Where Do I Belong? Narratives of Rodina among Russian-speaking Youth in Kazakhstan

Abstract

This essay engages critically with the personal narratives of rodina (home, motherland) among Russian-speaking youth in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. It is argued that the concept of rodina as an important locus of belonging cannot be imbued with a single meaning; instead, it is characterised by internal conflicts and variations. Supported by empirical material, the essay moves beyond the confines of ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ to illustrate the different ways in which Russian speakers frame their perception of rodina, and how such narratives can influence the construction of self- and community-identification.     

Advocacy coalitions,beliefs and climate change policy in the United States

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) asserts that disagreement over policy core beliefs divides organizations into competing coalitions. We apply Discourse Network Analysis to 1,410 statements in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today to investigate what kinds of beliefs contribute to coalition formation in the climate change policy debate in the news media in the United States. We find that the beliefs concerning the reality of anthropogenic climate change, the importance of ecology over economy and desirability of governmental regulation divide organizations into three advocacy coalitions: the economy, ecology and science coalitions. Policy preferences such as cap and trade do not; they find support across coalition lines. Based on these findings, we suggest that ACF theory could be clarified to better account for how beliefs concerning policy instruments contribute to coalition formation. In some policy domains, policy instruments are where opposing coalitions find agreement. In others, they are more divisive.     

Political Partisanship and Welfare Service Privatization: Ideological Attitudes among Local Politicians in Sweden

This article ties in with a growing international literature examining the link between party politics and welfare service privatization in modern welfare states. In recent decades, a central aspect of policy change in Sweden is that private actors have come to produce publicly financed welfare services on a more regular basis. This overall privatization trend is furthermore characterized by substantial geographical variation across Sweden's 290 municipalities. The ideological attitudes of local politicians have been recognized as particularly important for understanding this development. This article examines the extent to which local politicians’ ideological attitudes regarding welfare service privatization are best explained with a partisan approach emphasizing between‐party polarization as opposed to a critical perspective that points to the proclaimed significance of ideological consensus between left and right parties in certain municipal contexts. Using multilevel modelling and survey data collected from elected politicians in municipal governments, the empirical findings show substantial differences in attitudes between Conservatives and Social Democrats, irrespective of municipal characteristics – most notably the degree of welfare service privatization. Hence, the results strongly indicate that the partisan approach is much more fruitful compared to the consensus approach as a general explanation for local politicians’ attitudes towards welfare service privatization in Sweden. Accordingly, a conclusion is that comparisons at the subnational level within countries are important as a complement to country‐comparative studies when attempting to understand the link between political partisanship and welfare service privatization in modern welfare states.     

Gender Quotas for Corporate Boards: Depoliticizing Gender and the Economy

Gender quotas for corporate boards can be seen as a way of drawing attention to gendered power within the economy as well as a way to democratize the economy, yet the debate about them has focused on the economic and business benefits of gender equality rather than on gender justice or democracy. This article examines how women’s under-representation in economic decision-making was constituted as an economic problem in the European Union’s gender-equality policies and how the economization of the debate on gender quotas for corporate boards affects understandings of gender equality and the economy. The article contributes to research on gender and neoliberalism through developing an approach for analysing the depoliticizing effects of economized gender-equality discourses. It argues that the depoliticized understandings of gender and the economy put forward in the debate water down the politicizing potential of the proposed EU gender-balance directive and that the debate about gender quotas has enhanced the neoliberalization and corporatization of EU gender-equality discourse.     

Always More Than Two: Vibrations,the Foetus,and the Pregnant Person in Childbirth Singing Practices

The goal of this article is to expand the theoretical approaches in feminist research that have explored the relationship between the pregnant person and the foetus in terms of constitutive relationality. I examine new ways of understanding and conceptualizing such a relationship, which may be enabled by the concept of vibration, by focusing on a childbirth-singing method developed and taught by Finnish music educator Hilkka-Liisa Vuori. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork; I participated in a course on childbirth singing taught by Vuori and interviewed women who had used singing and vocalizing during pregnancy and labour. With the help of new feminist materialisms and feminisms inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s thinking, I suggest that sound and music as vibrations are agential matter that allow us to rethink the dyad between the pregnant person and the foetus. I argue that when the foetus–pregnant person dyad is approached as a constitutive relationality, more than two bodies are always involved.     

The Dynamics of Enlargement in International Organizations

Most international organizations (IOs) expand their membership over the course of their lifespan. Although these enlargements tend to be heralded as normatively positive — for the IOs themselves, for the new members, and for cooperative outcomes more generally — expansions can also lead to conflicts in the organization. What conditions lead to enlargement rounds that reshape an organization in unexpected ways? We argue that, depending upon the diversity of the initial group of countries, members may vote to admit new entrants that can tilt organizational decision-making in unexpected directions. We anticipate fewer enlargements with lesser impact on the character of the organization among organizations that have either a smaller range of founding members or a relatively even initial dispersion. We develop an agent-based model that accounts for the complex decision-making environment and social dynamics that typify IO accession processes. The model helps us explain how the nature of decision-making in organizations can shift following enlargement, likely changing the organization’s output and goals.     

Emotional Awareness in Depressive and Anxiety Symptoms in Youth: A Meta-Analytic Review

Emotion regulation is assumed to play an important role in depressive and anxiety symptoms in youth. However, the role of core components of emotion regulation, such as emotional awareness, is not well understood so far. Thus this meta-analysis aimed to examine the relationship between depressive and anxiety symptoms with emotional awareness in youth. A systematic literature search (PsycINFO, Medline, Google Scholar) identified 21 studies, from which 34 effect sizes were extracted. Results from random effects models showed that difficulties in emotional awareness were significantly correlated with a medium effect size for each, depressive and anxiety symptoms separately, and for their combined effects (overall outcome). Additionally, further analyses revealed that age was a significant moderator of the relationship between emotional awareness with depressive and anxiety symptoms, with younger samples (mean age?≤?12 years) showing a stronger association between difficulties in emotional awareness and depressive and anxiety symptoms as compared to older samples (mean age?>?12 years). The results suggest that emotional awareness may be of relevance for depressive and anxiety symptoms in youth. Future work is required to examine longitudinal developments, moderators, and mediators in multi-method approaches. Moreover, children and adolescents may benefit from interventions that aim to enhance emotional awareness.     

Transnational Reception: Nordic Women Writers in Fin de Siècle Finland

Abstract

This article investigates the transnational and translingual reception of Nordic women’s writing (among authors writing in Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish) in a multilingual country, Finland, around the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. This contribution is a component of our work for the international Joint Research Project, Travelling TexTs. We concentrate on the presence of Nordic women’s writing in various languages in fin de siècle Finland by investigating a library collection from that time. We look at the complexities in the reception of Nordic women’s writing in translation in Finland, making use of the concept of the Nordic dimension of translation history, and introducing the notion of intranational reception. We emphasize the role of women translators as cultural transmitters, and the intertwining of national and transnational (or, even, in today’s terms, feminist) agendas. We also investigate the reception of Nordic women’s texts in the press of that time, by examining both literature written for adults and literature for girls. Working with large-scale digitized sources has enabled us to examine the question of reception broadly.