‘Us’ and ‘them’: the limits and possibilities of a ‘politics of neurodiversity’ in neoliberal times

The neurodiversity movement claims that there are neurological differences in the human population, and that autism is a natural variation among humans – not a disease or a disorder, just ‘a difference’. A ‘politics of neurodiversity’ is based on the claim that the ‘neurodiverse’ population constitutes a political grouping comparable with those of class, gender, sexuality or race. This paper considers the limits and possibilities of neurodiverse political activism, and concludes by calling for a politics of identity that does not depend on a politics of ‘us’ and ‘them’.     

Fengshui your graffiti: embodied spatial practices in the ‘city of gambling’

ABSTRACT

To date, the academic discussion of graffiti culture in Greater China borrows a set of theoretical assumptions or preoccupations based on Euro-American graffiti subculture practices, focusing on the artistic dimensions of graffiti. This article, based on an ethnography in Macau, tries to re-examine two forms of local graffiti culture – the one influenced by hip hop culture, the other by the Chinese writing tradition – and endeavours to analyse the logic of their different spatial strategies and embodied practices.     

‘Show me the money and the party!’ – variation in Facebook and Twitter adoption by politicians

Our study explores the adoption of Facebook and Twitter by candidates in the 2013 German Federal elections. Utilizing data from the German Longitudinal Election Study candidate survey fused with data gathered on the Twitter and Facebook use of candidates, we draw a clear distinction between Facebook and Twitter. We show that adoption of both channels is primarily driven by two factors: party and money. But the impact of each plays out differently for Facebook and Twitter. While the influence of money is homogenous for Facebook and Twitter with the more resources candidates have, the more likely they are to adopt, the effect is stronger for Facebook. Conversely, a party’s impact on adoption is heterogeneous across channels, a pattern we suggest is driven by the different audiences Facebook and Twitter attract. We also find candidates’ personality traits only correlate with Twitter adoption, but their impact is minimal. Our findings demonstrate that social media adoption by politicians is far from homogenous, and that there is a need to differentiate social media channels from one another when exploring motivations for their use.     

Adolescents' understandings of binge drinking in Southern and Northern European contexts – cultural variations of ‘controlled loss of control’

Previous research on youth drinking has brought out important features in young people's time- out cultures as and how they relate to the current neo-liberal social order with its expectation of self-governing individuals. However, previous research has not sufficiently considered cultural variations on the meaning of binge drinking for young people; in particular, there have been very few studies dealing with under-aged drinkers. This paper considers the applicability of binge drinking as ‘controlled loss of control’ in Northern and Southern European contexts by comparing young people's perceptions of binge drinking in Finland and Italy, which have conventionally been considered as representing sharply contrasting drinking traditions. The data consist of 28 focus-group interviews conducted at schools among 15-year-old pupils (N = 148) in Helsinki and Turin. In both countries, binge drinking was seen as risky, but it was associated with social norms that defined the limits of successful or failed drinking experience. Cultural variations were found especially in the ways self-control was defined with regard to drinking regulation. However, in both data the competence of the drinker and self-control was emphasized, thus contradicting the interpretation of binge drinking as loss of control or a time-out from the neo-liberal social order.     

‘Generation rent’ and the ability to ‘settle down’: economic and geographical variation in young people’s housing transitions

The term ‘Generation Rent’ denotes young people who are increasingly living in the private rented sector for longer periods of their lives because they are unable to access homeownership or social housing. Drawing on qualitative data from two studies with young people and key-actors, this paper considers the phenomenon of ‘Generation Rent’ from the perspective of youth transitions and the concept of ‘home’. These frameworks posit that young people leaving the parental home traverse housing and labour markets until they reach a point of ‘settling down’. However, our data indicate that many young people face difficulties in this ‘settling’ process as they have to contend with insecure housing, unstable employment and welfare cuts which often force them to be flexible and mobile. This leaves many feeling frustrated as they struggle to remain fixed in place in order to ‘settle down’ and benefit from the positive qualities of home. Taking a Scottish focus, this paper further highlights the geographical dimension to these challenges and argues that those living in expensive and/or rural areas may find it particularly difficult to settle down.     

Why ‘Reunion in Democracy’ fails? – the past and the future of a colonial city

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the current political predicament in Hong Kong. However, rather than offering a casual political commentary on the current state of identity politics of Hong Kong, it offers a critical and historical evaluation of the ideas and practices of ‘Reunion in Democracy’ in the past decades.     

‘Blowing up the pylon’: the limitations to Lacanism in organization studies,seen from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari

We critically engage with the Lacanian notions of fantasy and lack through an understanding of desire as ontologically productive. The introduction of the Lacanian psychoanalytic notions of fantasy and lack into organizational studies has helped to widen the understanding of the mechanism that makes employees desire the idealized images of identity provided by the organizations for which they work. Our claim is that Deleuze’s and Guattari’s conception of desire as productive contributes to the understanding of the role that desire plays in producing and organizing the social setting in which such fantasies and a sense of lack emerge in the first place. Furthermore, we argue that Deleuze and Guattari can help point to the inherent danger of Lacanism’s blunting its own analytical and critical potential when trying to understand such social settings.     

Beyond the mirror towards a plurilingual prism: exploring the creation of plurilingual ‘identity texts’ in English and French classrooms in Toronto and Montpellier

In an age of transnational mobility, there has been a growing recognition of the need for both English and French mainstream classroom teachers to be trained to teach increasingly plurilingual student populations. In this article, I begin by describing the context for an exploratory comparative and collaborative ethnographic action research study in four English and French schools in Toronto, Canada and one school in Montpellier, France that engaged children as co-researchers of their lived plurilingualism. I analyse in particular the process of creating plurilingual multimodal books with students and teachers across the five different school cases. This paper focuses on the iterative ‘identity text’ creation process across all five schools by examining one plurilingual identity text from each case, along with students’ research conversations about their creative productions, and interviews with their classroom teachers and parents. Finally, I summarize five features of inclusive plurilingual pedagogy that emerged across the five cases and call for further collaborative research across English and French schools and scholarly communities investigating creative plurilingual language and literacy production in the twenty-first century.     

‘We are Hungry but We Won’t Eat the Food’: Schoolchildren’s ‘Thin’ agency and its impacts on the implementation of Ghana’s School Feeding Programme

Following the introduction of the concept of agency by the New Sociology of Childhood, the concept has dominated discourses about children's everyday lives. Nevertheless, little is known about schoolchildren's agency in their daily interactions with the service providers of Ghana's school feeding programme. Through this qualitative study, the paper provides empirical evidence to show how children in restrictive contexts exercise ‘thin’ agency in their interactions with frontline service providers, leading to significant improvements in the quality of services delivered to them. Consequently, the article questions Michael Lipsky's assumption that clients have minimal effect on the services delivered to them.     

Disability terminology and the emergence of ‘diffability’ in Indonesia

The labelling of disabilities in Indonesian society and legislation has changed over time. More recently, the grassroots has used the term difabel to allude to the conceptualisation of ‘differently able’. The persistence of the grassroots in defending the term difabel, while in the UNCRPD ratification era the elites have turned to using disabilitas, alerts us to the power of labels and the role they play. This article provides a critique of the issue of language and the labelling of people with impairments and how it influences the paradigm of policy and service responses, and thereby the future role of differently able people. Given the background on the evolved disability terminology, this article suggests that difabel should also be adopted into broader English usage (i.e. ‘diffability’). Such a term provides a more positive characterisation of people with impairments and reminds us of the importance of emphasising abilities and acknowledging differences.     

Skuka and the Absurd in Gogol'’s Tale of the ‘Two Ivans’

The present article is devoted to an analysis of Gogol'’s last story from his Ukrainian cycle, “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich”; it makes use of canonical as well as innovative approaches to Gogol'’s tale in order to explore the significance of the epilogue to an interpretation of the story as a whole. The examination will encompass ideas on the temporal aspects of the narration, the philosophical concept of ennui/skuka, and the possible significance of the camera obscura as the setting for one of the key moments in the story. Whereas the camera obscura is the setting of the quarrel between the two main characters, the story ends with a manifestation of skuka from the narrator: how do these two elements relate to each other, and what do they suggest in terms of the possibility of reaching an all-encompassing interpretation of the ‘Two Ivans’?     

‘I Want to Persuade You!’ – Investigating the effectiveness of explicit persuasion concerning attributes of the communicator and the marketing campaign

In explicit persuasion, the communicator states explicitly a desire to persuade the consumer. By referring to an attributional approach, social engagement was simultaneously explored as a beneficial communicator attribute, while cause-related marketing (CRM) was addressed as a boundary condition. In an experiment, we varied the persuasion strategy (explicit vs. implicit), the communicator’s prior experience with social engagement (yes vs. no), and the specific marketing strategy (CRM vs. non-charity marketing). As expected, in the non-charity marketing condition, explicit (vs. implicit) persuasion was more effective when the communicator had prior experience in social engagement. In the CRM condition, explicit (vs. implicit) persuasion was less effective when the communicator had prior experience in social engagement; when no prior experience was reported, persuasiveness increased.     

‘Tumult and Silence’ in the Study of the American Slave Revolts

Throughout the twentieth century, scholars of the American slave revolts were concerned primarily with what the revolts revealed about the character of slavery and those who resisted it. Recently, in a shift in perspective that has not been fully appreciated, several historians have used the methods of micro-history to focus attention instead on the process by which stories of the revolts were composed. The emphasis of this new approach on silences in the historical record accounts for its immense interest to the historical profession, as well as for its profound limitation as a contribution to our understanding of American slavery.     

‘Wishing to go it alone’: the complicated interplay of independence,interdependence and agency

Some individuals with disabilities for whom verbal speech is not reliable use facilitated communication to express thoughts and ideas. While they may require intensive physical support initially, the goal is independent typing. However, this emphasis on fading support and independence bears consideration. We utilize a Disability Studies lens to frame practices around independence and the complicated interplay between interdependence, agency and voice. Based on qualitative analysis of communication training sessions, we present four findings: the complexity of the message versus fading of physical support, the emotional dimensions of independence, the facilitator’s navigation of multiple roles, and the importance of facilitating agency. We also share implications of reframing independence and facilitating agency for the communication training process.     

‘It’s all bollocks!’ and other critical standpoints on the UK Government’s vision of global citizenship

The UK Government’s International Citizen Service (ICS) sends volunteers abroad to ‘fight global poverty’ as ‘global citizens’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the construction of development on the ICS programme forecloses important political and historical contexts, resulting in a model of global citizenship we might term ‘soft’. This article presents data from interviews with ICS volunteers with a specific methodological concern of recognizing the agency of young people and allowing their responses to lead discussion. The outcome is a range of themes across the data that critique the Government’s model of citizenship and, I argue, shows the volunteers to be ‘critical’ global citizens. I then ask whether we can consider this a mode of resistance. I conclude with a final data set that – the case is made – presents an imperative to allow these volunteers to have their perspectives on historical and contemporary North–South relations recognized as a critical mode of global citizenship.     

Rwanda's ‘Hutsi’: intersections of ethnicity and violence in the lives of youth of ‘mixed’ heritage

This article looks at young Rwandans of ‘mixed’ Hutu–Tutsi heritage, exploring how their mixed identity shaped their experiences during the 1994 genocide and how it influences their everyday experiences of categorization and belonging in contemporary Rwanda. It reveals the complex position of these young ‘Hutsi’ and the significant constraints they face in exercising identity choices in a context with a history of ethnic violence and where state policies have outlawed ethnicity. This article argues that the experiences, narratives and performances of these young Rwandans simultaneously challenge and reinforce the binary ‘ethnic logic’ that persists in contemporary Rwanda. Yet it suggests that providing space for Rwanda's ‘Hutsi’ and their diverse experiences could help to de-essentialize the categories ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ and reduce the risks of future violence.     

‘Class’, ‘Race’ and Language: imagining China and the discourse on the category ‘Han’ in the writing of Marxist revolutionary Qu Qiubai (1899–1935)

This study investigates the discursive peregrinations of the ‘Han’ category in the writings of the Chinese revolutionary, theoretician and activist Qu Qiubai. In the papers he wrote at the beginning of the 1930s dealing with the questions of language and writing, the author made singular use of the concept ‘Han’ to talk about the language/writing of the ‘Han’ (Hanzi, Hanyu) as a racial or ethnic group (Hanzu). Qu elaborated a discourse which articulated and mobilized, sometimes in a contradictory manner, the ‘Han’ category both as a ‘race’ and as a social class. Going beyond the race/class dialectic, I will try to show that these texts question the territorial, cultural and ethnic boundaries of ‘China’ and its homogeneity. Following this argument, this paper demonstrates how Qu's attempt to define ‘Chinese language(s)’ helps us to elucidate the complex articulation between China as a discursive and spatial category, the ‘Han’ category, and the other nationalities in the Chinese space. By questioning the homogeneity of the linguistic identity of China, using the word zhongguohua, Qu Qiubai unveiled an unstable and fragile imaginary relative to China and its so-called majority ethnic group, the Han.     

Health social movements and the hybridisation of ‘cause regimes’: an ethnography of a British childbirth organisation

This article reports on an ethnographic study of the UK’s largest health advocacy organisation dedicated to pregnancy, childbirth and parenting, the National Childbirth Trust or NCT. Working from interview data, textual materials and fieldnotes, we articulate three key phases in the NCT’s historically shifting relationships to feminism, medicine, the state and neoliberal capitalism. The concept of folded cause regimes is introduced as we examine how these phases represent the hybridisation of the organisation’s original cause. We argue that for the NCT the resulting multiplicity of cause regimes poses significant challenges, but also future opportunities. The apparent contradictions between cause regimes offer important insights into contemporary debates in the sociology of health and illness and raises critical questions about the hybrid state of health advocacy today. Focussing on cause allows for a deeper understanding of the intense pressures of diversification, marketisation and the professionalisation of dissent faced by third-sector organisations under current social and economic conditions.     

‘The Mexican’ and ‘The Cancer in the South’: Discourses of Race,Nation and Anti-blackness in Early Twentieth-Century Debates on Mexican Immigration

This article explores the flexible manner in which discourses of anti-black racism were employed within congressional debates on the proposed restriction of Mexican immigration at the end of the 1920s. I examine how both sides of this debate placed Mexicans within a particular historical narrative of race and nation, positioned in relation to a range of other populations, including Chinese and Japanese immigrants, Native Americans, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Within these narratives, slavery and the imagined negro problem were particularly salient, being frequently used to orient racial interpretations of Mexican immigrants as well as the manner in which they were positioned in relation to other ‘racial elements’. Imprinted with US histories of slavery, conquest and empire, these discourses offer insight into the ambivalent interrelationships of American’s multiple trajectories of racism.     

Slavery, ‘respectability,’ and being ‘freeborn’ on the shores of nineteenth-century Lake Tanganyika

Concepts of slavery and freedom dominate the historiography of labour and social relations in nineteenth-century East and Central Africa. This article argues that such concepts oversimplify the complexity of other forms of servitude. It does so by analysing the position of people who referred to themselves as ngwana on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Ngwana translates from Swahili as ‘gentlemen,’ and it implies ‘respectability’ and ‘freeborn’ status. Yet most ngwana could not claim to be free, even if they had ceased being slaves. Rather than freedom, ngwana sought ‘respect,’ and in so doing blurred the lines between slavery and freedom.