NGOs, Global Governance and the UN: NGOs as “Guardians of the Reform of the International System”

The role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the United Nations (UN), as well as in world politics in general, is increasingly gaining the attention of scholars of international law, political science and social anthropology. Using extensive earlier research on NGO-UN relations and on the concept of global governance, it is concluded that although NGOs are becoming increasingly influential actors on the international arena, several problems impede their influence from growing within the UN. Once the inefficiencies of NGOs participation in United Nations’ bodies and institutions have been described, we propose some modalities of reform of this Organization, with the purpose of improving the involvement of world civil society in UN decision-making processes, and increasing its democratic profile. Finally, the study suggests several areas that require future research and more in-depth study in order to make predictions about how NGO-UN relations will evolve in the coming decades.

Students’ narratives of the future: Imagined mobilities as forms of youth agency?

In the context of the ‘iFuture’ research project, 341 18-year-old Sardinian students were asked to write an essay in which they imagined themselves at 90 and described what their futures (in the past) would look like. Such data allow us to investigate the notion of agency. Agency and the future are deeply intertwined: agency involves the idea of projection and implies anticipation; the ‘desired’ futures have an impact on the ways in which youth act in the world today. We focus on the analysis of one of the emerging findings, which expresses an interesting configuration of youth agency, namely the imagination of youth mobility. This finding expresses the desire to put some projects into place, yet it concurrently implies that youth believe that these projects are impossible to achieve in the current context. After offering an overview of imagined destinations, we identify two ways in which imagined mobility emerges from the rich material collected: (a) mobility as an entry ticket, to bypass the uncertainty associated with crude reality and (b) mobility as an occasion for self-experimentation and self-growth. We conclude by discussing in what ways these forms of imagined future mobilities may be seen as youth agency.     

Forget “militarization”: race,disability and the “martial politics” of the police and of the university

This article investigates the limits of the concept of militarization and proposes an alternative concept: martial politics. It argues that the concept of militarization falsely presumes a peaceful liberal order that is encroached on by military values or institutions. Arguing instead that we must grapple with the ways in which war and politics are mutually shaped, the article proposes the concept of martial politics as a means for examining how politics is shot-through with war-like relations. It argues that stark distinctions cannot be made between war and peace, military and civilian or national and social security. This argument is made in relation to two empirical sites: the police and the university. Arguing against the notion that either the police or the university have been “militarized,” the article provides a historical analysis of the ways in which these institutions have always already been implicated in martial politics – that is, of producing White social and economic order through war-like relations with Indigenous, racialized, disabled, poor and other communities. It concludes by assessing the political and scholarly opportunities that are opened up for feminists through the rejection of the concept of militarization in favor of the concept of martial politics.     

When Robert E. Park was (Re) writing “the city”: Biography,the social survey,and the science of sociology

Sociological production is a situated and embodied activity carried out by individuals inserted in actual social relations. Considering that this feature has an influence upon the content of scholarly literature and that it can be revealed in the scientific text itself, I propound a new interpretation of the writing process of Robert E. Park's “The City,” the famous paper he published initially in 1915. Customarily depicted as a manifesto for an autonomous urban sociology, I argue on the contrary that its general economy has to be linked to Park's biographical background. When he affiliated with the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago, Park was brought to teach a course on the social survey. “The City” was to be the academic expression of his point of view on the topic. Park's biographical encounters with some active promoters of the social survey approach are evidenced and their influence onhis 1915 essay is carefully analyzed, showing notably that curious intellectual omissions in “The City” can be traced back to these previous encounters. Park's latter texts, and the 1925 revised version of “The City” in particular, are shown to provide the interwar sociologists with a peculiar narrative about the history of sociology: Park's predecessors are deliberately confined in a pre-scientific stage of the discipline and Park's original essay is presented as a seminal research program destined to be later fulfilled by the newly established urban sociologists. The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments on the first draft of the paper, Lawrence T. Nichols for his kindly editorial guidence, and Jacques Marquet and Felice Dassetto for their marerial support.     

Kvetching and carousing under Communism: old Odessa as the Soviet Union’s Jewish city of sin

Odessa has often been branded a “Jewish city.” Much like their counterparts in New York and Warsaw, Odessa’s Jews have historically played a fundamental role in the city’s demographic makeup, economic life and culture. But Odessa is unique among Jewish cities because it has been mythologised as a city of sin, a frontier seaport boomtown whose commercial prosperity and balmy climate attracted legions of adventurers, gangsters and swindlers seeking easy wealth and earthly pleasures. Old Odessa was the Russian Jew’s golden calf – gilded, wicked and ostentatious in its intemperance. Odessa’s carnivalesque environment was fertile ground for the blending of different cultures, and the Jews spearheaded this process, adopting a Yiddish‐inflected Russian as their language for celebrating their profligate city. By the 1917 Revolution the foundations had been laid for the emergence of Isaac Babel, Leonid Utesov, Mikhail Zhvanetskii and the many other Jews who subsequently left Odessa for Moscow and the Soviet interior. They would go on to disseminate the Odessa myth using literature, comedy and music, and their immense popularity ensured that Odessa was indelibly marked as a Jewish city of sin, inhabited by comical rogues whose colourful escapades were rooted in an idiom of Jewishness.     

Nurses and the dying: Symbolic interaction as a precipitator of dying “stages”

The impact of nurses' attitudes upon their communication with dying patients is examined from the symbolic interaction perspective. Data were obtained from participant observation in the intensive care and postintensive care units of a hospital and from in-depth interviewes with additional nurses. Characteristics of the situation, nurses, and patients were examined in terms of an Interpersonal Reactions Model. The strength of this model is its emphasis upon the effect unintended judgments may have on a patient's self-image. A stage in the dying process may simply be a response to the nonverbally communicated expectations of interactors with dying persons. This research focuses on the first stage of this model—the differential reaction of nurses to the varying characteristics of patients within the constraints of extra-care situations.This is a revision of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Mid-South Sociological Association in Little Rock, Arkansas, in November, 1980.     

What's better than the pill,vasectomy, celibacy and rhythm?

A report of a new technique of male contraception involves the use of heat which lowers the sperm count. Early reports of lowered sperm counts in men wearing jockstraps or increased sperm counts in men whose testicles have been cooled several degrees have led to the experimentation in the male rat of the effects of heat and ultrasound on the sperm count and the ability to fertilize the female. 250 male rats were divided into 5 groups: 1) control, 2) a 60 degree C water circulating testicle cup with 15 minutes exposure, 3) exposure to radiant energy for 15 minutes and raising scrotal temperatures to 60 degrees C, 4) exposure to microwaves of varying powers, and 5) exposure to ultrasound of 1 w/cm to 2 w/cm for 1 minute. Group 2 results indicated that libido was uninhibited, testosterone levels undisturbed a nd organ sizes unaffected by the hot-water treatment. It took 30-35 days for any pregnancies to occur after a single treatment. In group 3, results were substantially the same except that it took 60-75 days for any pregnancies to occur. In group 4, a 20% exposure to radiation for 5 minutes impaired fertility for 65-80 days, while those exposed to 20% for 15 minutes were still infertile at the end of the 10-month study. In these cases libido was also unimpaired. Animals in group 5, exposed to 1 w/cm for 1 minute had impaired fertility for 150-210 days although testicular temperature rose to only 38 degrees C. When exposure to ultr asound was doubled, fertility was impaired throughout the study. In all cases where fertility was restored, resulting offspring appeared normal and were themselves capable of reproducing normal-appearing offspring. Ultrasound was considered the most promising heat source. In all cases the germinal epithelium function is arrested. Future research should be directed to making the ultrasound technique more finely tuned to a contraceptive function.     

Homemaking in the public. On the scales and stakes of framing,feeling, and claiming extra-domestic space as “home”

This article reviews the emerging literature on the negotiation of home-related feelings, claims, and practices in the public urban sphere, under the rubric of homemaking in the public. This contributes to a better sociological understanding of home and illuminates long-debated societal questions such as the interaction between majority and minority groups and the shifting boundaries between what is (regarded as) public or private. While home has traditionally been understood as a private and domestic matter, it also has a major public significance. As a category of analysis, it reveals how supposedly domestic attitudes, routines, and practices are scaled up into the public domain. As a category of practice, it is a powerful discursive resource for contentious politics in the extra-domestic domain. Who is entitled and legitimated to claim a public space as “home”, and what this implies for inter-group categorizations and relations, are questions that deserve original and comparative analysis in sociology. Processes of domestication of the public sphere, of mutual interaction between public and private life realms, and of claims-making on various scales can be fruitfully revisited along these lines, by advancing an original research agenda on the ways of framing, feeling and claiming public space as home.     

“Changing the world”: epistemic communities,and the democratizing power of science

This paper puts forward the argument that science can not only “save the world” but also “change the world.” While much has been written about the evident power of science to bring politicians to change their policies in order to “save the world,” e.g. the environment, less attention has been drawn on the hidden power of science to “change the world,” i.e. to frame and shape political orders and constituencies so that they get more democratic in the deliberative sense of the term, both at international and domestic scales. The paper sheds light on how science can induce democratizing effects in domestic constituencies. It can do that by the intermediary of three distinct enumerative mechanisms: “teaching,” “empowering,” and “taming.” These mechanisms, it is argued, are especially likely to become effective in those transnational institutional settings linking scientists and technical experts on the one side, with political and societal actors, on the other side, or in what Haas calls “epistemic communities.”     

“Oh,language of exile – woven of sorrow and mockery”: the Kalevala centennial jubilee as a bone of contention between Hebraists and Yiddishists

The article explores contacts between eminent Jewish Zionists and the Finnish cultural and political elite using the Kalevala centennial jubilee as a case study. The article shows how Finnish nationalists sympathised with the cause of Zionists propagating the use of modern Hebrew: members of the Kalevala Society warm‐heartedly invited the Hebrew poet Saul Tchernichowsky from Palestine to the centennial jubilee in 1935. The article also deals with the exclusion of the Yiddish representative, Hersh Rosenfeld, recommended by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna, and discusses the possibility of anti‐communism and anti‐cosmopolitanism behind his omission from the centennial jubilee. The Jewish community of Helsinki, which was experiencing a rapid Finnification process, was involved in inviting the Hebrew representative to Finland. The article ends by analysing a Yiddishist poem that can be interpreted as an individual’s protest about the exclusion of the Yiddish language from the Kalevala centenary.     

Accidents related to the use of products and services in the city of São Luis, Brazil

This article presents a study on the accidents related to the use of products and services, as recorded at two emergency hospitals at the city S?o Luís, Brazil. The goal of the study was to evaluate the main types and causes of unintentional accidents as well as the more frequent injuries for further improvement of products and services. The study evaluated the victims profile (gender and age), the circumstances (activity, local and time) that lead to the accidents and the type of resulted injury. Non-parametric statistics showed that 83.64% of the accidents were related to products (57.6% of them being consumer products) and 8.6% are related to maintenance services. 57.6% of the victims were children under 15 years old, and 58.4% were male. 50.2% of accidents occurred at home, more often (44.7%) in the afternoon. The most common injury was musculoesqueletal (48.6%), 49.0% being cranioencephalic trauma and 15.2% fractures.     

Art for integration: political rationalities and technologies of governmentalisation in the city of Malmö

Cities increasingly use artistic and cultural activities to promote active citizenship and social cohesion. We suggest that city-sponsored cultural and artistic practices in Sweden are finding a new discursive context in migration. In this article, we look at two artistic and cultural institutions in Malmö, Sweden: Arena 305 and Drömmarnas hus. We develop a typology of governmentalisation based on the work of Nicholas Rose and Peter Miller, which allows us to describe the governing activity of Arena 305 and Drömmarnas hus. What becomes visible is the discrepancy between the moral form of the political rationalities and the technologies of government: even though institutions may harbour ideals and principles of inclusion, they are perfectly capable of sustaining activities that brighten the very boundaries they set out to challenge.     

Marginalization by the Marginalized: Race,Homophobia, Heterosexism,and “the Problem of the 21st Century”

On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States. This historic election occurred 105 years after W. E. B. Du Bois proclaimed in the introduction to The Souls of Black Folk, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” (1994, p. v). According to Du Bois, the problem of the color line is racialized segregation and oppression. This article posits, however, that “the problem of the 21st century” is the further marginalization within already marginalized groups, and this article focuses on the history and occurrence of homophobia and heterosexism within the African American community as well as its links to gender discrimination. Special focus is placed on the Black Church as a possible causal factor for homophobia and heterosexism in the African American community. Possible solutions are also proposed, which consist of a nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage and African American leaders actively and publicly supporting lesbian, gay, and bisexual members of the African American community.     

Philosophy as juris‐fiction: Jean‐Luc Nancy and the “philosophy of right”

This article proposes that the “philosophy of right” deserves deconstruction at the juncture of philosophy and the politics of the state. It maintains the thesis that Jean‐Luc Nancy is correct to regard the “philosophy of right” as an unfounded, situationist exercise of “juris‐fictioning”, the activity of juridically reading cases as if they were accidents as such that befall the law. It argues that philosophy’s inability to provide rationale that justify its own juris‐fictioning renders it vulnerable to influence by political requirements and even confers a vestige of legitimacy on them. This influence reinforces the “theologicopolitics” that support the state and is in turn informed by the values of the “juridico‐commerical” model of contemporary “market democracy”. Therefore, on the one hand, philosophy is open to influence by non‐philosophical criteria that endow its notion of rationality with unfounded presuppositions; on the other hand, however, the politics of the state is given an artificial legitimacy through philosophy’s inability to provide foundations for juridical rationality.     

“They love death as we love life”: The “Muslim Question” and the biopolitics of replacement

This article approaches the analytic of the “Muslim Question” through the prism of the discursive and conspiratorial use of demographics as an alleged threat to Europe. It argues that concerns about “Muslim demographics” within Europe have been entertained, mobilized, and deployed to not only construct Muslims as problems and dangers to the present and future of Europe, but also as calls to revive eugenic policies within the frame of biopower. The article begins by sketching the contours of the contemporary “Muslim Question” and proceeds with a critical engagement with the literature positing a deliberate and combative strategy by “Muslims” centered on birth rates—seen by these authors as a tactical warfare—to allegedly replace European “native” populations. The analysis continues by focusing on two images juxtaposing life and death as imagined within the replacement discourse, and that capture that discourse in powerful albeit disturbing ways. Finally, the article proposes reading the population replacement discourse as a deployment of biopolitics and one of its many techniques, namely, eugenics.     

“Settlers” and Zimbabwe: Politics,Memory, and the Anthropology of Commercial Farms During a Time of Crisis

This article examines the contested politics surrounding the participation of white farmers in the national public sphere in Zimbabwe. It examines how farm workers have acted as an “interior frontier” to white farmers and how this has helped to shape the public identification of white farmers in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. In so doing, the differential use of the term settlers and the memory of colonialism within the current violence surrounding land reform and democratization are analyzed. Through addressing some of the engagements with this ambiguous identification of white farmers, the politics of analysing “settlers” within anthropology and postcolonial studies is raised.     

Ellen Swallow Richards: “Humanistic Oekologist,” “Applied Sociologist,” and the founding of sociology

Best known as the first woman graduate from MIT, and the founder of Home Economics, Ellen Swallow Richards was a Progressive Era reformer who applied social science research techniques to problems of concern to early sociologists. As a mentor to many women who joined the “Cultural” and “Pragmatic” feminists of Hull House, her secular theories of “Oekology” and “Euthenics” challenged many of the models of social change prevalent in the Cambridge and Chicago academic communities. Her most radical contribution as a feminist was her assertion that women’s unpaid labor in the home played a vital economic role in maintaining capitalism and was the ultimate source of their second-class citizenship. She shared a belief in democracy and education as a feminist “Pragmatist,” and laid the groundwork for the contemporary “Ecofeminist” movement. Although she was a biochemist by training, she engaged several genera-tions of women in the application of scientific methods to the solution of contemporary social problems. As a political organizer, much of her legacy is reflected in the accomplishments of the reform organizations she was instrumental in founding.     

Unfolding intersecting forms of socio-spatial exclusion: Accommodation centres at the height of the “refugee reception crisis” in Germany

At the height of the “refugee reception crisis” in 2015, a large number of forced migrants had to be accommodated in Germany, which led to the transformation of old infrastructures and building of new centres. Based on extensive fieldwork in three centres in the same city, this article seeks to highlight the intersecting forms of socio-spatial exclusion in refugee accommodations in Germany. First, we unpack how differential internal and external spatial arrangements intersect to aggravate or alleviate social exclusion of forced migrants. Second, we draw attention to the ways in which the regulation of space and social relations inside the accommodation centres intersect with the dominant gendered notions of the refugee label. Despite the potency of power relations that differentially categorizes, controls and excludes, exclusion remains ambivalent as forced migrants consistently claim ownership over the space in and around the centres and build social relationships to maintain a sense of “normalcy”.