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This paper considers ways in which rulers can respond to, generate, or exploit fear of COVID-19 infection for various ends, and in particular distinguishes between ‘fear-invoking’ and ‘fear-minimising’ strategies. It examines historical precedent for executive overreach in crises and then moves on to look in more detail at some specific areas where fear is being mobilised or generated: in ways that lead to the suspension of civil liberties; that foster discrimination against minorities; and that boost the personality cult of leaders and limit criticism or competition. Finally, in the Appendix, we present empirical work, based on the results of an original survey in Brazil, that provides support for the conjectures in the previous sections. While it is too early to tell what the longer-term outcomes of the changes we note will be, our purpose here is simply to identify some warning signs that threaten the key institutions and values of democracy.
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.
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.
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.
Episodes of liberalization in autocracies: a new approach to quantitatively studying democratization
(2022)
This paper introduces a new approach to the quantitative study of democratization. Building on the comparative case-study and large-N literature, it outlines an episode approach that identifies the discrete beginning of a period of political liberalization, traces its progression, and classifies episodes as successful versus different types of failing outcomes, thus avoiding potentially fallacious assumptions of unit homogeneity. We provide a description and analysis of all 383 liberalization episodes from 1900 to 2019, offering new insights on democratic “waves”. We also demonstrate the value of this approach by showing that while several established covariates are valuable for predicting the ultimate outcomes, none explain the onset of a period of liberalization.
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.
Introduction
(2022)
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.
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.
In this article, we propose to develop a realist interpretation of political progress—that is, an analysis of what it means to achieve better conditions of life in society under political power according to realist standards. Specifically, we are interested in identifying the criteria according to which political realism defines a change in the status quo as a desirable change...