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Material Consequences (material + consequence)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Drought, Domestic Budgeting and Wealth Distribution in Sahelian Households

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 5 2000
Matthew Turner
Over the past twenty-five years, Sahelian households have experienced recurrent harvest failure and greater reliance on remittances from migratory wage labour. Household subsistence has become less dependent on household grain stores and more on the liquidation of individual wealth stores. This study investigates how these broader changes have affected struggles between household members over obligations to support the household in the Zarmaganda region of western Niger. As the land-derived leverage of male patriarchs has declined and household dependence on individual wealth stores has increased, domestic budgeting has become more contested. Household heads make case-by-case moral claims on other household members during times of grain shortage. Women and subordinate males invoke Islamic law, which accords primary provisioning responsibility to the household head, to protect their individual wealth in times of grain deficit. This article investigates the nature of these budgetary struggles, showing how individuals' decisions to contribute individual wealth to support the household are best understood as highly situated, affected not only by the specific material conditions of the household but also the interplay of the moral, structural, and individualistic imperatives that derive from one's position within the household. Using reconstructed livestock wealth histories for the members of fifty-four households in western Niger, this study investigates the material consequences of these struggles. Male heads of corporate households, the historic managers of the household's land and agricultural labour, have lost wealth relative to their wives and married male subordinates since the drought of 1984. [source]

,People Is All That Is Left to Privatize': Water Supply Privatization, Globalization and Social Justice in Belize City, Belize

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2009
DAANISH MUSTAFA
Abstract This article presents the findings of an extensive survey on public and policy level perceptions of the failed water supply and sanitation system privatization in Belize City. Drawing upon the burgeoning critical geographical literature on the commodification and privatization of water, we formulate a conceptual framework for analyzing the ethnographic data on perceptions and experience of privatization by Belize City water users. The experience of water supply privatization was largely negative. Residents complained bitterly about an increase in water tariffs and excessive disconnection rates by the privatized Belize Water Supply Limited (BWSL). Many policy makers also accused BWSL of front-loading profits and not making strategic investments in infrastructure. But the symbolic significance of water privatization for the residents of a small Caribbean country like Belize exceeded its practical implications. We argue that the major themes to emerge from the ethnographic data collected for the study can be synthesized into three ,popular privatization narratives' (PPNs). The first was based on the perception that poor governance led to privatization; the second on a preference for national- over global-scale politics, so that objections to privatization were based on nationalism; the third on angst about losing control to the systemic compulsions of neoliberal globalization. Overall the privatization process not only had important (largely negative) material consequences for Belizeans but, given their historical and cultural geography, profound discursive and symbolic consequences for their sense of identity in a condition of neoliberal globalization. Résumé Cet article présente les résultats d'une vaste enquête sur les impressions, de la population et des acteurs des politiques publiques, concernant l'échec de la privatisation du réseau d'approvisionnement en eau et d'assainissement de Belize City. Utilisant les publications géographiques critiques qui se multiplient sur la marchandisation et la privatisation de l'eau, un cadre conceptuel est formulé pour analyser les données ethnographiques sur les impressions et l'expérience de la privatisation émanant des usagers de l'eau de Belize City. L'expérience de cette privatisation a été en grande partie négative. Les habitants se plaignent amèrement de l'augmentation des tarifs et de taux de coupures excessifs par la société privée Belize Water Supply Limited (BWSL). De nombreux décideurs politiques ont également accusé BWSL de prélever les bénéfices sans effectuer d'investissements stratégiques d'infrastructure. Toutefois, la place symbolique de la privatisation de l'eau pour les habitants d'un petit pays de la mer des Antilles comme Belize dépasse les incidences pratiques. Les principaux thèmes dessinés par les données ethnographiques collectées peuvent se résumer en trois ,récits populaires de la privatization'. Le premier repose sur l'impression que la faiblesse de la gouvernance a conduit à la privatisation; le deuxième sur une préférence pour une politique à l'échelon national plutôt que mondial, de sorte que les objections à la privatisation étaient liées au nationalisme; le troisième sur l'angoisse de perdre la maîtrise des pressions systémiques exercées par la mondialisation néolibérale. En général, le processus de privatisation a eu des conséquences matérielles importantes (en grande partie négatives) pour les Béliziens mais aussi, étant donnée la géographie historique et culturelle nationale, de profondes implications discursives et symboliques sur leur sens de l'identité dans un contexte de mondialisation néolibérale. [source]

The semiotics of language ideologies in Singapore1

JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 3 2006
Lionel Wee
As an ethnically and linguistically diverse society, Singapore has had to grapple with the problem of how to manage this diversity across a range of contexts, thus making it a particularly interesting case study for language ideologies. This paper examines three particular cases taken from the history of Singapore's language policy. In the first situation, the policy remains largely unchanged, varying only in its lexical and textual realizations; in the second, performances in the service of a set of ideologies give rise to potentially serious problems; and in the third, the material consequences of implementing the ideologies lead to changes in the ideologies themselves. By drawing on recent theoretical developments in the study of language ideologies, this paper shows how attention to the sitedness of language ideologies can help provide greater specification and appreciation of the interactional processes by which the ideologies are instantiated. [source]

Disciplining Subjectivity and Space: Representation, Film and its Material Effects

ANTIPODE, Issue 2 2004
Jennifer England
Although the distinction between representation and reality is increasingly blurred, I argue that representational discourses have material effects in everyday life. By moving "outside the text" I trace the messy terrain between visual discourse and everyday life in Downtown Eastside, Vancouver by examining two questions: (1) how do discursive productions of visual culture articulate, inscribe, and discipline space and subjectivity and (2) how do aboriginal women negotiate the material consequences of those representations? Using discourse and feminist analysis, I analyse how a documentary film, produced by the Vancouver Police Department, constructs spaces and subjectivities of deviance through techniques of realism and the moral gaze of the police officers. I argue that aboriginal women negotiate these deviant representations through their experiences of racism and sexism by police officers. Consequently, aboriginal women are rendered either hyper-visible or invisible by police officers, marked by their gender, race, and class. Combining an analysis of the documentary film and in-depth interviews with aboriginal women, I argue that critical geographers must consider the analytical spaces "outside of the text" to explore the material effects of visual representations. [source]

Fracturing the Real-Self,Fake-Self Dichotomy: Moving Toward "Crystallized" Organizational Discourses and Identities

COMMUNICATION THEORY, Issue 2 2005
Sarah J. Tracy
This article begins with the following question: Why, even with the proliferation of poststructuralist theoretical understandings of identity, do people routinely talk in terms of "real" and "fake" selves? Through an analysis of critical empirical studies of identity-construction processes at work, this article makes the case that the real-self,fake-self dichotomy is created and maintained through organizational talk and practices and, in turn, serves as a constitutive discourse that produces four subject positions with both symbolic and material consequences: strategized self-subordination, perpetually deferred identities, "auto-dressage," and the production of "good little copers." The article challenges scholars to reflexively consider the ways they may perpetuate the dichotomy in their own academic practices. Furthermore, the authors present the metaphor of the "crystallized self" as an alternative to the real-self,fake-self dichotomy and suggest that communication scholars are well-poised to develop alternative vocabularies, theories, and understandings of identity within the popular imagination. [source]