‘I will not be thrown out of the country because I’m an immigrant’: Eastern European migrants’ responses to hate crime in a semi-rural context in the wake of Brexit

This article examines Eastern European migrants’ experiences of and responses to hate crime. Following the UK European Union Membership Referendum (‘Brexit’ vote), there was an increase in reported hate crimes against immigrants. The study focuses on the experiences of migrants in Lincolnshire, a region of England which has a significant migrant population, and which had one of the highest ‘leave’ votes. The focus on white migrants in this semi-rural setting offers an original perspective in the field of hate crime studies. We draw on semi-structured interviews and observations to identify temporal, spatial, and relational factors in responses to hate crime. We uncover the insecure occupation of a ‘third space’ constituted by material, discursive, and emotional practices. This positioning was destabilised post referendum; but there was also evidence of the operation of agency within processes of ‘othering’, suggesting a transition from victim identity to emergent political subject

‘I will not be thrown out of the country because I’m an immigrant’: Eastern European migrants’ responses to hate crime in a semi-rural context in the wake of Brexit

This article examines Eastern European migrants’ experiences of and responses to hate crime. Following the UK European Union Membership Referendum (‘Brexit’ vote), there was an increase in reported hate crimes against immigrants. The study focuses on the experiences of migrants in Lincolnshire, a region of England which has a significant migrant population, and which had one of the highest ‘leave’ votes. The focus on white migrants in this semi-rural setting offers an original perspective in the field of hate crime studies. We draw on semi-structured interviews and observations to identify temporal, spatial, and relational factors in responses to hate crime. We uncover the insecure occupation of a ‘third space’ constituted by material, discursive, and emotional practices. This positioning was destabilised post referendum; but there was also evidence of the operation of agency within processes of ‘othering’, suggesting a transition from victim identity to emergent political subject

Avatars of Eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace

Recent scholarly critiques of the so-called liberal peace raise important political and ethical challenges to practices of postwar intervention in the global South. However, their conceptual and analytic approaches have tended to reproduce rather than challenge the intellectual Eurocentrism underpinning the liberal peace. Eurocentric features of the critiques include the methodological bypassing of target subjects in research, the analytic bypassing of subjects through frameworks of governmentality, the assumed ontological split between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘local’, and a nostalgia for the liberal subject and the liberal social contract as alternative bases for politics. These collectively produce a ‘paradox of liberalism’ that sees the liberal peace as oppressive but also the only true source of emancipation. However, the article suggests that a repoliticization of colonial difference offers an alternative ‘decolonizing’ approach to critical analysis through repositioning the analytic gaze. Three alternative research strategies for critical analysis are briefly developed

Heroes and villains of world history across cultures

© 2015 Hanke et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedEmergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History Survey (WHS) involving 6,902 university students in 37 countries evaluating 40 figures from world history. Multidimensional scaling and factor analysis techniques found only limited forms of universality in evaluations across Western, Catholic/Orthodox, Muslim, and Asian country clusters. The highest consensus across cultures involved scientific innovators, with Einstein having the most positive evaluation overall. Peaceful humanitarians like Mother Theresa and Gandhi followed. There was much less cross-cultural consistency in the evaluation of negative figures, led by Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. After more traditional empirical methods (e.g., factor analysis) failed to identify meaningful cross-cultural patterns, Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to identify four global representational profiles: Secular and Religious Idealists were overwhelmingly prevalent in Christian countries, and Political Realists were common in Muslim and Asian countries. We discuss possible consequences and interpretations of these different representational profiles.This research was supported by grant RG016-P-10 from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (http://www.cckf.org.tw/). Religion Culture Entropy China Democracy Economic histor

Culture and Subjectivity in Neoliberal and postfeminist times

My aim in this paper is to think through a number of issues concerning the relationship between culture and subjectivity. It seems to me that exploring the relationship of changing forms of political organisation, social relations and cultural practices to changing modes and experiences of subjecthood and subjectivity are among the most important and urgent tasks for critical intellectual work. These questions go to the heart of understanding power, ideology and agency and they require research that is interdisciplinary, psychosocial and intersectional. My particular focus in this short article is on the interrelations between changing representational practices in visual culture and changing subjectivity/ies. I argue that neoliberalism and postfeminism are central to understanding contemporary media culture, and I put the case for research which does not retreat from exploring how these broader social/political/economic/cultural discourses and formations may relate to subjectivity

A post-colonial analysis of agile software development methods in ICT4D

There is evidence that agile approaches to information system development can improve product quality and developer productivity. However, successful adoption of these approaches appears to depend on adaptation to specific contexts. This research contributes to a broader goal to understand what it means to “be agile” in the presence of adaptations to the specific context. To pursue our research objectives, we have performed 31 semi-structured recorded and transcribed practitioner interviews from three companies in Lebanon. The interview transcripts were analysed using an approach informed by grounded theory. Agile methods enable learning and improvement through team conversations. Yet, the practitioners in our study shun public self-evaluation, finding it difficult to discuss areas for improvement in public. We also found legacy “top down” management practices that undermine team autonomy and local client companies lack experience of engaging with agile processes. In a more positive vein, we found evidence of rich use of various communications channels to overcome geographical distance. On the one hand, agile methods represent a “northern” idea being propagated to the Global South. And yet, on the other hand, the agile concept of self-organising teams has the potential to be empowering and emancipatory. Post-colonial theory helps us understand the phenomenon of agile tailoring, where development process ceremonies are adapted to suite a specific local context

Deep Theorizing in International Relations

This paper starts from the observation that, at a time when the popularity of grand theory is in decline among IR scholars, they do not agree on what they mean by theory. In fact, the celebration of theoretical pluralism is accompanied by the relative absence of a serious conversation about what ‘theory’ is, could, or should be. Taking the view that we need such a conversation, this puts forward the notion of ‘deep theorizing’. Countering both the shallow theorizing of modern scholarship that conflates theory with scientific method, and the postmodern view that abstract narratives must be deconstructed and rejected, it offers a reading of the parameters along which substantial theorizing proceeds. Specifically, it suggests that ‘deep theorizing’ is the conceptual effort of explaining (inter)action by developing a reading of drives/basic motivations and the ontology of its carrier through an account of the human condition, that is, a particular account of how the subject (the political actor) is positioned in social space and time. The paper illustrates the plausibility of this meta-theoretical angle in a discussion of realist, liberal and postcolonial schools of thought

Infrastructures of empire: towards a critical geopolitics of media and information studies

The Arab Uprisings of 2011 can be seen as a turning point for media and information studies scholars, many of whom newly discovered the region as a site for theories of digital media and social transformation. This work has argued that digital media technologies fuel or transform political change through new networked publics, new forms of connective action cultivating liberal democratic values. These works have, surprisingly, little to say about the United States and other Western colonial powers’ legacy of occupation, ongoing violence and strategic interests in the region. It is as if the Arab Spring was a vindication for the universal appeal of Western liberal democracy delivered through the gift of the Internet, social media as manifestation of the ‘technologies of freedom’ long promised by Cold War. We propose an alternate trajectory in terms of reorienting discussions of media and information infrastructures as embedded within the resurgence of idealized liberal democratic norms in the wake of the end of the Cold War. We look at the demise of the media and empire debates and ‘the rise of the BRICS’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) as modes of intra-imperial competition that complicate earlier Eurocentric narratives media and empire. We then outline the individual contributions for the special collection of essays