Putting Large-Scale Infrastructure Projects First: The COVID-19 Pandemic in Indigenous Mexico

This article argues that whilst indigenous people are central to the Mexican president's official developmentalist discourse of bringing prosperity to the country's marginalised and poor, their needs during the COVID-19 pandemic have not been met and their interests have been sidelined. Whilst experiencing serious loss of trading revenue, negative impacts of misinformation, and lack of access to appropriate healthcare, indigenous Mexicans also faced the aggressive advance on their territories of large-scale infrastructure projects, which have become the backbone of the president's strategy for countering the economic recession caused by the pandemic. The discontinuation of relevant legal means to challenge the advance of the megaprojects during the pandemic effectively threatened indigenous people's democratic rights to protect their land, identities and way of life.     

A ‘society … divisible into the blessed and the unblessed’: Michael Young and Meritocracy in Postwar Britain

‘Meritocracy’ continues to unfold as both core conceptual framework and political ideal of the language of social mobility. In recent decades, politicians of various hues have declared it a sine qua non of the so-called ‘classless society’. The longer trajectory of postwar discourses of equality reveal a more chequered conceptual past. Its origins in the forums of revisionist social democracy of the 1950s, and subsequently popularised in the writings of social democratic polymath, Michael Young, are much more circumspect. The article considers pivotal contributions and developments of this conceptual history and trajectory. It considers the origins and emergence of meritocracy as a dimension of discourses of equality in the 1950s, and the formative contribution of Michael Young, reaction and responses on the left to his 1958 seminal work, The Rise of the Meritocracy, and the subsequent ‘meritocratic turn’. In spite of its satirical origins and warnings of dire social consequences, meritocracy presently enjoys a confirmatory position as a concept of opportunity and social mobility, as an embedded ideal of social organisation and means of allocating differential rewards.     

‘Feel what I feel’: making da(r)ta with teen girls for creative activisms on how sexual violence matters

Abstract

Inspired by feminist new materialist and posthuman activist philosophy, this paper speculates on what happens when data entangles with arts-based methodologies in a school-based participatory activist project with six teen girls (age 15) on gender-based and sexual violence. Mapping the journey of how data become da(r)ta and how da(r)ta become d/artaphacts, the paper follows how the Runway of Disrespect, the Shame Chain, the Ruler-Skirt and the Tagged Heart ripple through peer cultures, school assemblies and national policy landscapes. Each journey provides a small glimpse into how bodies, space, objects, affects and discourse ‘intra-act’ in dynamic assemblages to produce d/artaphacts crafted from and carrying experience. The paper concludes to consider the ethical-political affordances of how participatory arts-based methodologies and the im/personal vitality of objects might support young people to safely and creatively communicate and potentially transform oppressive sexual cultures and practices.     

试论日本据台与闽粤移民之中挫——以《清国人入境台湾条例》为中心

1895年台湾沦为日本的殖民地,海峡两岸关系发生了重大变化,台湾住民被认定为所谓“日本国民”。随着《清国人入境台湾条例》的颁布实施,传统闽粤移民渡台历史进程遭致中挫。日据后迁徙台湾的闽粤民众被称做“华侨”,成为侨居者。此后,台湾社会历史进入以内生性发展为主的新阶段。     

复杂性视域下阿马蒂亚·森发展观的多维审视

复杂性科学提供了一种新的思维方式和方法论,被人文社会科学的学者广泛重视,它具有动态多变性、非线性、自组织性、非加和性、不可还原性等特征。阿马蒂亚·森在质疑以简单性思维为基础的传统发展观基础上,立足于开放社会的复杂系统,用复杂性思维去探索发展问题,提出以人为本的发展观、能力发展观、自由发展观,超越了传统发展观的机械论、还原论等局限,对中国避免西方发达国家弊端,实践科学发展观不无裨益。     

Constitutionalism as a solution to despotism and imperialism: the Iranian Constitutional Revolution in the Ottoman-Turkish press

This article contributes to the growing scholarship on the connections between the Ottoman and Iranian revolutions by exploring Ottomans’ reactions to and portrayal of the constitutional struggle in Iran. Based on an examination of primary sources that have not been utilized before, it reveals how an ideologically diverse group of intellectuals tried to link the two revolutions together in the Ottoman-Turkish press, focusing on shared problems and ideals. It demonstrates that undergoing a revolutionary process themselves, these intellectuals interpreted the events in Iran through the prism of their own experiences and used them to garner support for the constitutional regime at home. Through their depictions of the Iranian revolution, they not only portrayed the 1908 Revolution as part of a broader struggle against despotism and imperialism with significant implications for the Islamic world, but also conveyed the message that the Ottoman constitution needed to be supported and protected so that it did not fail like the one in Iran.     

Instrumental and cultural considerations in constructing European identity among ethnic minority groups in Lithuania in a generational perspective

Research on European identity focuses mainly on majority populations in Western European countries without differentiating among specific population groups and generations, and, above all, disregarding ethnic minority groups living in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper addresses this gap by investigating the development of European identity among three ethnic minority groups in Lithuania: Belarusians, Poles, and Russians. Theoretically, the project is based on the instrumental approach, which argues that European identity is closely related to perceived benefits from “being European,” and on the cultural approach, which holds a common history, ancestry, and culture responsible for the development of European identity. Existing research has, above all, emphasized the importance of instrumental considerations. Analyzing qualitative interviews collected in the FP7 research project “ENRI-East,” the paper compares how young and adult members of ethnic minority groups construct European identity due to “instrumental” and “cultural” considerations. The results show that both instrumental and cultural considerations are relevant and further development of European identity depends on which age group or ethnic minority group an individual belongs to.     

云南少数民族体育产业化发展的阶段性及目标

研究云南少数民族体育产业化发展必须经历的阶段性及其目标 ,是推进少数民族体育产业化的重要依据。根据产业化的一般规律 ,结合云南省的实际 ,可将云南少数民族体育产业化发展分为三个阶段及发展目标 :培育阶段 ;成长阶段 ;成熟阶段。     

中国农村的自杀问题(1980-2009)——兼与景军先生等商榷

通过对7省34村的质性访谈而获得的1980-2009年间604例农民自杀死亡案例的数据分析,本文认为当前农村自杀率仍呈显著上升态势。青年人自杀率的显著下降与老年人自杀率的急速上升并行不悖地运行于当下农村,青年女性自杀率的显著下降拉低了青年人整体自杀率并使之向下运行,然而,老年人自杀率的急速上升则拉升了农村的整体自杀率并使之向上运行。分析指出,决定这种复杂形貌的因素并非农村女性的迁移所导致,而是由于代际关系变动与离婚加速兴起所造成。其背后更为深刻的机制则表明,当前农村自杀率的复杂变化是现代性持续地侵蚀农村的产物。     

民生保障研究:论适足生活水准权保障与实现

适足生活水准权的实现遵从辅助性原则、国家义务、平等与非歧视原则。食物权、住房权与健康权构成了适足生活水准权最主要的具体权利形态,其实现标准主要有:有效、真实与可接受。适足生活水准权的保障与实现不是孤立的,是与其他人权,如财产权、工作权等,特别是公民权利与政治权利,密切相关。公民权利和政治权利的保障是实现适足生活水准权救济的有效方式。适足生活水准权的实现为呼声日高的民生保障研究提供了新视角。