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The Russian invasion of Ukraine illustrates the increasingly judicialized nature of international relations and geopolitics. By viewing aspects of the invasion as illegal – in particular through the identification of war crimes and crimes against humanity – the international response draws attention to the political geographies of international criminal investigation. Human rights groups, academics, journalists, and open-source forensic investigations have joined forces to collect, evaluate and analyze the violent nature of war crimes. While similar shifts in evidence gathering have been observed in the case of the Bosnia-Herzegovina war and the Assad regime's violence against Syrian citizens, the use of evidence-gathering technologies and evidence-securing institutions in the case of Ukraine is distinctive. In this scholarly intervention we seek to illustrate the intimate geopolitics of evidence gathering by zooming in on two different elements that shape evidential procedures in Ukraine: i) the blurring of civilian/military boundaries; and ii) the challenges of access. By evaluating what is new and what is similar to previous war sites, we suggest that these two areas reflect a geopolitics of evidence gathering, highlighting its global-local intimacies. Both these areas are well positioned to foster new research on the (geo)legal nature of war crimes in political geography and beyond.
While it is extraordinarily difficult to theoretically specify privacy, in the last 100 years or so (social) psychology, philosophy, communication studies, economics, and, to a lesser degree, also sociology and anthropology, provided attempts to conceptualize its meaning. Be that as it may, from the 1960s onwards privacy discourse has focused upon data, understood as “personal information”, to a certain extent because of the advent of huge databases and information and communication technologies (ICTs). Influential scholarship at the present time tends to conceive of ICT-related privacy in terms of the “sociotechnical”, thus highlighting the interlocking of human and technical agency. Although having developed a manifold of instruments to research sociotechnical phenomena, STS engagement with sociotechnical privacy, so far, has been rather low-key. In our contribution we therefore provide a mapping of the research landscape, identify connecting factors between STS and sociotechnical privacy research, and calling for further STS contributions.
Highlights
• Family structure transitions decrease academic school track attendance among children of less educated parents.
• Children of highly educated fathers in single-mother families also have lower outcomes.
• Reduced income and increased exposure to poverty are relevant mediators.
• There is no cumulative disadvantage linked to a further transition to a stepfamily.
• Previous parental separation does not affect educational outcomes for children residing with a highly educated stepfather.
Abstract
Recent research has documented that the effect of parental separation on children’s educational outcomes depends on socioeconomic background. Yet, parental separation could lead to a stable single-parent family or to a further transition to a stepfamily. Little is known about how the effect of family structure transitions on educational outcomes depends on the education of parents and stepparents, and there has been limited empirical research into the mechanisms that explain heterogeneity in the effects of family transitions. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and models with entropy balancing and sibling fixed effects, I explore the heterogeneous effects of family transitions during early and middle childhood on academic secondary school track attendance, grades and aspirations. I find that family transitions only reduce the academic school track attendance among children of less educated parents living in stepfamilies or with a single mother after parental separation, and among children of highly educated fathers living in single-mother families. The mechanisms that partly explain these effects relate to reduced income and exposure to poverty after parental separation. The findings underscore the importance of considering the stepparent's educational level, indicating that the adverse consequences of parental separation on educational outcomes are mitigated when a highly educated stepfather becomes part of the family. Overall, these findings align more closely with the resource perspective than the family stability perspective.
In the life sciences, there is an ongoing discussion about a perceived ‘reproducibility crisis’. However, it remains unclear to which extent the perceived lack of reproducibility is the consequence of issues that can be tackled and to which extent it may be the consequence of unrealistic expectations of the technical level of reproducibility. Large-scale, multi-institutional experimental replication studies are very cost- and time-intensive. This Perspective suggests an alternative, complementary approach: meta-research using sociological and philosophical methodologies to examine researcher trust in data. An improved understanding of the criteria used by researchers to judge data reliability will provide crucial, initial evidence on the actual scale of the reproducibility crisis and on measures to tackle it.
Korean immigrants have migrated to New Zealand over the past three decades in search of a happier and more balanced life. While they anticipated that their children would be integrated into New Zealand society, they have primarily settled in Korean ethnic enclaves. In this context, younger Korean New Zealanders have been exposed to and influenced by New Zealand’s national and Korean ethnic cultures. This study examined success beliefs and well-being among Korean youth in New Zealand with a Third Culture Kid background (TCK K-NZ) in comparison to Korean youth in Korea (K-Korean) and European New Zealand youth (Pākehā). Results indicated that TCK K-NZ youth endorsed extrinsic success similarly to K-Korean youth, but that valuing extrinsic success predicted lowered well-being only for K-Korean youth. Conversely, valuing intrinsic success predicted higher well-being across the three groups. Results also revealed that TCK K-NZ youth's well-being levels were between those of K-Korean and Pākehā youth, potentially influenced by different structural relations between success beliefs and well-being, as well as their position as “third culture kids” in New Zealand. This study contributes to understanding cultures' roles in formulating success beliefs and the relationship between success beliefs and well-being for Korean New Zealander youth.
Does political conflict with another country influence domestic consumers' daily consumption choices? We exploit the volatile US-China relations in 2018 and 2019 to analyze whether US consumers reduce their visits to Chinese restaurants when bilateral relations deteriorate. We measure the degree of political conflict through negativity in media reports and rely on smartphone location data to measure daily visits to over 190,000 US restaurants. A deterioration in US-China relations induces a significant decline in visits not only to Chinese but also to other foreign ethnic restaurants, while visits to typical American restaurants increase. We identify consumers' age, race, and cultural openness to moderate the strength of this ethnocentric effect.
Research around the “glass escalator” demonstrates that men receive promotions faster than women in women-dominated occupations. However, it remains unclear how overall establishment composition affects the glass escalator. We use German longitudinal linked employer-employee data (LIAB) between 2012 and 2019 to examine how occupational and establishment gender composition shape gender differences in promotions to management. Establishment gender composition moderates the glass escalator, meaning women's mobility disadvantages in women-dominated jobs are most pronounced in men-dominated establishments. We hypothesize that changing occupational status is a central mechanism: When occupations mirror the composition of the establishment, their status increases locally. Higher occupational status offsets lower leadership expectations attributed to women and increases women's promotion odds relative to their male colleagues.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine illustrates the increasingly judicialized nature of international relations and geopolitics. By viewing aspects of the invasion as illegal – in particular through the identification of war crimes and crimes against humanity – the international response draws attention to the political geographies of international criminal investigation. Human rights groups, academics, journalists, and open-source forensic investigations have joined forces to collect, evaluate and analyze the violent nature of war crimes. While similar shifts in evidence gathering have been observed in the case of the Bosnia-Herzegovina war and the Assad regime's violence against Syrian citizens, the use of evidence-gathering technologies and evidence-securing institutions in the case of Ukraine is distinctive. In this scholarly intervention we seek to illustrate the intimate geopolitics of evidence gathering by zooming in on two different elements that shape evidential procedures in Ukraine: i) the blurring of civilian/military boundaries; and ii) the challenges of access. By evaluating what is new and what is similar to previous war sites, we suggest that these two areas reflect a geopolitics of evidence gathering, highlighting its global-local intimacies. Both these areas are well positioned to foster new research on the (geo)legal nature of war crimes in political geography and beyond.
Amidst the growing interest in enhancing the academic understanding of the relationships between e-shopping and transport, a key element remains underexplored – the impact of e-shopping on spatial accessibility to in-store retail. The paper studies variations in multimodal accessibility to in-store retail between e-shopper groups and the associated spatial effects. The research is based on a face-to-face questionnaire, administered in the city of Alcalá de Henares (Madrid Metropolitan Area, Spain), which provides data on socio-economic characteristics, e-shopping habits, and travel time preferences to reach in-store retail. Clustering techniques serve to identify three e-shopper groups: occasional e-shoppers with a car, infrequent e-shoppers with a car, and frequent e-shoppers without a car. A comparison of e-shopper distance-decay functions to reach in-store retail is made, revealing significant differences between the three e-shopper groups for car and public transport for any time interval. However, for walking such differences are limited to time intervals between 10 and 40 minutes. Distance-decay functions are processed through a gravity-based model, identifying three main multimodal accessibility places: highly resistant places to e-shopping, moderately resistant places, and vulnerable places. Places that are highly resistant to e-shopping are mainly located in the city centre, while vulnerable places are mostly found in the city’s periphery. The paper closes with concluding remarks on policymaking and a few pathways for future research.
Highlights
• We present a novel alternative to the die-in-the-cup experiment.
• Participants’ payoffs depend on their reported mothers’ birthdays.
• We find that subjects lied to obtain real monetary payoffs.
• The extent of lying is small and insensitive to several design variations.
Abstract
We ask a representative sample of German household decision-makers to enter their mother's birthday, with potential payments depending on the month and the day they state. Thus, we create an incentive to lie. Compared to the die-under-the-cup experiment, our alternative has a lower probability that the income-maximizing outcome is true. Furthermore, it is better suited for online surveys and samples in which gambling is socially stigmatized. We conduct different variations of this game to crystalize design recommendations for researchers interested in our tool. Participants lied to receive higher payoffs, but only with real monetary incentives and only to a relatively small extent. Our results are largely insensitive to several design elements that we vary, such as the probability of being paid and the magnitude of the payoffs.
The question of whether nuclear energy—as a source with relatively low carbon dioxide emissions—can be classified as a sustainable energy source has come into focus in connection with climate change. There is a controversy over securing independence from fossil fuels and gas supplies from other countries through a revival of nuclear energy. On the other hand, some viewpoints are critical: the handling of nuclear waste and the still unclear risks to human health and the environment, especially in light of recent perils from Russian military attacks on Ukrainian nuclear plants. To evaluate the worldwide publications on nuclear energy under health and environmental aspects, socio-economic parameters were included to provide an informed background for all stakeholders, from scientists to decision-makers. The correlation between the number of nuclear power plants and the publication output of the countries is proven to be highly significant. Thus, the operating countries publish the most. It has been shown that the development and economic use of nuclear energy are major stimuli for scientific endeavors. Reactor accidents have also spurred research. Mathematical risk modeling has been the area with the highest citation rate to date, but environmental and health aspects have become more important, especially after major accidents. The results show the importance of economic interests in research on nuclear energy from health and environmental aspects. Against the background of transnational hazards, global research participation should be encouraged. Moreover, the international debate should not ignore the reality of threats and their possible impacts.
Evaluating spatial inequalities using a single walking accessibility measure is quite challenging. In response, the paper proposes combining two accessibility measures (real and potential) to provide additional insights into the identification and mapping of spatial inequalities. The municipality of Getafe in the Madrid Metropolitan Area, Spain serves as a case study. A questionnaire, administered via face-to-face interviews, recorded the resident’s walking preferences for reaching in-store retail. A gravity-based model was used to calculate real and potential accessibilities, which were combined to map four accessibility places that originate spatial inequalities: advantageous, moderately advantageous, moderately disadvantageous, and disadvantageous. The results suggest that potential accessibility values are higher than real accessibility values, and the final map shows the city centre residents (mostly seniors) benefit from the advantageous accessibility places. Disadvantageous places are mainly found in the city’s periphery, where younger people live.
Recent research finds that Muslim girls increasingly have in-group friendships in adolescence, while Muslim boys remain more open to interreligious friendships. This gender gap mirrors established findings of female Muslims’ lower involvement in interreligious romantic relationships, which is attributed to gendered religious norms. In this study, we examine whether gendered religious norms also contribute to the emerging gender gap in Muslim youths’ interreligious friendship-making. Building on the literature on intergroup dating, we identify religiosity, parental control, and leisure time activities as key factors through which religious norms may not only constrain Muslim girls’ intergroup romantic relationships, but also their interreligious friendships. We also examine the contribution of gendered experiences of religious discrimination and rejection by non-Muslims to religious friendship-making. We study 737 Muslim youth from age 11–17 with six waves of longitudinal German data and find that religiosity, parental control, and leisure time activities all contribute to the emerging gender gap in interreligious friendship-making. Religiosity is associated with more in-group friendships, but only rises among Muslim girls in adolescence, not among boys. By contrast, parental control increases among both genders, but it only constrains girls’ interreligious friendships. Muslim girls’ declining participation in clubs also is associated with fewer interreligious friendships. Gendered experiences of religious discrimination and rejection do not contribute to the gender gap. Jointly, these factors explain one third of the emerging gender gap in interreligious friendship-making. This finding suggests that gendered religious norms not only limit interreligious romantic relationships but also interreligious friendships of Muslim girls.
The 2011 Arab Spring marked the opening of the Central Mediterranean Route for irregular border crossings between Libya and Italy, which produced heterogeneous reductions of bilateral smuggling distances between country pairs in the Mediterranean region. We exploit this source of spatial and temporal variation in bilateral distance along land and sea routes to estimate the elasticity of irregular migration intentions for African and Near East countries. We estimate an elasticity of migration intentions to smuggling distances exceeding −3, mainly driven by countries with weak rule of law and high internet penetration. Our findings are consistent across irregular migration measures both at the aggregate and individual levels. We show that irregular migration elasticity is higher for youth, relatively skilled individuals and those with an informative advantage (having a social network abroad or a mobile phone).
By comparing two distinct governmental organizations (the US military and NASA) this paper unpacks two main issues. On the one hand, the paper examines the transcripts that are produced as part of work activities in these worksites and what the transcripts reveal about the organizations themselves. Additionally, the paper analyses what the transcripts disclose about the practices involved in their creation and use for practical purposes in these organizations. These organizations have been chosen as transcription forms a routine part of how they operate as worksites. Further, the everyday working environments in both organizations involve complex technological systems, as well as multi-party interactions in which speakers are frequently spatially and visually separated. In order to explicate these practices, the article draws on the transcription methods employed in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis research as a comparative resource. In these approaches audio-video data is transcribed in a fine-grained manner that captures temporal aspects of talk, as well as how speech is delivered. Using these approaches to transcription as an analytical device enables us to investigate when and why transcripts are produced by the US military and NASA in the specific ways that they are, as well as what exactly is being re-presented in the transcripts and thus what was treated as worth transcribing in the interactions they are intended to serve as documents of. By analysing these transcription practices it becomes clear that these organizations create huge amounts of audio-video “data” about their routine activities. One major difference between them is that the US military selectively transcribe this data (usually for the purposes of investigating incidents in which civilians might have been injured), whereas NASA’s “transcription machinery” aims to capture as much of their mission-related interactions as is organizationally possible (i.e., within the physical limits and capacities of their radio communications systems). As such the paper adds to our understanding of transcription practices and how this is related to the internal working, accounting and transparency practices within different kinds of organization. The article also examines how the original transcripts have been used by researchers (and others) outside of the organizations themselves for alternative purposes.
The paper reports on research that investigates older men's care practices and how their caring for others opens new ways of exploring the intersections of aging, gender, and care work. Using the concept caring masculinities as a sensitizing concept, the onus is on exploring patterns of power, interdependence, and relationality within men's care practices. Aging masculinities often remain constructed around paid-for occupational work (in opposition to unpaid care work) despite the transition into retirement. Little work exists on how caring is at work in later life potentially transforming gender relations and enacted masculinities. Moreover, much of the research on aging masculinities have not considered the expansiveness of retirement and the discourses as well as subjective expectations around the activity in later life that create an uncertain terrain of socioculturally structured mandates to be navigated. This paper draws on data from two qualitative interview studies conducted with retired men in England and Germany, in which the role of caregiving emerged as an inductive theme in their narratives. The paper makes a specific contribution to developing empirical and theoretical knowledge of caring masculinities and power relations by providing insights on men's trajectories into caring, and how they make sense of their caring for and about others.
For some years, the German public has been debating the case of migrant workers receiving German benefits for children living abroad, which has been scandalised as a case of “benefit tourism.” This points to a failure to recognise a striking imbalance between the output of the German welfare state to migrants and the input it receives from migrant domestic workers. In this article I discuss how this input is being rendered invisible or at least underappreciated by sexist, racist, and classist practices of othering. To illustrate the point, I will use examples from two empirical research projects that looked into how families in Germany outsource various forms of reproductive work to both female and male migrants from Eastern Europe. Drawing on the concept of othering developed in feminist and postcolonial literature and their ideas of how privileges and disadvantages are interconnected, I will put this example into the context of literature on racism, gender, and care work migration. I show how migrant workers fail to live up to the normative standards of work, family life, and gender relations and norms set by a sedentary society. A complex interaction of supposedly “natural” and “objective” differences between “us” and “them” are at work to justify everyday discrimination against migrants and their institutional exclusion. These processes are also reflected in current political and public debates on the commodification and transnationalisation of care.
Highlights
• Parents with and without migration background differ in educational knowledge.
• Parents with migration background have less educational knowledge on average.
• Variations in educational knowledge by immigrant groups.
• Social and cultural resources are central to explaining knowledge differences.
• Acculturation strategies prove to be of little relevance.
Abstract
Although extant research persistently highlights the importance of information for educational decision-making, better understanding the existence of, and the underlying reasons for, informational differences between immigrant and non-immigrant parents is important. This study examines the differences in the level of information between immigrant and non-immigrant parents of third graders just before they make probably their most important educational decision in the German education system. We draw on approaches highlighting the importance of resources and parents’ acculturation to explain the informational differences between immigrant and non-immigrant parents. Employing linear regression and probability models on data from the National Educational Panel Study in Germany (N = 3961), we demonstrate that all immigrant groups, particularly those from Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and northern Africa, are significantly less informed than parents without own immigration experience. This result is evident both in our overall test and in various domains of the test, which analyze different aspects of information relevant to parents’ educational decision-making. Furthermore, different endowments with social and cultural capital largely explain the informational differences between parents with and without an immigrant background. In contrast, different acculturation strategies are almost negligible in explaining the differences in the level of information. Our findings provide important insights for research on migration-related inequalities in educational decision-making and for developing interventions to improve migrant parents’ ability to make well-informed and thus intended educational decisions.
During the last 15 years most central and east european countries faced an era of institutional, economic and demographic transition. With the fall of the wall and the end of the Soviet Union, the former socialist countries transformed their political, economic and social institutions; today, some of them are already a member state of the European Union. The re- unificated Germany was not only affected by this process in its eastern part, the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), where the political and institutional structures were entirely exchanged; with the end of the “Rheinische Bundesrepublik”, the incarnation of a welfare and growth oriented Fordist society, also former West Germany had to adapt to this transition and still is facing a process of institutional modernisation.
Facing the challenges of motorised traffic, many cities around the globe started implementing measures to transform their urban transport systems. One of the major challenges for the success of adequate policies is not only their effectiveness but also whether they are accepted by city residents. With a quantitative case study in four neighbourhoods in Frankfurt am Main (N = 821), this article investigates the acceptability of three measures: (i) parking management, (ii) the conversion of car lanes into cycle lanes and (iii) the closure of an inner city arterial road to car traffic. The results show a surprisingly high acceptability for all measures if the benefits for local residents are tangible. Thus, successful policy packages may combine push measures with either pull measures, as suggested frequently in the literature, or with improvements for other land uses (e.g. re-using former car-parking spaces for non-transport purposes, such as greenery or seating areas). Furthermore, the perceived effectiveness, daily travel practices and intentions to reduce car use, the built environment and, to a lesser degree, socio-demographics explain differences in acceptability by population group.
Highlights
- Cost-free ticket increases public transport use even when the share was high beforehand
- Free tickets are more effective than just a price reduction (zero-price effect)
- Low income, female and older employees benefit the most
- Not only travel behaviour but also attitudes change
- Cost-free public transport is one component in a set of travel demand management tools
Abstract
To increase its attractiveness for employees, to save costs regarding parking supply and to foster modal shift away from the car, employers can offer sharply cost-reduced public transport tickets. In the state of Hesse/Germany, public authorities have gone one step further by introducing a cost-free public transport ticket for all state employees. We argue that the step from sharply cost-reduced to cost-free is more than just a monetary difference. The aim of this study is to assess whether the ticket is actually affecting employees and what changed their travel behaviour. Therefore, we have analysed a two-wave survey conducted at Goethe University in Frankfurt: one from before and one from after the introduction of the new ticket. The results show a substantial increase in the use of public transport (pt) for commuting and other trip purposes. Car use and availability, however, did not decrease. In particular, those who had no cost-reduced jobticket beforehand switched to public transport after the introduction. Furthermore, we identified increasing public transport use for low-income employees (inclusion hypothesis) and several indicators pointing towards a more multimodal behaviour (multimodal hypothesis).
Highlights:
• Evaluation of three cycle street designs by means of visualisation assessments.
• Shared space is evaluated as the safest and most attractive cycle street design.
• The conventional urban street design is perceived as the most clearly structured.
• Affinity towards walking and cycling favours a positive evaluation of shared space.
Abstract
Cycle streets have been implemented in many urban areas around the world in recent years to make cycling safer and more attractive. In these streets, cyclists have priority over motorised traffic. They are allowed to use the entire roadway and determine traffic speed. However, there have been no standardised design guidelines for cycle streets to date. Moreover, there is limited understanding of the individual perception of different cycle street designs. Yet, positive evaluations of safety and attractiveness are especially important for pleasant travel in public spaces. Therefore, this study examines the individual perceptions of three cycle street designs: conventional, flow and shared space. Visualisations of these designs were implemented in a written household survey conducted in the urban Rhine-Main metropolitan region in Germany (n = 701). Participants were asked to assess the different designs in terms of safety, clarity, attractiveness and fun. Furthermore, bivariate analyses and regression models were performed to investigate whether individual travel preferences and attitudes, regular mode use and socio-demographic characteristics affect assessments of the designs. The results show that the shared space design is rated as the safest, most attractive and most fun. The conventional cycle street is evaluated as the most clearly structured. Individual affinity towards cycling and walking favours a good evaluation of the shared space design, while a high car affinity and having a migrant background positively affect the assessment of the conventional design. In addition, younger participants and members of households without a car assess the flow design more favourably.
Highlights
• Applies a biographically inspired practice-theoretical approach to understand everyday mobility from car-reduced neighborhoods.
• Investigates various ‘contexts’ and ‘practice bundles’ that shape car-(in)dependent mobility practices.
• Material, personal-temporal, and socio-cultural contexts of residents’ travel behavior in car-reduced neighborhoods stabilize and support car-independent mobility.
• The meanings (including emotions and feelings) of mobility practices determine their performance type.
• Calls for more car-reduced planning for the transition to low-carbon mobility.
Abstract
Lately, transport researchers and practitioners are showing renewed interest in car-reduced neighborhoods and their residents’ mobility to investigate possible factors influencing sustainable transport. With a biographically inspired practice-theoretical approach, this study considers the ‘context of travel behavior’ and, thus, focuses on mobility as a ‘practice’ in order to improve the understanding of everyday mobility as well as the potential and limitations of implementing car-reduced housing. Based on qualitative interviews with residents of two German car-reduced neighborhoods, we first identify different compositions of materials, competences, and meanings (including the feelings and emotions) of car-(in)dependent mobility practices. Second, we discover the personal, social, temporal, and socio-structural circumstances of the residents’ travel behavior alongside ‘practice bundles’ that interact with car-(in)dependent mobility. Finally, our findings indicate, on the one hand, that the car-centric material context outside car-reduced neighborhoods, the incorporation of private car driving with the practice of everyday life, and the affective satisfaction with car use and ownership negatively influence car independence. On the other hand, our results highlight that residential location and its materiality in the case of car-reduced housing developments, as well as the personal-temporal and socio-cultural contexts of their residents’ mobility practices stabilize and support car independence and low-carbon mobility.
Highlights
• Compares narratives and mobility-related practices of car-reduced neighborhoods.
• Identifies commonalities and differences between the ideal vision and the lived practice of car independency.
• The article concludes that a 'post-car system' requires continuous material and immaterial change.
• This can be fostered by political and planning readiness, as well as local willingness and public acceptability.
• Overall, this study reveals the exemplary role of car-reduced neighborhoods for mobility transition.
Abstract
In the pursuit of sustainability, the concept of ‘car-reduced neighborhoods’ promises to decrease car ownership and increase car-independent mobility. However, mobility is not only designed from ‘above’ by planners and policymakers, but also shaped from ‘below’ by its practitioners and their contexts. Only a few studies currently bring together the perspective from ‘above’ and ‘below’ regarding car-reduced neighborhoods. This article therefore combines both perspectives by contrasting the narratives and the mobility-related practices of two German car-reduced urban residential areas. Firstly, we conduct interviews with various actors involved in the planning and implementation of both neighborhoods to identify the narratives. Secondly, we interview the residents to determine the mobility-related practices. Finally, we compare both empirical investigations to analyze the commonalities and differences of the ‘planning vision’ and the ‘lived practice’ of car-free living, car-independent mobility, and restrictive car parking. Although this study identifies differences between the two perspectives, the discrepancy is smaller than evaluated in earlier studies. After relocating to a car-reduced neighborhood, residents tend to maintain, strengthen, and adapt car-independent mobility practices rather than weakening car-independent mobility practices and maintaining car-dependent ones. Thus, residents seem to be encouraged to drive less and to leave their cars parked for most of the time. However, relocating to a car-reduced neighborhood does not automatically initiate full demotorization. Furthermore, residents' parking practices also sometimes deviate from the planning vision. Consequently, the article concludes that overcoming the ‘system’ of automobility for a ‘post-car system’ requires continuous (i) material and (ii) immaterial change fostered by political and planning readiness, as well as local willingness and public acceptability. In this regard, car-reduced neighborhoods can be seen as blueprints for a mobility transition.
Highlights
• Explanation of mobility design and its practical, aesthetic and emblematic effects on travel behaviour.
• Review of recent studies on mobility design elements and the promotion of non-motorised travel.
• Discussion of research gaps and methodological challenges of data collection and comparability.
Abstract
To promote non-motorised travel, many travel behaviour studies acknowledge the importance of the built environment to modal choice, for example with its density or mix of uses. From a mobility design theory perspective, however, objects and environments affect human perceptions, assessments and behaviour in at least three different ways: by their practical, aesthetic and emblematic functions. This review of existing evidence will argue that travel behaviour research has so far mainly focused on the practical function of the built environment. For that purpose, we systematically identified 56 relevant studies on the impacts of the built environment on non-motorised travel behaviour in the Web of Science database. The focus of research on the practical design function primary involves land use distribution, street network connectivity and the presence of walking and cycling facilities. Only a small number of papers address the aesthetic and emblematic functions. These show that the perceived attractiveness of an environment and evoked feelings of traffic safety increase the likelihood of walking and cycling. However, from a mobility design perspective, the results of the review indicate a gap regarding comprehensive research on the effects of the aesthetic and emblematic functions of the built environment. Further research involving these functions might contribute to a better understanding of how to promote non-motorised travel more effectively. Moreover, limitations related to survey techniques, regional distribution and the comparability of results were identified.
Highlights
• Typology of low-income families by their daily travel practices.
• The competence to finance, organise or borrow materials needed for travel enhance low-income families' mobility options.
• Low-income families' social networks can compensate transport disadvantages through direct and indirect financial support.
• Low-income families experience transport-related social exclusion.
Abstract
Being mobile is essential to participate in social life. However, as transport involves costs, this is a particular challenge for people on low incomes. Households with children are, especially, at an increased risk of poverty. To provide a deeper understanding of how financial poverty affects the daily travel practices of low-income families and how they cope with their limited financial resources, we conducted 16 qualitative problem-centred interviews with low-income families in Ronnenberg (Hanover Region, Germany). Although all the interviewees have to cope with limited financial resources, their daily travel practices differ. We identify four types of daily travel practices for these families: (1) car-centred, (2) car-reduced, (3) public transport oriented and (4) non-motorised. For a more detailed analysis on how poverty affects transport and participation, we use the practice theory perspective (Shove et al., 2012). Our analysis highlights that the car plays a significant role despite poverty for some families. However, other low-income families manage their daily life with public transport and non-motorised modes only. Our results show that low-income households with children have several strategies for organising and financing their daily travel practices. One strategy is direct and indirect support for travel from their social network. Furthermore, some families forgo leisure activities with entrance fees or higher travel costs.
Highlights
• Investigates the effect of a nearly fare-free public transport ticket.
• In-depth analysis of the 9-Euro-Ticket using qualitative empirical research.
• Low-income people's mobility and social participation benefits from affordable PT.
• This study reveals six main findings of interest for policy and practice.
From June to August 2022, the financial barrier to public transport use almost completely disappeared in Germany due to the 9-Euro-Ticket. It enabled anyone with access to public transport infrastructure across Germany to use public transport for 9 euros per person per month. As this completely changed the conditions for public transport use, especially for low-income households with children, the following research questions arise: (1) what effect does the 9-Euro-Ticket have on the travel practices and social participation of low-income households with children? (2) how and by what were the travel practices shaped by the 9-Euro-Ticket? and (3) what happened to the interviewees’ travel practices after the measure expired? To answer these questions, twelve qualitative interviews were conducted with low-income households with children in the Hanover region.
This study found that the 9-Euro-Ticket removed the financial constraint of public transport use, changed the travel practices of most interviewees and had a wide range of positive meanings. The respondents associate the 9-Euro-Ticket with freedom, joy at being able to offer their children something, along with financial and psychological relief. Additionally, the 9-Euro-Ticket enabled the interviewees to engage in leisure activities, to visit relatives, contributed to integration, had an empowering effect, especially for women and children, and thus represents a measure to increase social participation. After the three months of the 9-Euro-Ticket, financing public transport use challenges low-income households again and financial constraints prevent them from reaching certain places and engaging in out-of-home activities.
This study investigates a historical event that occurred during the Indonesian Revolution as depicted in Indonesian historical films and argues that these films not only attempt to depict the past but also use the past as a means of social commentary, teaching moral insight, and historical reinforcement. The historical films selected are The Long March (Darah dan Do’a) (1950) and Mereka Kembali (1972). Both films deal with the Long March event experienced by the troops of the Siliwangi Division in 1948. These troops were previously assigned to infiltrate Yogyakarta and its surrounding areas. They were instructed to march back to their original base in West Java as a part of the military strategies to confront the Dutch during the Indonesian Revolution, also known as the Indonesian War of Independence. This event became known as the Long March of the Siliwangi Division. This study examines not only the representation of the past or the texts of the films but also the production process, which includes the motivations of the filmmakers and the public reception when the films were screened for the public at the time—in 1950 and 1972, respectively. This approach provides a broader and richer dimension, valuable insights into the behind-the-scenes process of making the selected historical films, and essential information about the public reception of the films. From the production point of view, there are two main reasons for making these historical films: personal reason and social engagement. Further, the military also plays a vital role in these historical film productions. From the historical representation aspect, these two films depict the events of the Long March of the Siliwangi Division as a journey full of various obstacles and difficulties, such as harsh terrain, lack of food, battles against the Dutch, and internal disputes with fellow Indonesians: Darul Islam. From the reception aspect, the audience’s point of view, these films provide several representations that meet their expectations about the Long March of the Siliwangi Division. However, the audience disagrees with some of the other representations. Finally, the study revealed that historical films are potential vehicles for telling, interpreting, entertaining, legitimating and preserving the past. In addition, this study has a vital implication for reopening the tradition of Indonesian film studies and reigniting attention to old films.
This monograph contributes to research in content and language integrated learning (CLIL). Amidst the absence of any educational standards as well as other research deficits, Chapter II sketches a conceptual framework with a competence model for multilingual CLIL classes in the social sciences. It develops a line of argument for the promotion of global discourse competence for democratic participation within a transnational civil society. The subsequent four chapters, comprising one conceptual, one methodological and two empirical contributions, look at different aspects of the conceptual framework. Chapter III defends the developed competence model and further specifies its idea of thought in proposing the construction of multilingual 'cosmopolitan classroom glocalities' for the genesis of 21st century skills. The example of #climonomics, a multilingual EU parliamentary debate about climate change, illustrates its practical realization within school education and exemplifies the contribution to education for sustainable development (ESD) and the value of democratic and participatory learning arrangements. Chapter IV introduces design-based action research (DBAR), the method used in Chapters V & VI. DBAR is a hybrid of action and design-based research and is thereby ideally suited for bridging the gap of theory and practice in educational research. Chapter IV argues for closer cooperation between academics and practitioners, along with pragmatic stakeholder participation by involving students and teachers into research, in a quest for inductively making practical knowledge scientific. Chapter V, more language-biased, draws on the notion of translanguaging and presents the concept of 'trans-foreign-languaging' as a multilingual approach to CLIL with first language (L1) use. During six weeks DBAR, a comprehensive CLIL teaching model with judicious and principled L1 use was designed together with the study group. The model offers affordance-based and differentiated methods for different learner types. Its genesis is reconstructed by a thick description of the natural classroom dynamics. Chapter VI, rather subjectbased, asks about the influence of such bilingual language use on emotions, in particular on the formation of political judgments. It suggests different ways to measure emotions during various natural classroom settings. The chapter concludes that CLIL with L1 use has the potential to engender a perfect equilibrium of emotional and rational learning, integrating emotions into learning and valuing its positive contribution towards appropriate and multilayered political judgments. The concluding Chapter VII binds the previous chapters together and discusses the results. Criteria for the generalization of the results are assessed, and limits demarcated. It highlights the contribution to CLIL research and looks into the future, suggesting further direct classroom interventions, also with the goal to prepare the research field for larger undertakings.
Moulages are contact media – images made by contagion in the most literal sense: their production relies on a process in which the object to be reproduced is touched by the reproducing material. In the case of dermatological moulages, the plaster touches the infected skin of the sick and, once dried, serves as the negative form for the waxen image of a disease. Focussing on the collection of the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris, the article situates the production of dermatological moulages within the visual culture of 19th-century medicine and raises the question how an ancient technique of image production could become such a prevalent tool for the documentation of skin diseases during a period usually associated with the rise of scientific medicine and a reconsideration of theories of contagion in medical aetiology.
In the 21st century, the division of housework remains gendered, with women on average still spending more time doing chores than their male partners. While research has studied why this phenomenon is so persistent, few studies have yet been able to assess the effect of gender ideology and socio-economic resources at the same time, usually due to data restrictions. We use data from the pairfam, a new and innovative German panel study, in order to test the effect of absolute and relative resources as well as his and her gender ideology on the division of housework. We employ a life course perspective and analyze trajectories of couples’ housework division over time, using multi-level random effects growth curve models. We find that an egalitarian gender ideology of both him and her significantly predicts more egalitarian division-trajectories, while neither absolute nor relative resources appear to have an effect on the division of housework over time. Furthermore, our results expand the literature by investigating how these processes differ among childless couples and couples who experience the first birth.
The intergenerational transmission of gender: paternal influences on children’s gender attitudes
(2022)
Objective: This study provides the first systematic longitudinal analysis of the influence of paternal involvement in family life—across childhood and adolescence—on the gender-role attitudes of children by the age of 14 or 15.
Background: Recent research suggests that, in post-industrial societies, paternal involvement in family life is increasing. Although previous studies of paternal involvement have considered paternal influences on children's cognitive or socio-emotional development, such studies have not yet addressed paternal influences on children's attitudes toward gender. Relatedly, previous studies on the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes have analyzed maternal influences, but have neglected the significance of paternal influences. This study engages both strands of the research by analyzing the effects of paternal behaviors on children's attitudes toward gender roles.
Method: Multivariate linear regressions models were estimated on data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC); a survey with biannual observations over 10 years for 2796 children born between 1999 and 2000.
Results: Fathers' time spent on childcare during childhood was associated with gender-egalitarian attitudes in children by the age of 14 or 15. The most powerful predictor of children's gender-role attitudes, however, was the amount of time fathers spent on housework during children's adolescence, both absolute and relative to the amount of time mothers spent on housework. Fathers' unpaid labor at home was as relevant for children's gender-role attitudes as mothers' paid labor in the workforce. These results held after controlling for maternal domestic behaviors and for the gender-role attitudes of both parents.
Conclusion: Father involvement in childcare and housework during childhood and adolescence play an important role in shaping children's gender-egalitarian attitudes.
This cross-sectional study examined gender differences between male- and female-typed housework during the early COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. Participants in Germany, India, Nigeria, and South Africa (N = 823) rated their housework share before and during the lockdown, then speculated about the division of housework performed by men and women in general, before and post-lockdown. Women spent more time on female-typed tasks and men (in Nigeria and South Africa) on male-typed tasks before and during the lockdown. Irrespective of participants’ gender, they speculated that men's and women's housework was more pronounced post-lockdown than before, but we only found gender differences in South Africa and India. Gender role ideology (GRI) moderated the gender‒housework relationship in Germany, but gender did not moderate the paid work hours and housework relationship in any country. Our findings suggest that gendered housework persisted in these countries and raises concerns that this pattern is likely to continue post-lockdown.
Material gerontology poses the question of how aging processes are co-constituted in relation to different forms of (human and non-human) materiality. This paper makes a novel contribution by asking when aging processes are co-constituted and how these temporalities of aging are entangled with different forms of materiality. In this paper, we explore the entanglements of temporality and materiality in shaping later life by framing them as spacetimematters (Barad, 2013). By drawing on empirical examples from data from a qualitative case study in a long-term care (LTC) facility, we ask how the entanglement of materiality and temporality of a fall-detection sensor co-constitutes aging. We focus on two types of material temporality that came to matter in age-boundary-making practices at this site: the material temporality of a technology-in-training and the material temporality of (false) alarms. Both are interwoven, produced and reproduced through spacetimematterings that established age-boundaries. Against the backdrop of these findings, we propose to understand age(ing) as a situated, distributed, more-than-human process of practices: It emerges in an assemblage of technological innovation discourses, problematizations of demographic change, digitized and analog practices of care and caring, bodily functioning, daily routines, institutionalized spaces and much more. Finally, we discuss the role power plays in those spacetimematterings of aging and conclude with a research outlook for material gerontology.
This paper studies the intergenerational effects of parental unemployment on students’ post-secondary transitions. Besides estimating the average treatment effect of parental unemployment on transition outcomes, we identify the economic, psychological or other intra-familial mechanisms that might explain any adverse impact of parental unemployment. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and propensity score matching estimators we find that paternal unemployment has an adverse impact on the likelihood of entering tertiary education, whereas maternal unemployment does not. We also find that the magnitude of the effect depends on the duration of unemployment. Even though we are unable to fully account for the underlying mechanisms, our mediation analysis suggests that the effect of paternal unemployment is not due to the loss of income, but relates to the negative consequences of unemployment for intra-familial well-being and students’ declining optimism about their academic prospects.
Children from upper-class families have better cognitive outcomes and fewer behavioural problems than those from working-class families. Previous studies highlighted that the class gap in child development is partially driven by differences in parenting styles, but they rarely looked at multiple, more specific dimensions of parenting, i.e., inductive reasoning, parenting consistency, warmth and anger. This study provides a systematic account of how parental social class shapes these four dimensions of parenting, and how these dimensions affect children’s cognitive outcomes and behavioural problems. Using high-quality, longitudinal data, and both hybrid models and the generalized methods of moments, this study reports two main findings. First, upper-class parents significantly differ from lower-class parents in two parenting dimensions, displaying more inductive reasoning and parenting consistency, but no relevant class differences are found in the two emotion-type dimensions of parenting (i.e., warmth and anger). Second, all four parenting dimensions have a strong impact on children’s behavioural problems, while they do not affect cognitive outcomes. An exception is consistency, the only dimension that affects both types of child outcomes. The study underscores the relevance of analysing parenting and child development from a multidimensional approach to better understand how upper-class parents transmit advantage to children.
Although scholars hypothesized early on that social belonging is an important predictor for voting behavior, its role for populist voting remains empirically ambiguous and underexplored. This contribution investigates how different aspects of social belonging, that is, quality, quantity, and perception of one's own social relationships, relate to electoral abstention and to populist voting on the left and right. Employing multilevel regression models using data from four waves of the European Social Survey, this study finds that all measures of social belonging foster turnout, but they exert an incoherent influence on populist voting depending on the party's ideological leaning. While social belonging plays a subordinate role for left populist support, strong social belonging reduces the probability to support populist parties on the right. With that, the study analysis offers a nuanced view on how different dimensions of social belonging relate to electoral behavior. By doing so, this study sheds light on what aspects of social belonging encourage, or inhibit, which form of “protest at the ballot box.”
Disentangling age and schooling effects on inhibitory control development: An fNIRS investigation
(2021)
Children show marked improvements in executive functioning (EF) between 4 and 7 years of age. In many societies, this time period coincides with the start of formal school education, in which children are required to follow rules in a structured environment, drawing heavily on EF processes such as inhibitory control. This study aimed to investigate the longitudinal development of two aspects of inhibitory control, namely response inhibition and response monitoring and their neural correlates. Specifically, we examined how their longitudinal development may differ by schooling experience, and their potential significance in predicting academic outcomes. Longitudinal data were collected in two groups of children at their homes. At T1, all children were roughly 4.5 years of age and neither group had attended formal schooling. One year later at T2, one group (P1, n = 40) had completed one full year of schooling while the other group (KG, n = 40) had stayed in kindergarten. Behavioural and brain activation data (measured with functional near-infrared spectroscopy, fNIRS) in response to a Go/No-Go task and measures of academic achievement were collected. We found that P1 children, compared to KG children, showed a greater change over time in activation related to response monitoring in the bilateral frontal cortex. The change in left frontal activation difference showed a small positive association with math performance. Overall, the school environment is important in shaping the development of the brain functions underlying the monitoring of one own's performance.
Producing reliable estimates for childhood mortality rates is essential to monitor progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) and correctly evaluate policies designed to reduce childhood mortality rates. Different model-based approaches have been proposed to assess levels and trends in childhood mortality indicators. In this paper, we propose a design-based complement that accumulates birth histories across different household surveys to increase the precision of childhood mortality rates estimates. We accumulate birth histories across different cross-sectional Demographic Health Surveys/Multiple Cluster Indicator Surveys collected in Senegal and Malawi and estimate pooled childhood mortality rates based on calendar years. We show that accumulating birth histories smoothens fluctuations in time series for national and sub-national mortality rates, establishes more stable and reliable time trends, and results in estimated standard errors of the cumulated rates that are about 50–60% lower than their counterparts from separate surveys.
An interdisciplinary group of researchers from both Israel and Germany came together in December 2021 to exchange and discuss findings on the effects of the COVID-pandemic on children and older adults in Israel and Germany.This white paper provides a selection of empirical research findings, policy recommenda-tions and identified blind spots for future research with respect to a “linking ages” perspec-tive. The authors emphasize on loneliness in early and late life from a specific social science perspective and based on a selected set of definitions.
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, social restrictions and social distancing policies forced large parts of social life to take place within the household. However, comparatively little is known about how private living situations shaped individuals experiences of this crisis. To investigate this issue, we analyze how experiences and concerns vary across living arrangements along two dimensions that may be associated with social disadvantage: loneliness and care. In doing so, we employ quantitative text analysis on open-ended questions from survey data on a sample of 1,073 individuals living in Germany. We focus our analyses on four different household structures: living alone, shared living without children, living with a partner and children, and single parents. We find that single parents (who are primarily single mothers) are at high risk of experiencing care-related worries, particularly regarding their financial situation, while individuals living alone are most likely to report feelings of loneliness. Those individuals living in shared houses, with or without children, had the lowest risk of experiencing both loneliness and care-related worries. These findings illustrate that the living situation at home substantially impacts how individuals experienced and coped with the pandemic situation during the first wave of the pandemic.
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.
Over the last three decades, countries across the Andean region have moved toward legal recognition of indigenous justice systems. This turn toward legal pluralism, however, has been and continues to be heavily contested. The working paper explores a theoretical perspective that aims at analyzing and making sense of this contentious process by assessing the interplay between conflict and (mis)trust. Based on a review of the existing scholarship on legal pluralism and indigenous justice in the Andean region, with a particular focus on the cases of Bolivia and Ecuador, it is argued that manifest conflict over the contested recognition of indigenous justice can be considered as helpful and even necessary for the deconstruction of mistrust of indigenous justice. Still, such conflict can also help reproduce and even reinforce mistrust, depending on the ways in which conflict is dealt with politically and socially. The exploratory paper suggests four proposition that specify the complex and contingent relationship between conflict and (mis)trust in the contested negotiation of pluralist justice systems in the Andean region.
The article studies civil wars and trust dynamics from two perspectives. It looks, first, at rebel governance during ongoing armed conflict and, second, at mass mobilisation against the regime in post-conflict societies. Both contexts are marked by extraordinarily high degrees of uncertainty given continued, or collective memory of, violence and repression.
But what happens to trust relations under conditions of extreme uncertainty? Intuitively, one would assume that trust is shaken or even substantially eroded in such moments, as political and social orders are questioned on a fundamental level and threaten to collapse. However, while it is true that some forms of trust are under assault in situations of civil war and mass protests, we find empirical evidence which suggests that these situations also give rise to the formation of other kinds of trust. We argue that, in order to detect and explain these trust dynamics in contexts of extreme uncertainty, there should be more systematic studies of: (a) synchronous dynamics between different actors and institutions which imply trust dynamics happening simultaneously, (b) diachronous dynamics and the sequencing of trust dynamics over several phases of violent conflict or episodes of contention, as well as long-term structural legacies of the past. In both dimensions, microlevel relations, as well as their embeddedness in larger structures, help explain how episodes of (non-)violent contention become a critical juncture for political and social trust.
To fight the global problems of humanity, the United Nations has adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To achieve these goals, it is necessary that future decision-makers and stakeholders in society consider these goals to be important. Therefore, in this study, we examined how important students in 41 countries directly related to the environmental sector rated each of the 17 SDGs. Based on the analysis of these ratings, it was possible to categorize the SDGs into three higher-level factors that reflect the three pillars of sustainability (social, economic, environmental). These three pillars are considered to be of varying importance in different countries. We also correlated the ratings of these higher-level factors with country-specific indicators, such as the Human Development Index. The correlations between the indicators and the higher-level factors revealed that in countries with higher indices, the SDGs are rated as less important compared to in countries with lower indices. These results provide stakeholders with important guidance on how the SDGs should be promoted in their country.
The article re-examines the relationship between the works of Alfred Schütz and Harold Garfinkel, focusing on their respective approaches to temporality in interaction. Although there are good reasons to emphasize the differences between Schütz’s notion of individual projects of action and Garfinkel’s interest in communicative sequencing, there is also an interesting historical connection. In order to elucidate this connection, the article provides a close reading of the steps that lead Schütz from his premise of ‘egological’ time consciousness to his understanding of the reflexive and interactive process of meaning establishment and interpretation developed in his first book, The Phenomenology of the Social World (1967 [1932]). The article reflects further upon which aspects of Schütz’s considerations resonated with Garfinkel in his formative years and how Garfinkel related to them variously in his later development of ethnomethodology. Hence, it appears that Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology successively departs from many of Schütz’s premises while simultaneously incorporating and further developing some of his notions on the sequential organization and temporal flux of interactive processes.
Cryovalues beyond high expectations: endurance and the construction of value in cord blood banking
(2022)
Cryopreservation attracts attention as a practice grounded in high expectations: current life is suspended for future use—to generate life, to save life, and to resurrect life. But what happens when high expectations in cryobanking give way to looming uselessness and the risk of failure? Based on ethnographic insights into the case of umbilical cord blood (CB) banking in Germany, this contribution investigates the liminal state of “non-failure.” Averting failure amid a lack of success in this field requires putting effort into the construction of value. The resulting practices and dynamics overflow generic stories of commercialization and instrumentalization of biological material and are best grasped as an expanded version of the recently coined notion of “cryovalue.” The long-term availability of cryopreserved CB facilitates the steady yield of social and economic capital beyond and after promise. Moreover, the value construction is reoriented from CB itself toward the socio-technical cryo-arrangements in which it is embedded. In exemplifying how it expands the understanding of the diversity of valuation and valorization practices, continuities, and economic endurance in cryoeconomies and bioeconomies, the paper advocates the study of their ambivalent and allegedly uneventful sites.
Studies of occupational sex segregation rely on the sociocultural model to explain why some occupations are numerically dominated by women and others by men. This model argues that occupational sex segregation is driven by norms about gender-appropriate work, which are frequently conceptualized as gender-typed skills: work-related tasks, abilities, and knowledge domains that society views as either feminine or masculine. The sociocultural model thus explains the primary patterns of occupational sex segregation, which conform to these norms: Requirements for feminine (masculine) skills increase with women’s (men’s) representation in the occupation. However, the model does not adequately explain cases of segregation that deviate from these norms or investigate the ways in which feminine and masculine skills co-occur in occupations. The present study fills these gaps by evaluating two previously untested explanations for deviations from the sociocultural model. The findings show that requirements for physical strength (a masculine skill) increase with women’s representation in professional occupations because physical strength skills co-occur with substantially higher requirements for feminine skills that involve helping and caring for others. These results indicate that the sociocultural model, and more generally explanations for how gender norms drive occupational sex segregation, can be improved by examining patterns of gender-typed skill co-occurrence.
Structural anthropology remains a hidden influence in Frantz Fanon's theory of the 'sociogenesis' of mental illness. This chapter outlines how Fanon's belief in the therapeutic capacity of 'socialization' critically absorbs Claude Lévi-Strauss's examination of the link between 'madness' and the symbolic structure of society. These innovations, Chamberlin argues, pushed Fanon to institute 'semihospitalization' as a radically dialectical method of treatment in his final role as a clinician at the Neuropsychiatric Day Centre in Tunis (1958–60).
Anarchival practises : the Clanwilliam Arts Project as re-imagining custodianship of the past
(2023)
Where is the past? It is not really behind us, but with us, constantly imagined and re-imagined in public discourse through historical narrations. Using the Clanwilliam Arts Project as a case study, this volume is founded on the 'anarchive', a conceptual constellation that positions the past in relation to the present, bringing into view strategies to facilitate remembering beyond the colonial archive.
Climate crimes – a critique
(2023)
This paper aims on taking a critical approach to the emerging debate on climate criminal justice, that is mostly about something labeled „climate criminal law“ („Klimastrafrecht“). The critique is directed at climate crimes intended to protect our habitable climate („Klimaschutzstrafrecht“) or to prevent climate change („Klimawandelpräventionsstrafrecht“) staged as transformational criminal law. “Fighting" climate change with climate crimes can lull us into deceptive certainties and by extension into perilous idleness; and it will do so if we think of climate protection essentially in terms of traditional criminal law. Climate crimes are based on the idea that we can counter climate change with the "sharpest sword" available to a polity (cf. the German and Continental European ultima-ratio principle) and that we can thereby also get hold of "the powerful". But these certainties rest on but normative (and at heart: liberal) doctrines, which are deceptive in having lost touch with the realities of the administration of criminal justice. They obscure that more effective measures are available to mitigate the climate crisis and that "the powerful" will likely be shielded with and by climate crimes. Therefore, the climate crimes approach to the climate crisis may just turn out to be (self-)appeasement. It obfuscates that more effective measures are likely necessary to avert impending crises. Our critique is therefore not "only" directed at the symbolic, but the dysfunctional and "dark side" of climate crimes.
In this article, I analyse the street market in the Osnabrück city quarter of Schinkel as a multifunctional place and an important component in the physical as well as the imaginary construction of both the immediate surroundings and the environment on a global level. Schinkel is located in the east of the city and is known as being very diverse. It is home to 14,412 inhabitants, including Poles, Portuguese, Italians, Turks, Bulgarians, and people from various countries of the former USSR as well as Germans...
Financial poverty, mobility and social participation are interrelated. This nexus makes old-age poverty a highly relevant issue in terms of transport-related social exclusion in an ageing society. To understand how financial poverty affects older people’s travel practices and how they cope with their limited financial resources, we conducted qualitative interviews with low-income older people (aged 60 and above) in Ronnenberg (Hanover region, Germany). Although all the respondents have comparably limited financial resources, using a practice theory perspective along the elements of materials, competences and meanings (Shove et al., 2012), we identified three different types of low-income older people by their travel practices: (i) active older people with multifaceted social interactions, (ii) neighbourhood-oriented older people with local interactions and (iii) home-centred older people with few social interactions. From our analysis, we conclude that financial poverty shapes each element of low-income older people’s travel practices and thereby increases the risk of transport-related social exclusion: (i) certain materials have to be financed, which is challenging or even impossible due to financial poverty; (ii) meanings of travel practices are strongly linked to other practices, thus, if (also for financial reasons) no or a limited range of destinations are mentioned, travel practices are restricted in their frequency and distance; and (iii) necessary competences to be mobile and engage in social activities despite low financial means seem to be differentially available or - more cautiously formulated – less often utilised by low-income older people, which may lead to them abandoning travel practices and related social activities.
Rethinking smartness
(2023)
Like many metropolitan centers around the world, Berlin aspires to be a "smart city." Making a city smart usually involves constructing a dense net of sensors, often embedded in and around more traditional infrastructures throughout the urban environment, such as transportation systems, electrical grids, and water systems. The process also requires the city to solicit the distributed input of its inhabitants through active technological means, such as smart phone apps. Finally, the city employs high-end computing and learning algorithms to analyze the resulting data, with the goal of optimizing urban technical, social, and political processes. Yet, perhaps counterintuitively, a smart city is not synonymous with a utopian - or even a specific - form of the city, which would then remain stable for the foreseeable future. In this sense, the smart city is quite unlike utopian cities as they were imagined in the past, when it was presumed that a specific form - such as Le Corbusier's "Radiant City" or the concentric circles of Ebenezer Howard's garden cities - would enable a specific goal, such as integration of humans into natural processes, or economic growth, or an increase in collective happiness, or democratic political participation. Rather, a city is "smart" when it achieves the capacity to adjust to any new and unexpected threats and possibilities that may emerge from the city's ecological, political, social, and economic environments (a capacity that is generally referred to in planning documents with the term "resilience"). In short, a smart city is a site of perpetual learning, and a city is smart when it achieves the capacity to engage in perpetual learning.
In recent years, many European cities have developed strategies to improve the quality of urban life by reducing car traffic and increasing the attractiveness of alternative modes and the built environment for residents. Frequently, at least in German cities, improvements to the cycling infrastructures play a key role in this transformation of urban spaces. One of those transformative interventions took place in 2020 in Frankfurt am Main (Germany). The city redesigned an arterial road close to the city centre, the Friedberger Landstrasse, by converting two car lanes to bicycle lanes. It is the aim of this study to analyse the effects of this change on the quality of urban life of its residents using a quantitative before-and-after study. The results demonstrate the expected improvements in the perceived quality of urban life for residents after the intervention. A more detailed analysis, however, shows that the residents’ perceptions vary according to their own mode use on the Friedberger Landstrasse and other sociodemographic characteristics. Thus, better cycling infrastructure does not only improve conditions for cyclists, but also contributes to a higher quality of urban life for residents and, therefore, improves the liveability of a city in two ways. We conclude that local transport policies are not only relevant for a modal shift, but also for the quality of urban life and, thus, related urban development strategies.
This article aims to show that a perspective that understands urban protests as a conflict between two or more interest-driven actors falls short. For a more comprehensive analysis, the complex fabric of multiple power-laden discourses, processes, networks and spatial conditions in which such conflicts are embedded must be taken into account. To this end, this article adopts an assemblage perspective. Taking the protests around the inner-city marina Port Vell in Barcelona as an example, this perspective is used to elaborate the various spatial conditions that shape this conflict.
Refugee reception in Germany is a primarily municipal task that relies heavily on neighborhood-based volunteering. This paper asserts that there are fundamental spatial mismatches between municipal policies and neighborhood-based approaches that place additional burden on all of the stakeholders involved. Drawing from the case of Frankfurt-Rödelheim, which is a socially and ethnically mixed neighborhood in Frankfurt am Main, I show how the way the municipality accommodates refugees disregards the politically embraced work of neighborhood-based volunteers and how the ideal of neighborhood-based inclusion creates a spatial fetish that fails the living reality of the refugees. The findings are based on my ethnographic fieldwork as volunteer in a neighborhood-based welcome initiative.
Academic self-efficacy (ASE) refers to a student’s global belief in his/her ability to master the various academic challenges at university and is an essential antecedent of wellbeing and performance. The five-item General Academic Self-Efficacy Scale (GASE) showed promise as a short and concise measure for overall ASE. However, of its validity and reliability outside of Scandinavia is limited. Therefore, this paper aimed to investigate the psychometric properties, longitudinal invariance, and criterion validity of the GASE within a sample of university students (Time 1: n = 1056 & Time 2: n = 592) in the USA and Western Europe. The results showed that a unidimensional factorial model of overall ASE fitted the data well was reliable and invariant across time. Further, criterion validity was established by finding a positive relationship with task performance at different time stamps. Therefore, the GASE can be used as a valid and reliable measure for general ASE.
Measuring teaching cross-culturally - the issue of measurement invariance and sources of bias
(2021)
Im Kontext der Globalisierung nimmt das Interesse daran, Unterricht vergleichend zwischen Bildungssystemen der ganzen Welt zu untersuchen, kontinuierlich zu (Paine et al., 2016). Unterricht ist einer der stärksten Prädiktoren für Lernergebnisse von Schülerinnen und Schülern (Hattie, 2009). Folglich bieten internationale Vergleiche die einmalige Möglichkeit von besonders erfolgreichen Bildungssystemen zu lernen und geben Auskunft über die Generalisierbarkeit beziehungsweise über die kulturellen Variationen von Unterricht und dessen Wirksamkeit. Gleichzeitig sind sie richtungsweisend für bildungspolitische Entscheidungen (Klieme, 2020). Zur Erfassung von Unterrichtsmerkmalen aus der Perspektive der beteiligten Lehrkräfte und Schülerinnen und Schüler werden häufig Fragebögen in internationalen Schulleistungsstudien eingesetzt. Erste empirische Befunde weisen jedoch daraufhin, dass die Fragebogenskalen oftmals nicht messinvariant sind (z.B. Desa, 2014; He & Kubacka, 2015; Nilsen & Gustafsson, 2016). Das bedeutet, dass Unterschiede in den Messwerten zwischen Bildungssystemen nicht automatisch genuine Unterschiede im gemessenen Konstrukt, wie beispielsweise Unterschiede in der Klassenführung, reflektieren. Stattdessen entstehen diese teilweise durch nicht intendierte kulturelle Variationen im Antwortprozess (Bias), beispielsweise durch kulturelle Unterschiede in der Bedeutung der Items zur Messung von Klassenführung oder durch kulturspezifische Antworttendenzen (van de Vijver & Leung, 1997). Eine fehlende Messinvarianz hat folgenreiche Konsequenzen, da valide (Mittelwerts-)Vergleiche von Unterrichtsmerkmalen zwischen Bildungssystemen nicht möglich sind und somit die umfangreichen Datensätze internationaler Studien nicht ausgeschöpft werden können (Davidov et al., 2018a). Dennoch mangelt es in der international vergleichenden Bildungsforschung bisher an empirischen Studien, die mit fortgeschrittenen Analysemethoden die Messinvarianz von Unterrichtsmerkmalen prüfen, sowie an empirisch-fundierten Erkenntnissen zu den Ursachen der oftmals fehlenden Invarianz. Mit einer Kombination aus quantitativen und qualitativen Methoden widmet sich die vorliegende Dissertation in drei Beiträgen der Aufarbeitung dieser Forschungslücke. Sie konzentriert sich auf Fragebogenskalen zur Messung von zwei generischen Unterrichtsmerkmalen aus der Perspektive von Schülerinnen und Schülern, der Unterrichtsqualität mit den Dimensionen Klassenführung, konstruktive Unterstützung und kognitive Aktivierung und den Unterrichtsmethoden mit den Dimensionen lehrerzentrierte und schülerzentrierte Methoden und Methoden des Assessments.
Beitrag I prüft die Messinvarianz von PISA Skalen zur Erfassung der drei Basisdimensionen der Unterrichtsqualität zwischen 15 Bildungssystemen. Zusätzlich wird untersucht, ob die kulturelle Ähnlichkeit (operationalisiert als ähnliche oder identische Sprache) der Bildungssysteme einen Einfluss auf das Ausmaß der Messinvarianz besitzt. Da die Modellannahmen der häufig eingesetzten konfirmatorischen Faktorenanalyse zunehmend als zu strikt für Messinvarianzprüfungen im interkulturellen Kontext kritisiert werden (Rutkowski & Svetina, 2014), wird mit Alignment (Asparouhov & Muthén, 2014) eine flexiblere und angemessenere Methode verwendet. Dennoch erreichen die drei Basisdimensionen nur metrische (identische Faktorenladungen) und nicht skalare Invarianz (identische Intercepts) zwischen den 15 Bildungssystemen. Folglich sind valide Vergleiche von Mittelwertsunterschieden in der Unterrichtsqualität zwischen den 15 Bildungssystemen nicht möglich. Innerhalb der fünf Cluster, bestehend aus jeweils drei Bildungssystemen mit ähnlicher oder identischer Sprache, wird im Gegensatz dazu skalare Invarianz bestätigt. Die Ergebnisse aus Beitrag I legen nahe, dass die untersuchten Fragebogenskalen zur Messung von Unterrichtsqualität unterschiedlich zwischen Bildungssystemen funktionieren. Eine höhere Vergleichbarkeit scheint jedoch mit einer kulturellen und sprachlichen Ähnlichkeit der Befragten einherzugehen. Wird diese Ähnlichkeit bei der Analyse berücksichtigt, sind valide Vergleiche von Mittelwertsunterschieden für eine Teilmenge an Bildungssystemen mit invarianter Messung möglich.
Beitrag II knüpft an Ergebnisse aus Beitrag I an und untersucht potenzielle Ursachen der fehlenden Invarianz. Der Fokus liegt auf kulturellen Variationen im Antwortprozess, die zu einer eingeschränkten Datenvergleichbarkeit führen können (z.B. Schwarz et al., 2010). Beitrag II konzentriert sich auf die erste und zweite Stufe des Antwortprozesses, der Item-Interpretation und der Assoziation des Item-Inhaltes mit persönlichen Erfahrungen (Tourangeau, 1984). Mit Hilfe von kognitiven Interviews wird untersucht, wie Schülerinnen und Schüler aus China (Shanghai) und Deutschland PISA Items zur Messung konstruktiver Unterstützung interpretieren und welche Unterrichtserfahrungen sie mit den Items assoziieren. Die Ergebnisse der strukturierenden qualitativen Inhaltanalyse nach Kuckartz (2018) zeigen zwar, dass sowohl chinesische als auch deutsche Schülerinnen und Schüler die Items mehrheitlich mit Unterrichtsmethoden assoziieren, die zur Kompetenzunterstützung beitragen (beispielsweise Methoden zur Beseitigung von Verständnisproblemen). Es zeigen sich jedoch auch deutliche interpretative Variationen, sowohl für statistisch nicht messinvariante (nicht vergleichbare) Items als auch für messinvariante (vergleichbare) Items. Diese können zum einen auf Eigenschaften der Messung zurückgeführt werden. Hierzu zählt eine unterschiedliche Übersetzung des Terms Lernen (in Deutschland Lernfortschritt in China Lernstand). Zudem finden sich Hinweise, dass komplexe und uneindeutige Itemformulierungen mehr Spielraum für kulturspezifische Interpretationen zulassen. Die zweite Ursache der interpretativen Variationen ist ein unterschiedliches Verständnis von konstruktiver Unterstützung, das durch kulturelle Unterschiede in der Unterrichtsgestaltung und -zielsetzung erklärt werden kann (Leung, 2001). Neben der Kompetenzunterstützung assoziieren die deutschen Schülerinnen und Schüler die Items mehrheitlich mit Methoden zur Unterstützung ihrer Autonomie und ihres sozial-emotionalen Erlebens im Unterricht, wohingegen die chinesischen Schülerinnen und Schüler die Items mehrheitlich mit Methoden zur Unterstützung ihrer akademischen Produktivität (z.B. ihrer Aufmerksamkeit) assoziieren. Die Ergebnisse aus Beitrag II legen nahe, dass die Interpretation von Fragebogenitems variieren kann, je nach dem in welchem kulturellen Kontext die Frage gestellt wird. Sie betonen zudem, dass quantitative und qualitative Methoden miteinander kombiniert werden sollten, um verlässliche Information über die interkulturelle Vergleichbarkeit von Fragebogenitems zu erhalten ...
This paper challenges widespread assumptions in trust research according to which trust and conflict are opposing terms or where trust is generally seen as a value. Rather, it argues that trust is only valuable if properly justified, and it places such justifications in contexts of social and political conflict. For these purposes, the paper suggests a distinction between a general concept and various conceptions of trust, and it defines the concept as a four-place one. With regard to the justification of trust, a distinction between internal and full justification is introduced, and the justification of trust is linked to relations of justification between trusters and trusted. Finally, trust in conflict(s) emerges were such relations exist among the parties of a conflict, often by way of institutional mediation.
The policy review is part of the project EQualCare: Alone but connected? Digital (in)equalities in care work and generational relationships among older people living alone, a three-year international project involving four countries: Finland, Germany, Latvia and Sweden. EQualCare interrogates inequalities by gender, cultural and socio-economic background between countries, with their different demographics and policy backgrounds. As a first step into empirical analysis, the policy review aims to set the stage for a better understanding of, and policy development on, the intersections of digitalisation with intergenerational care work and care relationships of older people living alone in Germany.
The policy review follows a critical approach, in which the problems policy documents address are not considered objective entities, but rather discursively produced knowledge that renders visible some parts of the problem which is to be solved as other possible perspectives are simultaneously excluded. Twenty publicly available documents were studied to analyse the processes in which definitions of care work and digital (in)equalities are circulated, translated and negotiated between the different levels of national government, regional governments and municipalities as well as other agencies in Germany.
The policy review consists of two parts: a background chapter providing information on the social structure of Germany, including the historical development of Germany after the Second World War, its political structure, information on the demographic situation with a focus on the 60+ age group, and the income of this age group. In addition, the background presents the structure of work and welfare, the organisation of care for old people, and the state of digitalisation in Germany. The analysis chapter includes a description of the method used as well as an overview of the documents chosen and analysed. The focus of this chapter is on the analysis of official documents that deal with the interplay of living alone in old age, care, and digitalisation.
The analysis identified four themes: firstly, ageing is framed largely as a challenge to society, whereas digitalisation is framed as a potential way to tackle social challenges, such as an ageing society. Secondly, challenges of ageing, such as need of care, are set at the individual level, requiring people to organise their care within their own families and immediate social networks, with state support following a principle of subsidiarity. Thirdly, voluntary peer support provides the basis for addressing digital support needs and strategies. Publications by lobby organisations highlight the important work done by voluntary peer support for digital training and the benefits this approach has; they also draw attention to the over-reliance on this form of unpaid support and call for an increase in professional support in ensuring all older people are supported in digital life. Fourthly, ageing as a hinderance to participation in digital life is seen as an interim challenge among younger old people already online.
In summary, the analysis shows that the connection between ageing and digitalisation remains a marginal topic in current politics. The focus on older people merely as a potential group at risk of being left behind implies a deficit perspective on ageing and a homogenising of a large and diverse age group. Lessons learnt from the pandemic should not be interpreted in a one-sided way, by merely acknowledging the increasing number of (older) people moving online, but by acknowledging intersecting inequalities that mitigate social participation.
A trio of themes recur across prominent Western theories of laughter: violence, the human/nonhuman, and error. The paper traces this trio through a series of frequently cited paradigms for understanding laughter, including superiority, incongruity and relief theories, Henri Bergson's theory of laughter and V. S. Ramachandran's false alarm theory; and argues that it reflects a shared, if partially submerged concern with the instability and demise of a particular figure of the human, one that is circumscribed by the culturally specific (if globally influential) values of Eurocentric/Western thought, largely corresponding to Sylvia Wynter's 'Man'. This suggests that laughter has an ambiguous immanent potential for both undermining and/or reasserting, de- and/or restabilising the illusion of Man's universalizing drive to identify itself with the human per se.
This paper contributes to the clarification of the concept of “typicality” discussed in contemporary philosophy of physics by conceiving the nomological status of a typical behaviour such as that expressed in the Second Law of Thermodynamics as a “minutis rectis law”. A brief sketch of the discovery of “typicality” shows that there were ideas of typical behaviour not only in physics but also in sociology. On this basis and in analogy to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is shown that the nomological status of sociological laws such as Gresham’s Law can also be conceived as “minutis rectis laws”.
Aims: The purpose of this paper was to investigate the relationship between high-involvement human resource management, autonomy, affective organisational commitment and innovative behaviours of nursing staff who care for elderly clients.
Background: Nursing teams are increasingly required to demonstrate innovative behaviours that enhance care quality. Nursing leaders need to create environments where nursing staff have sufficient autonomy and feel a sense of commitment to support these behaviours. The appropriate implementation of these processes and practices may lead to greater involvement.
Methods: A cross-sectional survey-based research design was employed to explore the experiences of involvement practices, autonomy, affective organisational commitment and innovative behaviours of 567 nursing staff workers from four elderly care organisations in the Netherlands.
Results: The results demonstrate that a bundle of high-involvement practices positively influences innovative behaviour and that affective commitment and autonomy fully mediate this relationship.
Conclusions: The study highlights the role of autonomy and commitment as routes towards translating involvement practices into nurses’ innovativeness.
Implications for Nursing Management: To create an innovative environment, leaders need to create a positive climate by providing nurses with opportunities to enhance their competence, relatedness and autonomy through active involvement. Leaders should, therefore, encourage involvement as a mechanism to promote innovation.
The future of work has become a pressing matter of concern: Researchers, business consultancies, and industrial companies are intensively studying how new work models could be best implemented to increase workplace flexibility and creativity. In particular, the agile model has become one of the “must-have” elements for re-organizing work practices, especially for technology development work. However, the implementation of agile work often comes together with strong presumptions: it is regarded as an inevitable tool that can be universally integrated into different workplaces while having the same outcome of flexibility, transparency, and flattened hierarchies everywhere. This paper challenges such essentializing assumptions by turning agile work into a “matter of care.” We argue that care work occurs in contexts other than feminized reproductive work, namely, technology development. Drawing on concepts from feminist Science and Technology Studies and ethnographic research at agile technology development workplaces in Germany and Kenya, we examine what work it takes to actually keep up with the imperative of agile work. The analysis brings the often invisibilized care practices of human and nonhuman actors to the fore that are necessary to enact and stabilize the agile promises of flexibilization, co-working, and rapid prototyping. Revealing the caring sociotechnical relationships that are vital for working agile, we discuss the emergence of power asymmetries characterized by hierarchies of skills that are differently acknowledged in the daily work of technology development. The paper ends by speculating on the emancipatory potential of a care perspective, by which we seek to inspire careful Emancipatory Technology Studies.
Vehicle registrations have been shown to strongly react to tax reforms aimed at reducing CO2 emissions from passengers’ cars, but are the effects equally strong for positive and negative tax changes? The literature on asymmetric reactions to price and tax changes has documented asymmetries for everyday goods but has not yet considered durables. We leverage multiple vehicle registration tax (VRT) reforms in Norway and estimate their impact on within car-model substitutions. We estimate stronger effects for cars receiving tax cuts and rebates than for those affected by tax increases. The corresponding estimated elasticity is − 1.99 for VRT decreases and 0.77 for increases. As consumers may also substitute across car models, our estimates represent a lower bound.
Quo vadis Papua: case study of special autonomy policies and socio-political movements in Papua
(2021)
This research discusses socio-political movements in Papua as a result of the implementation of special autonomy policies (Otsus) by the government for almost two decades. Theoretically, indigenous Papuans should support it but in empirical reality, Otsus has been considered "fail" by the indigenous Papuan people because there are still many problems that have not been resolved by Otsus. This negative response indicates public dissatisfaction towards the development planning process in Papua. This dissertation aims to examine these issues; why these policies and development plans failed and are protested, why protests against them are prolonged, how do protests develop into social movements, and whether indigenous Papuan movements can be classified as social movements. The study uses qualitative approach, through case study methods. Data are collected through interviews, observations and documentation studies. The research finds that the presence of Otsus in Papua in addition to being a source of new conflict, also triggers conflicts in the form of protests and resistance movements against the government of Indonesia, both physical and political. This research discovers that, indeed the Otsus management has succeeded in changing the face of Papua because of the many physical projects but the development of human aspects and supporting instruments has not been touched at all. Thus, only a small percentage of indigenous Papuans feel the benefits of Otsus, while most of them are still struggling. This paper finds that protests against Otus are due to the growing resentments from the community so long as their demands are not met. This study suggests that the presence of the state in Papua through the Otsus policy must be re-evaluated. The state must ensure that in the Otsus era, the indigenous Papuans should not be marginalized, so that aspirations for the welfare of all indigenous Papuans through Otsus can be realized.
In this publication, researchers from the social and economic sciences and medicine as well as practitioners from the media and politics reflect on the influence of scientific expertise in times of crisis. Differences and similarities between the Covid-19 pandemic, the financial and economic crisis, the refugee crisis and the climate crisis are elaborated. The interviews were conducted in November/December 2021.
This review analyses the aesthetic engagement with Nazi atrocities during WWII and belonging in post-war Germany as presented in Nora Krug’s graphic novel Heimat: A German Family Album. The authors employ Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’ as an analytical tool that helps them locate the complex historical and emotional contexts from which this graphic novel receives its impulses. The concrete scenes from the novel are presented and subsequently related to the field of memory and postmemory scholarship. Wider critical debates on how aesthetic articulations of past atrocities influence the next generations of ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ are examined, to ask: What does it mean to inhabit memories of ghostly narratives about perpetrators and how does it form a feeling of post-home?
The COVID-19 pandemic has both highlighted and exacerbated global health inequities, leading for calls for responses to COVID to promote social justice and ensure that no one is left behind. One key lesson to be learnt from the pandemic is the critical importance of decolonizing global health and global health research so that African countries are better placed to address pandemic challenges in contextually relevant ways. This paper argues that to be successful, programmes of decolonization in complex global health landscapes require a complex three-dimensional approach. Drawing on the broader discourse of political decolonization that has been going on in the African context for over a century, we present a model for unpacking the complex task of decolonization. Our approach suggests a three-dimensional approach which encompasses hegemomic; epistemic; and commitmental elements.
The metaphor of DIADEM informs the way in which Proverbs depicts the character of a woman of strength and her place in the society. The metaphor serves the Proverbs to conceptualise a prudent, virtuous and reasonable character in relation to the divine and the human, and thus to provide the main support of a successful life.
NGO brokers between local needs and global norms: trajectories of development actors in Burkina Faso
(2021)
Local NGO brokers in Africa and beyond negotiate and mediate between (inter)national donors and potential beneficiaries within their communities. They translate local needs into development projects to make them suitable for international donors. This article looks at two main conditions that influence their work: First, windows of opportunity, which open and close according to structures and institutions beyond their sphere of influence; and second, their personality and skills. Based on two case studies from Burkina Faso, this article offers insights into biographies and life stories of such brokers where engagement leads to a distinguished lifestyle that contains aspects of cosmopolitanism and distinctiveness.
China’s law to control international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) has sent shockwaves through international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), civil society and expert communities as the epitome of a worldwide trend of closing civic spaces. Since the Overseas NGO Management Law was enacted in January 2017, its implementation has seen mixed effects and diverging patterns of adaptation among Chinese party-state actors at the central and local levels and among domestic NGOs and INGOs. To capture the formal and informal dynamics underlying their mutual interactions in the longer term, this article employs a theory of institutional change inspired by Elinor Ostrom’s distinction between rules-in-form versus rules-in-use and identifies four scenarios for international civil society in China – “no change,” “restraining,” “recalibrating” and “reorienting.” Based on interviews, participant observation and Chinese policy documents and secondary literature, the respective driving forces, plausibility, likelihood and longer-term implications of each scenario are assessed. It is found that INGOs’ activities are increasingly affected by the international ambitions of the Chinese party-state, which enmeshes both domestic NGOs and INGOs as agents in its diplomatic efforts to redefine civil society participation on a global scale.
The segregation of refugees in collective accommodation centres represents an integral component of the European border regime and its complex interplay of inclusion and exclusion. The corresponding spatial, symbolic and discursive demarcations, however, are not simply implemented politically from above, but negotiated on the ground on a daily basis. One crucial group of actors in the German context are neighbourhood-based volunteers. These groups frequently accompany accommodation centres with support structures. Based on contributions in the field of critical border studies and on the example of a municipal accommodation facility in Frankfurt, Germany, this paper demonstrates how volunteers, through their practices and engagement with refugees and others, on one hand, and dominant discourses, institutions and regulations on the other, participate in the production of locally specific spaces of asylum that are marked by simultaneous and contradictory processes of bordering and debordering.
Gender stereotypes and self-characterizations in Germany and Nigeria: a cross-cultural comparison
(2021)
Studies on the content of gender stereotypes have been conducted primarily in the United States, while research in other, particularly non-Western, countries is scarce. In this research, we assessed and compared the content of gender stereotypes and self-characterizations in Germany—a Western European country—and Nigeria—a West African country. We asked 403 Germans and Nigerians to rate three target groups (either men in general, women in general, or themselves) on 74 agentic and communal characteristics. We found that Nigerian women were rated as more agentic and more communal than German women, while German men were rated as more communal than Nigerian men, but similarly on agency. On self-characterizations, Nigerian men rated themselves as more communal than German men, but again similarly on agency; Nigerian women rated themselves as more agentic and more communal than German women. Within-country comparisons showed that in Germany, men and women were perceived as similarly agentic and communal, while in Nigeria, men and women were perceived as similarly agentic, but women were perceived as more communal than men (by both others and when rating themselves). Further analysis on individual agentic and communal characteristics, however, showed important differences in stereotypes and self-characterizations of men and women in both countries that were obscured when looking at overall agency and communion. Our results show that gender stereotyping of oneself and others is complex and highlights the impact of culture on people's perceptions of gender.
Previous research has found higher levels of heatwave mortality and morbidity among urban residents with a migration background because of their social, health and environmental conditions. The purpose of the study was to investigate and compare heat induced changes in the outdoor recreation behaviours of Turkish migrants with those of non-migrants on hot days in Vienna. Specifically, the study compared coping behaviours due to heat such as inter-area, intra-area, temporal and activity displacement between migrants and non-migrants. The study interviewed 400 migrants and non-migrants in four public green spaces of different area sizes and asked about their outdoor recreation motives and activities, as well as behavioural changes, due to summer heat. Results show that migrants have different motives for visiting urban green spaces on hot days, and that they visit these less frequently on hot days compared to non-migrants. While both groups shift their outdoor uses more to shady areas and the cooler times of the day, more migrants visit green spaces in the afternoon, perform more energetic recreational activities, and use sunnier sites more frequently than non-migrants on hot days. Few migrants and non-migrants stated that they would visit alternative green spaces when it is hot. The results indicate that migrants’ behaviours result in higher heat exposure, while making less use of the opportunities larger green spaces such as forests can provide for heat relief. Recommendations on how green and city planners could reduce heat related health risks for both study groups are presented.
In ‘Justice and Natural Resources,’ Chris Armstrong offers a rich and sophisticated egalitarian theory of resource justice, according to which the benefits and burdens flowing from natural (and non-natural) resources are ideally distributed with a view to equalize people’s access to wellbeing, unless there are compelling reasons that justify departures from that egalitarian default. Armstrong discusses two such reasons: special claims from ‘improvement’ and ‘attachment.’ In this paper, I critically assess the account he gives of these potential constraints on global equality. I argue that his recognition of them has implications that Armstrong does not anticipate, and which challenge some important theses in his book. First, special claims from improvement will justify larger departures from the egalitarian default than Armstrong believes. Second, a consistent application of Armstrong’s life planfoundation for special claims from attachment implies that nation-states may move closer to justify ‘permanent sovereignty’ over the resources within their territories than what his analysis suggests.
In this paper, we discuss Armstrong’s account of attachment-based claims to natural resources, the kind of rights that follow from attachment-based claims, and the limits we should impose on such claims. We hope to clarify how and why attachment matters in the discourse on resource rights by presenting three challenges to Armstrong’s theory. First, we question the normative basis for certain attachment claims, by trying to distinguish more clearly between different kinds of attachment and other kinds of claims. Second, we highlight the need to supplement Armstrong’s account with a theory of how to weigh different attachment claims so as to establish the normative standing that different kinds of attachment claims should have. Third, we propose that sustainability must be a necessary requirement for making attachment claims to natural resources legitimate. Based on these three challenges and the solutions we propose, we argue that attachment claims are on the one hand narrower than Armstrong suggests, while on the other hand they can justify more far-reaching rights to control than Armstrong initially considers, because of the particular weight that certain attachment claims have.
The paper analyses the interrelationship between Armstrong’s egalitarian theory and his treatment of the ‘attachment theory’ of resources, which is the dominant rival theory of resources that his theory is pitched against. On Armstrong’s theory, egalitarianism operates as a default position, from which special claims would need to be justified, but he also claims to be able to incorporate ‘attachment’ into his theory. The general question explored in the paper is the extent to which ‘attachment’ claims can be ‘married’ to an egalitarian theory. The more specific argument is that a properly constrained attachment theory is more plausible than Armstrong’s egalitarian theory. Armstrong’s paper also criticizes attachment and improvement accounts as justifying permanent sovereignty over resources. This paper argues that neither of those arguments aim to justify the international doctrine of permanent sovereignty.
This paper argues that land and resource rights are often essential in overcoming colonial inequality and devaluation of indigenous populations and cultures. It thereby criticizes global welfare egalitarians that promote the abolition of national sovereignty over resources in the name of increased equality. The paper discusses two ways in which land and resource rights contribute to decolonization and the eradication of the associated inequality. First, it proposes that land and resource rights have acquired a status-conferring function for (formerly) colonized peoples so that possession of full personhood and relational equality is partially expressed through the possession of land and resource rights. Second, it suggests that successful internal decolonization depends on access to and control over land and resources, especially for indigenous peoples.
In Justice and Natural Resources: An Egalitarian Theory (2017), Chris Armstrong proposes a version of global egalitarianism that – contra the default renderings of this approach – takes individual attachment to specific resources into account. By doing this, his theory has the potential for greening global egalitarianism both in terms of procedure and scope. In terms of procedure, its broad account of attachment and its focus on individuals rather than groups connects with participatory governance and management and, ultimately, participatory democracy – an essential ingredient in the toolkit of green politics and policy-making. In terms of scope, because it does not commit itself to any particular moral framework, Armstrong’s theory leaves the door open for non-human animals to become subjects of justice, thus extending the realm of the latter beyond its traditionally anthropocentric borders. I conclude that these greenings are promising, but not trouble-free.
A reply to my critics
(2021)
It is a real pleasure to reply to so many thoughtful and probing responses to my book. In what follows, I will focus on six key themes that emerge across the various pieces. Some of them call into question core commitments of my theory, and in those cases I will try to show what might be said in its defence. Quite a number of the critics, however, present what we might call expansionist arguments: though they endorse some of the arguments I make, that is – or pick up some of its key concepts – they seek to push them in new and interesting directions. I will suggest that many of those arguments look likely to be successful, though I will also express caution about one or two of them. I doubt, however, that I will be the final judge of their success. Early on in the book I express the hope that it might provide a set of conceptual tools capable of advancing discussions about resource justice more broadly, even for scholars who reject my own idiosyncratic approach. Having made that gambit, I cannot now claim to have a monopoly on the use of the tools in question. Witnessing the use that others have already made of them has been a refreshing and rewarding experience.
This paper uses a novel account of non-ideal political action that can justify radical responses to severe climate injustice, including and especially deliberate attempts to engineer the climate system in order reflect sunlight into space and cooling the planet. In particular, it discusses the question of what those suffering from climate injustice may do in order to secure their fundamental rights and interests in the face of severe climate change impacts. Using the example of risky geoengineering strategies such as sulfate aerosol injections, I argue that peoples that are innocently subject to severely negative climate change impacts may have a special permission to engage in large-scale yet risky climate interventions to prevent them. Furthermore, this can be true even if those interventions wrongly harm innocent people.
Chris Armstrong argues that attempts at justifying special claims over natural resources generally take one of two forms: arguments from improvement and arguments from attachment. We argue that Armstrong fails to establish that the distinction between natural resources and improved resources has no normative significance. He succeeds only in showing that ‘improvers’ (whoever they may be) are not necessarily entitled to the full exchange value of the improvement. It can still be argued that the value of natural and improved resources should be distributed on different grounds, but that the value of improvements should be conceived differently.
This paper argues first that Armstrong is led to see natural resources primarily as objects of consumption. But many natural resources are better seen as objects of enjoyment, where one person’s access to a resource need not prevent others from enjoying equal access, or as objects of production, where granting control of a resource to one person may produce collateral benefits to others. Second, Armstrong’s approach to resource distribution, which requires that everyone must have equal access to welfare, conceals an ambiguity as to whether this means equal opportunity for welfare, or simply equal welfare – the underlying issue being how far individuals (or countries) should be held responsible for the use they make of the resources they are allocated. Third, when Armstrong attacks arguments that appeal to ‘improvement’ as a basis for claims to natural resources, he treats them as making comparative desert claims: if country A makes a claim to the improved resources on its territory, it must show that their comparative value accurately reflects the productive deserts of its members compared to those of countries B. But in fact, A needs only to make the much weaker claim that its members have done more than others to enhance the value of its resources. Overall, Armstrong’s welfarist approach fails to appreciate the dynamic advantages of allocating resources to those best able to use them productively.
Introduction
(2021)
Today in the United States, the notion that ‘the rise of the far right’ poses the greatest threat to democratic values, and by extension, to the nation itself, has slowly entered into common sense. The antecedent of this development is the object of our study. Explored through the prism of what we refer to as the domestication of the War on Terror, this publication adopts and updates the theoretical approach first forwarded in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, the Law and Order (Hall et al. 1978). Drawing on this seminal work, a sequence of three disparate media events are explored as they unfold in the United States in mid-2015: the rise of the Trump campaign; the release of an op-ed in The New York Times warning of a rise in right-wing extremsim; and a mass shooting at a historic African American church in Charleston, South Carolina. By the end of 2015, as these disparate events converge into what we call the public face of the rise of the far right phenomenon, we subsequently turn our attention to its origins in policing and the law in the wake of the global War on Terror and the Great Recession. It is only from there, that we turn our attention to the poltical class struggle as expressed in the rise of 'populism' on the one hand, and the domestication of the War on Terror on the other, and in doing so, attempt to situate the role of the rise of the far right phenomenon within it.
By the latter half of the twentieth century, a documented, substantial quantitative increase had occurred in the total number of Christian political organizations operating in Washington, D.C. with the sole purpose of influencing Congress and the administration through direct lobbying. This study seeks to understand what were the contributing historical factors that influenced the rise of Christian Lobby Organizations (CLOs), resulting in their normalization in American society?
The relationship between exhaustion and work engagement has received considerable attention during the past decades. Although the theoretical proposition exists that work engagement may increase exhaustion over time, previous research has been mixed. Drawing on the transactional stress model and applying latent growth modeling, we aim to provide a more comprehensive picture of the work engagement–exhaustion relationship over time. In two longitudinal studies, with four measurement points each, we found consistent evidence that a higher initial work engagement related to increased exhaustion over time. Consistent with our hypotheses, a higher initial work engagement also related to less initial exhaustion, and increases in work engagement related to decreases in exhaustion over time. However, contrary to our expectations, a higher initial exhaustion related to elevated work engagement over time. In conclusion, our findings suggest that engaged employees are less exhausted but face a higher risk of exhaustion over time. At the same time, exhausted employees are less engaged, but they have the potential to become more so over time. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings will be discussed in this paper.
The influence and power of some OECD states is under threat but China appears to remain astonishingly flexible, economically potent, and politically strong. How accurate is this view? To answer this question, major aspects of Chinese economic regulation that were adopted in the country’s progress towards capitalist modernization are examined. The analysis requires a historical reconstruction of how China changed the way it intervenes economically and politically, especially with regard to the institutions of the central state. Such a reconstruction reveals that, since the 1990s, the central state has indeed increased its steering capacities. These capacities have a distinctive basis that includes acceptance of a state-centered approach, idiosyncratic innovation policies taking place in the "shadow" of the state’s hierarchy, and the ongoing influence of the communist party. An all-embracing controlling power is, however, not detectable. What does exist in China’s competition-driven system of “statecapitalist” regulation, is a set of limits on the state’s capacity to govern.
The book deals with a comprehensive constellation of narrative and visual, often counterposed representations of the causes, course, and results of the assault on the Palace of Justice of Colombia by a guerrilla commando and the immediate counterattack launched by state security forces on November 6, 1985, as well as with the local memorial traditions in which the production, circulation and reproduction of these representations have taken place between 1985 and 2020. The research on which it is based was grounded in the method and perspective of classical anthropology, in as much as qualitative fieldwork and the search for the perspective of the actors involved have played a central role. Within that context, memory entrepreneurs belonging to diverse sectors, from the far-right to the human rights movement, were followed through multisited fieldwork in various locations of Colombia, as well as in various countries of America and Europe. The analyses of fieldwork data, documental sources, and visual representations that constitute the core of the argument are framed in the field of memory studies and mainly based on theoretical and methodological resources from Pierre Bourdieu’s Field Theory, Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of social trauma, and Ernst Gombrich’s characterization of iconological analysis.
The book is composed of four chapters preceded by an introduction and followed by the conclusions and documental appendices, and substantiates three main theses. The first is that the Palace of Justice events were a radio- and television-broadcasted dispersed tragedy that affected the lives of actors from different social sectors and regions of Colombia, who have launched since 1985 multiple memorial initiatives in different fields of culture, thereby contributing to the formation and intergenerational transmission of a widespread cultural trauma. The second is that the narrative and visual representations at the core of that trauma express a vast universe of local representational traditions that can be traced at least until the early 20th century, and therefore preexists the so-called Colombian “memory boom”, dated to the mid-1990s. As an example of the preexistence and longstanding impact of these traditions, the local usage of the figure of “holocaust” for representing the effects of politically motivated violence is analyzed regarding the Palace of Justice events, but also traced to other representations emerged in the decade of 1920. The third thesis is that analyzing the diverse, frequently counterposed accounts of political violence elaborated within these traditions provides an opportunity to explore a wide variety of understandings of the causes and characteristics of the longstanding Colombian social and armed conflict.
Keywords: Political violence, Cultural trauma, Collective Memory, Iconology, Holocaust, Colombia.