Analysis of the Status Quo and the Reasons for Students' Political Participation in the Period of the Social Transformation

Author(s):  
Yang Xi
1970 ◽  
pp. 53-57
Author(s):  
Azza Charara Baydoun

Women today are considered to be outside the political and administrative power structures and their participation in the decision-making process is non-existent. As far as their participation in the political life is concerned they are still on the margins. The existence of patriarchal society in Lebanon as well as the absence of governmental policies and procedures that aim at helping women and enhancing their political participation has made it very difficult for women to be accepted as leaders and to be granted votes in elections (UNIFEM, 2002).This above quote is taken from a report that was prepared to assess the progress made regarding the status of Lebanese women both on the social and governmental levels in light of the Beijing Platform for Action – the name given to the provisions of the Fourth Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. The above quote describes the slow progress achieved by Lebanese women in view of the ambitious goal that requires that the proportion of women occupying administrative or political positions in Lebanon should reach 30 percent of thetotal by the year 2005!


Author(s):  
Tahir Abbas

This article situates the debate on the United Kingdom’s Prevent policy in the broader framework of the global paradigm for countering violent extremism (CVE), which appeared at the end of 2015. It argues that omission of a nuanced focus on the social, cultural, economic, and political characteristics of radicalised people has led to a tendency to introduce blanket measures which, inadvertently and indirectly, have had harmful results. Moreover, although Prevent has been the fundamental element of the British government’s counterterrorist strategy since 2006, it confuses legitimate political resistance of young British Muslims with signs of violent extremism, thus giving credence to the argument that Prevent is a form of social engineering which, in the last instance, pacifies resistance by reaffirming the status quo in the country’s domestic and foreign policy.


NAN Nü ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-162
Author(s):  
Wanning Sun

Abstract The social problem of “leftover men” among the most marginalized members of China’s rural migrant population has become widely known, but how these rural migrants themselves talk about and make sense of their failures to secure a marriage partner is relatively less understood. Answering this question may also shed light on how socioeconomic marginalization makes an impact on rural migrant men’s masculine identity. This paper is a longitudinal study of a cohort of unmarried rural migrant men born in the 1980s. This study shows that the emotional experience of cohort members is marked by a mixture of persistent feelings of loneliness, bitterness, and dissatisfaction with the status quo of their lives, and a quiet yearning for the possibility – however remote – of “finding someone” in the future. The paper also points to “masculine grievance” as a useful concept for understanding how unmarried migrant men rationalize their emotional hardships.


Author(s):  
Malose Langa ◽  
Steven Rebello ◽  
Linda Harms-Smith

Abstract This article reflects on the Marikana massacre of August 2012, subsequent violent strikes and responses by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a case study, and provides an analysis about whether these interventions bring transformative change or maintain the status quo in times of crisis. Events associated with Marikana are seen to be embedded in social structures of the time and part of deeper frictions and fractures of social transformation. The role that NGOs might play in this context must be interrogated as to their facilitation or hinderance of such social transformation. Interviews were conducted with representatives of NGOs intervening in Marikana that provided services of humanitarian assistance, and legal and psychosocial interventions and with mine workers and residents of Marikana about their experiences and views of these services. Findings from the study are illustrative of how NGOs were not primarily motivated to bring about lasting, transformative change but rather attempted to address immediate or short-term needs which, while important, did not account for underlying causes of the crises that they set out to address. Both ideological underpinnings of NGOs and structural conditions produced by state and capital impact on outcomes of interventions. Given these limitations, it is argued that there is a need for deep critical interrogation through praxis, for NGOs to intervene differently in times of crisis to bring ‘real’ change and transformation in the lives of those who are marginalized.


2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara C. Motta

AbstractThis article argues that social democratic and orthodox Marxist conceptualizations of politics are unable to “engage in solidarity” with many new forms of Latin American popular politics. Such movements challenge the politics of representation, the market economy, and the state form by reinventing territorialized experiments in self-government, which politicize place, subjectivities, and social relations. Developing a critique of these frameworks of political analysis, this article argues that conceptual categories combining the insights of autonomist or open Marxism and poststructuralism and the critical reflections and theorizations by Latin America's newest social movements enable a deeper engagement with such movements. This critique challenges academics committed to progressive social change to reexamine long-held notions about the nature and agents of social transformation and the epistemological categories that orient our research. It argues that if we fail to do this, then we risk becoming gatekeepers of the status quo.


1979 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian L. D. Forbes

In recent times the historiography of the Wilhelmine Reich has clearly reflected the influence of Eckart Kehr and of later historians who have adopted and developed his work. The Rankean dogma of the Primat der Aussenpolitik (primacy of foreign policy) has been replaced by a new slogan, Primat der Innenpolitik (primacy of domestic policy). The resultant interpretive scheme is by now quite familiar. The social structure of the Bismarckean Reich, it is said, was shaken to its foundations by the impact of industrialization. A growing class of industrialists sought to break the power of the feudal agrarian class, and a rapidly developing proletariat threatened to upset the status quo. The internecine struggle between industrialists and agrarians was dangerous for both and for the state, since the final beneficiary might be the proletariat. Consequently agrarians and industrialists closed their ranks against the common social democrat enemy and sought to tame the proletariat, which had grown restive under the impact of the depression, by means of a Weltpolitik which would obviate the effects of the depression, heal the economy, and vindicate the political system responsible for such impressive achievements. Hans-Ulrich Wehler and others call this diversionary strategy against the proletarian threat social imperialism; and this, it is said, is the domestic policy primarily responsible for Wilhelmine imperialism.


1982 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 169
Author(s):  
Aimara Da Cunha Resende

As Shakespeare matures, his ideological stance changes from that of a writer believing in and backing up the establishment, to that of one who, though deeply aware of man in his human condition, doubts the validity of the status quo. His art then reflects the changes in his stance. At first it tends to present Renaissance poetics, becoming essentially Baroque, in its greatest phase, to move back to more firmly delineated forms and structures, in his last plays. This study of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet and The Tempest aims at presenting some characteristics both of the Renaissance elements in the structure, based on "mise en abyme," and of the Baroque poetics found within this structure. These aspects are viewed against the background of the ideology of Shakespeare's England at the same time that duplication, in Lacan's sense, is analysed and shows to coincide with the support and/or acceptance of the social cannons.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 146
Author(s):  
Kittiphong Praphan

<p>Diasporic literature functions as an important source which provides the social contexts of the home countries of its authors. Carlos Bulosan’s 'America is in the Heart' and Pira Sudham’s 'Monsoon Country' are among this group of literature representing the voice of the oppressed and exploited farmers in the Philippines and Thailand, respectively home of the authors. The farmers are represented as being exploited by those in power, including colonizers, local officials, landlords, and middlemen. The exploiters can be seen as capitalists who accumulate wealth through the labor and the property of farmers. In their methods of oppression the oppressors employ State Apparatuses and Ideological State Apparatuses to maintain the status quo and reproduce the exploitative system. To transcend the oppression and exploitation, the major characters of the books struggle to obtain education, since they view that ignorance is the most important cause of the exploitation. Education is seen as the only way to eliminate ignorance and liberate themselves as well as their people from the exploitative cycle. 'America Is in the Heart' and 'Monsoon Country' represent the voice of the farmers in the Philippines and Thailand who condemn their exploiters and raise readers’ awareness of the problem.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong><em>diasporic literature, oppression and exploitation, education, voice</em></p>


Author(s):  
Michalina Lubaszewska

The paper analyzes the activities of two socially committed artists: Banksy and Jan Klata, who both use the funfair motif. Banksy employs it in a literal though subversive way in his project Dismaland, which is a quizzical reversal of Disneyland. Klata employs it in his performances (which often take the form of the director’s comments on the reality that surrounds us), showing a set of “amusements” resembling those from a funfair and leading the viewer to a perceptive dissonance (similarly to the collection of Eisenstein’s amusements). It seems that the space created by the committed art that uses the concept of a funfair allows for the implementation of a real rebellion against the status quo. Actual amusement parks, however, create only an illusion of the possibility to break with the norms of the social system.


2006 ◽  
Vol 157 (9) ◽  
pp. 377-383
Author(s):  
Winfried Schenk

At the beginning of the 1990s forest historians turned against the economic historian Joachim Radkau, who argued that lamentations in forest instructions around 1800 regarding wood shortage (scarcity) should rather be interpreted as an instrument of feudal authorities to regulate and constrain usage as well as a means to subjugate and discipline their subjects. By contrast, forest historians judged these lamentations to be an indication of actual shortcomings that existed before the advent of governmental forest management. As a result, many studies were undertaken that dealt with the social relevance of woods and forests in pre-industrial times. The present article starts with the status quo and traces back the complexity of the so-called wood emergency debate by taking a closer look at these early studies. It demonstrates how regional studies that were based on a wide range of sources contributed to the understanding of pre-industrial wood shortage events as complex phenomena related to distinct forest conditions and energy shortage discussions.


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