‘Heteroglossic’ Discourses on Globalization: A View from the ‘East’

Abstract

In view of the broad scope of literature on globalization, this paper provides a synoptic reading of some of the globalization literatures, organized as ‘discourses’. The analysis of the discourses on globalization is confined to three overlapping discourses, namely, regional, ideological and economic discourses. Specific references and examples of local uptake of globalization will be drawn from Singapore and the wider Asia pacific region, as Beck (2002) has reminded us that we cannot even think about globalization or discuss it effectively without the reference to specific locations and places. Hence the subtitle of this paper, ‘A View from the East’, is deliberate to signal the often forgotten fact that Singapore, as well as the wider Asia Pacific region, is ‘part of the “global” sphere that the West has dispersed itself into’.     

The White Management of ‘Volunteering’: Ethnographic Evidence from an Israeli NGO

The article examines the recent emergence of ‘volunteering’ as a publicly significant notion and practice. Based on an extensive fieldwork in a prominent intermediary NGO in Israel, the article follows the efforts to promote and expand ‘volunteering’ pursued by the organization’s board and staff members. Affiliated with the privileged social strata of Ashkenazi (European) Jews, whose hegemonic position has been eroded during the neoliberal transformations in Israel, the NGO staff seek to retain their privileged status through a managerial activity in the field of ‘volunteering’. They promote a particular, liberally inspired construction of ‘volunteering’, while universalizing it as a professional, a-political and consensual realm. Inspired by critical studies of ‘whiteness’, the article describes how the privileged character of this managerial activity is being successfully obscured through the representation of ‘volunteering’ as an all-inclusive aspiration.     

Evaluating Students’ Micro Practice Field Performance

The current study represents an effort to determine whether a universally recognized set of objectives for field-based learning in micro-level practice exists despite apparently widespread belief to the contrary among social work educators. A review of efforts over the past 50 years to conceptualize field learning and an analysis of current data on student performance criteria identified eight learning objectives for field study. These objectives reflect both traditional concepts and contemporary demands on the profession. Based on these learning objectives, the authors have proposed a method for evaluating student performance in the field.     

Thinking ‘Outside the Box’: A New Approach to Integration of Learning for Practice

The integration of learning is a central goal for all professions. The question of how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, and between the classroom and the field, is one which has preoccupied social work education since its very beginnings in universities in the United Kingdom and the United States in the early twentieth century. Between 2003 and 2005, the Scottish Institute for Excellence in Social Work Education funded a project which piloted a new approach to the integration of learning for practice. This paper reports on the findings of that project, and suggests ways of taking its findings forward in the future.     

Challenges to Bridging Field and Classroom Instruction: Exploring Field Instructors’ Perspectives on Macro Practice

Field education and macro practice have been highlighted as central educational domains in social work education; however, little scholarship has looked at how macro social work practice competencies have been integrated into field-based learning. This exploratory study aimed to gain perspectives from field instructors regarding macro social work and the integration of macro practice into their work with practicum students. Consistent with scholarship that has elucidated the impacts of neoliberalism on social work, including the marginalization of macro practice, emergent themes demonstrated that field instructors face barriers to incorporating macro work into their training of students. Challenges include prevalence of the medical model, time constraints, and funding limitations. Further, field instructors observed gaps among students, their university, and their organizational setting in regard to expectations for integrating macro practice into field education. Recommendations and directions for future research are discussed.     

“VY Mudimbe: from the ‘Nation’ to the ‘Global’ – ‘Who is the Master?' ”

This article examines Valentin Yves Mudimbe's work form the early 1970s, in the neo-colonial era, to the present day, a period marked by the advent of “Empire”, as conceived by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. The investigation appraises the way in which Mudimbe's epistemological excavation of African discourses and discourses about Africa serves wider ethical and political objectives resonating with critiques of anthropology as formulated by Benoît Verhaegen and Johannes Fabian in the 1960s and 1970s. Part I focuses on Zairian nationalism (“Zairianization”) and the ambition, on the part of the Mobutu regime, to develop an authentic national culture. This examination of the birth of a Zairian “community” is developed through a comparison between Mudimbe's little-studied Autour de la “nation” (1972) and Kangafu Kutumbagana's Discours sur l'authenticité (1973) and is argued on the basis of a number of propositions formulated by Jean-Luc Nancy in The Inoperative Community (1991). The second part of the article focuses on Mudimbe's On African Fault Lines (2013); it examines Mudimbe's attempts, in his analyses of contemporary works by Deepa Rajkumar and Geert Hofstede, to reflect on globalization and to assess the political and ethical relevance of critical tools developed in the neo-colonial period to denounce the unequal basis of anthropology.     

Contradictions of the ‘New Green Revolution’: A View from South America's Southern Cone

This paper is an examination of the social, economic, and environmental problems created by the search for and application of biotechnological solutions to global hunger that are also protected by a system of globally harmonized intellectual property rights. These contradictions are illustrated by the example of South America's Southern Cone region (Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay) where the ‘New Green Revolution’ has since 1996 been vigorously introduced, led by genetically modified (GM) soybeans. It is argued that the ‘New Green Revolution’ is not a solution either to the problem of agro-ecological sustainability or to that of hunger and malnutrition.

Este artículo examina los problemas sociales, económicos y del medio ambiente, creados en busca de soluciones biotecnológicas para el hambre global, soluciones que también son protegidas por el sistema global armónico de derechos de propiedad intelectual. Estas contradicciones quedan claramente ilustradas utilizando el ejemplo de la región del Cono Sur en Suramérica (Argentina, Brasil y Paraguay) donde la “Nueva Revolución Verde” ha sido fuertemente introducida desde 1996, liderada por la utilización de soya genéticamente modificada (GM). Se argumenta que la “La nueva revolución verde” no es la solución para el problema de la sustentabilidad agro-ecológica ni para el hambre y la desnutrición.

     

‘A frog in a well’: the exclusion of disabled people from work in Cambodia

Based on ethnographic research conducted in north‐west Cambodia in 2000–2001, this paper examines why disabled people experience systematic marginalisation in the labour market. Although there are no official data on the relationship between disability and employment status in Cambodia, this research suggests that disabled people are more likely than their able‐bodied counterparts to be unemployed, in low status occupations, earn less or be out of the labour market altogether. Consequently, disabled people are more likely to live in poverty, experience social isolation and poor mental health. I argue that disabled people’s social status effectively shapes their work patterns through (mis)conceptions that associate ‘disability’ with ‘inability’ to work and to be employable. This paper illustrates how geographical processes fix disabled people in their socio‐spatial place, which together with ideological and structural inequalities distinguish and entrench their poverty from that of other social groups.     

A ‘Lost Crowd’: Reconfiguring the Harlem Renaissance as a Post-War ‘Lost Generation’

Abstract

Traditionally for black Americans, World War I did not signify the traumatic removal of traditional Victorian ideals, the end of any romantic notions of battle, or, as it would for white American literature, the disillusionment and alienation of a literary ‘Lost Generation’. Although experiencing continued racism upon their return, the recognition that black Americans had received in wartime France came to characterize a budding enthusiasm for the social prospects of the post-war era. Yet many novels of the Harlem Renaissance certainly resonate with the disillusionment of the Lost Generation and similarly grapple with notions of war trauma and traumatic post-war (re)integration into a chaotic American society. This article considers the endeavour to reconcile feelings of post-war national unity with the African-American struggle for racial equality in the early twentieth century. By evaluating the analogous themes of alienation, masculinity, and place represented by both the Lost Generation and Harlem Renaissance, this article seeks to highlight traumatic parallels between post-war literatures of two divergent ‘lost’ generations.     

A Practitioner’s Guide to Sampling in the Age of Evidence-Based Practice: Translation of Research into Practice

Evidence-based practice must include the translation of research into practice, and the social work practitioner is the essential link in that translation. As part of the EBP process, researchers must present findings in a way that is accessible to practitioners and practitioners must view the study as relevant and representative of their clients’ needs. This article provides practitioners with tools to interpret research, specifically the sampling process. Our goal is to support practitioners in bridging the gap between research and practice. We discuss how sampling fits with the translation of research and describe sampling procedures. We conclude with a unique three-step approach for reviewing research that is designed to assist practitioners to translate research into practice.     

A semiotic approach to ‘ethnicity’. An example from Taiwanese ‘Chineseness’

For a few decades, socio-cultural as well as linguistic anthropologists have worked hard to construct a reliable semiotic paradigm to study linguistic, cultural and social interactions. These subfields – linguistic, cultural and social – are often analytically tackled asunder, though they are intimately interconnected, intertwined and overlapping. The semiotic theory of culture is not a novel discovery in itself, but it can also be applied to the study of society and ethnicity. Culture, society and ethnicity are systems of communication, that is systems of signs; society is a system of signs whose meaning emerges from social interactions and ethnicity a system of signs whose meaning is strategically imposed by a specific society through a specific culture. Moreover, those three systems of communication, of signs, are interconnected in various ways. This essay will analyze ‘Taiwanese Ethnicity’ in its semiotic dimension, and explore how society, culture and ethnicity interact in constructing an ethnic identification.     

Exploring the ‘craftedness’ of multimedia narratives: from creation to interpretation

This paper emerges from a comparative study of two community-based multimedia storytelling projects in Toronto and Montreal, and the multimedia narratives participants produced in those projects. Following current scholarship in visual methods that acknowledges the significance for research of the medium’s formal qualities, the authors offer the concept of ‘craftedness’ as one which might help researchers grapple with the significance of the processes of both creating and interpreting visual data. Through a study of the visual data produced in these two projects, they examine three qualities of this aesthetic experience captured in the notion of craftedness, which seem to both complicate and enable processes of self-representation and interpretation: aesthetic distance, visual excess and the visualisation of the unrepresentable. Taking seriously the craftedness of multimedia works highlights the complexities of interpreting visual data and the dilemmas of representing ourselves and others.     

Nonverbal Emotion Priming: Evidence from the ‘Facial Affect Decision Task’

Affective associations between a speakers voice (emotional prosody) and a facial expression were investigated using a new on-line procedure, the Facial Affect Decision Task (FADT). Faces depicting one of four basic emotions were paired with utterances conveying an emotionally-related or unrelated prosody, followed by a yes/no judgement of the face as a true exemplar of emotion. Results established that prosodic characteristics facilitate the accuracy and speed of decisions about an emotionally congruent target face, supplying empirical support for the idea that information about discrete emotions is shared across major nonverbal channels. The FADT represents a promising tool for future on-line studies of nonverbal processing in both healthy and disordered individuals.The author gratefully acknowledges the service of Elmira Chan, Sarah Addleman, and Marta Fundamenski for running the experiment, and for helpful comments received from M. Harris, K. Scherer and anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of the paper. This research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.     

Social Work Students ‘Juggling’ Field Placement

Field education is widely acknowledged as a central component of social work education. However, it requires a substantial commitment of time and energy from students which can present challenges to students who have multiple responsibilities. Based on a literature review conducted in preparation for doctoral research into social work student experience of juggling multiple roles and responsibilities with field placement, this article summarises what is known about the challenges they face and what helps them to complete placement. The findings have implications for students, schools of social work and field placement agencies. Further research should provide guidance for professional social work bodies, schools of social work, field educators and students.     

Understanding health inequalities: from ‘Transmitted Deprivation’ to ‘Social Capital’

This article examines the conceptualisation and use of memory in the social sciences, both as a methodological tool and as an object of research. The article situates memory as a vast potential resource for the social sciences in the exploration of relations between public and private life, agency and power, and the past, present and future. It goes on to recognise that the methodological issues surrounding the use of memory have, with few exceptions, rarely received sustained attention. The article argues for, and moves towards, developing a coherent account of the variety of practical techniques of using memory in data collection and analysis, and their appropriate use within a clear epistemological framework which distinguishes itself from conventional historiography and it’s criteria of validity. It is argued that without this attention to method, memory will remain on the margins of social science research.     

Social Work Field Instructors’ Views and Implementation of Evidence-Based Practice

This article presents the results of a cross-sectional study of social work field instructors’ views of and implementation of the evidence-based practice (EBP) process and compares their responses with non-field instructors. A total of 688 National Association of Social Workers/Texas members (107 of which were field instructors) anonymously responded to an online administration of the Evidence-Based Practice Process Assessment Scale–Short. The results suggest generally positive attitudes among field instructors and high levels of familiarity but lower levels of perceived feasibility and engagement in the EBP process. In addition, field instructors and non-field instructors did not differ significantly across the 4 subscales or overall orientation toward the EBP process. Implications and future steps for social work education are discussed.