‘Globalizing’ academics? Ranking and appropriation in the transformations of the world-system

ABSTRACT

In an historical materialist analysis, the article challenges the dominant understanding of global academic rankings as ‘inevitable’ and ‘here to stay’. Instead, rankings are treated as historically transformative ‘tracings’ over the accumulation of capital in the world-system, and thus offer a contingent strategic response to three historical shifts in global political economy: ‘financialization’, displacement of the Core, and an shift to surplus ‘appropriation’ in the core. By understanding these transformative shifts as elements of an historic ‘inversion’ of the global frontier of capitalization, the argument: (1) connects global rankings to neoliberal capitalism; (2) challenges the utopian view of rankings as instruments of marketization; and most specifically (3) opens up a space between frontiers of appropriation and commodification proper, indicating how rankings exist in a historically transient and politically dialectical space of hybrid outcomes, imperfect commodifications, and indirect subjections, that are bound to the contradictions of accumulation in contemporary world history.     

Media use and political learning: Comparing Trump supporters to celebrity candidate voters

This study examines whether political media use behaviors of voters who supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election align with those of “celebrity candidate voters” portrayed in the literature. The study used a national online survey (N = 1,608) conducted during the 2016 primary, and findings reveal that Trump supporters, more than other voters, are driven by entertainment motivations and follow campaign news using entertainment media: specifically, the video-sharing site YouTube. Although Trump voters are interested in the campaign, their level of political knowledge is lower than other voters, and no one media outlet made a significant contribution to their learning. A comparison group of other voters showed significant knowledge gains from news websites and Twitter. Results for Trump voters are consistent with scholars’ characterization of the celebrity candidate audience, particularly in studies suggesting that celebrity politicians may increase citizens’ engagement through entertainment gratifications rather than by a desire to become informed.     

Trump,proto-presidency,and the rise of sane supremacy

This articles opines that America’s far-Left is sowing the seeds of ‘sane supremacy’: first, by unapologetically tarring President Trump as ‘insane’ for political purposes; and, second, legislating for psychiatry to colonize the White House so as to remove Trump on account of his suspected ‘insanity’. This article deploys an anti-sanist lens and uses the notion of ‘prototypicality’ to show how the regressive far-Left portrays Trump as not meeting the ‘normative’, ‘proto-presidential’ standard. Instead of depicting Trump as mentally unfit, we need to focus on his politics and their effects.     

Variegated neoliberalization: geographies,modalities, pathways

Across the broad field of heterodox political economy, ‘neoliberalism’ appears to have become a rascal concept – promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested. Controversies regarding its precise meaning are more than merely semantic. They generally flow from underlying disagreements regarding the sources, expressions and implications of contemporary regulatory transformations. In this article, we consider the handling of ‘neoliberalism’ within three influential strands of heterodox political economy – the varieties of capitalism approach; historical materialist international political economy; and governmentality approaches. While each of these research traditions sheds light on contemporary processes of market‐oriented regulatory restructuring, we argue that each also underplays and/or misreads the systemically uneven, or ‘variegated’, character of these processes. Enabled by a critical interrogation of how each approach interprets the geographies, modalities and pathways of neoliberalization processes, we argue that the problematic of variegation must be central to any adequate account of marketized forms of regulatory restructuring and their alternatives under post‐1970s capitalism. Our approach emphasizes the cumulative impacts of successive ‘waves’ of neoliberalization upon uneven institutional landscapes, in particular: (a) their establishment of interconnected, mutually recursive policy relays within an increasingly transnational field of market‐oriented regulatory transfer; and (b) their infiltration and reworking of the geoinstitutional frameworks, or ‘rule regimes’, within which regulatory experimentation unfolds. This mode of analysis has significant implications for interpreting the current global economic crisis.     

Ableism and the Trump phenomenon

This article argues that Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential campaign was abetted by ableism, both directly, through Trump’s rhetoric, and indirectly, through the ableist culture and infrastructure of the rural, white working-class communities that turned the election for Trump. The article uses Robert McRuer’s account of ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ to situate Trump’s popularity in relation to the neoliberal policies that have marginalized and stigmatized the white working class, and deploys Lennard Davis’s account of normalcy to explain why Trump’s own bodily difference was widely, and hypocritically, mocked by the left, and also why Trump’s ‘non-normative’ embodiment appealed to his white working-class supporters.     

Three notes on a political economy of youth

The paper seeks to makes a contribution to a recent debate in the Journal about what a political economy of youth might look like. The paper will take up aspects of Sukarieh and Tannock’s [2016. ‘On the political economy of youth: a comment.’ Journal of Youth Studies 19 (9): 1281–1289] response to the initial contributions by Côté [2014. ‘Towards a New Political Economy of Youth.’ Journal of Youth Studies 17 (4): 527–543, 2016. ‘A New Political Economy of Youth Reprised: Rejoinder to France and Threadgold.’ Journal of Youth Studies.] And France and Threadgold [2015. ‘Youth and Political Economy: Towards a Bourdieusian Approach.’ Journal of Youth Studies], and will take the form of three ‘notes’: Capitalism: From the first industrial revolution to the third industrial revolution; Youth as an artefact of governmentalised expertise; The agency/structure problem in youth studies: Foucault’s dispositif and post-human exceptionalism.

These notes will suggest that twenty-first century capitalism is globalising, is largely neo-Liberal, and is being reconfigured in profound ways by the Anthropocene, bio-genetics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT). A political economy of twenty-first century capitalism, let alone a political economy of young people, must be able to account for a capitalism that in many ways looks like the capitalism of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, but which is at the same time profoundly different as it enters what has often been described as the Third Industrial Revolution. It is these profound emergences that pose the greatest challenges for engaging with a political economy of youth.     

Eastern Drama. Capitals of Eastern Europe, 1830S–2006: An Introductory Overview

The theme of this part of the Review differs from the current mainstream of urban sociology, which is largely preoccupied with questions of political economy, around the buzzword of ‘global cities’, and/or of urban inequality, and focused on the present. Here the perspective is historical, and with a particular, if by no means exclusive, attention to changes of culture and symbolism. The approach is multidisciplinary, with major contributions by art, architectural, and cultural historians, as well as by social scientists.     

Global development and precarity: a critical political analysis

ABSTRACT

Precarity as a concept has come to be conceived as a distinctive experience of neoliberal development, especially in the European context. The experience of precarity, according to some, has influenced efforts aimed at living otherwise from the precepts of neoliberal development. Yet, for others, precarity is producing a ‘new dangerous class’. However, despite different perspectives of the effects and implications of precarity, the analytical purchase and political utility of the concept has received insufficient attention. In this article, we hope to contribute to critical debates on the limitations of ‘precarity’ as a concept for critical political analysis. We argue that in the dominant use of precarity as an analytic of inequality, particular experiences are rendered as historical universals. Consequently, these (particular) experiences are disconnected from global social and political relations of inequality, while at the same time reinforcing a linear and reductionist conception of development. We demonstrate that the temporal scheme represented by the notion of the ‘age of post-Fordism’, which serves as a crucial marker of the explanatory framework of precarity (in Europe), actually misconstrues the politics of global development through inequalities. Moreover, the tendency to focus on subjectification as conditioning the formation of a ‘new’ dangerous class, entails far-reaching omissions of actual transnational political struggles against domination and inequality. Instead of precarity, a critical engagement with the politics of global development ought to be the subject of analysis for understanding contested relations of affluence, insecurity and inequality.     

The more attacks,the more retweets: Trump’s and Clinton’s agenda setting on Twitter

The present study aims to contribute to the agenda setting theory and political campaign literature by examining candidates’ tweets and their effects on voter reactions in the context of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Content analysis of Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s 3-month tweets (N = 1575) revealed that half of their tweets were attacks, and those attacks were effective in attracting favorites and retweets for both candidates. Their tweets reflected their issue agendas highlighted on campaign websites, and they mainly emphasized issues owned by their parties in both venues. Some of the issues Trump stressed in his tweets (i.e., media bias and Clinton’s alleged dishonesty) drew significantly more favorites and retweets, suggesting public agenda setting possibilities through Twitter. None of the issues Clinton emphasized were significant predictors of favorites and retweets. However, visual elements such as pictures and videos were effective in bringing voter reactions for Clinton. While Clinton sent twice as many tweets as Trump did during the three months, Trump’s tweet received in average three times as many favorites and retweets as Clinton’s. Overall, the results show that Trump was more successful than Clinton in drawing public attention to preferred issues through Twitter.     

China and global internet governance: toward an alternative analytical framework

Drawing on historical methods, this study assesses the conventional “cyber-sovereignty” framework, which has been used to capture and interpret China’s stance toward global Internet governance. This framework focuses on political control and tends to reduce China’s policies to the attempts by an authoritarian state to elevate governments and intergovernmental organizations to be the only legitimate governors of global cyberspace. As it traces the evolution of China’s relationship with the global Internet in the past three decades, the study demonstrates that China’s stance is more complex than the prevalent framework allows and that it is both built upon and different from the US-centric, market-oriented Internet governance scheme. This study recognizes the inadequacy of the conventional framework and invokes a theory of critical political economy of communication, thereby offering an alternative model to explicate the complex power dynamics behind China’s changing strategies. The alternative model advanced in this study is based on the understanding of China’s evolving approach as the product of multifaceted interactions among a group of power-holders that include both state agencies and business units on the transnational level.     

Paris 1871 and Fatsa 1979: revisiting the transition problem

ABSTRACT

This article approaches transition as a problem on its own right, through the cases of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Fatsa ‘Commune’ of 1979. Transition has received scant attention as an object of theoretical inquiry. Prior to Etienne Balibar’s suggestion that the history of the mode of production occurs at the intersections between political struggles and economic contradictions, a theory of transition had not been explicitly explored. Problematizing transition can reveal what is ‘ruptural’ about ruptural moments, indicating the limitations of the prevalent mode of production. This investigation builds on the Althusserian theory of temporal lag, and considers aspects of the cases in order to translate its insights into the historical events, and conversely to develop theoretical initiative based on findings. An examination of outstanding figures and events in the cases suggests that they can inform a theory of transition and address certain challenges of contemporary radicalism.     

Deras as sites of electoral mobilisation in Indian Punjab: examining the reasons that political parties flock to the deras

Mushrooming of the deras in Indian Punjab, and the role of some of these deras in influencing the political choices of their followers, most of whom belong to the socially and economically marginal groups, is being recognised and apparently encouraged by the political parties. This is evident in the fact that political leaders/candidates cutting across party divides flocked to various deras in the run-up to the recent elections. This phenomenon can be attributed primarily to the fact that the social basis of political power of state has remained unaltered in favour of the upper castes/communities. Unwilling to share power, yet compelled to seek the crucial support of numerically strong and economically mobile dalit and other backward castes voters in a closely contested bi-polar polity, the upper-caste political leadership takes recourse to the ‘softer’ option of cultivating the deras to ‘deliver’ en bloc the marginal-castes votes. With one form of the identity politics based on ethno-regional communal divide having receded to background, it is the turn of the caste-based identity politics through the ‘dera route’ that is prevailing in post-militancy Punjab.     

Structural Influences on Energy Production in South and East Asia, 1971–20021

To address questions about the environmental consequences of globalization and modernization, I estimate the effects of a variety of structural factors on energy production in 14 nations of South and East Asia, which contain more than half the world’s population, using panel data covering the period 1971–2002. My results suggest that energy production is significantly influenced by a variety of structural factors, including economic development, urbanization, export intensity, and debt service. Consistent with the arguments of theorists of the political economy of the world‐system, I find compelling evidence that modernization and integration into the global economy contribute to natural resource exploitation.     

National Politics,Neighborly Politics: How Trump’s Election Impacted a Black and White Detroit Community

Most research on right-wing populism has tried to explain the rise of populist movements and parties. While some have studied how neighborhood contexts and histories shape voting patterns, few have examined what happens locally after votes are cast. This article draws on three years of ethnographic research while the author lived in Brightmoor, a majority black, minority white poor depopulated Detroit neighborhood, to show how Trump’s politics shaped local expressions and experiences of racism. First, I show how white Trump supporters expressed distinct approaches to xenophobic ethnonationalism and racial politics. Trump’s surge empowered many to broadcast anti-immigrant sentiments, while they continued to put interactional and discursive work into not being seen as racist. Many also applied a “Trump lens” to local interactions and geographies and rendered minorities salient under Trump politics hypervisible. Second, I show how black residents equated xenophobic ethnonationalism with antiblack racism: seeing through pro-Trump whites’ attempts to separate these. Some also applied a new “Trump lens” to interactions and geographies, using the category of Trump voter and a sense of the voting map to anticipate and make sense of racist interactions. This article offers new insights into the local impacts of a national surge in right-wing populism.     

Visual representations of ethnic violence: an Indonesian portrayal

The horrific violence that has marred Indonesia's ‘transition to democracy’ raises numerous disconcerting questions; not least of which is how future interested actors or governments – central and regional alike – will tackle these atrocities in a historical framework. How should a series of historical events, such as the killing of thousands of Indonesians by Indonesians be (un)officially remembered? Two paintings that hang in Sambas, West Kalimantan's most prominent cultural centrepiece, the Alwadzi Koebillah kraton, are remarkable, for they give us a glimpse as to how local voices might attempt to possess the historical meanings and readings of Indonesia's recent ethnic strife. Perhaps one of a kind in Indonesia, these paintings boldly portray the bloody battles that took place in Sambas in early 1999, pitting the ‘courageous’ and ‘youthful’ Malays of Sambas against the ‘middle-aged’ and ‘treacherous’ Madurese. These depictions make it abundantly clear that, through this bloodletting, Sambas Malays awoke from their slumber in time to mobilise, to confront and to defeat their nemesis. As an ethnopolitical force, the glorious rise of ‘Malay’ is unmistakable. The broader political context in which these paintings were commissioned, however, invests them with greater significance. Only in a decentralised state, one distinct from the excessive centralism of the New Order, would the (semi) public display of these heroic memorials to local, i.e. non-national, violence be made possible.     

Global Studies: Have Catechism,Will Travel

This second response to comments on my article ‘What is Global studies?’ (Globalizations 10, 4, 2013) notes that the comments feature research agendas. These provide scaffolding for global studies but not of course a complete building. Among themes that need further attention are political economy and finance, the dimension of time and history, and the dynamics of twenty-first century globalization and the role of emerging economies.     

Not yet the postcolonial era: The (super) nation-state and transnationalism of cultural studies: Response to Ang and Stratton

Abstract

What is the epistemological and political status of the nation-state in the current practices of Cultural Studies? What is the relationship between the transnationalization of capital/super-states and the transnational turn of Cultural Studies? Through analyzing discursive sites of ‘regionalization’, ‘the Postcolonial’, ‘globalization’, this essay attempts to pinpoint unquestioned assumptions in the critical phase of ‘internationalizing’ Cultural Studies. Unless counter-hegemony positions and strategies can be collectively discussed, argued over and formulated, Cultural Studies as an internationalist project will run the risk of losing its critical edges and even reproducing the existing power structure of the nation-states and global capital. An openended geo-colonial historical materialism is proposed to revitalize Cultural Studies as part of a global decolonization movement.     

The US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief

This article analyses the US response under former President George W. Bush to the global HIV/AIDS epidemic at the intersection of neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism, highlighting the various ways their distinct gender logics collide to reproduce masculine privilege and gender inequalities on a global scale. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is the United States global HIV/AIDS policy and is the largest commitment made by any single nation for an international health project. My analysis is based on PEPFAR's ‘formal’ policy texts, including its authorizing legislation, five-year strategic framework and specific policy directives for recipient organizations. In addition, I examine more ‘informal’ texts like Congressional reports and Presidential speeches delivered by George W. Bush on various occasions. Drawing on a rich body of feminist ethnographic work in the fields of global governance, international political economy, organizational theory and sexuality and masculinity studies, the following article examines the various ways market-based norms and practices can legitimate the moral imperatives of neo-conservatism to promote ‘traditional’ values and institutions in the global South as leading solutions to global problems and insecurities.     

‘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.