Transactions with God: Market,Moralities and Agency in the Worship of the Goddess of the Treasury in Northern Vietnam

This article explores the complex moral choices of those who have negotiated the encounter between marketisation and distinctive religious traditions within and beyond Asia. I focus on the dramatic rise in the worship of the Goddess of the Treasury in northern Vietnam since the onset of marketisation. She is believed to possess a special power: to grant those who borrow a sum from her symbolic treasury the same amount as real profit and actual wealth through earthly business activities. I show that the Goddess's rise does not reflect the universalising effects of marketisation, but instead how Vietnamese religious ideas of faithfulness and sincerity continue to inform worshippers’ choices as active moral agents. Rather than robotic doers of market principles or passive followers of ‘superstitious’ beliefs in rejection of market changes, worshippers are creative actors who innovatively employ traditional moralities in novel ways to meet their present-day quest for economic prosperity.     

Kindness in Australia: an empirical critique of moral decline sociology

A new sociological agenda is emerging that interrogates how morality can be established in the absence of the moral certainties of the past but there is a shortage of empirical work on this topic. This article establishes a theoretical framework for the empirical analysis of everyday morality drawing on the work of theorists including Ahmed, Bauman and Taylor. It uses the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes to assess the state and shape of contemporary moralities by asking how kind are Australians, how is its expression socially distributed, and what are the motivations for kindness. The findings demonstrate that Australians exhibit a strong attachment and commitment to kindness as a moral value that is primarily motivated by interiorized sources of moral authority. We argue these findings support the work of theorists such as Ahmed and Taylor who argue authenticity and embodied emotion are legitimate sources of morality in today's secular societies. The research also provides new evidence that generational changes are shaping understandings and practices of kindness in unexpected ways.     

Sixty years of “peaceful liberation” at the Tibet Museum in Lhasa: triumphant modernization at the rooftop of the world

In recent years, China has developed an increasingly ambitious public diplomacy program to enhance its soft power abroad. Although several scholars have sought to assess the effects of this program, little attention has been paid to the Chinese governmental conception of soft power and its use in propaganda. This article explores how the state's view of soft power is transformed into policy through the cultural bureaucracy and, conversely, how it limits the program's effectiveness. The article concludes that the limited success of soft power is due to the following main factors. First, although China's public diplomacy programs are planned and implemented in ways that reflect its domestic cultural policy, they are rarely successful even in their home markets. Second, China's conception of soft power focuses on top-down, State-centered image management, thereby overlooking the relational and context-dependent aspects of soft power.     

Facebook Bras and #digitalharems: Fantasies of Mimesis and the Transgressions of Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Sboui

Abstract

This article presents a horizontal reading of Aliaa Elmahdy's and Amina Sboui's corporeal interventions alongside the efficacy of digital platforms in order to consider how algorithmic and normative protocols related to content filtering on social media amplify certain forms of political communication while prohibiting others. I argue that readings of Elmahdy's and Sboui's bodily politics through the lens of liberal feminism rely on what I call discourses of mimetic networking, where particular mediated events become reterritorialized as part of an archival knowledge of ‘Arabness’. This is done through the organization of data via hashtagging and content moderation, and through rhetorics of techno-optimism that mirror ‘first contact’ narratives which gender, racialize, and flatten complex and fluid engagements with new media in non-US/European contexts. The article concludes with a consideration of how the persistence of their corporeality relays with both normative and programmatic parameters online to make alternative visions of communication possible.     

Moral codes of mothering and the introduction of welfare-to-work in Ontario

In this paper, I trace how the reform of social assistance in Ontario, especially the post-1990s enforcement of lone mothers' employability via welfare-to-work programs, parallels shifts in dominant moral codes of mothering, from "mother-carer" to "mother-worker." Additionally, I use this case as an entry point to consider the implications of public and policy allegiance to these moral codes for all mothers. The central argument I make is that the introduction of welfare-to-work programs in Ontario did not occur in a neoliberal state-sanctioned vacuum but also involved the circulation of ideas about moral mothering outside of policy into policy.     

Moral Reasoning in Interactional Context: Strategic Uses of Care and Justice Arguments in Mediation Hearings*

Previous studies of moral reasoning have treated moral reasoning as a product of the individual. This article extends the study of moral reasoning by analyzing its use in strategic interaction. I analyze how participants in a naturally occurring situation of conflict use moral arguments strategically and negotiate over the types of arguments that are acceptable. Gilligan's Care and Justice modes of moral reasoning are identified in participants' justifications for positions taken in nine videotaped mediation hearings. I found that participants may use both modes of reasoning during the course of a hearing, and that the type of moral argument used is often a response to the actions of other participants. Strategic uses of moral arguments included shifting mode to challenge or support another's position, bridging a difference in mode between two disputants, and shifting mode to refocus the topic. Because of their institutional and interactional roles in the hearings, mediators play a major role in negotiations over mode of moral reasoning.     

'She Wasn't Tall Enough and Breasts Get in the Way': Why Would a Woman Bullfighter Retire?

In 1999, the first Spanish woman bullfighter, Cristina Sanchez, retired after performing as a full-fledged torero for only three years. In this article, I examine the circumstances of her success and of the curtailment of her short career as a case study in how an emergent feminine identity can be created and established through the conscious actions of a woman in the public sphere. Through an analysis of ethnographic and media materials, I will demonstrate how in this context of changing Spanish gender Cristina Sanchez's career and retirement made the Spanish gender debate public and explicit through a performative and media manifestation of women's agency. This work is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Spain from 1992-1994, media analysis, and a series of return visits since that time.     

Emerging,attracting and challenging: how some of the world's largest media companies perceive their challenges and opportunities in China

China's emerging media market, despite having heavy entry regulations, attracts foreign companies that suffer from saturation and stagnation in their home markets. This paper seeks to provide an understanding of how some of the world's largest media companies perceive their opportunities and challenges in China by discussing research interviews with company managers. It analyzes the findings of the interviews in the light of existing conceptualizations, which suggest that in emerging and opening media markets, cultural barriers to the success of imported media increase with the waning interest in foreign media and the increasing strength of the domestic media industry. The article suggests that Chinese audiences will become more inwardly oriented in their media tastes and that if the Chinese media market opens further in the future, the existing advantages that the Western media companies appear to have over their Chinese counterparts will have diminished by that time.     

Morally Controversial Leisure: The Social World of Gun Collectors

In this article I examine the world of gun collectors. When dealing, collecting and showing this group sees guns as fascinating collectibles. Yet, collecting and other leisure pursuits are often controversial. Academics, politicians and media persons perceive gun collectors and their collections as symbols of deviance and their guns as threats to society. The moral controversy created by the anti-gun position, and the gun collectors' accounts of their activities, shows how other hobbies may become social problems.     

LITIGATION AND SUBTERFUGE: CHINESE IMMIGRANT MOBILIZATION DURING THE CHINESE EXCLUSION ERA

I analyze historical changes in American immigration law and the subsequent responses of Chinese immigrants during the Chinese Exclusion Era. Using the political process model's concept of “political opportunity structure,” I examine how the indeterminate nature of the Chinese Exclusion laws provided key opportunities for mobilization. I present an interactive framework that considers not only how the broader political environment enabled and constrained the Chinese, but also how they responded by actively reshaping their environment. I apply this framework to the Chinese community's initial use of litigation and their move towards tactics of subterfuge in response to changes in Chinese exclusion policies. My findings show that the anti-Chinese immigration policies basically fulfilled their purpose, but led to unintended exploitation due to problematic language and enforcement.     

Digitized diaspora governance during the COVID-19 pandemic: China's diaspora mobilization and Chinese migrant responses in Italy

We explore how the Chinese diaspora state during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 managed to transform a severe health crisis into a geo-political opportunity for transnational nation-building through diaspora governance based on extensive use of social media technologies. By adopting a multi-scalar perspective, we analyse the intertwined nature of top-down and bottom-up processes of the Chinese Party-state's diaspora mobilization. Based on discourse and ethnographic analysis, we argue that China's diaspora governance exposed a new and strong capacity for extra-territorial governance. We explore how discursive hegemony, social control and diaspora mobilization were achieved by widely employing the Chinese social media application, WeChat. We also contend that this was facilitated by the Italian government's and media's pro-China attitudes to emphasize the importance of considering transnational embeddedness when studying the implementation and impact of interactive online technology for diaspora governance in an illiberal political context.     

Candidate emergence as movement mobilization: An analysis of Women's post-2016 electoral engagement

Political science scholarship argues that women's underrepresentation in American politics stems from a persistent shortage of female candidates. Women are less likely to run because they often perceive individual and structural obstacles that negatively impact their electoral interest. Such barriers remain intact, yet thousands of women have signaled their interest in running for office since the 2016 election by participating in candidate training programs (CTPs). Though running for office is not commonly defined as an activist activity, this article argues that theories of collective action and movement mobilization, rather than those focusing on the psychological aspects of candidate emergence, are better equipped to explain the recent increase of electoral interest. Using EMILY's List—an elite political entity that began as a grassroots social movement organization—as a case, this article integrates scholarship from sociology and political science to examine how feminist activist organizing can impact women's interest in running for public office. I first review the research on women's candidate emergence and CTPs before discussing the electoral movement strategies and the mobilizing impact of the media and collective action frames. The article reviews recent scholarship on the Women's March and the Resistance, then synthesizes the literature to examine EMILY's List and their electoral movement strategies leading up to the 2018 midterm elections. I conclude by suggesting avenues for future research that can bridge the relationship between movements and electoral politics and advance scholarly understanding of how, when, and why women run for office.     

The Social Imaginaries of Women's Peace Activism in Northern Uganda

The metanarrative of global feminism is often constructed as a progressive and emancipatory movement emanating from the West and fostering radical politics elsewhere in the world. Such a view is not only ethnocentric but, critically, it fails to engage with the complex ways in which feminist politics travel and are evinced in specific localities. In this article, I seek to understand how marginalized women in the “Global South” – particularly in Africa – interpret, experience and negotiate feminist ideas to wield political power within the context of their social and moral worlds. I focus on women's organized resistance to violence and armed conflict, known as “women's peace activism.” Using a case study of a women's peace movement in Uganda mediated by an international feminist organization called Isis Women's International Cross-Cultural Exchange, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with a wide range of activists in the organization and in its network in postconflict areas in Northern Uganda. I argue that the feminist peace discourse is most meaningful when its universal values of equity and securing the dignity of women are appropriated and re-signified through the cultural institutions and the collective memory of activists in their local settings.     

From Transgression to Suppression: Implications of Moral Values and Societal Norms on Emotional Labour

This article endeavours to develop a conceptual perspective of moral values and societal norms, and how they impact on emotion regulation within employment contexts. The article draws on social psychology and emotional labour literature to explore the concept of contextual emotional labour. I argue that the conflicting requirements of one's societal and employment contexts may require one to transgress one's moral values to fulfil job requirements. I also argue that it is important to examine the aversive state(s) that may follow one's transgression and how this is managed in the workplace.     

The Unwed Father: a "Non-Deviant" Rule Breaker

By and large, men (unwed fathers) responsible for impregnating unmarried women have successfully avoided being labeled deviant and have been largely overlooked as sociological research subjects. After they responded to newspaper advertisements, 140 men responsible for 176 extramarital pregnancies were interviewed to determine how they avoid being identified and sanctioned despite their apparent culpability. Factors investigated include: lack of a sense of moral trespass (including the double standard, perception of the pair relationship, and contextual moral meanings), visibility, and social distance. The apparent inconsistency between culpability of behavior and absence of labeling is reconciled by consideration of the "morality of consequences" and the "morality of intentions." It is suggested that consideration of the interaction of rules based on these moralities contributes to an understanding of the labeling process.     

Religion as a means of cultural reproduction: popular rituals in a Yunnan Chinese village in northern Thailand

This article discusses how popular rituals are used to achieve cultural reproduction in Banmai, a Yunnan Chinese village in northern Thailand where I conducted empirical fieldwork between 2002 and 2007. Most Banmai villagers were local militias originally associated with the Chinese Nationalist Party in western Yunnan Province. They went into exile on the Burmese side of the Golden Triangle in or shortly after 1949 when the People's Liberation Army swept through this region, and they ultimately settled in northern Thailand's hill regions in early 1960s. As the self-proclaimed preservers of authentic Chinese culture, Banmai villagers vigorously instituted many traditional practices, following the imagined Confucian orthodoxy, to build a reified community that represents an idealized Chinese spiritual world. Through their participation in popular rituals, we see clearly how villagers have been able to attain the cultural unification that has played a crucial role in meeting their spiritual needs at various levels: the individual, the family, the kin group, and the community.     

Renegotiating religious transnationalism: fractures in transnational Chinese evangelicalism

In this article, I question to what extent future generations of immigrants will engage in practices of religious transnationalism through their ethnic institutions. I examine how leaders of the next generation of English‐speaking Chinese Canadian evangelicals made sense of their participation in the Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelism, a movement that rallies behind both a pan‐Chinese identity and the belief that the Chinese have a special role in evangelizing the world. I argue that the call to religious mobilization grounded in Chinese ethnicity stands on tenuous ground and propose that linguistic, geographical, generational and ideological fractures may diminish the participation of future generations of the Chinese diaspora in ethnically‐based transnational religious organizations. I conclude that these developments would push ‘negotiated transnational religious networks’ into a state of ‘renegotiation'.     

Nationalist competition on the internet: Uyghur diaspora versus the Chinese state media

This article explores the evolving relationship between nationalism and identity formation as it is now facilitated on the internet. Particularly, it examines the implications of nationalist competition between the Uyghur diaspora online community and Chinese state media. Since the onset of the Information Age, each party has sought to influence international perception of the Uyghur people and their traditional homeland Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) by promoting English language representations of Uyghurs and Xinjiang on the internet. Further, this study looks at the question of how each party's engagement in this online nationalist competition affects either positively or negatively its own agenda. The question is investigated through comparative textual analysis of Uyghur diaspora and Chinese state media websites and an interview with a Uyghur diaspora website administrator.