures, which prioritize collective over individual interests, from individualist cultures, which value individual autonomy, achievement and freedom. These dimensions intersect with the horizontal-vertical syndrome, where verticality means the preference for a society organized by hierarchies, in contrast to a horizontal culture, which privileges equality. This paper explores these dimensions using a new instrument in a sample of 990 participants from four regions in Mexico. The results of exploratory and confirmatory factorial analyses show four theoretically congruent factors with adequate levels of internal consistency reaching metric equivalence criteria in three of the four samples. The scores show greater support for horizontal individualism and less support for vertical collectivism. These results are discussed within the context of a cultural shift towards individualism.     

哈根达斯in南昌

南昌人的特点之一是:热衷于尝试新鲜事物,酷爱美食和购物,有着令人意想不到的消费热情。今年10月23日,全球极品冰淇淋品牌——哈根达斯正式进驻南昌,让南昌的哈迷们大饱眼福和口福了。与哈根达斯以往城市的开业典礼不同,素有冰淇淋中"劳斯莱斯"之称的哈根达斯,在开业典礼举办了其一场"寻找舌尖上的甜蜜奢华——极品冰淇淋品鉴会"。