Off-centring empire in the Anthropocene: towards multispecies intimacies and nonhuman agents of survival

ABSTRACT

This paper examines colonial legacies in human-nonhuman relations to off-centre empire in the Anthropocene. Imperial methods of collecting, preserving and displaying nature profoundly shaped species perception, which in turn affected the scientific attention and ecological relevance a species was granted. In particular, I reflect on the category of invasibility to show how empire sanctioned the mobility of specific population groups and animal species as border-crossing. This further shows how speciesist logics served to extend, maintain and legitimize imperial power. This analysis is relevant in the Anthropocene where invasibility is mobilised to police movement in the context of increased human and nonhuman migration. Further, I discuss how invasibility is considered as one of main threats for biodiversity, which may misdirect conservation efforts. Overall, the article examines the potential in human-nonhuman encounters to challenge colonial legacies. Based on an ethnographic example of multispecies homemaking with species considered invasive in (hetero)normative modes of intimacy and domesticity, I argue that colonial legacies of racialized, gendered and speciesist hierarchies can be disturbed by human-nonhuman relations of companionship, care and interdependence. Finally, I scale-up the analysis to the landscape, by tracing the transformation of a former imperial wasteland in Vienna’s peripheral South from being perceived as economically and aesthetically worthless to a natural monument. Attending to multispecies entanglements is key here to understand the transformative process that led to the recovery of this wasteland. Here I off-centre empire by challenging anthropocentric narrations of how landscape transforms in favour of a narration that re-centres nonhuman agency. I argue that stories of wasteland recovery guided by nonhuman animals are crucial due to the increase in industrial wasteland and environmental degradation in the Anthropocene.     

Race scholarship “with,by, and for” children: How critical youth studies can inform research on race

Children's perspectives on race and their own racialized experiences are often overlooked in traditional social scientific race scholarship. From psychological and child development studies of racial identity formation, to social psychological survey research on children's racial attitudes, to sociological research conducted on children in order to quantify racially disproportionate child outcomes, the unique perspectives of young people are often marginalized. I explore some of the key themes in existing sociological and psychological research involving race and young people and demonstrate the important contributions of this expansive body of scholarship but also highlight limitations. I argue that when it comes specifically to the sociological study of young people and race, much can be learned from an emerging field known as “critical youth studies.” Further, I argue that more research on race that, as Kate Telleczek (2014, p. 16) describes, is “with, by, and for” young people, grounded in the epistemological and methodological tenants of critical youth studies, can lead to new sociological understandings of race and childhood, serve to inform public policies and practices intended to improve children's lives, and provide a platform for young people to express their own concerns and ideas about the racialized society in which they live.     

The Body in Mind: Mead's Embodied Cognition

This article highlights the role played by the body in the work of George Herbert Mead. For Mead, the social emergence of mind depends on human physiology. This is revealed through a detailed exploration of three thematic domains in his work: the organism–environment dyad, perception, and the manipulatory stage of the act. From this, I argue that Mead saw the body as constitutive of cognition and central to the development of mind and self. Present-day research supports this view and demonstrates Mead's relevance for understanding embodied cognition.     

Resistance Is Not Futile: Liberating Captain Janeway from the Masculine‐Feminine Dualism of Leadership

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Race,Religiosity, and the Women's Vote

Abstract

Much of our popular political discourse focuses on the Democratic character of the women's vote, but there is, in fact, considerable diversity among female voters. Important sectors of the female electorate have political concerns that are at odds with the Democratic Party, though they hold these preferences less strongly than do men. This article focuses on these differences between women and links them to electoral behavior in the 1996 presidential election. I argue that women, like men, cast their vote with the party that best represents their interests, as they understand them. African American women overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party in 1996, which is consistent with theories of racial group interests, but white women diverge politically.

The main finding of this research is that religious values play a central role in white women's voting behavior, even after taking into account ideological and partisan predispositions. We see this result, I argue, because religious and secular women correctly identify the Republican Party as the repository of social conservatism and the Democratic Party as embracing social liberalism.     

Considering Alternate Sources of Role Identity: Childless Parents and Their Animal “Kids”

Identity theory posits that role identity is negotiated between human social actors and is based in broader cultural expectations about how particular statuses should be performed. I argue that the formation of role identity in actors can also occur in relationship to nonhuman actors, if they are perceived as minded. Depending on context and human perception, identity can be formed as a result of interaction and developing “theory of mind” with nonhuman animals, directly implicating the animal. Using in‐depth interviews of childless and childfree companion animal owners, I demonstrate the existence of a parent identity in childless participants that would not otherwise be present were it not for interaction with the animal “child.” This identity is confirmed in participant narratives describing substantial behavioral output aligned with the U.S. cultural ideal of “parent.” Likewise, I find that significant others provide external support for the enactment of this role identity, allowing participants to verify self‐in‐situation. Overall, my analysis emphasizes the importance of considering nonhuman sources as occupying counterstatus positions in the formation of role identity while highlighting how these relationships affect interaction in the childfree and childless home, thus expanding scholarly understanding about both identity formation and emerging family types.     

Intimate Violence against Rural Women: The Current and Future State of Feminist Empirical and Theoretical Contributions

Rural crime in general ranks among the least studied social problems in the social sciences; however, a growing body of research shows that rural woman abuse is a major problem. The current state of progressive critical feminist social scientific knowledge enhances an empirical and theoretical understanding of intimate violence against rural women. Revealing the complexities of rural women's experiences and struggles with violent relationships reconstitutes violence against women as a public crisis that requires continued serious attention with regard research, theory, and policy. Three primary objectives of this article are as follows: (i) briefly review recent feminist social scientific literature on research, methodology, and theoretical contributions on violence against women in rural areas, (ii) suggest new directions in researching and theorizing rural women's experiences with intimate violence, and (iii) offer creative practical and policy solutions towards a broad vision of social change.     

National Robin Hoods and Local Avengers: On Two Shifts in the Criminal Myth of Rayyā and Sakīna in Present Day Egypt

The article examines bandit myths from a socio-historical perspective, as part of the socio-cultural reality of present-day Egypt. It engages in the semiotics of banditry encouraged by Stephanie Cronin by taking a first step towards a social semiotics analysis of Rayyā and Sakīna, the two Egyptian female criminals par excellence, arrested in 1920 and executed in 1921. I will argue that Rayyā and Sakīna's criminal myth is currently being resignified in terms that can be conceived of as social banditry. Ethnography, press, and broadcast sources help to highlight two different recent shifts towards bandit myths, linked respectively to national and local circulation.     

The Production of the Female Entrepreneurial Subject: A Space of Exclusion for Women of Color?

SUMMARY

Using critical discourse analysis, this paper examines how the female entrepreneurial subject is constructed/produced within entrepreneurial discourses, how this subject is racialized, gendered and classed, and examines what practices contribute to the shaping of the female entrepreneurial subject. I specifically look at four areas/discourses central to entrepreneurship; that of independence, self-definition/self-monitoring, networking, and women's abilities as businesswomen. I contend that contemporary self-employment discourses mirror those of neo-liberalism/modernization where the notion of the independent liberal subject has the ability to self-determine and self-monitor, which is a sign of autonomy and mastery of the self. I also argue that the space of women's entrepreneurship legitimizes white middle-class women's experiences and excludes women of color from becoming active subjects in entrepreneurial discourses.     

Do welfare policies matter for immigrant entrepreneurship? An analysis in the context of France

There is little research on the relationship between welfare policies and immigrant entrepreneurship. Accordingly, this paper examines changes in three welfare domains: child-care, health/medical insurance, and unemployment insurance in the context of France since roughly the 1980s, but with a focus on the 21st century. Given changes in French welfare policy, I show that immigrants' greater access to fluctuating, sometimes declining, but overall increasing spending in the three domains, can be positively correlated with slowly increasing immigrant entrepreneurship since the early 2000s. However, I also argue that welfare policies do not seem to have a significant effect on the levels and survival of immigrant-owned firms in France. The findings of this paper should nonetheless be taken with extreme caution in light of the obstacles to analyzing this relationship. As a consequence, I provide an assessment of three possible research designs as a route towards better understanding this relationship.     

Climate riskscapes in world port cities: situating urban‐cosmopolitan risk communities via Ulrich Beck's comparative tactics

Building on empirical research into translocal connections among world port cities in addressing shared challenges of climate risk mitigation and adaptation, in this article I review two widespread tendencies in urban studies – methodological city‐ism and methodological globalism respectively – as a springboard for articulating a methodologically cosmopolitan alternative. This alternative, I argue, involves epistemological issues of how to interrogate ‘the urban’ as assemblages that constitutively draw together the near and the faraway, as well as more practical issues of mobile, multisited, and comparative urban research methods. Empirically, I compare the ways in which urban actors stage global climate risks on the waterfronts of four world cities – Hong Kong, Rotterdam, Yokohama and Copenhagen – to argue that such a comparative tactic of variable ‘riskscapes’ helps situate Ulrich Beck's notion of urban cosmopolitan risk communities more thoroughly into urban studies. In such ways, I suggest, Beck's methodological cosmopolitanism is germane to studying ongoing and far ranging transformation in world political geography, in which transurban networks, communities, and governance arrangements come to complement nation‐state centred institutions. Such conclusions must be tempered, however, by the deployment of Beck's equally strong impetus towards comparative attention to the varieties of second modernity; and doing so, I conclude, aligns well with ongoing transformations in urban studies itself.     

Believing Not Seeing: A Blind Phenomenology of Sexed Bodies

Vision plays a privileged role in social interaction and the construction of intersubjective reality. Given that one of sociology's tasks is to problematize the taken for granted, research that examines rarely foregrounded non‐visual modes of sensory perception is a powerful resource. This article draws on twenty‐seven interviews that explore blind people's perceptions of male and female bodies. I highlight several distinctive features of non‐visual sex attribution (salience, speed, and diachronicity), and argue that conceptions of sex as “self‐evident” primarily reflect visual perception. These findings suggest the need to explore the sociology of perception as a new approach to the sociology of the body, and more broadly highlight the role of sensory perception in the social construction of reality.     

Towards an Insurrectionary Power/Knowledge: Movement-Relevance,Anti-Oppression,Prefiguration

Despite ongoing efforts to articulate radical methods and theoretical frameworks for social movement research, the field remains embedded in exploitative, oppressive, and hierarchical modes of knowledge production. Following Foucault, I argue that this is because societies like ours, founded through racial and patriarchal violence, are invested in a regime of truth supportive of that violence. In light of this, I argue that social movements scholars need to adopt a radically different form of knowledge practice. Building on anarchist, anti-racist feminist, and anti-colonial scholarship, this paper begins by analysing how liberalism constrains social justice organizing and how academic norms foreclose accountable social movements scholarship. I then introduce three unique ethics emerging in resistance to this situation: movement-relevant, anti-oppressive, and prefigurative. The first confronts the extractive imperatives of enlightenment truth-making; the second resists its neutral and disinterested tendencies; and the third models a rejection of its hierarchical and exclusive mode of authority. I argue that together they provide scholars with a strategy for re-/orienting their research towards what Foucault theorizes as an insurrection of knowledges. These three ethical frameworks combine to facilitate an insurrectionary power/knowledge that fosters collective struggle as it progressively dismantles the regime of truth underlying social movements research.     

ON BEING BOUND TO EQUIVALENTIAL CHAINS

Taking up the test case of radical anti-globalization protest, this essay addresses Ernesto Laclau's theory of the democratic demand, reading it against Lacan's and Freud's conceptions of demand. I argue, largely drawing from Lacan's conception of enjoyment that a theory of the democratic demand must take into account the risk that a subject's enjoyment in positing a demand can overwhelm the potential political of the demand itself. In response to this risk, I argue that a theory of democracy should shift from a demand-driven politics centred around enjoying a specific subject position tied to ‘resistance’ towards a desire-driven politics that productively incorporates the ‘no’ as a means of articulating collective political aspirations.     

Mind,Self, and Human-Animal Joint Action

Abstract

Because Herbert Blumer maintained that symbolic interactionism was useful in examining all realms of social behavior, and advocated what Martin Hammersley refers to as “critical commonsensism,” this paper focuses on one of the most common contemporary social relationships—that between people and companion animals. I first examine the basis for Blumer's (like Mead before him and many interactionist scholars today) exclusion of nonhuman animals from consideration as “authentic” social actors. Primarily employing the recent work of interactionists Eugene Myers, Leslie Irvine, Janet and Steven Alger, and Clinton Sanders, this paper advocates the reasonableness of regarding nonhuman animals as “minded,” in that mind, as Gubrium emphasizes, is a social construction that arises out of interaction. Similarly, I maintain that animals possess an admittedly rudimentary “self.” Here I focus special attention on Irvine's discussion of those “self experiences” that are independent of language and arise out of interaction. Finally, I discuss “joint action” as a key element of people's relationships with companion animals as both the animal and human attempt to assume the perspective of the other, devise related plans of action and definitions of object, and fit together their particular (ideally, shared) goals and collective actions. I stress the ways in which analytic attention to human-animal relationships may expand and enrich the understanding of issues of central sociological interest.     

Complex archetypal structures that underlie the ‘human condition’

Abstract

In this article I synthesise notions from several different fields to argue that there are archetypal structures that underlie the human condition that can best be understood through the language of complexity. In so doing I accommodate the disparity that exists between different branches of the social sciences through the provision of a holistic overview that accords with the idea of a coherent scientific body of knowledge. To do this I use a Jungian typology to reinforce the parameters of four archetypes by which organisation and individuals have been interpreted, and locate this within some findings from evolutionary psychology, thereby building a meta-typology of the human condition. I conclude by suggesting that this can best be understood through the notions of relationship and knowledge through the opposite, and by examining some of the implications this approach holds for the field.     

The Symbiotic Ideology: Stewardship,Husbandry, and Dominion in Beef Production

Social studies of agriculture tend to overlook the micro and symbolic interactions that structure relationships among agriculturalists, the environment, and animals raised as commodities. In this study, I use ethnographic methods and in‐depth interviews with conventional beef producers to understand their perceptions of the environment and the nonhuman animals they raise. Central themes in this setting are the ethics of stewardship and husbandry. I seek to understand how these values are constructed and used interactionally. I argue that stewardship and husbandry help describe a process of co‐constitution that binds together ranchers, cattle, and the natural environment. The analysis engages actor‐network theory by emphasizing nonhuman activeness and draws from symbolic interaction and cultural sociology to show how people interpret the actions of nonhumans. The findings show that ranchers frame their relationships with cattle and the environment as symbiotic and work to understand the interests of the nonhuman as complementary to production. I introduce the term symbiotic ideology to show the way this approach mystifies power dynamics embedded in the ethic of dominion.     

Towards design sociology

In this review essay, I introduce and map the field of what I call “design sociology”. I argue that design research methods have relevance to a wide range of sociological research interests, and particularly for applied research that seeks to understand people's engagements with objects, systems and services, better engage publics and other stakeholders, work towards social change, and identify and intervene in futures. I discuss 3 main ways in which design sociology can be conducted: the sociology of design, sociology through design and sociology with design. I explain key terms in design and dominant approaches in social design research—participatory, critical, adversarial, speculative, and ludic design. Examples of how sociologists have already engaged with design research methods are outlined. The essay concludes with suggestions about what the future directions of design sociology might be.     

Should trans people be postmodernist in the streets but positivist in the spreadsheets? A reply to Sullivan

ABSTRACT

Accurate census data is essential for a variety of government planning functions and plays an important methodological role in social science. This article responds to issues raised by Alice Sullivan concerning how the UK 2021 census will ask about sex and gender. The two-centuries-old question about male/female sex is not ideal, even with the new guidance proposed; however, I will argue that the proposed changes are unlikely to cause harm. The new open-ended census question on gender identity is welcome and will yield important data. I also respond to Sullivan‘s worries that “queer postmodernists” are “coming for” questionnaires and threaten the sanctity of scientific fact. Sullivan misrepresents trans-inclusive gender theories and how scientific research explaining sex/gender differences is carried out. Finally, I discuss how questioning the ontological reality of trans gender identities leads to transphobic harassment and worse.     

Embodiment, experience and theory: in defence of the sociological tradition

This paper examines whether the theoretical analyses and ambitions of sociologists of the body are increasingly making obstructive and irrelevant the subject boundaries and methodological conventions associated with their parent discipline. Concerns about the utility of the discipline have been expressed by a number of body studies emanating from within and outside of sociology. These imply that it is necessary to reject the dominant problematic of sociology and utilise non disciplinary resources if we are to understand issues surrounding the ‘lived experience’ of embodiment. In opposing this rejection of sociology, if not the use of other intellectual resources, I argue that the discipline contains much valuable theorising about experience which has yet to be developed by body theorists. Many of sociology's central concepts, indeed, evoke dimensions of human experience that remain highly pertinent to an understanding of the individual and societal significance of the body in the contemporary era. In order to illustrate this argument, I focus on the writings of Durkheim and Simmel. Their work is rarely central to writings on the body, but provides good examples of the diversity of theoretical approaches within sociology that remain relevant to body theorists. Specifically, I want to use it to develop the outlines of a theory of embodiment as a medium for the constitution of society which has at its centre a concern with human experience. I conclude by reassessing the strategic options sociologists of the body confront in developing their analyses.