Showing papers on "Ideology published in 2020"

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

Abstract: In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. He argues that centrally managed social plans derail when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not -- and cannot be -- fully understood. Further the success of designs for social organization depends on the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a persuasive case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. And in discussing these planning disasters, he identifies four conditions common to them all: the state's attempt to impose administrative order on nature and society; a high-modernist ideology that believes scientific intervention can improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large-scale innovations; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

Abstract: In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of black people and black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of blacks on western continents, Robinson argues, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this. To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright. |In this reissue of a 1983 classic, Robinson argues that Western Marxism is unable to comprehend either the racial character of capitalism or mass movements outside of Europe. Robinson combines political theory, history, philosophy, and cultural analysis to illustrate his argument and chronicles the influence of Marxist ideology and black resistance on such important black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright.

The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity : A feminist appropriation of Foucault

Abstract: The ideal of slenderness, then, and the diet and exercise regimens that have become inseparable from it, offer the illusion of meeting, through the body, the contradictory demands of the contemporary ideology of femininity. The body may also operate as a metaphor for culture. From quarters as diverse as Plato and Hobbes to French feminist Luce Irigaray, an imagination of body-morphology has provided a blueprint for diagnosis and/or vision of social and political life. The shift to the practical dimension is not a turn to biology or nature, but to another "register," as Foucault puts it of the cultural body: the register of the "useful body" rather than the "intelligible body." All the cultural paraphernalia of femininity, learning to please visually and sexually through the practices of the body–media imagery, beauty pageants, high heels, girdles, make-up, simulated orgasm – were seen as crucial in maintaining gender domination.

A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town

Abstract: Michael Herzfeld describes what happens when a bureaucracy charged with historic conservation clashes with a local populace hostile to the state and suspicious of tourism. Focusing on the Cretan town of Rethemnos, once a center of learning under Venetian rule and later inhabited by the Turks, he examines major questions confronting conservators and citizens as they negotiate the "ownership" of history: Who defines the past? To whom does the past belong? What is "traditional" and how is this determined? Exploring the meanings of the built environment for Rethemnos's inhabitants, Herzfeld finds that their interest in it has more to do with personal histories and the immediate social context than with the formal history that attracts the conservators. He also investigates the inhabitants' social practices from the standpoints of household and kin group, political association, neighborhood, gender ideology, and the effects of these on attitudes toward home ownership. In the face of modernity, where tradition is an object of both reverence and commercialism, Rethemnos emerges as an important ethnographic window onto the ambiguous cultural fortunes of Greece.

Political Ideology Predicts Perceptions of the Threat of COVID-19 (and Susceptibility to Fake News About It)

Abstract: The present research examined the relationship between political ideology and perceptions of the threat of COVID-19. Due to Republican leadership’s initial downplaying of COVID-19 and the resulting...

An ideology critique of global citizenship education

Abstract: In the last two decades, global citizenship education (GCE) has become a catchphrase used by international and national educational agencies, as well as researchers, to delineate the increasing int...

High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng's China

Abstract: Jing Wang offers the first overview of the feverish decade of the 1980s in China, from early reexaminations of Maoism through the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Wang's energetic, creative, and highly intelligent take on Chinese culture provides a broad portrait of the post-revolutionary era and a provocative inquiry into the nature of Chinese modernity. In seven linked essays, the author examines the cultural dynamics that have given rise to the epochal discourse. She traces the Chinese Marxists' short debate over "socialist alienation" and examines the various schools of thought - Li Zehou and the Marxist Reconstruction of Confucianism, the neo-Confucian Revivalists, and the Enlightenment School - that came into play in the Culture Fever.She also critiques the controversial mini-series "Yellow River Elegy". In mapping out China's post-revolutionary aesthetics, Wang introduces the debate over "pseudo-modernism," refutes the pseudo-proposition of "Chinese postmodernism," and looks at the dawning of popular culture in the 1990s. This book delivers a ten-year intertwined history of Chinese intellectuals, writers, literary critics, and cultural critics that gives us a deeper understanding of the China of the 1980s, the 1990s, and beyond.

From academic language to language architecture: Challenging raciolinguistic ideologies in research and practice

Abstract: In this article, I argue that academic language is a raciolinguistic ideology that frames racialized students as linguistically deficient and in need of remediation. I propose language architecture...

The role of populist attitudes in explaining climate change skepticism and support for environmental protection

Abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that partisanship and political ideology, writ large, are some of the most powerful explanations of attitudes towards climate change and environmental politics. While comp...

Mentality and behavior in COVID-19 emergency status in Japan: Influence of personality, morality and ideology.

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic began in December 2019 and severely influenced society. In response, the Japanese government declared a state of emergency on 7th April in seven prefectures. The study conducted an immediate survey on 8th April to record the response of the general public to the first emergency status due to epidemics. The study hypothesized that personality traits, moral foundation, and political ideology can influence people's mentality, cognition, and behavior toward COVID-19. Based on a nationwide dataset of 1856 respondents (male = 56.3%, Mage = 46.7, emergency regions = 49.9%), the study found that personality, morality, and ideology altered mental health status and motivated behaviors toward COVID-19. Neuroticism and avoiding harm involved cognition and behavior through various means. The study also found significant differences among demographic groups. Results are informative and contributive to the governance and management of, and aid for, individual responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Everyday Life and Everyday Communication in Coronavirus Capitalism

Abstract: The coronavirus crisis is an existential crisis of humanity and society. It radically confronts humans with death and the fear of death. This collective experience can on the one hand result in new forms of solidarity and socialism or can on the other hand, if ideology and the far-right prevail, advance war and fascism. Political action and political economy are decisive factors in such a profound crisis that shatters society and everyday life.

Religion in the Age of Social Distancing: How COVID-19 Presents New Directions for Research

Abstract: In this brief note written during a global pandemic, we consider some of the important ways this historical moment is altering the religious landscape, aiming our investigative lens at how religious institutions, congregations, and individuals are affected by the social changes produced by COVID-19. This unprecedented time prompts scholars of religion to reflect on how to strategically approach the study of religion in the time of "social distancing," as well as moving forward. Particularly important considerations include developing heuristic, innovative approaches for revealing ongoing changes to religion, as well as how religion continues to structure social life across a wide range of contexts, from the most intimate and personal to the most public and global. Although our note can only be indicative rather than exhaustive, we do suggest that the initial groundwork for reconsiderations might productively focus on several key analytical themes, including: Epidemiology, Ideology, Religious Practice, Religious Organizations and Institutions, as well as Epistemology and Methodology. In offering these considerations as a starting point, we remain aware (and hopeful) that inventive and unanticipated approaches will also emerge.

Uses and Abuses of Ideology in Political Psychology

Abstract: Ideology is a central construct in political psychology. Even so, the field’s strong claims about an ideological public rarely engage evidence of enormous individual differences: a minority with real ideological coherence and weak to nonexistent political belief organization for everyone else. Here, I bridge disciplinary gaps by showing the limits of mass political ideology with several popular measures and components—selfidentification, core political values (egalitarian and traditionalism’s resistance to change), and policy indices— in representative U.S. surveys across four decades (Ns ~ 13 k–37 k), plus panel data testing stability. Results show polar, coherent, stable, and potent ideological orientations only among the most knowledgeable 20–30% of citizens. That heterogeneity means full-sample tests overstate ideology for most people but understate it for knowledgeable citizens. Whether through top-down opinion leadership or bottom-up ideological reasoning, organized political belief systems require political attention and understanding to form. Finally, I show that convenience samples make trouble for ideology generalizations. I conclude by proposing analytic best practices to help avoid overclaiming ideology in the public. Taken together, what first looks like strong and broad ideology is actually ideological innocence for most and meaningful ideology for a few.

Conspiracy theories and the conspiracy mindset: implications for political ideology

Abstract: We consider the significance of belief in conspiracy theories for political ideologies. Although there is no marked ideological asymmetry in conspiracy belief, research indicates that conspiracy theories may play a powerful role in ideological processes. In particular, they are associated with ideological extremism, distrust of rival ideological camps, populist distrust of mainstream politics, and ideological grievances. The ‘conspiracy mindset’ characterizes the ideological significance of conspiracy belief, and is associated with measuring conspiracy belief by means of abstract propositions associated with aversion and distrust of powerful groups. We suggest that this approach does not pay sufficient attention to the nonrational character of specific conspiracy beliefs and thus runs the risk of mischaracterizing them, and mischaracterizing their ideological implications.

The dual evolutionary foundations of political ideology.

Abstract: Research over the last fifty years has suggested that political attitudes and values around the globe are shaped by two ideological dimensions, often referred to as economic and social conservatism. However, it remains unclear why this ideological structure exists. Here we highlight the striking concordance between these dual dimensions of ideology and independent convergent evidence for two key shifts in the evolution of human group living. First, humans began to cooperate more and across wider interdependent networks. Second, humans became more group-minded, conforming to social norms in culturally marked groups and punishing norm-violators. We propose that fitness trade-offs and behavioural plasticity have maintained functional variation in willingness to cooperate and conform within modern human groups, naturally giving rise to the two dimensions of political ideology. Supported by evidence from across the behavioural sciences, this evolutionary framework provides insight into the biological and cultural basis of political ideology.

How fascism works: the politics of us and them

Abstract: Many of us in higher education are familiar with the history of fascism, but with the current rise of fascist ideology in America and Western Europe, Jason Stanley offers an excellent synopsis of c...

Do People Really Become More Conservative as They Age

Abstract: Folk wisdom has long held that people become more politically conservative as they grow older, although several empirical studies suggest political attitudes are stable across time. Using data from...

Organizational Political Ideology and Corporate Openness to Social Activism

Abstract: This paper argues that organizations tend to be more “open” or “closed” as a function of their members’ political ideologies and that this variation can help explain firms’ responses to social acti...

The Social Dimension of Political Values

Abstract: Worries about the instability of political attitudes and lack of ideological constraint among the public are often pacified by the assumption that individuals have stable political values. These political values are assumed to help individuals filter political information and thus both minimize outside influence and guide people through complex political environments. This perspective, though, assumes that political values are stable and consistent across contexts. This piece questions that assumption and argues that political values are socially reinforced—that is, that political values are not internal predispositions, but the result of social influence. I consider this idea with two empirical tests: an experimental test that recreates the transmission of political values and an observational analysis of the effect of politically homogeneous social contexts on political value endorsements. Results suggest that political values are socially reinforced. The broader implication of my findings is that the concepts scholars term “political values” may be reflections of individuals’ social contexts rather than values governing political behavior.

The Impact of Political Ideology on Concern and Behavior During COVID-19

Abstract: Beliefs about objective matters of fact are caused in no small part by political identity. This includes beliefs regarding the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic, which tend to align with ideological commitments. These linkages between beliefs and political identity matter for behavior, and not just in the voting booth. Decisions about whether (and how) to adopt measures like social distancing rely in part upon how one evaluates the seriousness of the risk posed by the virus. In this paper we investigate the relationship between one’s political ideology, sources of information and news consumption, and COVID-19 oriented behavioral changes. We find that liberals and moderates make fewer trips than conservatives and are more likely to change their behavior in ways suggested by government recommendations and guidelines. The results further show little effect of state-level orders, but we do find some indication that concern about COVID-19, and beliefs about the behavior of others can predict behavior changes.

Academic English as standard language ideology: A renewed research agenda for asset-based language education:

Abstract: The author situates language education policy and scholarship on Academic English within the broader historical context of standard language ideology, the view that the language variety of socio-economic elites is intrinsically more complex than other varieties. It is argued that the current predominant focus on the nature of school language gives the impression that school language alone can express complex ideas or use complex grammar, leaving little conceptual space for leveraging children’s home language varieties. The author calls for a return to historical commitments to an asset-based approach to school and home language differences in mainstream language education research.

Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory

Abstract: ‘An authoritative analysis of the role of communication in contemporary capitalism and an important contribution to debates about the forms of domination and potentials for liberation in today’s capitalist society.’ — Professor Michael Hardt, Duke University, co-author of the tetralogy Empire, Commonwealth, Multitude, and Assembly ‘A comprehensive approach to understanding and transcending the deepening crisis of communicative capitalism. It is a major work of synthesis and essential reading for anyone wanting to know what critical analysis is and why we need it now more than ever.’ — Professor Graham Murdock, Emeritus Professor, University of Loughborough and co-editor of The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications Communication and Capitalism outlines foundations of a critical theory of communication. Going beyond Jurgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action, Christian Fuchs outlines a communicative materialism that is a critical, dialectical, humanist approach to theorising communication in society and in capitalism. The book renews Marxist Humanism as a critical theory perspective on communication and society. The author theorises communication and society by engaging with the dialectic, materialism, society, work, labour, technology, the means of communication as means of production, capitalism, class, the public sphere, alienation, ideology, nationalism, racism, authoritarianism, fascism, patriarchy, globalisation, the new imperialism, the commons, love, death, metaphysics, religion, critique, social and class struggles, praxis, and socialism. Fuchs renews the engagement with the questions of what it means to be a human and a humanist today and what dangers humanity faces today.

Technology as Ideology in Urban Governance

Abstract: This article argues that the turn toward smart cities, emphasizing solutions, services, and infrastructures driven by digital technologies, has reinforced a dominant ideology shaping urban decision...

What is an ‘oriental’ carpet? Reimagining, remaking, repossessing the patterned pile carpets of South, Central and West Asia since 1840

Abstract: This thesis excavates what lies beneath commonly accepted judgements of the patterned pile carpets of South, Central and West Asia, widely known as ‘oriental’ carpets, in order to open new areas of investigation into these artifacts. Beginning with a critique of the dominant European and North American connoisseurial and scholarly position on these artifacts, the thesis analyses the role they play in materializing ideas of the Other, the subaltern and the colonized. It investigates their participation in complex global networks of materials, technology, skills, and ideology. It interrogates important concepts underlying not only European and North American ideas about the patterned pile carpets of South, Central and West Asia, but about crafts more broadly. Contested concepts such as tradition, authenticity, authorship, originals and copies, handmade and machine-made are explored, and the binaries implied by them are challenged. Chapter one interrogates the assumptions underlying European and North American writing and thinking on these artifacts since around 1840. It argues that rather than articulating stable and enduring evaluations of aesthetic and cultural value, these assumptions express certain psychological, political, social and economic ideas in which Europeans and North Americans invested from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The chapter examines the circumstances which brought into being this dominant reading, a reading I describe as the European and North American orthodoxy; deconstructing the work of its foundational thinkers, and the practice which enacts and polices it. Chapters two, three and four investigate the orthodoxy at work, both materializing its values in carpets it reinvents as iconic and excluding carpets it regards as transgressive of its values. I use three examples to argue my case. The first is the reimagining of the canonical sixteenth century Persian Ardabil carpet in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, as the preeminent example of the values of the orthodoxy, from its arrival in the museum in 1892 to the present day. The second two examples are of carpets that transgress the European and North American orthodoxy’s values and are consequently defined by it as of low aesthetic, cultural and commercial value. They are machine-made versions of these artifacts woven at the Templeton Carpet Manufacturing Company in Glasgow from 1840, and handmade carpets produced for a global export market in colonial Punjab from 1860, and independent Pakistan from 1947. The thesis takes an approach which is at once political, rooted in the framework of orientalism, postcolonialism and decoloniality; historical, setting out to write a history of objects and history through objects; material, focused on technology, making, dyes and fibres; and experiential, drawing on haptic and psychoanalytical thought. From these perspectives, the thesis argues for an opening up of the conversation about these artifacts, beyond the frequently used constraints of connoisseurship and provenance. It sets out to readmit excluded weavers and their carpets to the story of these artifacts; and to reposition these carpets in the discussion about creativity, how things are made, and how that making changes across time and space, a conversation where their role has commonly been restricted to that of exemplars of the traditional and the Other.

Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen

Abstract: Why did 62 million Americans vote for Donald Trump? Trump and Us offers a fresh perspective on this question, taking seriously the depth and breadth of Trump's support. An expert in political language, Roderick P. Hart turns to Trump's words, voters' remarks, and media commentary for insight. The book offers the first systematic rhetorical analysis of Trump's 2016 campaign and early presidency, using text analysis and archives of earlier presidential campaigns to uncover deep emotional undercurrents in the country and provide historical comparison. Trump and Us pays close attention to the emotional dimensions of politics, above and beyond cognition and ideology. Hart argues it was not partisanship, policy, or economic factors that landed Trump in the Oval Office but rather how Trump made people feel.

“It’s Not Really My Job”: A Mixed Methods Framework for Language Ideologies, Monolingualism, and Teaching Emergent Bilingual Learners:

Abstract: Teacher education has redoubled efforts to prepare a predominantly monolingual teaching force for linguistic diversity in U.S. schools. Some jurisdictions are requiring specific teacher preparation...

The Conservative Backlash against Gender in Latin America

Abstract: Gender is central to the political disputes in Latin America today. Although conflicts concerning women and LGBTQ rights are not new, only recently have they become a dividing line in the public identities of parties, politicians, and candidates. The second decade of the 2000s brought the opposition to gender forward in the platforms of far-right movements and leaders, raising popular support as they mobilized conservative frameworks and antagonized feminist and LGBTQ activism. Their promises to protect the family from a supposed moral disorder made gender a popular category, strategically presented as an “ideology” threatening children, marriage, the natural order, and national values. Elections such as those in Brazil and Costa Rica in 2018 indicate that conflicts concerning gender and sexuality can also produce new electoral cleavages.

Not quite over the rainbow: the unrelenting and insidious nature of heteronormative ideology

Abstract: Heteronormative ideology refers to the belief that there are two separate and opposing genders with associated natural roles that match their assigned sex, and that heterosexuality is a given. It is pervasive and persistent, carrying negative consequences. Because it is embedded in societal institutions and propagated through socialization and other widely held ideologies, it is prevalent among both cis-hetero and LGBTQI+ individuals. In the current article, we discuss the unrelenting and insidious nature of heteronormative ideology, review some of the social-psychological mechanisms that contribute to its maintenance, and provide directions for future research that could inform efforts to combat it. We argue that threat reactions to non-heteronormative behavior reinforce heteronormative beliefs and that interventions are needed to address both prejudice and its underlying mechanisms.