Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Commentary On The Dynamics Of The Local And The Global, And The Representations Of Minorities In Mediascapes, Delphine Godefroit-Winkel

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

This commentary intends to extend knowledge about local identities with regard to their representations in the mediascape. It uses two focal MGDR papers and uncovers the opportunities for local identities to develop in global-local dynamics. This commentary reminds the interdependence between the global and the local and how local identities are formed. We discuss the accessibility of local identities and cultures.

Integrated Or Excluded: The Effects Of French Integration Policies On Immigrant Communities From 2000 To 2020, Johanna N. Soleil

Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference on the European Union

Few issues are as important to European politics as integration, though research into the actual effect of integration policies on immigrant communities is sparse in Europe and especially in France. This paper examines through the data available to researchers how immigrant communities compare to native populations in terms of cultural, health, and economic characteristics. To this end the paper is organized as follows: the first section introduces the French political context and the cultural attitude towards immigrants. Next, the various methods of analysis are presented, and each of the previously mentioned attributes is analyzed in the French context as well …

Strength Of Climate Goals And Results In Regions: A Comparative Study Of The Basque Country And Scotland And Their Respective Nations, Oviya Kumaran

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This research paper looks to find if regions have stronger climate initiatives to reduce more greenhouse gas emissions than their nation states and if so why does this occur. To investigate this, I will use the Basque Country of Spain and Scotland in the United Kingdom (U.K), and study their greenhouse gas emission and renewable energy targets, and their greenhouse gas emission data and renewable energy use. I will then compare the data from the regions to their respective countries and find if they are achieving more or less on these climate initiatives. A majority of this study is based …

Vox And Spanish Nationalism: The Constitutional Processes For The Elimination Of Regional Autonomy, Noah Halterman-Mitchell

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

After the death of Francisco Franco and the creation of the modern Spanish State, hard-core right-wing Spanish nationalism disappeared from the political spectrum. Spain and Portugal avoided the lure of far right-wing political tendencies to which the rest of Europe fell victim. Until recently, VOX, a far right-wing party, gained seats in Parliaments at the Autonomous Community level and in the Spanish National Parliament.

VOX believes in a mono-national state, a Spanish State, rather than a state composed of different nationalities such as Basque, Catalan, or Galician. In order to achieve their desired vision of the Spanish State, VOX advocates …

The Influence Of A Company's Inherent Values On Its Sustainability: Case Study Of Portuguese Small And Medium-Sized Enterprises, Charlie Lynch

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

SMEs are a significant portion of global corporations and, while individually might not compare to larger corporations in total emissions, holistically have significant impact. Therefore, understanding how a company's inherent values influence its ability to be sustainable is necessary to help inform the field. Thus, the project was focused on the influence of social, environmental, and economic values on the sustainability of a company. The study compared founder and company profiles generated from an interview with the founder and triangulated through secondary sources. The study found that the inherent values of Veganism, Ethical Drive, and Ecological Consciousness influenced mainly the …

Fighting Heroin Abuse With Heroin: How Legalizing Prescription Heroin Has Changed The Way New Generations Use Drugs, Claire Ridley

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

In the 1980s, Switzerland was embroiled in two simultaneous crises: widespread heroin use and spreading HIV/AIDS. Zurich became the capital of heroin consumption, with groups gathering in public parks and sharing needles to inject heroin. In response to these crises, several Swiss cities started conducting randomized control trials where they offered prescription heroin to help people addicted to heroin consume the drug safely and eventually recover from their addiction. As these trials reported positive results of maintaining better health outcomes for those undergoing treatment, the Swiss people supported federally legalizing heroin-assisted treatment and expanding access to harm reduction services in …

The Future Of Architecture: Measuring The Sustainability Of Paradigm Shifting Architectural Interventions, Jake M. Cohen

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Sustainable development in the built environment seems paradoxical given that the architecture, construction, and buildings sector is one of most polluting, wasteful, and inefficient industries. Despite this notion, the role of the architect is evolving and their influence on design is expanding beyond ideas for physical structures and into designing interactions between the built environment and components such as policy, material usage, sustainability, and urban regeneration. Architects that are able to implement paradigm shifting design ideas that improve the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability can be catalytic for systemic change and act as a vehicle to move away …

Comparing The Scottish National Party (Snp) And The Basque Nationalist Party (Eaj-Pnv)’S Social Policies Towards Refugees And Asylum Seekers, Emily Woodruff

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

In 2022, countries and territories across Europe experienced a sharp increase in the number of people seeking asylum, mainly due to the war in Ukraine. Over 3,5000 Ukrainians have sought refuge in the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) and as of July 2022, over 7,000 Ukrainians have sought refuge in Scotland (“3.587 refugiados de Ucrania”, 2022 and The Scottish Government, 2022). This increase is on top of the over 250,000 foreigners living in the BAC and the thousands of refugees already resettled throughout Scotland (Ikuspegi, Observatorio Vasco de Inmigración, 2022 and “Refugee resettlement”, 2022). Given the large number of refugees and …

The Contradictions Of Sought Safe Havens: The Difficulty Of Immigration And Integration For Muslim Maghrébins In France, Serena Korkmaz

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of laïcité and government trends to the right in France affect immigration and integration policy in France as it pertains to Muslim Maghrébin migrants. To do so, I conducted interviews with five experts with experience in some facet of Muslim North African migration, followed by using secondary sources to identify current trends, policies, and practices pertaining to migrants in France. The paper is broken into five sections that build on each other to contextualize and explore how the lives of Muslim Maghrébins are affected, including historical migrant trends, laïcité as …

Who Sent The Devil Down To Georgia? An Analysis Of The Causes Of The Russo-Georgian War Of 2008 And Its Effects On Georgian Democracy, Kris Bohnenstiehl

The Commons: Puget Sound Journal of Politics

No abstract provided.

The Commons: Volume 3, Issue 1, Kris Bohnenstiehl, Leona Derango, Ethan Stern-Ellis

The Commons: Puget Sound Journal of Politics

Table of Contents

• Letter From the Editors
  LILA BERNARDIN AND HANNAH WILLIAMS
• Who Sent the Devil Down to Georgia?
  KRIS BOHNENSTIEHL
• The Dehumanizing Gaze: Race in the Context of Academic Tourism
  LEONA DERANGO
• Balancing Populations of Electoral Districts
  ETHAN STERN-ELLIS

Pallavi Rastogi, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe In The Twenty-First Century (2020): Review Essay, Sourit Bhattacharya

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This review essay reads literary-critical works of what is broadly understood as ‘postcolonial disasters’. It outlines how literary critics in the last decades have drawn upon cultural-geographical and anthropological readings of disasters to develop critical frameworks around how literary writers have used style, form, and aesthetics to represent postcolonial catastrophes. It then offers a detailed review of Pallavi Rastogi’s 2020 monograph, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century. Through an engaged and critical reading, the essay attends to Rastogi’s insightful theorizing of the topic of ‘Disaster Unconscious’ and her wide-ranging interrogation of fiction from South Asia and Southern …

Incendiary Devices: Imagining E-Waste Frontiers And Africa’S Digital Futures, Treasa De Loughry

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Incendiary Devices: Imagining E-Waste Frontiers and Africa’s Digital Futures,” Treasa De Loughry focuses on different visual responses to e-waste in West Africa, from eco-documentary film and photography responses to the infamous Agbogbloshie e-waste yard in Ghana; to techno-utopian visions of e-waste bricoleurs, and e-waste as a signifier and artefact of the neocolonial nature of the capitalist world-ecology. The first half of this article focuses on Florian Weigensamer and Christian Krönes’ documentary film, Welcome to Sodom (2018), grounding it in critiques of the transmedial influence of the documentary form, while attending to the film’s pyrotechnical “optical regime” (Schoonover). …

Signs Of The Inhuman: Hauntings And Lost Futures In Verónica Gerber Bicecci’S La Compañía, Marcela Romero Rivera

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Current criticism of works of eco fiction maintains that one of the central contributions of this literary genre is a consciousness-raising effect that these works have on their readers by virtue of alluding, with varying degrees of specificity, to real-world environmental problems, implying that this is a central step towards remedying our current planetary climate crisis. This article suggests, conversely, that literary criticism of eco fiction necessitates a more rigorous material analysis—specifically one attentive to class and class antagonism—of these works and their conditions of production to understand their relation to power, as well as their affordances and limitations as …

Returning To The Past To Rethink Socio-Political Antagonisms: Mapping Today’S Situation In Regards To Popular Insurrections, Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo, Slavoj Žižek, Hernán Scholten, David Pavón-Cuellar, Gonzalo Salas, Oscar Ariel Cabeza, Jesús William Huanca Arohuanca, Sergio J. Aguilar Alcalá

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article seeks to elaborate a map or cartogram based on a number of protests and social mobilizations that took place in different parts of the world -mainly in Latin America, but also in Europe and Asia. Beyond the data and figures available from various sources, which never speak for themselves, an interpretation is proposed here to reveal the meaning of these events. In other words, by displaying a map of these social movements, the authors propose not only the visualization of a collection of data, but also an illumination of these events in the light of history. From there, …

Necropolitics And Visuality: Remembering ‘Speculative Fictions’ In Hong Kong After Rancière And Mbembe, Anthony Siu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “Necropolitics and Visuality: Remembering ‘Speculative Fictions’ in Hong Kong after Rancière and Mbembe,” Anthony Siu examines images from Defiance.Voices, a two-volume collection that gathers photography and art illustrations about the Hong Kong Protests. He studies how paintings from the second volume register politics and events, arguing that visual art can be viewed as a new form of “speculative fictions,” a material ontology that historicizes modes of sovereign violence in postcolony. The introduction situates the debate of aesthetics in Hong Kong, conjoining Rancière’s thinking on “the people” and Achille Mbembe’s philosophy on “necropolitics.” The first cluster of …

Fredric Jameson And Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’S Periodizing The Black Internal Colony, Jeremy Matthew Glick

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Fredric Jameson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Periodizing the Black Internal Colony,” Jeremy Matthew Glick reads these authors’ coupling of Black radical struggle with wars of decolonization as engaging against a twenty-first century war on revolutionary memory. This essay examines Jameson’s brief “Maoist Digression” in “Periodizing the Sixties” and discussion of Cuban Revolutionary Foco-theory as “neither in […] nor of it” and Spivak’s planetary turn’s link to Black internal colonialism analysis as a way to talk about the intersections of revolutionary politics and literary form. It concludes with a brief meditation on Amiri Baraka on the centrality of space for …

Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ And ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth In Urban China, Diego Gullotta, Lili Lin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ and ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth in Urban China”, Diego Gullotta and Lili Lin examine how Chinese youth are positioned within the dominant culture, how young people appropriate space in their emergent cultural practices, and how they negotiate meaning-making. The article first analyses the rising tides (houlang) video, sponsored jointly by the state and the private sector, and argues that it reduces youth to a homogenous subject inscribed into the discourse of “China’s rise” (zhongguo jueqi) via emotional mobilization. The “lying flat” phenomenon represents young people’s negative response to …

Breadtube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats To Spread Countercultural Ideology, Jj Sylvia Iv, Kyle Moody

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “BreadTube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats to Spread Countercultural Ideology,” J.J. Sylvia IV and Kyle Moody analyze the rise of BreadTube. Scholars have argued that YouTube’s algorithms lead to greater radicalization (Ribeiro et al.) and bad actors have weaponized algorithms to draw users into conspiracies (boyd, What Hath We Wrought?). This article adds to this by linking these practices to the commodification of social media that spread misinformation as adaptations of socially and rhetorically mediated technologies. It analyzes how the economics of YouTube and other platforms demand that user-generated content fit within paradigms of …

Periodizing The Residuality Of A Composite Protest Art Form: The Case Of Telangana Dhoom Dham, Vamshi Vemireddy, Sasi Kiran R. Mallam

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article will document the emergence of the composite art form of “Dhoom Dham” in the state of Telangana, a southern state from India. A mixture of folk song-and-dance routines interspersed with political speeches, Dhoom Dham emerged as a potent form of political protest during the Telangana statehood movement and dominated the cultural imaginary of the movement. It has the characteristics of a residual cultural form as conceptualized by Raymond Williams. Dhoom Dham masterfully combined the elements of folk and repurposed the left protest music traditions to help the cause of the formation of separate state of Telangana. …

Sounding The State Of The World: Interview With Karim Rafi, Summer 2021, Matthew Brauer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Matthew Brauer interviews Moroccan contemporary artist Karim Rafi about postcolonial creation in the 2020s in "Sounding the State of the World.” Beginning with Rafi’s shift to remote performances during the COVID-19 pandemic, the discussion approaches confinement as just the latest in a series of crises in North Africa and the world. The repeated experience of crisis opens a conversation about the contemporary experience of time, broached in relation to modern Moroccan art history, which emerged from and against the conservative institutions of the French Protectorate (1912-1956). The interview touches on a range of distinctive concerns in Rafi’s art practice, from …

A Case Of Pandemic Narrative And The End Of Post-Cold War, Yongbing Jin, Penghan Zhang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The topical book Wuhan Diary, authored by the Chinese writer Fang Fang during the COVID-19 lockdown of Wuhan, is not so much a diary as a “becoming-diary,” given its performative practices. Wuhan Diary’s emphasis on the individual or private nature of its writing activity is attributable to its characteristic realistic conception of authenticity, which resulted historically from the humanist trend within Chinese literature in the 1980s as a significant element of post-socialist realism. Insofar as Wuhan Diary claims an overarching authorship that does not cohere with—or is, indeed, utterly subverted by—its textual complexities, it can be interpreted as …

Biopolitics In The Twenty-First Century: India And The Pandemic, _ Swatie, Rashee Mehra

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Swatie and Rashee Mehra discuss in their "Biopolitics in the Twenty-first Century: India and the Pandemic”, the rise of the biopolitical state in India in the 2020s. The article emphasizes the relevance of Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics for the pandemic in India. The biopolitical governmentality of the Indian state operates at several levels to politicize ‘life itself’: racism (the notion that sections of the population are disposable), economics (the notion of privatization of care), and the logic of contagion (based on ideas of threat perception and risk). The article engages with biopolitics in the 21st century and looks at …

Confinement, Care, And Commodification In Mati Diop’S In My Room, Brittany Murray

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Confinement, Care, and the Commodification in Mati Diop’s In My Room,” Brittany Murray discusses a short film released in 2020 by the French and Senegalese director, Mati Diop. Shot in the artist’s studio in a Parisian banlieue during mandatory Covid-19 confinement, the film tackles the issues of grief, isolation, and care. The article shows how the film represents these issues, particularly urgent during the pandemic and yet belonging to longstanding concerns about care work and reproductive labor. To mediate between present crisis and a larger historical framework, the article demonstrates how the film’s formal attributes make a …

Reading The Global City: Crisis, Cognitive Mapping And The “Urban Sensorium” In Tom Mccarthy’S Satin Island And Ben Lerner’S 10:04, Marty Gilroy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

“What is the role played by the aesthetics and politics of space,” asks Kanishka Goonewardena, “in producing and reproducing the durable disjunction between the consciousness of our urban everyday life […] and the now global structure of social relations that is itself ultimately responsible for producing the spaces of our lived-experience?” (55). Goonewardena’s account of the “urban sensorium” describes the mediatory, ideological role played by space in this “gap,” informing his adaptation of Jameson’s “cognitive mapping” as a hermeneutics of urban experience vis-à-vis totality. This article considers the mediation of these insights as critical aesthetic strategies in two global city …

Literature And Economy In Portuguese-Speaking Southern Africa, Thomas Waller

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Literature and Economy in Portuguese-speaking Southern Africa”, Thomas Waller offers a comparative reading of literary responses to neoliberalization in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa. Reading the proliferation of spectral effects in the Mozambican literature of the late 1980s alongside dystopian depictions of societal collapse in contemporary Angolan fiction, he suggests that writers in the two states have used distinctive aesthetic idioms to register the reintegration of southern Africa into the neoliberal world-system. In the fiction of Mozambican writers Aldino Muianga and Aníbal Aleluia, he shows how the legacy of colonial underdevelopment and its role in the transition to neoliberalism in Mozambique …

Conjunctures, Commodities, And Social State Marxism, Stephen Shapiro

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “Conjunctures, Commodities, and Social State Marxism,” Stephen Shapiro discusses our current moment as the conjuncture of three temporalities: a secular trend of centrist liberalism, a Kress cycle of managerial capitalism, and three Kondratieff waves. These can be understood by the addition of implied terms in Marx’s advanced discussion of the commodity-form through an approach that Shapiro calls Social State Marxism.

Periodizing The Present: The 2020s, The Longue Durée, & Contemporary Culture, Treasa De Loughry, Brittany Murray

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Trauma, History, And Terror In The Poetry Of Yusef Komunyakaa And Sinan Antoon, Reema Binghadeer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her comparative study “Trauma, History, and Terror in the Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa and Sinan Antoon,” Reema Binghadeer considers the work of the African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1941) and the (Arab) Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon (b. 1967) through the lens of trauma theory of some notable theorists including; Freud, Cathy Caruth, Jean Laplanche, Roger Luckhurst, and Shoshana Felman—have negotiated in this field. The article explores the literary manifestations of trauma in two distinct historical periods and geographical settings to show the specificities of each prototype and how the historical-cultural significance and textual meanings of trauma have intertwined …

Precarity In The Times Of Partition: Personal Vs Communal Love In Khushwant Singh’S Train To Pakistan And Saadat Hasan Manto’S “Gurmukh Singh Ki Wasiyat”, Ayesha Perveen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The paper studies how various shades of love respond to precarity in anarchic times by comparing the narrative representation of the aftermath of the Partition of the British colonized Subcontinent into independent countries of India and Pakistan in 1947 with particular focus on Sikh-Muslim relationships in Punjab as presented in Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan and Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story “Gurmukh Singh ki Wasiyat.” Employing Judith Butler’s concept of precarity, the paper analyzes how both the writers sketch precarity in partition times ensuing in post-Partition communal violence and effacement of love. The selection of the texts is significant …