Group items tagged

"Community informatics (CI) is a form of activism that involves the application of information and communication technologies in pursuit of community development within localities. This article draws on discourse theory (DT) to re-evaluate activists' self-interpretations that rely on community, and to make sense of the political struggles at the heart of CI. It is argued that activists' community discourse constructs, through articulation, locally "resistant" collective identities and an associated collective agency capable of appropriating technology in pursuit of unfulfilled social demands. However DT also suggests that the socially progressive nature of CI is not guaranteed by recourse to the social ideal of community."

Convention suggests that multicultural areas tend to exhibit high levels of residential and educational segregation, high degrees of poverty and deprivation and low rates of contact between culturally distinct individuals and groups. By contrast, with the help of a case study of a fast growing English new town, this paper reflects on the experience of multicultural settlement in what might be described as an ordinary city: one in which that experience is relatively recent and whose identity is constantly in the process of being made and remade. It draws on qualitative research, based around semi-structured interviews, participant observation and the use of focus groups, to develop its conclusions. Moving beyond any notion that minority ethnic communities live 'parallel lives', the paper identifies and explores some of the ways in which the new city spaces of Milton Keynes are actively lived, negotiated and understood by the Ghanaian and Somali communities (and particularly by young people from those communities). It highlights the tensions between the ways in which difference is negotiated in practice and attempts to define communities through processes of governance.

Reviewing the literature on the domain of virtual communities, this research finds that there is still an important gap in the scholarly understanding of how institutions influence online spaces of interaction. The theme of institutions has been marginal to most of the academic research in the domain of virtual communities, with few exceptions. This paper proposes that an institutional perspective would permit a better understanding on the whys of online behaviours and explores the potential contributions of such an approach.

"Challenging Inequalities: Nations, Races and Communities," that is, challenging inequalities among nations, among races, and among communities. As we wrote in the call for papers: "The conference theme can be interpreted in two different ways. Political,

Much research in international political economy (IPE) has been criticised for focussing on large and powerful actors in post-industrial countries, to the neglect of sites, processes and actors in the global South. This article offers a corrective to this bias in two ways: by locating the analysis in two rural Central American communities; and by exploring the social relations of consumption in these communities. In doing this, I challenge assumptions about rural places being excluded from global processes and explore the complexities and contradictions of how such communities are inserted into global circuits of production and consumption.

Diversity has become a key factor of societal transformation during the last couple of decades. It has challenged the notion of the nation and its traditional representation as one community of people sharing the same 'national values' (eg. Goldberg, 2002). Diversity raises the question how we can, as people with all our mutual differences of, amongst others, sexuality, race and religion, form a community that enables its members to develop themselves, to flourish and prosper. Migration, especially, has had a considerable bearing on the idea of pluralism and its implication for social and political processes of inclusion or exclusion in contemporary societies. Migration has entailed an increasing awareness of diversity within each nation and national community (Heerma van Voss & van der Linden, 2002; Horton, 1995). This special issue of National Identities assembles articles from different disciplines that try to understand what it means for people, around the world, to be citizens in rapidly changing national, social and political landscapes.

This article analyzes how objects that are 'vessels of meaning' are involved in social interactions that create and maintain identity and community. Specifically, it examines the production and uses of chapbooks within poetry communities. Chapbooks are cheaply produced booklets of poetry that are distributed hand-to-hand rather than through institutionalized publication and distribution systems. The analysis draws from in-depth interviews with poets and ethnographic observation of literary events. By outlining the creation and deployment of chapbooks, a case is made for the centrality of material objects in constitutive social interactions. It is argued that material objects are both cultural products and cultural producers, not only because of their physical characteristics, but because of the ways in which they circulate.

Reviewing the 22 years that have elapsed since Gifford's 1989 report labelled Liverpool as racist, the authors focus on the fact that in a city which has had a British African Caribbean (BAC) community for over 400 years, there is minimum representation of that community in the city's workforce. The authors investigate two major forms of employment in the city, i.e. the teaching workforce and the city's Council workforce and one major route to employability, i.e. Higher Education Institutions in the city. They set out an evidenced argument which demonstrates the under-representation of the BAC community in two of the city's major areas of employment. The authors hypothesise that this under-representation is grounded in institutional and structural racism.

This essay elaborates upon some of the feminist legacies underwriting the work of Henry Jenkins, particularly the 2006 book, Convergence Culture, to develop a set of priorities for media and Cultural Studies research following in its wake. Focusing on critical uses of the term 'subculture', and its convenient fit with Internet scholarship to date, and moving to an analysis of the notion of 'participatory culture', we question how easily the practices of online media consumption can be separated from the wider structuring conditions of everyday life. Our recent research on fan communities and information workers highlights the labour and leisure conditions contributing to the experience of online community, fan-based or otherwise. These contrasting examples show the many non-voluntary dimensions that accompany participation in 'convergence culture', and how these are experienced in specific ways. The gendered intimacy of fan fiction communities and the coercive nature of technologically mediated white collar employment each reveal the stakes involved in allowing the practices of a minority to stand as the optimistic vision of the imminent media landscape.

Over the last two decades the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben has attracted widespread attention both within philosophy and more broadly across the human sciences. Central to the thinking of Nancy and Agamben is a shared theory of community that offers a model of resistance to oppressive power through radical passivity. This article argues that this model inherits the inadequacies of Martin Heidegger's attempts to conceptualize society and history. More specifically, Heidegger's understanding of collective history in terms of 'destiny' implicitly regulates the figure of community proposed by Nancy and Agamben. This alignment with the Heideggerian notion of destiny means that these later thinkers fail to offer a credible model of resistance in terms of concretely determined means of productive counter-practices. As a consequence the usefulness of the thinking of Nancy and Agamben as a conceptual framework for emancipatory politics is at best extremely limited.

"Habermas' universal pragmatics continues to draw significant attention from sociologists seeking a viable balance between poststructuralism and traditional critical theory, while at the same time becoming increasingly recognised within formal political circles worldwide. A number of social theorists and philosophers, however, have taken Habermas to task with respect to how much his 'theory of communicative rationality', the driving force behind universal pragmatics, in fact actually steps away from epistemological foundationalism as Habermas intends it to do. This paper explores parallels between Habermas' particular notion of human reason and rationality (i.e., communicative rationality) and that expressed within connectionism, today's dominant paradigm in the discipline of artificial intelligence (AI), created as an alternative to the classical AI view of 'mind as computer'. Given the homology, I argue, the practical shortcomings of connectionism may indeed lend unique and compelling weight to those claims that Habermas' system of thought is foundationalist, despite Habermas' efforts."

"This article argues that the status of migrant subjects is characterized by a loss of communication rights and locates the instances where this loss is most visible. It investigates the process of silencing and immobilization of migrants and the particular forms it takes for female migrants through the disenablement of communicative acts. In this process the detained migrant loses her status as an interlocutor, irrespectively of the instances and processes that allow her-or demand of her-to speak. The state of exceptionality assigned to detained migrants is supported in the criminalization of migration laws and securitization, which together with widespread policies of incarceration in the West have become the antipode of the fundamental principles of free movement and expression. Silence and immobilization constitute the 'standard' rather than exceptional conditions of people on the move that shadow them across every step of their way, geographically, politically, culturally, legislatively, socially."

Broadly globalising processes have been in train for centuries, but contemporary discourse about globalisation is here located within a specific historical context, particularly characterised by new forms of communications and the pressures on states produced by the decline of Keynesianism and the end of the Cold War. Coincident changes also led to a growing interest in national identities, marked not least by the founding of this journal in 1999. Globalisation, a series of processes rather than a single force, has a range of effects on states, nations and national identities, including accommodation and adaptation as well as resistance. Indeed, globalising forces, such as democratisation, are shown to require nation-building. Attempts to impose order on international society through cosmopolitan devices are arguably more inimical to national identities. As with nations, cosmopolitanism involves an imagined community. Because this necessarily exists outside time, the building of a sense of trust and commonality across people and territory is however more challenging. Without popular ownership, it is argued, cosmopolitanism is often more likely to appear a threat than a boon. Building a global civil society, or indeed local democracies, is also unlikely when so many societies still lack local versions anchored in some form of national identity.

"For most indigenous communities, communal lands and natural resources have fundamental spiritual, social, cultural, economic and political significance that is integrally linked to both their identity and continued survival. Denial of the inherent and inalienable rights to their traditional land and natural resources is often at the root of human rights violations, giving rise to intra-state tensions and laying the foundation for emerging and ongoing conflicts. Full enjoyment of their land rights, including access to and control over the lands and their natural resources, would imbue indigenous peoples with the economic independence they need to preserve their distinct cultures and determine their futures. Immediate resolution of this issue is critical to ensuring that indigenous peoples are able to enjoy the rights to which they are entitled, and to enhance stability at the national level. It is suggested that one possible means is through the strategic reconceptualisation of self-determination. More specifically, the implementation of alternative manifestations of this right, particularly the effective realisation of the emerging right to autonomy, recognised in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, would enable indigenous peoples to have effective, de facto control over all aspects of their political, social, cultural and economic survival."

"Research on social movement networks has been defined by an emphasis on structural determinism and quantitative methodologies, and has often overlooked the spatial dimension of networking practices. This article argues that scholars have much to gain if (1) they move beyond the understanding of networks as organisational and communication structures, and analyse them as everyday social processes of human negotiation and construction, and (2) they pay attention to how networks between different organisations create multiple and overlapping spaces of action and meaning that define the everyday contexts of social movements. Drawing on ethnographic research within the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, this article explores the everyday dimension of political and communication networks. It shows that everyday networking practices are embedded in processes of identification and meaning construction, and are defined by a politics of inclusion and exclusion; introducing the concept of ethnographic cartography, it demonstrates that social movement networks are incorporated into everyday practices and narratives of place-making."

"This paper explores software's pivotal role in the power dynamics of contemporary capitalism. The author theorizes Free Software as a new form of property that is infecting capitalism like a virus, challenging the system of private property central to its dominant logic. Free Software can be produced by developers working for free in peer communities or in profit-oriented firms. The author explores the conditions under which Free Software is produced through peer versus market-based production, emphasizing the implications for constructing the Free Software market and the digital commons. The author identifies actors' motivations, the organizational structure of production, and financial resources as three factors shaping these conditions. The author focuses on the case of Ubuntu, a Free Software operating system that is available free of charge on the Internet. Ubuntu is produced by Canonical, a Free Software, market-based firm, through an intriguing combination of market-based and peer production that both embodies and transforms capitalist practices."

"This article discusses three interrelated challenges related to conducting social science research in 'Internet Time'. (1) The rate at which the Internet is both diffusing through society and developing new capacities is unprecedented. It creates some novel challenges for scholarly research. (2) Many of our most robust research methods are based upon ceteris paribus assumptions that do not hold in the online environment. The rate of change online narrows the range of questions that can be answered using traditional tools. Meanwhile, (3) new research methods are untested and often rely upon data sources that are incomplete and systematically flawed. The paper details these challenges, then proposes that scholars embrace the values of transparency and kludginess in order to answer important research questions in a rapidly-changing communications environment."

In several respects, the European Union (EU) represents both a novel system of quasi-supranational governance and a novel form of political community or polity. But it is also a relatively fragile construction: it remains a community still in the making with an incipient sense of identity, within which powerful forces are at work. This article has three main aims. Firstly, to analyse the reasons and key ideas that prompted a selected elite to construct a set of institutions and treaties destined to unite European nations in such a way that the mere idea of a 'civil war' among them would become impossible. Secondly, to examine the specific top-down processes that led to the emergence of a united Europe and the subsequent emergence of the EU, thus emphasising the constant distance between the elites and the masses in the development of the European project. Finally, to explain why the EU has generated what I call a 'non-emotional' identity, radically different from the emotionally charged and still prevailing national identities present in its member states.

This essay argues that the failures of U.S. immigration enforcement institutions functioned as a strategic policy from 2003 to 2010, when the undocumented population in the United States reached an unprecedented twelve million people. The author examines how the so-called broken immigration system installed a repressive form of governmentality based in failure. While deferring any legalization, federal and state authorities fostered a regime of exclusion and removal that constituted a class of minimal subjects, those of unauthorized migrants and their kin who would effectively exist outside the community of rights. During this period, immigration arrests and deportations reached unprecedented levels, at a moment when the majority of the undocumented remained an irredeemably criminalized status. By disavowing any intention to conduct mass deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents gained sanction for more targeted campaigns of militarized raids, racial profiling, and detentions. The author argues that heightened enforcement, including the 287g program, created dangerous opportunities for government agents to suspend basic democratic restraints on state power, often for interests of racial and class antagonism that exceeded the bounds of immigration enforcement-with severe consequences for Latino communities. By mobilizing a social imaginary predicated on the necessity of uprooting the undocumented, federal, state, and local officials committed themselves to the actions of a police state and sanctioned a system of apartheid governance within the boundaries of the United States.

This essay proposes the category of subalternity as a tool to adjudicate between the often conflicting claims of diaspora and indigeneity. Written in the context of two itineraries on the part of the author - one a combined lecture/tourist trip to Ecuador and the second a talk presented at a symposium on indigeneity and postcoloniality in Urbana-Champaign - the essay begins by tracking the various knowledge claims that arise out of the experience of travel. It goes on to record a travel narrative to an indigenous community in Ecuador in which many of the concerns of representation, language and political recognition that colonized communities face are raised. The essay then moves on to a discussion of the risks of unilaterally privileging either the claims of indigeneity or the claims of diaspora.