Articles de revues sur le sujet « Social sciences -> social sciences -> black studies (global) »

Abstract Introducing a special issue of Matatu titled “South African Food Studies,” this essay argues for the importance of food as a lens for understanding contemporary culture and society. More specifically, the essay advocates for recentring Global South contexts—in this case South Africa—in a ‘food studies’ conversation that has often been dominated by the American academy; it also underscores the vitality of the humanities, qualitative social sciences, and creative arts for transcending reductive ‘food security’ paradigms often applied in the Global South. The essay first examines the short story “Water No Get Enemy” by South African writer Fred Khumalo, introducing how a focus on food and eating can illuminate globalisation, xenophobia, resource conflict, and environmental change. From here, the authors introduce the evolving field of ‘food studies,’ then outline the eight academic, personal, and creative pieces that constitute this special issue, all authored by contributors from the African continent. Issues raised include the gendered and queer politics of food, breastmilk, and soil; the ongoing coloniality of neoliberal approaches to food inequality; the burdening of Black bodies; the role of so-called ‘ethnic restaurants’ in building transnational and multi-ethnic communities; and the heightened stakes of food access during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the past two decades, social scientists have begun to explicitly interrogate the racialized economic, political, cultural, and ideological mechanisms of social space. This work interrogates the overt and covert racial organization of social spaces and the ways in which systemic White supremacy is facilitated by racialized space. Drawing on and synthesizing that work we explicate a critical theory of White space, explicating how geographical, physical, cultural, and ideological social spaces reproduce a racialized social structure organized by White supremacy. We argue that White spaces are integral to racialized social systems and global anti-Black racism in ways that not only normalize the existing racial and social order but ensures Whites’ fantasy(ies) of complete dominion over place and space, as well as control over brown and Black bodies.

Abstract This review essay discusses recent exhibitions and accompanying art books published at the threshold of Black philosophy and aesthetics in relation to feminist mourning practices: Nicole Fleetwood’s book and exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020); Grief and Grievance, an exhibition (2021); a book (2020) conceived by the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor; and Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (2020), edited by C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp. These books and several others elucidate how relationships between transnational feminism, mourning, and Black works of art speak to Frantz Fanon’s idea of “the leap into existence,” Hortense Spillers’s “dialectics of a global new woman,” and David Marriott’s psycho-political analysis of invention.

Abstract Through the recounting of the narratives of two revolutionary Black mothers, Melissa Mckinnies and Yolanda McNair, this essay explores the ways in which Black mothers who have lost children to police violence have responded to Black maternal necropolitics and the ensuing historical legacy of Black maternal grief through political activism. It examines, through an engagement with global Black scholars through political theory, mothering theories, and depth psychology, how they manage to navigate maternal grief and loss into political action, thereby continuing their work of mothering and affirming the worth of their children’s lives, even when all that remains of their children are their dead bodies. In this way, the authors hope to highlight how Black mothers who embody revolutionary mothering through maternal activism enable them to imagine the possibility of an alternative future, one in which Black mothers are able to live happily with their children free from state-sanctioned violence targeting Black people.

Human factors, including contact structure, movement, impact on the environment and patterns of behaviour, can have significant influence on the emergence of novel infectious diseases and the transmission and amplification of established ones. As anthropogenic climate change alters natural systems and global economic forces drive land-use and land-cover change, it becomes increasingly important to understand both the ecological and social factors that impact infectious disease outcomes for human populations. While the field of disease ecology explicitly studies the ecological aspects of infectious disease transmission, the effects of the social context on zoonotic pathogen spillover and subsequent human-to-human transmission are comparatively neglected in the literature. The social sciences encompass a variety of disciplines and frameworks for understanding infectious diseases; however, here we focus on four primary areas of social systems that quantitatively and qualitatively contribute to infectious diseases as social–ecological systems. These areas are social mixing and structure, space and mobility, geography and environmental impact, and behaviour and behaviour change. Incorporation of these social factors requires empirical studies for parametrization, phenomena characterization and integrated theoretical modelling of social–ecological interactions. The social–ecological system that dictates infectious disease dynamics is a complex system rich in interacting variables with dynamically significant heterogeneous properties. Future discussions about infectious disease spillover and transmission in human populations need to address the social context that affects particular disease systems by identifying and measuring qualitatively important drivers. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Opening the black box: re-examining the ecology and evolution of parasite transmission’.

This article reviews two recent books on persistent inequalities in the global economy and the role of colonial legacies and racial hierarchies in explaining them. Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire (2019) and Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa (2020) draw on the Black Radical Tradition and stratification economics respectively to challenge mainstream understandings of racial hierarchies. After first outlining the strengths and key insights of each book, the author discusses how they could be expanded in a more radical manner, along the lines of anti-colonial, decolonial and black Marxism. She argues that in order to understand how racial hierarchies are connected to the development of capitalism, further engagement with radical scholarship that sees race and class as co-constituted would be required.

Abstract Examining the critical genealogy of transnational feminism, this essay proposes a feminist theoretical model called quilted epistemology derived from the Black feminist art of quilting. Aiming to strengthen transnational feminism, quilted epistemology intends to resolve some of the existing limitations of transnational feminism and embrace multiple and incompatible feminist knowledge positions from the Global South to the Global North.

Abstract Global anti-Muslim racism takes new and specific forms in contemporary Russia by mobilizing the shifting meanings of “Blackness” to stigmatize vulnerable populations. Stemming from the tsarist and Soviet pasts, these meanings of “Blackness” (and “whiteness”) have been refracted by the dramatic socioeconomic and political shifts since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This article draws on the accounts of working-class devout Muslim women, with whom the author conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Saint Petersburg between 2015 and 2017, to elucidate their experiences of how anti-Muslim racism operates as a tool of exclusion, deployed along racial, religious, ethnic, class, and gender lines. The women’s daily responses to anti-Muslim racism suggest how solidarities might sustain communities targeted by racism, while laying the foundations for future intersectional anti-racist movements in the country.

Otherwise known as Black Rock City, Burning Man is an artistic event, that, mounted annually in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, has become the inspiration for a global cultural movement. While it has been the subject of considerable attention from ethnographers and sociologists, Burning Man has persistently resisted classification. In this article, I undertake a tentative approach to Burning Man via a concept integral to Maffesoli’s postmodern social philosophy popular within Anglophone sociology: the neo-tribe. Ethnographic attention to Burning Man illustrates spectacular aspects of neo-tribalism. It is cyclical, immediate, sensual, enchanted, collaborative and offers multiple sites of belonging for participants, many of whom will self-identify as ‘tribal’ or ‘neo-tribal’. And yet Burning Man is also demonstrative of an optimising modernist ‘project’ complicating, if not incongruent with, postmodern tribalism. With Black Rock City theme camps, art projects and build teams echoing a design-orientated maker culture, and an organisation – the Burning Man Project – dedicated to propagating and scaling (making) the ethical, civic and progressive dimensions of this culture, this article demonstrates the paradoxical proclivities of Burning Man’s tribal character. The objective of the article is to forge a fuller understanding of Burning Man and other ‘transformational’ events illustrative of an alternative tribalism, and to explore ways the phenomenon both approximates and deviates from Maffesoli’s thesis.

Sustainable energy use is rapidly developing, often accompanied by state support and patriotic political rhetoric. But the solar and wind energy industries are highly transnationalised and already inserted into global patterns of accumulation. This article argues that, while possibly resolving some of the most pressing conflicts between capitalism and environmental sustainability, green capitalism nevertheless fails to address the contradiction between labour and capital. Therefore, any progressive strategy for social transformation must link together the fair treatment of both nature and labour.

Two landmark books, originally published during the same era of struggle in the UK, have been republished in 2018: Finding a Voice: Asian women in Britain and Heart of the Race: Black women’s lives in Britain. These books make the history of anti-racism in the UK – and the role of black and Asian women within this that is so often overlooked – accessible to a broad audience and give context to the gendered racism and racialised patriarchies that persist today. Reviewing these reissued texts, the author argues that the UK’s radical history is a powerful tool that can reactivate anti-racist feminism both locally and internationally, pointing to the continued fight to retain BAME domestic violence refuges in the face of austerity cuts in the UK and the unique global solidarity that is coming to the fore as an emboldened far Right attacks women’s rights internationally.

The emergence of COVID-19 in the United States in early 2020 has severely disrupted the lives of most Americans, and people engaged in sex trade are no exception. People in sex work encounter multiple challenges when trying to access the services they need, particularly as they fear arrest, stigma, and pathology related to their work. These barriers have been amplified during the global COVID-19 pandemic, as sex trade workers may further lack access to crucially needed health care and may not have a mechanism for generating a basic income to meet their daily survival needs. Using an intersectional feminist lens, in this article, we discuss the impact of COVID-19 on people in sex work while highlighting sex workers’ resiliency and community action in the face of the pandemic. We highlight empowerment work led by black and brown sex worker communities. As authors and advocates, we call for critical feminist social work action that situates social workers as advocates for the human rights, well-being, and health of individuals in sex work, with a focus on centering the voices of those with lived experience and a focus on harm reduction, during and in the lingering aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: Uncontrolled hypertension (HTN) is the major global risk factor for cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Black individuals have worse cardiovascular health outcomes than their racial counterparts. High incidences of HTN-related strokes, heart failure, and chronic kidney diseases are prevalent in Black communities. Long-term adherence to HTN treatment is efficacious in hypertension control but challenged by psychosocial factors and the asymptomatic nature of HTN. Purpose: This research aims to assess if the country of residence moderates the relationship between adherence and each of its potential predictors in Black adults with HTN residing in the United States and Nigeria. Methodology: This is a secondary data analysis of two studies conducted in New York and southeast Nigeria (n=226). Data were analyzed using SPSS Statistical software Version 27. Descriptive differences in adherence and predicting variables, bivariate analyses for significant predicting variables within each sample, and general linear model analyses with plots for country of residence interaction effects were conducted. Results: The mean ages of the US and Nigerian samples were 57.3 ± 11.9 years (70.9% female) and 46.6 ± 8.9 years (67.1% female), respectively. Significant differences (p <.05) were noted between levels of adherence, age, self–efficacy, illness perception, annual income, and herbal use. Adherence was significantly associated (p < .05) with social support, self-efficacy, provider-patient communication, depressive symptoms, herbal use, employment, and income status within the Nigerian sample. Adherence was significantly associated with depressive symptoms and income status within the US sample. The interaction of country of residence with illness perception, social support, self-efficacy, and provider-patient communication significantly predicted adherence but not for the other variables. Interestingly, there was an opposite relationship between illness perception and adherence between the two samples. Conclusions: The country of residence moderated the relationship between adherence and illness perception, social support, self-efficacy, and provider-patient communication. These findings have clinical, cultural, and policy implications. Understanding the similarities and differences between the US and Nigeria will help clinicians working with Black patients and tailor interventions to meet the unique needs of this population. Future studies and culturally relevant strategies to improve HTN treatment adherence could target factors unique to hypertensive patients’ country of residence.

The writings of the Black Marxist-Leninist thinker and activist C. L. R. James are now widely known and studied, although most of his long career was passed in obscurity. His two most influential books, The Black Jacobins (1938) and Beyond a Boundary (1963) now have a global impact. But his work did not begin to receive wide recognition until the 1980s and 1990s. And it is the nature of that recognition, and the ends to which his work has been put in the US academy, that this article explores. In critiquing a wide range of influential theoretical approaches to James’ work, the author relates current interpretations of it to the wider political and cultural climate engendered by neoliberalism, with its emphasis on the individual not as a historical agent, but as primarily concerned with self-fashioning and cultural identity. In the process, the article demonstrates how the political activist thrust of James’ analyses and work, and its concerns with imperialism and resistance, has been set aside as part of the corporate world’s continuing appropriation of the ‘alternative and adversarial culture of the 1960s’.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks and heavy-handed state and popular response to them stimulated increased scholarship on American Muslims. In the social sciences, this work has focused mainly on Arabs and South Asians, and more recently on African Americans. The majority of this scholarship has not engaged race theory in a comprehensive or intersectional manner. The authors provide an overview of the work on Muslims over the past 15 years and argue that the Muslim experience needs to be situated within race scholarship. The authors further show that September 11 did not create racialized Muslims, Arabs, or South Asians. Rather, the authors highlight a preexisting, racializing war on terror and a more complex history of these groups with race both globally and domestically. Islamophobia is a popular term used to talk about Muslim encounters with discrimination, but the concept lacks a clear understanding of race and structural racism. Newer frameworks have emerged situating Muslim experiences within race scholarship. The authors conclude with a call to scholars to embark on studies that fill major gaps in this emerging field of study—such as intersectional approaches that incorporate gender, communities of belonging, black Muslim experiences, class, and sexuality—and to remain conscious of the global dimensions of this racial project.

How to explain the violent xenophobic attacks in South Africa in recent years? Two militant South African activists, Leonard Gentle and Noor Nieftagodien, interviewed here, analyse the race/class bases for the anti-foreigner violence in terms of the echoes/reverberations of apartheid and the rise of neoliberalism. They argue that remnants of apartheid have endured through the reproduction of racial and tribal categories, which has contributed to the entrenchment of exclusionary nationalist politics and the fragmentation of black unity. South Africa’s specific history of capitalist development, the African National Congress’s embraces of neoliberalism, on the one hand, and rainbowism, on the other, have produced the underlying conditions of precarity and desperation that resulted in the normalisation of xenophobia. The unions, too, have failed to recognise the new shape of the ‘working class’. Gentle and Nieftagodien outline the need to contend with the broader social conditions, the global economic crisis, neoliberalism and the deep inequalities it engenders in order to counteract the rising tide of xenophobia and build working-class unity.

AbstractClimate change has rapidly expanded as a key topic of research across disciplines, but it has remained virtually untouched in nationalism studies. Climate change is a boundless, uncontainable phenomenon that ignores class, geographic, and ethnonational boundaries. As such, it can hardly be comprehended within the limits of a nationalist world vision. This article reassesses this intuition by focusing on the situational and adaptive plasticity of nationalism, characterized by its notorious Janus-faced adaptability. I first identify and address a methodological stumbling block that precludes scholars in some areas of the humanities and social sciences—specifically nationalism studies—from conceptualizing and grappling with this unfolding reality. Second, I advance a typology that can work as a conceptual grid for studying similar problems that emerge at the intersection of environmental politics, climate change, and nationalism studies. I suggest two ways in which the nation and national narratives have been and are being mobilized to make sense of, contrast, reject, and incorporate new life-changing trends. I identify these, respectively, under the umbrella terms resource nationalism and green nationalism. I conclude by emphasizing the continuing relevance of nationalism in plans for ongoing global energy transitions.

In 2013, the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences began a study of black communities in the USA. By now, the research was conducted in six states (Alabama, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania); in a number of towns as well as in the cities of Boston, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. The study shows that diasporas as network communities have already formed among recent migrants from many African countries in the U.S. These are diasporas of immigrants from individual countries, not a single “African diaspora”. On one hand, diasporas as an important phenomenon of globalization should become objects of global governance by means of regulation at the transnational level of both migration streams and foreign-born communities norms of existence. On the other hand, diasporas can be agents of social and political global governance, of essentially transnational impact on particular societies and states sending and accepting migrants, as evidenced by the African diasporas in the USA. Most American Africans believe that diasporas must and can take an active part in the home countries’ public life. However, the majority of them concentrates on targeted assistance to certain people – their loved ones back home. The forms of this assistance are diverse, but the main of them is sending remittances. At the same time, the money received from migrants by specific people makes an impact on the whole society and state. For many African states these remittances form a significant part of national income. The migrants’ remittances allow the states to lower the level of social tension. Simultaneously, they have to be especially thorough while building relationships with the migrant accepting countries and with diasporas themselves. Africans constitute an absolute minority among recent migrants in the USA. Nevertheless, directly or indirectly, they exert a certain influence on the establishment of the social life principles and state politics (home and foreign), not only of native countries but also of the accepting one, the U.S. This props up the argument that elaboration of norms and setting the rules of global governance is a business of not only political actors, but of the globalizing civil society, its institutions and organizations either. The most recent example are public debates in the American establishment, including President Obama, on the problem of immigration policy and relationships with migrant sending states, provoked by the 2014 U.S.–Africa Leaders Summit. Remarkably, the African diasporas represented by their leaders actively joined the discussion and openly declared that the state pays insufficiently little attention to the migrants’ needs and insisted on taking their position into account while planning immigration reform. However, Africans are becoming less and less “invisible” in the American society not only in connection with loud, but infrequent specific events. Many educated Africans who have managed to achieve a decent social status and financial position for themselves, have a desire not just to promote the adaptation of migrants from Africa, but to make their collective voice heard in American society and the state at the local and national levels. Their efforts take different forms, but most often they result in establishing and running of various diaspora organizations. These associations become new cells of the American civil society, and in this capacity affect the society itself and the government institutions best they can. Thus, the evidence on Africans in the USA shows that diasporas are both objects (to date, mainly potential) and real subjects of global governance. They influence public life, home and foreign policy of the migrant sending African countries and of migrant accepting United States, make a modest but undeniable contribution to the global phenomena and processes management principles and mechanisms. Acknowledgements. The research was supported by the grants of the Russian Foundation for Humanities: no. 14-01-00070 “African Americans and Recent African Migrants in the USA: Cultural Mythology and Reality of Intercommunity Relations”, no. 13-01-18036 “The Relations between African-Americans and Recent African Migrants: Socio-Cultural Aspects of Intercommunity Perception”, and by the grant of the Russian Academy of Sciences as a part of its Fundamental Research Program for 2014. The author is sincerely grateful to Veronika V. Usacheva and Alexandr E. Zhukov who participated in collecting and processing of the evidence, to Martha Aleo, Ken Baskin, Allison Blakely, Igho Natufe, Bella and Kirk Sorbo, Harold Weaver whose assistance in organization and conduction of the research was inestimable, as well as to all the informants who were so kind as to spend their time for frank communication.

Abstract This article explores the possibilities of distinctly queer and Muslim futures rooted not only in Muslim diaspora communities but in the Muslim world itself. The Palestinian intifadas of 1987 and 2000 are the author’s primary inspiration, whereas the future becomes a blank canvas onto which one can imagine the next global intifada, a giant popular uprising fought on many fronts. The author examines the work of artists Jassem Hindi, Layla tul Qadr, Saba Taj, and Hushidar Mortezaie, who look at the future in terms of parallel imaginative possibilities rather than in temporal terms. In addition to these artists, the writings of scholars and artists Jose Estaban Muñoz, Ronak Kapadia, Etel Adnan, and Hamed Sinno further emphasize the future-facing nature of both queerness and Islam, as well as the radical possibilities of telling queer Muslim stories in the future.

In synaesthetes, specific sensory stimuli (e.g. black letters) elicit additional experiences (e.g. colour). Synaesthesia is highly prevalent among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the mechanisms of this co-occurrence are not clear. We hypothesized autism and synaesthesia share atypical sensory sensitivity and perception. We assessed autistic traits, sensory sensitivity and visual perception in two synaesthete populations. In Study 1, synaesthetes ( N = 79, of different types) scored higher than non-synaesthetes ( N = 76) on the Attention-to-detail and Social skills subscales of the autism spectrum quotient indexing autistic traits, and on the Glasgow Sensory Questionnaire indexing sensory hypersensitivity and hyposensitivity which frequently occur in autism. Synaesthetes performed two local/global visual tasks because individuals with autism typically show a bias towards detail processing. In synaesthetes, elevated motion coherence thresholds (MCTs) suggested reduced global motion perception, and higher accuracy on an embedded figures task suggested enhanced local perception. In Study 2, sequence-space synaesthetes ( N = 18) completed the same tasks. Questionnaire and embedded figures results qualitatively resembled Study 1 results, but no significant group differences with non-synaesthetes ( N = 20) were obtained. Unexpectedly, sequence-space synaesthetes had reduced MCTs. Altogether, our studies suggest atypical sensory sensitivity and a bias towards detail processing are shared features of synaesthesia and ASD. This article is part of the discussion meeting issue ‘Bridging senses: novel insights from synaesthesia’.

Abstract Climate change is projected to increase the number of days producing excessive heat across the southwestern United States, increasing population exposure to extreme heat events. Extreme heat is currently the main cause of weather-related mortality in the United States, where the negative health effects of extreme heat are disproportionately distributed among geographic regions and demographic groups. To more effectively identify vulnerability to extreme heat, complementary local-level studies of adaptive capacity within a population are needed to augment census-based demographic data and downscaled weather and climate models. This pilot study, conducted in August 2009 in Phoenix, Arizona, reports responses from 359 households in three U.S. Census block groups identified as heat-vulnerable based on heat distress calls, decedent records, and demographic characteristics. This study sought to understand social vulnerability to extreme heat at the local level as a complex phenomenon with explicit characterization of coping and adaptive capacity among urban residents.

The EU’s response to the global ‘refugee crisis’ has involved the returning of refugees to war zones, for example in Afghanistan, in breach of human rights conventions. But it has also been so determined to stop further asylum seekers reaching European waters or shores that it has entered into the most dubious of agreements with countries outside the EU. Using bribery (aid, promises of investment, even the prospect of membership of the EU) and blackmail (threats of withdrawal of support for educational and health programmes), the EU has inveigled and browbeaten countries around the Mediterranean and as far afield as sub-Saharan Africa, to undertake immigration controls on its behalf. This has involved the EU in agreements with repressive regimes such as Turkey, Sudan and Eritrea, designed to block the movements of millions of people in the Middle East and Africa necessitated by war, famine, climate change and religious conflict. The outsourcing of migration policy to countries run by known dictators and war criminals has come at the expense of Europe’s humanitarian tradition, argues the author, who looks at the implications of policy by country and region.

In this critically insightful and highly readable book of political ethnogra- phy, Aisha Ahmad, a political scientist at University of Toronto, seeks to explain how and why Islamist movements continue to militarily prevail and politically succeed in forming proto-states, over clan, ethnic, and/or tribal based competitions, amidst the chaos and disorder of civil wars across the contemporary Muslim world, from Mali to Mindanao. To this end, Ahmad seeks to go beyond the usual expositions that center the explanatory power of Islamist ideologies and identities, which dominate the scholarly fields of political science, international relations, security studies as well as the global public discourse shaped by journalists, politicians, and the punditry of shouting heads everywhere. Through a deep, immersive study of power in Afghanistan and Soma- lia, Ahmad demonstrates the profoundly symbiotic relationship between Islamists and the local business class. While recognizing the interconnec- tions between violent conflict and illicit trade is nothing new, Ahmad’s explication of the economic logics of Islamist proto-states furnishes a nov- el two-stage dynamic to explain the indispensability and ubiquity of this Islamist-business alliance in conflict zones. The first is the gradual social process of conversion of the business class’ worldview and practice to align them with Islamist identity formations, which is “aimed at mitigating un- certainty and improving access to markets” (xvii). Alongside this long-term socialization is a second, short-term political-economic dynamic of rapid shift in the business class’s collective patronage of a new Islamist faction, based on the assumption that it will lower the cost of business. The for- midable alliance between business class interests and Islamist institutions brings forth the new Islamist proto-state. Chapter one of the book adum- brates this two-stage argument and offers justifications for the two case studies, namely the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia. The second chapter unpacks the two-stage dynamic in detail. We learn that in modern civil wars across the Muslim world, business communi- ties intentionally adopt ardent Islamist identities as a practical means to- ward building trust and lowering cost. Islamist factions, aspiring toward hegemony, offer the possibility of economic relationships that transcend the ethnic boundaries which limit rival factions rooted in clan, tribal, or ethno-linguistic social formations. This leads to the second, faster conver- gence of business-Islamist interests, wherein the Islamist groups leverage their broader social identity and economic market to offer stronger secu- rity at a lower cost. This development of an economy of scale leads the local business elites to throw their financial support behind the Islamists at a critical juncture of militant competition. Once this threshold is met, Islamist factions rapidly conquer and consolidate territories from their rel- atively socially constrained rivals to form a new proto-state, like the Taliban regime and the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). When we look at the timeline of their development (the Taliban in 1994 and the ICU in 2006), we notice a similar length of gestation, about 15 years of war. This similarity may be coincidental, but the political-military threshold is the same. Both societ- ies, ravaged by civil war, reached a stalemate. At this critical juncture the positional properties of Islamist formations in the field of civil war factions gives the Islamists a decided economic (cost analysis) and social (trust building across clan/tribal identities) advantage. Chapters three to six examine each of the two processes for the se- lected sites of inquiry. Thus chapters three and five, respectively, explore the long-term Islamist identity construction within the smuggling industry in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderland, and the Somali business elites’ gradual convergence with Islamists. In chapter four, Ahmad explores the second dynamic in the context of rising security costs during the Afghan civil war. Mullah Omar’s Taliban provided the order and security across the borderland that had previously eluded the variety of industries. This allowed the Taliban to expand on the backs of voluntary donations, rather than extortions like their rival tribal warlords, which in turn allowed them to recruit and retain more disciplined fighters (81). The source of these donations was the business class, especially those involved in the highly lucrative transit trade, which, before the rise of Taliban, paid immense op- portunity cost at the hands of rapacious local and tribal warlord fiefdoms and bandits. Instead of the multitude of checkpoints crisscrossing south- ern Afghanistan and the borderlands, the Taliban presented a simplified administration. While the rest of the world took notice of their repressive measures against women’s mobility, education, and cultural expression, the men of the bazaar appreciated the newly acquired public safety to ply their trade and the lowered cost of doing business. Chapter six, “The Price of Protection: The Rise of the Islamic Courts Union,” demonstrates a similar mutually beneficial Islamist-business relationship emerging out of the incessant clan-based militia conflicts that had especially plagued southern Somalia since the fall of the last national government in 1991. Businesspeople, whether they were tycoons or small business owners, had to pay two types of tax. First was what was owed to the local racket or warlord, and the second was to the ever-fragmenting sub-clan militias and their checkpoints on the intercity highways. Unlike their rival, the Transitional Federal Government (TGF), ICU forged their supra-clan institutional identity through a universalist legal discourse and practice rooted in Islamic law and ethics. They united the courts and their associated clan-based militias, including al-Shabaab. Ahmad demonstrates, through a synthesis of secondary literature and original political ethnogra- phy, the economic logics of ICU’s ability to overcome the threshold of ma- terial and social support needed to establish the rule of law and a far-reach- ing functioning government. If the Taliban and the ICU had solved the riddle of creating order and security to create hegemonic proto-states, then what was their downfall? Chapter seven gives us an account of the international interventions that caused the collapse of the two proto-states. In the aftermath of their de- struction, the internationally supported regimes that replaced them, de- spite immense monetary and military aid, have failed to gain the same level of legitimacy across Afghanistan and Somalia. In chapter eight, Ahmad expands the scope of analysis to North/Western Africa (Al-Qaeda in the Is- lamic Maghrib: AQIM), Middle East (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: ISIS), and South Asia (Tahrik-i Taliban-i Pakistan: TTP). At the time of this book’s publication, these movements were not yet, as Ahmad posits, closed cases like the Taliban and the ICU. Thus, the data from this chapter’s comparative survey furnishes suggestive arguments for Ahmad’s larger thesis, namely that Islamist proto-states emerge out of a confluence of economic and security interests rather than mere ideological and identity politics. The epistemic humility of this chapter signals to this reader two lines of constructive criticism of some aspects of Ahmad’s sub- stantiation of this thesis. First, the juxtaposing of Islamist success against their clan-/tribal iden- tity-based rivals may be underestimating the element of ethnic solidarity in those very Islamists’ political success. The most glaring case is the Taliban, which in its original formation and in its post-American invasion frag- mentations, across the Durand Line, was more or less founded on a pan- or-tribal Pashtun social identity and economic compulsions relative to the other Afghan ethno-linguistic communities. How does one disaggregate the force of ethnic solidarity (even if it is only a necessary condition, rather than a cause) from economic calculus in explaining the rise of the Taliban proto-state? The second issue in this juxtaposition is that when we compare a suc- cessful Islamist movement against socially limited ethnocentric rivals, we discount the other Islamist movements that failed. Explanations for those Islamists that failed to create a proto-state along the lines of the ICU or the Taliban, such as al-Ittihad al-Islamiyya (Somalia) or Gulbuddin Hekmat- yar’s Hezb-e Islami (Afghanistan), needed to be more robustly taken into account and integrated into the substantiation of Ahmad’s thesis. Even in the section on ISIS, it would have been helpful to integrate the case of Jabhat al-Nusra’s (an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria) inability to create a proto-state to rival ISIS. We must ask, why do some Jihadi Islamist movements prevail against each other and why do others fail? Perhaps some of these Islamist movements appear too early to scale up their operation (i.e., they precede Ahmad’s ‘critical juncture’), or they were too embroiled and too partisan in the illicit trade network to fully leverage their Islamist universalism to create the trust and bonds that are the first part of Ahmad’s two-stage dy- namic. Possible answers would need to complement Ahmad’s excellent po- litical ethnography with deeper quantitative dives to identify the statistical variations of these critical junctures: when does the cost of warlords and mafias’ domination outweigh the cost of Islamist-Jihadi movements’ social- ly repressive but economically liberating regimes? At which point in the social evolution of society during an unending civil war do identities forged by the bonds of blood give way to those imagined through bonds of faith? These two critical suggestions do not diminish Ahmad’s highly teach- able work. This book should be read by all concerned policy makers, schol- ars in the social sciences and humanities, and anyone who wants to go be- yond ‘culture talk’ historical causation by ideas and identity and uncover structuralist explanations for the rise of Jihadi Islamist success in civil wars across the Muslim world. It is especially recommended for adoption in cog- nate courses at the undergraduate level, for its combination of erudition and readability. Maheen ZamanAssistant ProfessorDepartment of HistoryAugsburg University

In this critically insightful and highly readable book of political ethnogra- phy, Aisha Ahmad, a political scientist at University of Toronto, seeks to explain how and why Islamist movements continue to militarily prevail and politically succeed in forming proto-states, over clan, ethnic, and/or tribal based competitions, amidst the chaos and disorder of civil wars across the contemporary Muslim world, from Mali to Mindanao. To this end, Ahmad seeks to go beyond the usual expositions that center the explanatory power of Islamist ideologies and identities, which dominate the scholarly fields of political science, international relations, security studies as well as the global public discourse shaped by journalists, politicians, and the punditry of shouting heads everywhere. Through a deep, immersive study of power in Afghanistan and Soma- lia, Ahmad demonstrates the profoundly symbiotic relationship between Islamists and the local business class. While recognizing the interconnec- tions between violent conflict and illicit trade is nothing new, Ahmad’s explication of the economic logics of Islamist proto-states furnishes a nov- el two-stage dynamic to explain the indispensability and ubiquity of this Islamist-business alliance in conflict zones. The first is the gradual social process of conversion of the business class’ worldview and practice to align them with Islamist identity formations, which is “aimed at mitigating un- certainty and improving access to markets” (xvii). Alongside this long-term socialization is a second, short-term political-economic dynamic of rapid shift in the business class’s collective patronage of a new Islamist faction, based on the assumption that it will lower the cost of business. The for- midable alliance between business class interests and Islamist institutions brings forth the new Islamist proto-state. Chapter one of the book adum- brates this two-stage argument and offers justifications for the two case studies, namely the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia. The second chapter unpacks the two-stage dynamic in detail. We learn that in modern civil wars across the Muslim world, business communi- ties intentionally adopt ardent Islamist identities as a practical means to- ward building trust and lowering cost. Islamist factions, aspiring toward hegemony, offer the possibility of economic relationships that transcend the ethnic boundaries which limit rival factions rooted in clan, tribal, or ethno-linguistic social formations. This leads to the second, faster conver- gence of business-Islamist interests, wherein the Islamist groups leverage their broader social identity and economic market to offer stronger secu- rity at a lower cost. This development of an economy of scale leads the local business elites to throw their financial support behind the Islamists at a critical juncture of militant competition. Once this threshold is met, Islamist factions rapidly conquer and consolidate territories from their rel- atively socially constrained rivals to form a new proto-state, like the Taliban regime and the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). When we look at the timeline of their development (the Taliban in 1994 and the ICU in 2006), we notice a similar length of gestation, about 15 years of war. This similarity may be coincidental, but the political-military threshold is the same. Both societ- ies, ravaged by civil war, reached a stalemate. At this critical juncture the positional properties of Islamist formations in the field of civil war factions gives the Islamists a decided economic (cost analysis) and social (trust building across clan/tribal identities) advantage. Chapters three to six examine each of the two processes for the se- lected sites of inquiry. Thus chapters three and five, respectively, explore the long-term Islamist identity construction within the smuggling industry in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderland, and the Somali business elites’ gradual convergence with Islamists. In chapter four, Ahmad explores the second dynamic in the context of rising security costs during the Afghan civil war. Mullah Omar’s Taliban provided the order and security across the borderland that had previously eluded the variety of industries. This allowed the Taliban to expand on the backs of voluntary donations, rather than extortions like their rival tribal warlords, which in turn allowed them to recruit and retain more disciplined fighters (81). The source of these donations was the business class, especially those involved in the highly lucrative transit trade, which, before the rise of Taliban, paid immense op- portunity cost at the hands of rapacious local and tribal warlord fiefdoms and bandits. Instead of the multitude of checkpoints crisscrossing south- ern Afghanistan and the borderlands, the Taliban presented a simplified administration. While the rest of the world took notice of their repressive measures against women’s mobility, education, and cultural expression, the men of the bazaar appreciated the newly acquired public safety to ply their trade and the lowered cost of doing business. Chapter six, “The Price of Protection: The Rise of the Islamic Courts Union,” demonstrates a similar mutually beneficial Islamist-business relationship emerging out of the incessant clan-based militia conflicts that had especially plagued southern Somalia since the fall of the last national government in 1991. Businesspeople, whether they were tycoons or small business owners, had to pay two types of tax. First was what was owed to the local racket or warlord, and the second was to the ever-fragmenting sub-clan militias and their checkpoints on the intercity highways. Unlike their rival, the Transitional Federal Government (TGF), ICU forged their supra-clan institutional identity through a universalist legal discourse and practice rooted in Islamic law and ethics. They united the courts and their associated clan-based militias, including al-Shabaab. Ahmad demonstrates, through a synthesis of secondary literature and original political ethnogra- phy, the economic logics of ICU’s ability to overcome the threshold of ma- terial and social support needed to establish the rule of law and a far-reach- ing functioning government. If the Taliban and the ICU had solved the riddle of creating order and security to create hegemonic proto-states, then what was their downfall? Chapter seven gives us an account of the international interventions that caused the collapse of the two proto-states. In the aftermath of their de- struction, the internationally supported regimes that replaced them, de- spite immense monetary and military aid, have failed to gain the same level of legitimacy across Afghanistan and Somalia. In chapter eight, Ahmad expands the scope of analysis to North/Western Africa (Al-Qaeda in the Is- lamic Maghrib: AQIM), Middle East (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: ISIS), and South Asia (Tahrik-i Taliban-i Pakistan: TTP). At the time of this book’s publication, these movements were not yet, as Ahmad posits, closed cases like the Taliban and the ICU. Thus, the data from this chapter’s comparative survey furnishes suggestive arguments for Ahmad’s larger thesis, namely that Islamist proto-states emerge out of a confluence of economic and security interests rather than mere ideological and identity politics. The epistemic humility of this chapter signals to this reader two lines of constructive criticism of some aspects of Ahmad’s sub- stantiation of this thesis. First, the juxtaposing of Islamist success against their clan-/tribal iden- tity-based rivals may be underestimating the element of ethnic solidarity in those very Islamists’ political success. The most glaring case is the Taliban, which in its original formation and in its post-American invasion frag- mentations, across the Durand Line, was more or less founded on a pan- or-tribal Pashtun social identity and economic compulsions relative to the other Afghan ethno-linguistic communities. How does one disaggregate the force of ethnic solidarity (even if it is only a necessary condition, rather than a cause) from economic calculus in explaining the rise of the Taliban proto-state? The second issue in this juxtaposition is that when we compare a suc- cessful Islamist movement against socially limited ethnocentric rivals, we discount the other Islamist movements that failed. Explanations for those Islamists that failed to create a proto-state along the lines of the ICU or the Taliban, such as al-Ittihad al-Islamiyya (Somalia) or Gulbuddin Hekmat- yar’s Hezb-e Islami (Afghanistan), needed to be more robustly taken into account and integrated into the substantiation of Ahmad’s thesis. Even in the section on ISIS, it would have been helpful to integrate the case of Jabhat al-Nusra’s (an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria) inability to create a proto-state to rival ISIS. We must ask, why do some Jihadi Islamist movements prevail against each other and why do others fail? Perhaps some of these Islamist movements appear too early to scale up their operation (i.e., they precede Ahmad’s ‘critical juncture’), or they were too embroiled and too partisan in the illicit trade network to fully leverage their Islamist universalism to create the trust and bonds that are the first part of Ahmad’s two-stage dy- namic. Possible answers would need to complement Ahmad’s excellent po- litical ethnography with deeper quantitative dives to identify the statistical variations of these critical junctures: when does the cost of warlords and mafias’ domination outweigh the cost of Islamist-Jihadi movements’ social- ly repressive but economically liberating regimes? At which point in the social evolution of society during an unending civil war do identities forged by the bonds of blood give way to those imagined through bonds of faith? These two critical suggestions do not diminish Ahmad’s highly teach- able work. This book should be read by all concerned policy makers, schol- ars in the social sciences and humanities, and anyone who wants to go be- yond ‘culture talk’ historical causation by ideas and identity and uncover structuralist explanations for the rise of Jihadi Islamist success in civil wars across the Muslim world. It is especially recommended for adoption in cog- nate courses at the undergraduate level, for its combination of erudition and readability. Maheen ZamanAssistant ProfessorDepartment of HistoryAugsburg University

Urban functional area (UFA) recognition is one of the most important strategies for achieving sustainable city development. As remote-sensing and social-sensing data sources have increasingly become available, UFA recognition has received a significant amount of attention. Research on UFA recognition that uses a single dataset suffers from a low update frequency or low spatial resolution, while data fusion-based methods are limited in efficiency and accuracy. This paper proposes an integrated model to identify UFA using satellite images and taxi global positioning system (GPS) trajectories in four steps. First, blocks were generated as spatial units in the study area, and the spatiotemporal information entropy of the taxi GPS trajectory (STET) for each block was calculated. Second, a 24-hour time-frequency series was formed based on the pick-up and drop-off points extracted from taxi trajectories and used as the interpretation indicator of the blocks. The K-Means++ and k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) algorithm were used to identify their social functions. Third, a multilabel classification method based on the residual neural network (MLC-ResNets) and “You Only Look Once” (YOLO) target detection algorithms were used to identify the features of the typical and atypical spatial textures, respectively, of the satellite images in the blocks. The confidence scores of the features of the blocks were categorized by the decision tree algorithm. Fourth, to find the best way to integrate the two sub-models for UFA identification, the 10-fold cross-validation method based on stratified random sampling was applied to determine the most optimal STET thresholds. The results showed that the average accuracy reached 82.0%, with an average kappa of 73.5%—significant improvements over most existing studies. This paper provides new insights into how the advantages of satellite images and taxi trajectories in UFA identification can be fully exploited to support sustainable city management.

While Nollywood, Nigeria’s movie/film industry, may have had a chequered history, it has no doubt carved a niche for itself in the global space of the film industry. It currently stands as the most authoritative and authentic voice of Africa and the Black race in film discourse. Employing historical-analytic and direct observation methods, this paper examines how Nigerian moviemakers preserve the Nigerian/African ecosystem through their film locales. By building homes for the gods in the forests and on tree trunks, they preserve such trees, which would have fallen victim to modernisation by being used as planks and woods for various purposes. Unfortunately, this supposedly noteworthy effort is distorting reality and misrepresenting the way Africans relate with and treat their gods. Drawing from Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory, the paper submits that Nollywood’s concept of forests and tree trunks as the dwelling place of the gods might, over time, be assumed to be the norm rather than a fictitious creation of filmmakers by the viewers in contrast to reality unless it is addressed forthwith. It is, therefore, recommended that Nollywood filmmakers should not sacrifice the reality of the dwelling place of the gods in Africa for the purpose of achieving film richness and aesthetics.

Exploring the ‘globalization’ of the social sciences, this article first presents an historical interpretation of how transnational exchange in the social sciences has evolved. Earlier forms of international circulation are distinct from the more global arrangements that have emerged since the late twentieth century. Considering this globalizing field in more detail, it is argued that its predominant characteristic is a core–periphery structure, with a duopolistic Euro-American core, multiple semi-peripheries and a wide range of peripheries. Focusing on the global level, much of the existing research, however, has neglected the emergence of transnational regional structures. The formation of a transnational European field of social science is taken as an example of this process of transnational regionalization. The social sciences worldwide can thus be seen as a four-level structure. In addition to the local and national level, transnational regional as well as global structures have gained increasing importance and a better understanding of ‘globalization’ requires more precise studies of both levels, in their own right as well as in their evolving interconnectedness.

Qualitative social science research is fundamentally embedded in grounded theory concerned with how the social world is interpreted, realized, understood and experienced, or produced. Qualitative investigation seeks answers to their questions in the realistic world. They congregate what they see, hear and read from the people and places and from events and activities and their main purpose are to learn about some aspects of the social world and to generate new understandings that can be used by that social world. The main objective of this study is the interpretation of social world especially of cultures and people’s life-ways rather than seeking causal explanations for social-cultural practices. Nevertheless, in very rapidly changing information dominated globalized world, innovative traditions of the perception of emerging local and global contexts and realities need to be exposed and accepted as well as practiced in qualitative social science research. Janapriya Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Vol. III (December 2014), page: 54-61

One can find many proposals for policy responses to global environmental problems. Different disciplines – notably economics, geography, innovation studies, policy and political sciences, psychology and sociology – offer partly inconsistent advice. This undermines the social-political acceptance of policies as voters and politicians are likely to be left confused. To decide about an adequate sustainability policy mix we need to concur on the core problems such a mix has to tackle. I address four of these hereafter. Each one involves important issues of disagreement as well as unresolved questions.

Research on immigrants and the eventual outcomes of immigration processes was at the very foundation of American sociology. But with the exception of a couple of studies on the Mexicans in the United States, such as Paul Taylor' (1932, 1934) monumental work on the life story of Mexican immigrant laborers in the Chicago and Calumet region during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Manuel Gamio' (1971 [1930], 1971 [1931]) anthropological studies of Mexican immigrants in the United States, and Edith Abbott'The Tenements of Chicago, 1908–1935(1936), Latinos were remarkably absent from such studies. Instead, these studies focused on the European immigrant experience and the experience of black Americans as newcomers to America' cities. Scholarship on Latinos (much lessbyLatinos) simply did not put down roots as early as scholarship on Afro-Americans. Perhaps this was partly due to the smaller size of the population back then, coupled with its being largely immigrant—composed of people who thought they would one day return to where they came from.

Abstract Social science inquiry on age, aging, and the life course spans many topics and methodologies. This symposium highlights papers that were selected as Editor’s Choice articles in the Journal of Gerontology Social Sciences in 2022. These papers highlight methodological innovations, important advancements in our state of knowledge in an area, or emerging issues in the study of aging and older adults. Moen et al. trace the divergence in later-adulthood work trajectories at the intersection of race, gender, and class. Hamler et al. discuss the impact of skin tone on mental health among older Black Americans. Waselmann et al. present an innovation of counting number of days one attended school and whether one lived in the Jim Crow South to help explain Black-White disparities in later-life cognitive function. Falzarano et al. explore cultural differences in orientation toward familialism and its impact on caregiver outcomes. Zimmer et al. examine the linkage between war exposure and later-life frailty among Vietnamese older adults.

This article presents the almost century-long history of the development of futures studies in a comprehensive review. Futures studies, rooted in sociology and policy sciences, had become an academic discipline by the 1960s. One of the major global communities representing the discipline, the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF), celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2023. In the 1970s, the focus was placed on discourses on global problems and preferred futures. Futures studies then developed a global institutional community and become a mature discipline by the 1980s and 1990s. Futurists by then had already mutually shared theoretical perspectives, objectives, ethics, and methods, and had produced empirical results. A wide range of comprehensive publications at that time synthesized the foundations and preceding results of futures studies. From the turn of the millennium, active discourse took place on the forthcoming role of futures studies. By that time, the theoretical, methodological, and practical knowledge foundations of the discipline had also appeared in internationally well-documented curricula. Since around 2010, the discipline has been characterized by the development of practical foresight projects. Based on notable trends and identified research gaps, this article formulates up-to-date expectations and research directions within which futures studies might develop in the future.

Abstract The Social Sciences section of The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences aims to publish the highest quality social scientific research on aging and the life course in the U.S. and worldwide. The disciplinary scope is broad, encompassing scholarship from demography, economics, psychology, public health, and sociology. A key substantive focus is identifying the social, economic, and cultural contexts that shape aging experiences worldwide. In the coming decade, social gerontology research is poised to present many opportunities for cross-national and cross-cultural scholarship – driven in part by the proliferation of large parallel data sets from many nations in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. I will discuss the role that peer-reviewed cross-national scholarship can play in disseminating knowledge that informs gerontological research, policy, and practice internationally. I will also identify under-researched areas that will be of great interest to scholars in the coming decade, including LGBT older adults, aging in the Global South, reconfigured families, and centenarians.

Missionaries and anthropologists have been at the forefront of the West's encounter with other peoples since the Age of Exploration. In this encounter their views of these people have changed as they learned to know and understand these Others better. The shift from Other as Savage and Pagan to Other as Primitive and Ancestor, and then to Other as Native and Unreached has shaped the way Western scholars and missionaries have theorized about and related to people from other parts of the world. As missiologists, we must move beyond the current views of others that dominate current anthropological and missiological thinking, and recognize that the Scriptures affirm that we are one humanity, that at the deepest level others are not other but us. Only such a change in attitudes will help us lay the foundations for the global mission of the global church.

The article outlines views on the modern scientific and practical significance of chernozem, emphasizing its special role in the history of science and humanity. The main attention is paid to the issues of geographical distribution, genesis, composition, structure, properties, rational use, restoration, preservation and protection. Problems related to the manifestation of degradation processes are considered: erosion, deflation, compaction, dehumification, destructuring, etc. Emphasis is placed on the role and importance of chernozems in the world of soils as a phenomenon of nature, ideal soil, feeder and means of work. In the Cenozoic period, three events stand out - not destructive, but creating, large in their progressive consequence. In the world of plants, this is the development of angiosperm families and genera, and among them cereals, which played a prominent role in the composition of specific herbaceous and cereal phytocenoses, and later in the food base of humans and domestic animals. Mammals began to predominate in the animal world, primates appeared, as a result of their long evolution, the first humanoids appeared already in the anthropogenic period. In the world of soils, the formation of chernozems began. The initial stage is the expansion of cereals and the formation on extensive, but mainly loess plains of meadow and grass-cereal steppes, under which chernozems began to form - soils of the "gathering" type, in contrast to the already existing podzolic and feralitic soils of the "dispersive" type, which are characterized by weak accumulation humus and dispersion - removal of chemical elements - biogens and many trace elements. Based on the analysis of extensive scientific research and publications about chernozem and its importance in society, it is expedient to develop a doctrine about chernozem and to single out a separate direction in the development of the science of soil science - chernozemology. Black geology is a field of soil science that studies the formation (genesis), structure, composition and properties, patterns of geographical distribution, processes of interaction with the external environment, which determine the formation and development of the main property - fertility, ecological and social functions, aesthetic value, ways of rational use, reproduction, preservation and protection. The question of chernozem and its degradation in the modern world is not only agronomic, ecological, economic, legal, aesthetic, but also political. Radical and tough decisions are needed so that the quiet crisis of the planet does not turn into a loud one in the foreseeable future. Evaluating the global importance of chernozem in the world of soils, it is advisable to develop a special course "Chernozem Science" for students of natural and agricultural specialties of higher educational institutions of Ukraine. Key words: chernozem, natural phenomenon, degradation, erosion, morphology, properties, ideal of perfection, aesthetic value.

The rise of networked social movements contesting neo-liberal globalization and protesting the summits of global finance and governance organizations has posed an analytical challenge to social movement theorists and called into question the applicability to this global milieu of the familiar concepts and heuristics utilized in social movement studies. In this article, we argue that the self-defining alter-globalization movement(s) might instead be engaged with as an expression and effect of global complexity, and we draw upon a ‘minor’ literature in social movement studies that includes Gregory Bateson, Gilles Deleuze and Alberto Melucci to illustrate our claims. This article uses a Deleuzian reading of complexity to describe the phase space of the ‘movement of movements’, and its perturbation of global civil society through the iteration of sense-making processes (reflexive framing) and the exploration of singularities inhering in social movement ‘plateaux’. Those transnational gatherings, protests and social forums facilitated by computer-mediated communications and the advent of unprecedented mobility which constitute a ‘shadow realm’ that remains largely invisible to political exchange theories operating within the conceptual confines of the nation-state.

Although much research documents the growth of a “professional middle class” among African Americans over the past several decades, we know comparatively little about how Blacks see themselves in social class terms, and whether this has changed over time. In the current study, we use data from the 1974 to 2010 General Social Surveys to analyze trends in, and the determinants of, Blacks’ social class identifications (SCI) over the past four decades. Our results show that Blacks’ tendency to identify as “middle class” has increased in concert with Blacks’ socioeconomic status (SES) gains since the 1970s. Regarding the determinants of SCI, education and household income appear more consequential than occupational prestige and self-employment in shaping Blacks’ self-reports of their own class positions. Finally, we see little evidence of change over time in the relationship between various SES characteristics and SCI, with one exception: Self-employment has become a more potent predictor of Blacks’ SCI over the past several decades. Our results provide an important update to our knowledge of the dynamics of SCI among Black Americans. They also raise important questions for future research on the relationship between, and relative impact of, “race” and “class” in shaping Blacks’ identities and their orientations toward American society.

Interested in the socio-cultural construction of the body and beauty, this study investigates the embodied experience of Black African women in South Africa. The Black female body has been problematically positioned in the discourses of beauty. In the dominant, Westernized imagery, the physical markers of blackness such as dark skin and kinky hair have been aesthetically devalued. In the African traditionalist discourses, these body features have been celebrated as beautiful and invoked as the signifiers of cultural pride. This, however, has also been considered as a form of cultural imperative that holds women accountable for how they embody their relationship with their race and ethnicity. Most recently, cultural critics notice the aesthetic revaluation of Black female beauty and ascribe it to the global popularity of the African-American hip-hop culture. In this study, we explore how the socio-cultural complexity of Black female beauty affects the ways in which individuals make sense of their bodies.

The First article in this issue sketched out what has been done in the recent past on various biological aspects of the history of the black in Africa and in the Americas. The articles that followed revealed in splendid fashion the quality and sophistication of studies underway today. In concluding the issue, I could not resist the temptation to discuss briefly what sorts of themes and issues I hope will be pursued tomorrow.Central to future bio-studies of the black will be the growing realization that after stripping away those husks of scholarly posturing and platitudes that in the past have pronounced Afro-Americans and Africans a “biological elite,” the kernel of truth remaining is that they were indeed such an elite, but not necessarily for the reasons offered. Those reasons generally have focused on the shock of capture, the long and deadly march to the sea, the squalor of the baracoons on the coast, the horrors of the middle passage, and the numbing, debilitating “seasoning” procedures on the plantations of the Americas. While there is no question that the whole of this represents a selection process of sorts, it was much too random to create an instant elite, as a bomb dropped on a city does not make an elite of the survivors.