Protest avatars as memetic signifiers: political profile pictures and the construction of collective identity on social media in the 2011 protest wave

Protest avatars, digital images that act as collective symbols for protest movements, have been widely used by supporters of the 2011 protest wave, from Egypt to Spain and the United States. From photos of Egyptian martyr Khaled Said, to protest posters and multiple variations of Anonymous' mask, a great variety of images have been adopted as profile pictures by Internet users to express their support for various causes and protest movements and communicate it to all their Internet peers. In this article, I explore protest avatars as forms of identification of protest movements in a digital era. I argue that protest avatars can be described as ‘memetic signifiers’ because (a) they are marked by a vagueness and inclusivity that distinguishes them from traditional protest symbols and (b) lend themselves to be used as memes for viral diffusion on social networks. In adopting these icons, participants experience a collective fusion in an online crowd, whose gathering is manifested in the very ‘masking’ of participants behind protest avatars. These forms of collective identification, while powerful in the short term, can however prove quite volatile, with Internet users often discarding avatars with relative ease, raising the question whether they can provide durable foundational elements of contemporary social movements.     

“America Will Not Tolerate Slave Traders”: Counter-Trafficking Policies and US Power

The US government has implemented an ambitious set of policies designed to combat human trafficking and sex trafficking in women and girls in particular. This article argues that anti-trafficking discourse and policy can be understood as a project to sustain and strengthen US power. This power has been wielded through the use of foreign aid, which influences the actions of both state and non-state actors overseas. Existing policies reinforce unilateralism and executive-branch dominance. Policymakers have also used gender strategically to moralize their actions and assert global leadership on this issue. Gender is thus deployed to serve US interests.     

Strategic Intersectionality and Political Representation: Female Muslim Councilors in London

This article addresses questions of how race/ethnicity, gender, and religion influence political representation. We use original interview data to test a strategic intersectionality theory developed by Fraga and colleagues (2005) in the case of female Muslim councilors in London, the United Kingdom. The original strategic intersectionality theory proposes that women are more effective advocates for ethnic group interests due to their unique capacity to leverage three primary resources: a substantive policy focus, multiple identity advantage, and gender inclusive advantage. We modify the thesis by analyzing religion as an additional identity marker and further disaggregating the three primary sources of leverage. We use the modified thesis to test whether female Muslim councilors of three London boroughs are more effective advocates for Muslim interests than their non-Muslim colleagues. We find mixed evidence for the presence of the three sources of leverage associated with strategic intersectionality, resulting in a more complex theorizing of this phenomenon than that found in prior research. This study offers a new contribution to the operationalization of intersectionality and the literature on intersectionality and political representation.     

Maintaining and Strengthening a Shaky Regime with Mnemonic Work: Inventing a Chinese National Day from 1949 Through 1987 in Taiwan

This paper investigates the invention of a Chinese National Day from 1949 through 1987 in Taiwan to illuminate the significance of mnemonic work in nation‐building. The 1949 Retreat after the Chinese Civil War resulted in a serious legitimacy crisis for the government of the Republic of China; thus, (re)inventing the National Day became an important mission to maintain and even strengthen this shaky regime. While the role of the standardized commemorative narrative in influencing people's collective memory is granted, this article emphasizes the aspect of embodied memory in nation‐remembering. I point out that the official Chinese nationalism constructed its National Day as “inevitably” bustling, memorialized, accepted, heroic, familial‐ized, blessed, and pivotal‐ized to shape the impression of a sacred and memorable day. This paper—while essentially consistent with Billig's argument of banal nationalism—suggests that national identity is accumulated by many symbolically encoded elements found in daily life; it goes further to argue that banal nationalism needs the “hot” nationalism found in special occasions to encode, refresh, and redefine the symbolic meaning of entities. That is, the oscillations between sacred and profane are needed to guarantee that patriotic emotions can be continually created and maintained.     

网络文化与文化霸权主义

本文旨在阐述随着网络文化的发展,文化的全球化已经是不言而喻,由此而产生的文化霸权主义便想争夺世界的统治地位,进而占领世界.这是一场严峻的战争,因此,各个民族都要保护自己本民族的文化精华,在这场文化之战中,不至于使自己民族文化的精华被文化霸权主义所吞没.     

从“官吏分途”到“群体三分”:中国地方治理的人事结构转换及其政治效应——对周雪光《从“官吏分途”到“层级分流”:帝国逻辑下的中国官僚人事制度》一文的一个补充

官吏分途作为古代中国国家治理的人事制度安排,依然具有其延续性和再生性。中国地方和基层治理中官僚群体、派生群体和雇佣群体的三分,与官吏分途有着异曲同工之妙。本文作为对周雪光《从“官吏分途”到“层级分流”:帝国逻辑下的中国官僚人事制度》一文的一个补充,提出群体三分是更接近官吏分途的延续者与变异者。层级分流与群体三分,共同构成了地方和基层治理的主干。官吏之间在数量和规模上的不对称与目前官僚群体、派生群体和雇佣群体在数量和规模上的不对称是相通的。雇佣群体是影响地方和基层治理绩效的重要因素。进入层级分流的精英群体或干部群体,除了具有经济学和社会学意义上的理性之外,还拥有政党所赋予的使命。使命政治是对晋升锦标赛政治的一个补充,它是解释中国的巨变和崛起的重要视角之一。     

John Key the biofinancial entrepreneur

ABSTRACT

Alongside the better known repudiations of truth that have risen to prominence since the 1970s—known variously in terms of postmodernism, identity politics, democratic materialism or simply university discourse—this article seeks to estimate the significance of the reactions against truth that are characteristic of finance. Finance is a collective subject or social movement in its own right, composed of a set of actors, devices, technologies and platforms which together constitute an apparatus that reacts against truths whenever and wherever they arise. This operates most clearly in the logic of risk management, a generalised technology that accompanies the financialisation of economy, politics and culture. The process of financialisation or rather what will be called here the ‘biofinancialisation’ that seeks to code life in the terms of finance, bears austere lessons about truth and resistance and these, in conjunction with new resistances from below, provide new prospects for radical politics and progressive social change today. These lessons we will learn from, among others, the 38th Prime Minister of New Zealand.     

Conceptualising the politics of social protection expansion in low income countries: The intersection of transnational ideas and domestic politics

The growing literature on social protection in low income developing countries has tended to focus on definitional debates, policy design and impact evaluations, with relatively little consideration of the ways in which politics shape policy. This article argues that politics needs to be at the centre of efforts to understand social protection and outlines a new conceptual framework for investigating this, with a particular focus on explaining the variation in progress made by low income countries in adopting and implementing social protection. We propose that an adapted ‘political settlements’ framework that incorporates insights from the literatures on welfare state development – notably ‘power constellations’ theory, discursive institutionalism and global policy networks – can help frame political commitment to social protection as flowing from the interaction of domestic political economy and transnational ideas. Importantly, this approach situates social protection within a broader political and policy context, and highlights the influence of underlying power relations at multiple levels.     

知识分子与政治

由于道德主义的困扰和内在连贯的分析框架的缺乏,知识分子社会学在学科传统内一直处于边缘化的窘境。目前,对“知识分子”主流定义的本体性假设正在受到质疑,而知识分子作为一种边界划分的过程和后果以及有关知识分子的阶级性等问题开始受到关注。在关于知识分子社会角色定性的问题上存在着教化与颠覆这两种不同的基本立场;而关于其意识来源,传统的研究结论则可以被归纳为经济决定论、社会决定论、场域塑造论与参照群体论。近十年来,新一轮思想社会学的兴起对传统范式构成了一系列挑战。本文认为,作为一种回应,通过将知识分子的政治意识由自变量重构为因变量,有望在知识分子研究领域形成一场以分析社会学为导向的变革,而知识场域、惯习、自我概念、亚文化认同与知识轨迹等概念可以帮助我们提出一个初步的政治认识论框架。
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后京都时代背景下应对气候变化的政策问题思辨——首届“气候变化与公共政策”国际学术会议综述

在德班气候变化会议召开前夕,举办此次学术会议意义重大。参加此次会议的大多学者都认为气候变化不是单纯的学科或单纯的科学认知问题,已演化成为人们共同关心的重大社会问题。会上,学者们就减缓与适应气候变化的对策问题进行了探讨,并集中探讨了气候变化中伦理问题、经济社会管理对策的有效性、应对气候变化的政策（或政策工具）选择与法律调控的相关内容等。他们认为,今后我们既需要从不同层面对气候伦理问题进行研究,也需要在应对气候变化的管理体制、采取减缓气候变化的具体政策选择、控制温室气体排放法律制度的完善等方面进行更深入更系统的研究。