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Im Mai 2008 verwüstete der Sturm Nargis über Myanmar/Burma hinweg, 140.000 Menschen wurden getötet. Das autokratisch regierte Land wies jedoch Katastrophenhilfe als innere Einmischung zurück und verweigerte die Einfuhr von Medikamenten und Lebensmitteln. Der französische Außenminister Kouschner drängte angesichts dieser Situation die UN zum Handeln, auf Grundlage der Responsibility to Protect (kurz R2P).
Dieser Akt der Versicherheitlichung steht allerdings im Kontrast zur Medienberichterstattung, wie Gabi Schlag in diesem Papier untersucht. Besonders das Bildmaterial aus dem Katastrophengebiet erzählt eine andere Geschichte. Die Photos der Berichterstattung von BBC.com zum Thema bilden ein visuelles Narrativ, welches keine Hilfsbedürftigkeit suggeriert, sondern kontrolliertes, besonnenes Vorgehen der lokalen Kräfte. Dieser Kontrast verweist auf die sprichwörtliche Macht der Bilder, welche die jeweiligen Bedingungen von Handlungsmöglichkeiten vorstrukturieren.
Often adopting a feminist perspective, the sociological literature on migrant domestic services (MDS) does not make explicit which feminist paradigm it speaks from. This article situates this literature within ongoing debates in feminist theory, in particular the tension between materialist and poststructuralist approaches. Then, it discusses the empirical relevance of each of those two paradigms on the example of the results of original research into the personalization of employment relationships in MDS.
The contribution proposes a new way of making sense of the diversity of feminist theories, distinguishing between modern and postmodern approaches. Indeed, since the 1980s, feminist theory in the US and Western Europe has undergone a ‘postmodern turn’, which renders previous typologies much less up-to-speed with recent developments in the field. Then, the article examines which paradigms are implicit in the sociological literature on MDS. Initially, personalization in MDS was mainly seen in materialist terms, as a way to maximize the quantity and quality of labour (including emotional labour) extracted from domestic workers. The emergence of postmodern approaches in feminist theory set off a progressive shift in MDS literature. First, this literature showed that personalization also fulfils identity functions for employers and
workers, then it widened its focus to include the affective dimensions of domestic labour (not to be confused with emotional labour). The final section shows how modern and postmodern feminist approaches can be combined within a single research, on the example of original research on personalization in MDS in Belgium and Poland. In particular, the contribution shows that the distinction between material functions of personalization on the one hand, and its emotional/identity functions on the other is not empirically operative. Indeed, migrant domestic workers generally use emotional/identity categories to frame material questions, and vice versa. This final part shows that, rather than representing incompatible approaches, modern and postmodern feminisms complete each other, in this case showing a fuller image of personalization processes in MDS.
This paper reviews social network analysis (SNA) as a method to be utilized in biographical research which is a novel contribution. We argue that applying SNA in the context of biography research through standardized data collection as well as visualization of networks can open up participants’ interpretations of relations throughout their lives, and allow a creative and innovative way of data collection that is responsive to participants’ own meanings and associations while allowing the researchers to conduct systematical data analysis. The paper discusses the analytical potential of SNA in biographical research, where the efficacy of this method is critically discussed, together with its limitations, and its potential within the context of biographical research.
What processes transform (im)mobile individuals into ‘migrants’ and geographic movements across political-territorial borders into ‘migration’? To address this question, the article develops the doing migration approach, which combines perspectives from social constructivism, praxeology and the sociologies of knowledge and culture. ‘Doing migration’ starts with the processes of social attribution that differentiate between ‘migrants’ and ‘non-migrants’. Embedded in institutional, organizational and interactional routines these attributions generate unique social orders of migration. By illustrating these conceptual ideas, the article provides insights into the elements of the contemporary European order of ‘migration’. Its institutional routines contribute to the emergence of a European migration regime that involves narratives of economization, securitization and humanitarization. The organizational routines of the European migration order involve surveillance and diversity management, which have disciplining effects on those defined as ‘migrants’. The routines of everyday face-to-face interactions produce various micro-forms of doing ‘migration’ through stigmatization and othering, but they also provide opportunities to resist a social attribution as ‘migrant’.
Large companies are increasingly on trial. Over the last decade, many of the world’s biggest firms have been embroiled in legal disputes over corruption charges, financial fraud, environmental damage, taxation issues or sanction violations, ending in convictions or settlements of record-breaking fines, well above the billion-dollar mark. For critics of globalization, this turn towards corporate accountability is a welcome sea-change showing that multinational companies are no longer above the law. For legal experts, the trend is noteworthy because of the extraterritorial dimensions of law enforcement, as companies are increasingly held accountable for activities independent of their nationality or the place of the activities. Indeed, the global trend required understanding the evolution of corporate criminal law enforcement in the United States in particular, where authorities have skillfully expanded its effective jurisdiction beyond its territory. This paper traces the evolution of corporate prosecutions in the United States. Analyzing federal prosecution data, it then shows that foreign firms are more likely to pay a fine, which is on average 6,6 times larger.
Highly-skilled labour migration in Switzerland: household strategies and professional careers
(2016)
The article investigates household strategies in the context of highly-skilled labour migration. It focuses on the ways highly-skilled migrants are taking up residence in Switzerland. The analysis shows different household strategies based on the perception of a further professional move. The perceived likeliness of a further move implies household strategies characterized by a high motility: the household remains ready to move and mobilises dedicated organisations (like outplacement agencies or international schools). When a further move is neither perceived nor wanted, the household develops more anchored strategies which are often cheaper. In order to cope with frequent mobilities, the analysis shows that household strategies are deeply gendered.
In my paper I take issue with proponents of ‘intersectionality’ which believe that a theoretical concept cannot/should not be detached from its original context of invention. Instead, I argue that the traveling of theory in a global context automatically involves appropriations, amendment and changes in response to the original meaning. However, I reject the idea that ‘intersectionality’ can be used as a freefloating signifier; on the contrary, it has to be embedded in the respective (historical, social, cultural) context in which it is used. I will start by mapping some of the current debates engaging with the pros and cons of the global implementation of the concept (the controversy about master categories, the dispute about the centrality of ‘race’, and the argument about the amendment of categories). I will then turn to my own use of ‘intersectionality’ as a methodological tool (elaborated in Lutz and Davis 2005). Here, we shifted attention from how structures of racism, class discrimination and sexism determine individuals’ identities and practices to how individuals ongoingly and flexibly negotiate their multiple and converging identities in the context of everyday life. Introducing the term doing intersectionality we explored how individuals creatively and often in surprising ways draw upon various aspects of their multiple identities as a resource to gain control over their lives.
In my paper I will show how ‘gender’ or ‘ethnicity’ are invariably linked to structures of domination, but can also mobilize or deconstruct disempowering discourses, even undermine and transform oppressive practices.
My aim in this paper is to make the debates about epistemic injustice fruitful for an analysis of trust in the knowledge of others. Epistemic trust is understood here in a broad sense: not only as trust in scientific knowledge or expert knowledge, but also as trust in implicit, positioned and experience-based knowledge. Using insights from discussions of epistemic injustice, I argue for three interrelated theses:
1. Questions of epistemic trust and trustworthiness cannot be answered with reference to individual virtue alone; rather, they have a structural component.
2. The rationality of epistemic trust must be analyzed against the background of social structures and social relations of domination.
3. Epistemic trust is (also) a political phenomenon and epistemically just relations depend on political transformation processes that promote equality.
This contribution1 is framed within the field of cultural studies and migration and ethnic relations, trying to examine how the Italian American experience has been imaginatively (re)created and received. It will entail an interdisciplinary approach about the cultural and literary analysis of the Italian diaspora in the United States, from a gender perspective that recovers the voice and historical presence of women as has been transmitted in the arts and critical methods. Focusing on the media and literary representations that deal with Italian migration to the United States since the last decades of the 19th century, their welcome or later development until our days, I make particular reference to a community mainly conceived in the masculine, as major receptions and persistent stereotypes about family relations and ethnicity attest. I will analyse, at the same time, the existence of other works that either contest or balance that cultural and gender stereotyping of the Italian American experience or community.