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How are problems of family/friend care framed and politicized, and with what socio-political implications? This feminist rhetorical analysis examines how carers are positioned, how problems and solutions of care are framed, and how carers’ social and political rights are supported by Canadian caregiver organizations. Organizations’ public materials draw on and expand narratives that foreground individual risk and recognition, decentring the state’s role. We elaborate on how carers’ citizenship rights are discursively bounded with proposed individualized solutions that support them in continuing to care. Broader narratives could consider carers’ human or citizenship rights or otherwise foreground relationality and complex collective care solidarities.
This article examines the intersecting roles of the face with reference to the popularisation of the smile in Republican China. Research on emotional labour presupposes the potency of the open, beautiful and polite smile without delving into its underlying emotional, aesthetic and sociocultural fabric. The article argues that the modern invincible smile not only conveys emotions, facial ideals and etiquette but, at a deeper level, reproduces expressive, aesthetic and cultural order. Through the qualitative analysis of Republican discourses about the smile and its visual representations in calendar posters, pictorials, portrait photographs and films, the article demonstrates how the broad, tooth-exposing smile was dynamically constructed as a charming, cheerful and civilised face. The popularity of the smiling face in this era reveals a dramatic transformation in China’s emotional regime and expressive convention, one that is interwoven with the rise of consumerism, the spread of hedonism and the wider social process of modernisation. By exploring this complex interplay, the article evinces the multiple social lines that construct and constitute the face.
The maintenance and reproduction of the working class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave this to the labourer’s drives for self-preservation and propagation. (Marx [1867] 1976: 718)
The capitalist mode of production gives rise to a crisis of working-class social reproduction from the outset, and continually exacerbates that crisis in the course of its development. Far from being in principle a crisis for the capitalist mode of production itself, then, crises of working-class social reproduction are the empirical effects of changes in the capitalist economy, reflecting capitalist power over the fate of the propertyless population. The inherent characteristics of the capitalist
mode of production – competition between individual capitals, uninterrupted scientific and technological revolution, an ever-increasing division of labour on local to global scales, the constant process of ‘creative destruction’ as obsolete capitalist enterprises die and new ones are born, the universalisation of commodity production, concomitant to proletarianisation and the creation of a permanent ‘reserve army of labour’, and the tendency for capital to invade and take over any form of production more ‘primitive’ than itself – all continually disrupt areas of social and economic activity within capitalist social formations and those which capitalism has not fully penetrated yet. The effect of state government policies and governance on the part of international organisations is to induce or exploit crises of working-class social reproduction in order to further the hegemony of capital over their own territory and the world market as a whole.
We are two colleagues and friends of Thomas Mathiesen who have written about Thomas from two perspectives. Kristian Andenæs contributes with the inside perspective of a long-time colleague at the Institute for Sociology of Law and the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law. Knut Papendorf, as a colleague and former criminologist and activist in Germany, focuses on the potential provided by the abolitionist model, as advocated by Thomas Mathiesen.
This article provides the reader with a theoretical framework and a method of representing cities called cartographies of infrastructural imaginations. The study employs mapping methods from the fields of architecture, urban geography and visual cultures. The research inquires about the role of cartography in the analysis of discourses that define policies of water supply, food distribution and land-use regulation, which are three environmental challenges in cities. How can we identify and situate the urban actors that attend to such challenges in cities from the Global South?
The research is empirically grounded in Mexico City, Shanghai and Bangalore, urban settlements with a history of colonial occupation in previous centuries. Their foreign interventions still shape urban imaginaries of these cities. The method of blending photographic analysis with maps aims to offer objective precision of geographical data and subjective street-level views of local stories. The intention is to understand where the infrastructural ideas come from, and how imaginaries flow to communicate visions about the development of the city. A central task here is to frame how power structures interact and represent their interests via utopian and dystopian narratives.
Transdisciplinarity is creative human agency including cognitive, intellectual and behavioural activities of individuals and groups. These activities define and are mutually defined by beliefs and ideas, knowledge and know-how, language and meanings, norms and rules, and opinions and values. The cultivation of transdisciplinary projects should embrace these cultural, social and psychological predispositions because they are core constituents of a trans-anthropo-logic. This requires transcending common research methods used in scientific studies and using scaffolding that facilitates agency, and positioning individuals and groups. However, scientists are rarely trained to pilot projects involving multiple stakeholders with different positions. This article explains why trained facilitators are needed to pilot transdisciplinary projects. They can cultivate transcendence and transgression – both analysed by the late Julie Thompson Klein – beyond the scope and purpose of common research methods. In essence, transdisciplinary practices respect different ontologies and epistemologies while incorporating ethical principles and moral values. The cultivation of transdisciplinary projects should accommodate and reduce asymmetries of power between politicians, public administrators, property owners, researchers and laypeople that are shaped by extant historical and societal variables in specific situations. Transdisciplinary projects should also apply multiple sources of quantitative data and qualitative information that represent the complexity, diversity and perhaps incommensurability of intentions, meanings, perceptions and values about specific subjects or situations. This is being achieved by innovative projects that should become beacons for change.
In 2016, by moving from armed struggle to collective reincorporation, Colombian women ex-guerrilleras of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) – the farianas – reconfigured the ‘combatant’ identity by leaving their weapons and engaging in post-war politics with their own feminist vision: insurgent feminism. Drawing upon feminist ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the north-east of Colombia in 2019 and 2022, this article has two interlinked objectives. First, through the lenses of embodiment and affects, it explores the challenges and contradictions of transiting from an armed organisation to a civilian identity for women militants. From there, the article then uses the continuum of militancy to explore the (ongoing) consolidation of farianas’ insurgent feminism and the tensions emerging in this endeavour. In doing so, the article contributes, theoretically, to the inclusion of emotions and embodiment in the theorisation of reincorporation and, empirically and politically, to the construction of knowledge and practice about insurgent feminism.
This study evaluated the extent to which body mass index (BMI) mediates associations between risk factors and incident high blood pressure in American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs), Non-Hispanic Whites (NHWs), Non-Hispanic Blacks (NHBs) and Hispanics. There were 7,793 participants from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health: 312 AI/ANs, 1,091 Hispanics, 1,567 NHBs and 4,823 NHWs. Risk factors for high blood pressure included adolescent BMI, TV watching, fast-food consumption, smoking, parental obesity, parental educational attainment and financial instability. Relative risk regression models stratified by race/ethnicity were used to examine associations between risk factors and incident high blood pressure. Path analysis was used to assess mediation by BMI. Female sex was a protective factor against high blood pressure, and higher BMI was a risk factor in all populations. Smoking increased high blood pressure risk in AI/ANs (Incident Rate Ratio [IRR]: 1.14, 95% CI: 1.02–1.27), but not in other groups. BMI partially mediated the effect of parental obesity on high blood pressure in NHWs and completely mediated the effect of parental obesity in NHBs. In AI/ANs and Hispanics, BMI did not mediate the relationship between incident high blood pressure and any risk factor. This study assessed the extent to which BMI mediates risk factors for high blood pressure in four populations, and showed important differences across populations. Further research is needed to improve knowledge about relationships between BMI, risk factors and incident high blood pressure, and their potential variability by race/ethnicity.
Background:
The COVID-19 policy context was characterised by high levels of uncertainty, imperfect knowledge and the need for immediate action. Therefore, governments in Europe tended to rely on expertise provided by advisory bodies to design their crisis response. Advisory bodies played a fundamental part in policy making during the crisis to optimise policy formulation.
Aims and objectives:
During the COVID-19 crisis, the literature on policy advice grew considerably. To grasp the main research outcomes, we conduct a scoping review that interrogates the COVID-19 policy advice literature to answer the question ‘How did policy advisory bodies operate in Europe during the COVID-19 crisis?’ Our review builds on a strong theoretical and conceptual basis informed by the literature on policy advisory systems, while offering a new perspective by focusing on advice and policy making during crisis times specifically. We present a review of newly established knowledge and identify what merits further study.
Methods:
The scoping review follows a strict protocol informed by Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines to capture the literature published between 2020 and 2023. We searched two databases, Scopus and Web of Science. The grey literature was excluded.
Findings:
In total, 59 academic outputs inform this review. Overrepresented in our review were qualitative studies, studies about the UK and Sweden, and studies that examined the first half of 2020. Our review shows that the academic community has focused on advisory body composition, body structure and the advisory process.
Discussion:
Avenues for further research include the independence and influence of advisory bodies, and the fate of bodies set up during the crisis.
Care home residents are exposed to high levels of social control. Despite this, and regardless of their disempowered and vulnerable status, they receive limited attention from social workers. The social work role is primarily transactional, relating to admission, reviews of placements, Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards assessments and investigations of abuse. Evidence suggests that higher levels of engagement with residents are likely to reduce risks of abuse and contribute to reduced levels of social control. There are three routes of impact: a formal ongoing link with care homes; greater involvement with the four existing roles, shifting the focus from procedure to process; and the adoption of a new, more critical role that is informed by political ethics, enhancing rights and social justice. This revisioned role will offer residents access to the knowledge and skills of a social worker and to higher levels of protection from systems and practices that are harmful and controlling.
