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Power Hierarchies (power + hierarchy)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences66%

Selected Abstracts

Implementing Affirmative Action: Global Trends

IDS BULLETIN, Issue 5 2010
Julie Ballington
This scoping article gives a global picture of dynamics, trends, policies and mechanisms for engaging with women's representation in political office. It discusses the kind of affirmative action introduced, and where it features vis-à-vis electoral cycles. It describes and compares candidate and reserved seats quotas and shows how electoral systems influence the possibilities of challenging power hierarchies in politics. The second part of the article reflects on the extent to which implementing quotas have been effective in engendering political representation and the conditions that allow or inhibit this. [source]

Representations of ethnicity in people's accounts of local community participation in a multi-ethnic community in England

JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY & APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 1 2002
Catherine Campbell
Abstract In this paper we examine the impact of the social construction of ethnic identities on the likelihood of local community participation. We do so in the context of an applied interest in the current policy emphasis on partnerships between government and local communities in initiatives to reduce health inequalities, and a conceptual interest in the role of social representations in perpetuating unequal power hierarchies. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 75 residents of a deprived multi-ethnic area in south England. Informants described themselves as African-Caribbean, Pakistani and White English; half men and half women, aged 15,75. We draw attention to the way in which ethnic identities may be constructed in ways that undermine the likelihood of local community participation. Stereotypical representations of ethnically defined ingroups and outgroups (the ethnic ,other') constituted key symbolic resources used by our informants in accounting for their low levels of engagement with local community networks. We examine the content of these stereotypes, and highlight how their construction is shaped by historical, economic and social forces, within the context of the ,institutional racism' that exists in England. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Displaced persons: symbols of South Asian femininity and the returned gaze in U.S. media culture

COMMUNICATION THEORY, Issue 2 2001
Meenakshi Gigi Durham
The media's showcasing of nose rings, mehndi, and bindis in U.S. fashion is contemporary appropriation of South Asian symbols by Western popular culture. This paper employs a critical analysis of media images of White women adorned in the symbols of Indian femininity to explore the circulating economy of seeing and representation. The theoretical intervention offered here turns on the notion of the Third Eye - the potential for the object of ethnographic spectacle to return the gaze. The analysis reveals that the contemporary ,ethnic chic' preserves power hierarchies by locating the White woman as sexual object, and the Indian woman as the disembodied fetish that supports White female sexuality. The implications for South Asian American women include the need to re-imagine sexuality with reference to critical race theory and the potential to return an oppositional gaze. [source]

Assessing Qualitative Television Audience Research: Incorporating Feminist and Anthropological Theoretical Innovation

COMMUNICATION THEORY, Issue 4 2000
Amanda D. Lotz
During the past 20 years qualitative audience researchers have produced respected theory and applied work in their studies of media audiences. Derived from roots in traditional anthropology, audience studies use methodologies that reproduce power differentials between researchers and participants. This article considers the application of feminist ethnography to the methodologies used in audience studies by exploring developments in recent anthropological approaches to ethnography. Shifting to a theoretical base incorporating feminist ethnography aids in identifying the power hierarchies between researcher and research participant and theorizes strategies to minimize these power differentials. In sum, this article queries the epistemological premises of current audience research practices and advocates a rethinking of this research based on the contributions of feminist ethnographic theory and other emergent anthropological developments. [source]

The Politics of Disciplining Water Rights

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 2 2009
Rutgerd Boelens
ABSTRACT This article examines how the legal systems of Andean countries have dealt with the region's huge plurality of local water rights, and how official policies to ,recognize' local rights and identities harbour increasingly subtle politics of codification, confinement and disciplining. The autonomy and diversity of local water rights are a major hindrance for water companies, elites and formal rule-enforcers, since State and market institutions require a predictable, uniform playing field. Complex local rights orders are seen as irrational, ill-defined and disordered. Officialdom cannot simply ignore or oppress the ,unruliness and disobedience' of local rights systems: rather it ,incorporates' local normative orders that have the capacity to adequately respond to context-based needs. This article examines a number of evolving, overlapping legal domination strategies, such as the ,marrying' of local and official legal systems in ways that do not challenge the legal and power hierarchy; and reviews the ways in which official regulation and legal strategies deny or take into consideration local water rights repertoires, and the politics of recognition that these entail. Post-colonial recognition policies are not simply responses to demands by subjugated groups for greater autonomy. Rather, they facilitate the water bureaucracy's political control and help neoliberal sectors to incorporate local water users' rights and organizations into the market system , even though many communities refuse to accept these policies of recognition and politics of containment. [source]

Should service user involvement be consigned to history?

JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRIC & MENTAL HEALTH NURSING, Issue 5 2006
A critical realist perspective
Service user involvement in the UK healthcare agenda is now widely expected. Historically, service user groups have been increasingly successful in their demands for greater involvement. Hierarchies of involvement exist that include consultation and partnership working. Psychiatry is an archetypal arena in terms of power and control. The traditional view of interpreting the place of service users within this arena is that the service user is at the bottom of this hierarchy; involvement allows transcendence of the power hierarchy. Critical realist theory is offered as an alternative approach to understanding these complex relationships. It is argued that contemporary models of involvement perpetuate and sustain the power positions of the dominant discourse within psychiatry. It is suggested that a critical realism perspective, offers a model that does not kowtow to the dominant discourse but rather recognizes that service users now possess power, especially in terms of being able to provide services that statutory services providers now require. Is it time for service users to call the tune, and, in doing so, establish a power position outside the traditional hierarchy of power? [source]