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Open Access
Article
Publication date: 15 September 2021

Roma Madan-Soni

The purpose of this article is to collectively work towards understanding and resolving the COVID-19 pandemic issues based on Messersmith's (2018) song, We All Do Better When We…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this article is to collectively work towards understanding and resolving the COVID-19 pandemic issues based on Messersmith's (2018) song, We All Do Better When We All Do Better. Furthermore, Our Identity should not Remain Marked to understand and overcome the workings of a virus whose Identity [DOES NOT] Remain Marked!

Design/methodology/approach

Practice-based creation coalesced with analytical writing.

Findings

We All Do Better When We All Do Better! The COVID-19 pandemic corresponds to crucial fundamental assumptions which have appeared from adversity anthropology over the past epochs. First, that environmental catastrophes infrequently surface, because calamities are communal and reliant on trans-species relationships. Furthermore, they appear from a blend of threat and susceptibility, with susceptibility as the causal issue. Second, the disaster occurs at manifold ranks concurrently, with responses to a threat; it endangers all the weak issues along with the original threat (Kelman, 2020).

Research limitations/implications

Throughout COVID-19 much of the media left cavernous time gaps, masks turned into tools of rebellion, and power and violence were exercised indirectly on the vulnerable. The virtual campuses of WhatsApp, Facebook and conventional broadcasting are disseminating specialist knowledge in pandemic science; now everyone is certified. They voice a nouveau-vindictive biopolitical language, so we rise towards COVID-19 denialism. And, we turn into unthinking puppets who speed up the transfer of misinformation that moves like an “asymptomatic” cough through an overcrowded bar or beach as all inhale-consume it.

Practical implications

Part of pandemic planning and dealing with the consequential calamity is to integrate instantly the disastrous aspects caused by lockdowns. In this surge of terror and apprehension, we cannot afford to isolate people, even more through shame and prejudice. Each one of us is accountable to support each other and advocate for an all-inclusive healthy community.

Social implications

Unescapably, as an immigrant, I had never dreaded this “home away from home” and stay anyhow, and I always had something to write home about. But recently I have had “Nothing to Write Home About,” (Madan-Soni, 2019). Migrant employees in most countries including international students were not much more than uninvited guests positioned in a conventional neighbourhood. It is as if your every expatriate-neighbour was plague-ridden and waiting to infect you. But the virus required no genomic or national identity or visa rank, it could cut all lines to get to you. The virus's Identity Is [Not] Marked.

Originality/value

Our Identity Remains Marked (2020) is my probing visual description of how Our Identity Remains Marked, layered, and stratified in stone under authoritarian structures of patriarchy. I read and researched about how Our Identity Remains Marked when humans are othered through the colours of race, gender, national and immigrant status, including all Earth others. Crafting things, creating something engages with a developing field of ecofeminist research on visual and embodied approaches and creativity (VEM Network, n.d; Reynolds, 2021). Painting offered me a therapeutic way of thinking and of using my senses.

Details

Ecofeminism and Climate Change, vol. 2 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2633-4062

Keywords

Abstract

Details

Living Life to the Fullest: Disability, Youth and Voice
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-445-3

Article
Publication date: 24 June 2020

Hannah Gunderman and Richard White

The authors articulate a posthuman politics of hope to unpack the richly embodied personal experiences and web of relationalities formed through repeated encounters with insects…

Abstract

Purpose

The authors articulate a posthuman politics of hope to unpack the richly embodied personal experiences and web of relationalities formed through repeated encounters with insects. Interrogating insect speciesism teaches to extend the authors’ compassion and live symbiotically with insects. The authors focus on the narrative of insect decline as impacted by colonialism and white supremacy, enabling insect speciesism to flourish alongside exploitation of other human and nonhuman creatures.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors pay particular attention the use of everyday language and framing of insects to “other” them, thereby trivializing and demonizing their existence, including “it's *just* a bug” or “they are pests.” Insect speciesism employs similar rhetoric reinforcing discrimination patterns of other nonhuman animals and humans. The authors focus on the unexpected encounters with insects in domestic spaces, such as an office desk, and through the multispecies space of “the allotment.”

Findings

The authors reflect on two possible posthuman futures: one where insect speciesism is entrenched and unrepentant; the second a decolonized society where we aspire to live a more compassionate and non-violent existence amidst these remarkable and brilliant creatures we owe our very existence on Earth.

Originality/value

One of the most profound lessons of the crisis-driven epoch of the Anthropocene is this: our existence on Earth is intimately bound with the flourishing of all forms of life. This includes complex multispecies encounters between humans and insects, an area of enquiry widely neglected across the social sciences. Faced with imminent catastrophic decline and extinction of insect and invertebrate populations, human relationships with these fellow Earthlings are deserving of further attention.

Details

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 41 no. 3/4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-333X

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 11 April 2017

Janet Sayers

This chapter explores how writing ‘with animals’ can contribute to the development of feminist and queer approaches in Critical Management Studies (CMS). The chapter is…

Abstract

This chapter explores how writing ‘with animals’ can contribute to the development of feminist and queer approaches in Critical Management Studies (CMS). The chapter is theoretically framed with previous work in organisational studies and CMS on gendered writing and introduces the queer practice of ‘dog-writing’ used by feminists in human-animal studies like Donna Haraway and Susan McHugh. Cixous’ essay on ‘On birds, women and writing’ is used to introduce the idea of writing as a ‘difficult joy’. The author then uses writing from her personal journals to ‘write with animals’, especially birds, to show how thought can start. Writing with animals means to be-in-the-world with animals and recognise the ways they are foundational to not only organisational life, but thought itself. By drawing on developments by queer and feminist writers in human-animal studies CMS writers can engage with contemporary creative resistance practices and offer affirmative alternatives.

Details

Feminists and Queer Theorists Debate the Future of Critical Management Studies
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78635-498-3

Keywords

Abstract

Details

Living Life to the Fullest: Disability, Youth and Voice
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-445-3

Article
Publication date: 12 October 2015

Harry Wels

Now that the human-animal distinction is increasingly critiqued from various disciplinary perspectives, to the point where some suggest even letting go of the distinction…

Abstract

Purpose

Now that the human-animal distinction is increasingly critiqued from various disciplinary perspectives, to the point where some suggest even letting go of the distinction completely, the purpose of this paper is to argue that organizational ethnography should start to explore in more detail what this means for organizational ethnographic research, theory and analysis to include non-human animals in it.

Design/methodology/approach

Revisiting the author’s earlier organizational ethnographic work in Zimbabwe on a private wildlife conservancy, an organization that was specifically set up for and around wildlife. At the same time these non-human animals were not taken into account methodologically nor featured at all in the empirical material or in the analysis. What could it mean for the analysis and conclusions if non-human animals would have been part of the equation?

Findings

Since we live in a world shared between human and non-human animals, this also is true for the organizational lives. As scientific research increasingly shows that the distinction between human and non-human animals is more in degree than in kind it is interesting to note that nevertheless non-human animals usually produce deafening “silences” in organizational ethnographic work. Revisiting the author’s earlier organizational ethnographic work in this context the author shows how taking non-human animals on board of the analysis radically alters the outcomes of the research.

Research limitations/implications

This paper reports on revisiting the author’s earlier ethnographic research, without actually doing the research itself again. In that sense it is a hypothetical study.

Practical implications

Organizational ethnography might have to rethink what it would mean in terms of fieldwork methodologies if it would allow non-human animals as actual agentic stakeholders in the research and analysis. It would at least need to also think in terms of “research methodologies without words” as non-human animals cannot be interviewed.

Social implications

The paper is based on a social justice perspective on human-animal relations. It tries to contribute to an intellectual argument to take non-human animals more seriously as “co-citizens” in the (organizational) life world. This may have wide ranging implications for the life styles, ranging from the types of food we eat, to liquids we drink, to the ways we think about the human superiority in this world.

Originality/value

A highly self-reflexive account of the author’s earlier organizational ethnographic work, showing what it means theoretically if we take non-human animals seriously in organizational ethnographic research and analysis. At the same time it shows quite painfully organizational ethnography’s speciecist approach to research methodologies and processes of organizing.

Details

Journal of Organizational Ethnography, vol. 4 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2046-6749

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 7 September 2008

Edgar Kiser

In contrast to some Second Wave structuralists (e.g., Skocpol, 1979), most contemporary comparative-historical sociologists support the non-reductionist version of methodological…

Abstract

In contrast to some Second Wave structuralists (e.g., Skocpol, 1979), most contemporary comparative-historical sociologists support the non-reductionist version of methodological individualism (Weber, [1922]1978; Coleman, 1986) suggesting that any complete explanation of social phenomena must include an analysis of individual action as one of its components. However, in part because theoretical training in sociology tends to focus on macro-level causal processes, and in part because it is much easier to get macro-level data about history than good data about the motivations of historical actors, they have usually given less attention to the micro level. As a result, many of the micro-level arguments in comparative historical sociology are incomplete or ad hoc (Kiser & Hechter, 1991). The main exception to this criticism is the growing literature analyzing microfoundations from a cultural/interpretivist perspective. This work often employs complex theoretical arguments oriented to uncovering and decoding the meanings motivating or attached to actions, and sometimes uses rich archival data to illustrate these arguments. At its best, this type of work can allow the reader to see and understand an entirely different historical world from the perspective of participants in it. However, many interpretivists are not interested in doing causal analyses, and most reject the attempt to construct and test causal propositions. For scholars interested in discovering and testing the impact of general causal mechanisms, this is a serious limitation.

Details

Political Power and Social Theory
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-418-8

Book part
Publication date: 23 December 2013

Peter Adey

The chapter explores the sustainability of European aeromobility and the socio-technical systems that enable it by examining how certain threats, risk and uncertainties are…

Abstract

Purpose

The chapter explores the sustainability of European aeromobility and the socio-technical systems that enable it by examining how certain threats, risk and uncertainties are managed in European airspace.

Methodology/approach

The chapter examines the discussions around the inception and deployment of methods of ‘crisis management’ to airspace governance and focuses on the importation of particular systems of knowledge, practices and technologies from other contexts.

Findings

The chapter finds that European authorities have installed a combination of capacities involving central and decentralised coordination and decision making – as well as training and simulation – in order to better anticipate and respond to moments of crisis, although the politics of such an arrangement is not unproblematic to the interests of state sovereignty and the airlines’ suspicion of regulation or lack thereof.

Originality/value

The chapter is one of the first to make explicit how ash-cloud crises and disruption to airspace are being governed post the more immediate consequences of the 2010 ash cloud.

Details

Sustainable Aviation Futures
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78190-595-1

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 21 August 2015

Landon Schnabel and Lindsey Breitwieser

The purpose of this chapter is to bring three recent and innovative feminist science and technology studies paradigms into dialogue on the topics of subjectivity and knowledge.

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this chapter is to bring three recent and innovative feminist science and technology studies paradigms into dialogue on the topics of subjectivity and knowledge.

Findings

Each of the three frameworks – feminist postcolonial science and technology studies, queer ecologies, and new feminist materialisms – reconceptualizes and expands our understanding of subjectivity and knowledge. As projects invested in identifying and challenging the strategic conferral of subjectivity, they move from subjectivity located in all human life, to subjectivity as indivisible from nature, to a broader notion of subjectivity as both material and discursive. Despite some methodological differences, the three frameworks all broaden feminist conceptions of knowledge production and validation, advocating for increased consideration of scientific practices and material conditions in feminist scholarship.

Originality

This chapter examines three feminist science and technology studies paradigms by comparing and contrasting how each addresses notions of subjectivity and knowledge in ways that push us to rethink key epistemological issues.

Research Implications

This chapter identifies similarities and differences in the three frameworks’ discussions of subjectivity and knowledge production. By putting these frameworks into conversation, we identify methodological crossover, capture the coevolution of subjectivity and knowledge production in feminist theory, and emphasize the importance of matter in sociocultural explorations.

Abstract

Details

Malleable, Digital, and Posthuman
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-621-7

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