身份政治与民族国家认同焦虑——对香港国际学校的一种解读

以香港的身份政治为背景,探讨香港国际学校是如何在一种奇特的身份政治中运作,以摆脱民族国家认同焦虑。     

Critical Reflections on the March for Science

Using MacKendrick (2017) as a springboard, this essay explores the March for Science as an example of social mobilization. I lay out some concerns regarding the use of this tactic as a response to attacks on science and suggest some ways sociology could contribute to the development of more efficacious actions to address the denigration of scientific knowledge.     

Focusing on Focusing Events: Event Selection,Media Coverage,and the Dynamics of Contentious Meaning‐Making

Despite the prevalent assumption among scholars of social movements and contentious politics that transformative contentious events are also the focus of public attention and discussion, there has been little attempt to substantiate this. After making a case for why to focus on focusing events and suggesting that these events should be thought of as products of a dialogical contentious meaning‐making process, we develop a coverage attribute‐based method for identifying focusing events. For illustrative purposes, we apply our method to the coverage of contentious events during the “first” intifada by Israeli‐Jewish, Jewish settler, and Palestinian newspapers. Findings from analyses of 11,868 news items reveal that newspapers are likely to strategically quiet contentious events that are strategically amplified by newspapers affiliated with opposing or targeted parties, and vice versa, depending on their interpretation of these events as political opportunities or threats. Analyses of variations across and within contending parties reveal the role of structure and agency in the dialogical seesaw‐like dynamics of contentious meaning‐making.     

At the intersection of globalization and ‘civilizational originality’: cultural production in Putin’s Russia

ABSTRACT

This special issue originates from a transnational collaboration of scholars in philology, comparative literature, social theory, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, and media studies. The collection strives to advance a research agenda built on the nexus of three intellectual and academic domains: post-Soviet ‘Russian cultural studies’, the research paradigm put forward by Cultural Studies, as well as empirical methods developed in sociology. The collection illustrates the importance of expanding the experience of Cultural Studies beyond its established spheres of national investigation, while it also speaks to the necessity to re-evaluate the hegemony of the English-language academic and cultural production on the global scale. The collection offers insights into the gamut of cultural practices and institutional environments in which Russian cultural production happens today. It shows how cultural industries and institutions in Russia are integrated into the global marketplace and transnational communities, while they also draw on and contribute to local lives and experiences by trying to create an autonomous space for symbolic production at personal and collective levels. Through diverse topics, the issue sheds light on the agency, i.e. practitioners and participants, creators and consumers, of Russian cultural production and the neoliberal practices implemented on creative work and cultural administration in Russia today. The Introduction outlines the development of academic studies on Russian cultural practices since 1991; describes main political developments shaping the cultural field in Putin’s Russia; and, finally, identifies the Cultural Studies debates the editors of the collection find most productive for investigations of Russia, i.e. the instrumentalization of culture and culture as resource. Relocated in an analysis of a post-socialist society, these conceptualisations seem increasingly problematic in a situation where local and federal policies governing cultural and creative work focus simultaneously on marketization and on nationalism as the main tools of legitimizing the federal government.     

历史地缘政治背景下广西政治中心的选择与分省设想

唐后期,为了控驭广西西南部的非汉民族,在广西境内首次设立高层政区岭南西道,道治位于邕州,但历时短暂。从北宋到明代,在以民族因素为主导的地缘政治背景下,广西的政治中心长期位于桂林。清代中前期,民族因素对广西地缘政治的影响削弱,桂林作为省会只是历史惯性的作用。清后期爆发的边疆危机,成为广西地缘政治变动的新因素,广西省会由桂林迁往南宁成为历史发展的妊然趋势。     

论新时期网络参政与中国民主政治发展

新时期网络参政对中国民主政治发展促进作用将更加明显,是有中国特色民主政治发展的重要内容之一。网络参政的作用已经引起了党和国家领导人的重视,地方党和政府的负责人也逐渐注意到网络参政的实际意义,其作用主要体现在：促进参与式民主的发展;促进传统集权等级制权力结构的转换;促进社会平等;促进政治、政府公开的发展;促进选民与人大代表的沟通;促进公民政治社会化的加强。网络参政还是把双刃剑,应该加强规范和管理。     

Positivism,ethics and politics in Africa

Despite the fact that the study of African politics is dominated by ethical postures, as can be seen with the self-proclaimed qualifications of African states and leaders, the debate on ethics per se is not common. The first challenge of this article is to address ethics as an entry point for African political studies. The second challenge is epistemological. It is related to my efforts to examine values and ideals as facts that should be considered seriously in political science. Therefore, positivism is not incompatible with values and ideals. They are part of the political universe. In this regard, African politics shows the symbolic triumph of democratic ethics. Current facts militate for the upholding of those values.     

On ‘flip‐flopping’: Branded stance‐taking in U.S. electoral politics1

This article examines stance in U.S. political discourse, taking as its empirical point of departure Democratic candidate John Kerry's epistemic stance‐taking in the televised 2004 presidential debates. Kerry's stance‐taking is shown to help display the characterological attribute of ‘conviction’ and serve as a rejoinder to critics who had branded him as a ‘flip‐flopper.’ His stance‐taking is thus not primarily ‘to’ or ‘for’ copresent interactants, but is largely interdiscursive in character. ‘Conviction’ and its opposite, ‘flip‐flopping,’ suggest further how stance‐taking itself has been an object of typification in the agonistic dynamics of candidate branding and counter‐branding. In moving from epistemic stance‐taking in discourse to models of the stance‐taker as a social type, this article addresses questions about the units and levels of analysis needed to study stance in contemporary political discourse.     

Towards a material ethnography of linguistic landscape: Multilingualism,mobility and space in a South African township1

The study of multilingual landscapes promises to introduce a new perspective into theories and policies of multilingualism, and to provide essential data for a politics of language. However, the theorization of space and language underlying the notion of linguistic landscape is not able to capture the manifold complexities of (transnational) multilingual mobility that is characteristic of many late‐modern multilingual societies. Basing our argument on signage data from a contemporary South Africa in a dynamic phase of social transformation, we argue that more refined notions of space coupled to a material ethnography of multilingualism could provide a theoretically more relevant and methodologically refocused notion of (multilingual) linguistic landscape. Specifically, we take an approach to landscapes as semiotic moments in the social circulation of discourses (in multiple languages), and view signs as re‐semiotized, socially invested distributions of multilingual resources, the material, symbolic and interactional artifacts of a sociolinguistics of mobility.     

Ambivalent Spaces—The Emergence of a New Gay Male Norm Situated Between Notions of the Commercial and the Political in the Swedish Gay Press, 1969–1986

Within sexual geographies, sexual struggles over urban public spaces are frequently explored. Less common is research on sexual struggles within sexually shared spaces and gay spaces. The aim of the article is to examine discursive struggles of meanings of gay male identity enacted in discussions of commodification/capitalism, disclosure, and space in Swedish gay press during 1969–1986. We trace the ambivalent feelings or the emergence of a new gay male norm situated between commercialism and non-commercialism within the Swedish gay press back to the 1970s. In the article we show how a monosexualization process was taking place in both the Swedish gay press as well as within sexual spaces. We explore rhetorical struggles between two competing discursive meanings of (ideal homonormative) male homosexuality, gay culture, and space: one wider (inclusive) and one narrower (exclusive).