From Patterns to Freefall: Exposing the Vulnerability of Human Predicament in the Times of the Pandemic

COVID-19 demands a paradigm shift in modes of human interaction and challenges hegemonic social structures to adapt and evolve themselves to the altered reality of human existence. Across the world, these shifts have been triggered by the new social order threatening to erase existing social systems. My paper attempts to look at the lives of the precariats, caught up within neoliberal structures, assuming these structures to be hegemonic normative systems, and the manner in which they refuse to change, thereby putting the precariats into a more exploitative crisis situation, dehumanizing them, demonizing them, thereby risking their erasure from the socio-political and legal systems that rule the world. I have used the context of India to substantiate my argument. My paper is divided into the following sections: a reading into the concept of precarity and contextualizing it in the neoliberal framework, analysing the pandemic against precarity using examples from Indian society.

Justice in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Mobility Capital and New Social Order

The COVID-19 pandemic forces us to reconsider the conceptual boundaries of the world and everyday social order, affecting such pairs of concepts as: natural / artificial; habitual / extraordinary. The author considers one of the aspects of the changes having occured: the transformation of spatial mobility, which is connected with deep social changes. In the first part, the experience of isolation is interpreted on the basis of the theoretical resources of the social theory of mobilities, primarily the concepts of mobility capital and mobility justice. Not all social groups were equally mobile, because they had different mobility capital. The issue of mobility equity has taken in a new context: a natural global threat that has exacerbated the existing inequalities caused by the emergency. The second part of the article deals with the concept of "state of emergency" by G. Agamben and analyzes the issue of transgression of the system of the world social order, including its everyday dimension. The answer to this question is given on the basis of an analysis of the interpretations and forecasts of the leading contemporary European intellectuals (Agamben, Žižek, Latour, Sloterdijk, Fuller). The problems of social distancing, the transformation of higher education, the increase in the powers of the state, associated with medical justifications are considered. Important parameters of the new social order are the environmental factor and the need for sociocritical optics to understand the consequences of the pandemic. Analysis captures the increasing role of digital intermediaries of social interactions, which forms a new context for the problem of justice, opening up perspectives for issues of distance with digital technologies and issues of digital ecology.

Values in Psychometrics

When it originated in the late 19th century, psychometrics was a field with both a scientific and a social mission: Psychometrics provided new methods for research into individual differences and at the same time considered these methods a means of creating a new social order. In contrast, contemporary psychometrics—because of its highly technical nature and its limited involvement in substantive psychological research—has created the impression of being a value-free discipline. In this article, we develop a contrasting characterization of contemporary psychometrics as a value-laden discipline. We expose four such values: that individual differences are quantitative (rather than qualitative), that measurement should be objective in a specific sense, that test items should be fair, and that the utility of a model is more important than its truth. Our goal is not to criticize psychometrics for supporting these values but rather to bring them into the open and to show that they are not inevitable and are in need of systematic evaluation.

Evolution of the plandemic communication network among serial participants on Twitter

The coronavirus pandemic has been accompanied by the spread of misinformation on social media. The Plandemic conspiracy theory holds that the pandemic outbreak was planned to create a new social order. This study examines the evolution of this popular conspiracy theory from a dynamic network perspective. Guided by the analytical framework of network evolution, the current study explores drivers of tie changes in the Plandemic communication network among serial participants over a 4-month period. Results show that tie changes are explained by degree-based and closure-based structural features (i.e. tendencies toward transitive closure and shared popularity and tendencies against in-degree activity and transitive reciprocated triplet) and nodal attributes (i.e. bot probability and political preference). However, a participant’s level of anger expression does not predict the evolution of the observed network.

Pentecostal Theology, Identity Politics, and Racialized Xenophobia: Claiming A New Social Order

Applying the methodological lens of ethnographic theology, the article argues that grounded Pentecostal theologies participate in reimagining a new social order, particularly in relation to racialized xenophobia. This argument is made in the specific context of two Pentecostal churches in Johannesburg, South Africa, both led and frequented by people who have come to Johannesburg from other parts of the African continent. The argument is outlined by unpacking three theological themes prominent in the collected ethnographic data: positive confession, Word-centred ecclesiology, and Christlike lifestyle. Taken together, these themes highlight a social conscience that other societal actors would do well to take seriously when considering combatting xenophobia. Overall, the article challenges the scholarly emphasis on Pentecostal theologies as uninterested in life-affirming structural change, building on Nimi Wariboko’s formulation of blackness, chosenness, and Nigerian Pentecostalism ‘that reads against the existing social order’ within the particular context of xenophobia in urban South Africa.

Perception et autoportrait de l’interprète indigène en Afrique coloniale française

African interpreters were hired to serve as intermediaries between Europeans and Africans, but they ended up establishing themselves as key parties in the mediation process, wielding as much power as both the colonial administrators and the traditional authorities. In so doing, they actively participated in the colonial enterprise, which involved dominating and exploiting native masses, promoting Eurocentrism, as well as fostering the rule of injustice and violence. Although in the African community the interpreter ’s status brought him privile ges and some respect, he was viewed with suspicion – and even contempt – by European colonial officers, who considered him as a threat to their own existence. Eventually, this indirect actor of the disintegration of African traditional societies could really identify neither with his fellow natives, for whom he was part of the colonial administration, nor with Europeans, who would rather keep him in a state of servitude. His personality reflected the contradictions of the new social order which he had helped to establish.

The Dialectics of Technology Standardization

Technology standardization unfolds as a dialectic process marked by paradoxical tensions. However, standardization research has yet to provide a dialectic analysis of how tensions and management responses interact recursively over time, and with what effect. In this paper, we apply dialectics to analyze an action research study of a Swedish initiative that developed and diffused a technology standard to facilitate the integration of disparate IT systems in road haulage firms. Drawing on the technology standardization literature and our empirical analysis, we engage in midrange theorizing to capture the recursive dynamics through which standard-setters construct and respond to manifestations of three latent tensions: development versus diffusion activities, private versus public interests, and local versus global solutions. Our resulting dialectic theorizing explicates how standard-setters bring these latent tensions into being; how they construct salient tensions through the oppositional logics of polarization, complementarity, and mutuality; how they manage these tensions through splitting, integrating, and suspension responses; and how consequential functional, architectural, and organizational standardization outcomes produce a new social order in which new tensions emerge. These theoretical insights contribute to both the technology standardization and dialectics literatures.

The Theology of Struggle

This article explores writing and scholarship on the theology of struggle developed by Protestants and Catholics in the Philippines during the 1970s-90s. Its focus is on popular writing—including pamphlets, liturgical resources, newsletters, magazines, newspaper articles, conference briefings, songs, popular education and workshop modules, and recorded talks—as well as scholarly arguments that articulate the biblical, theological, and ethical components of the theology of struggle as understood by Christians who were immersed in Philippine people’s movements for sovereignty and democracy. These materials were produced by Christians who were directly involved in the everyday struggles of the poor. At the same time, the theology of struggle also projects a “sacramental” vision and collective commitment towards a new social order where the suffering of the masses is met with eschatological, proleptic justice—the new heaven and the new earth, where old things have passed away and the new creation has come. It is within the struggle against those who deal unjustly that spirituality becomes a “sacrament”—a point and a place in time where God is encountered and where God’s redeeming love and grace for the world is experienced.

“Never Again the Everyday”: On Cinema, Colportage and the Pedagogical Possibilities of Escapism

This article is a philosophical analysis of escapism as a pedagogical possibility, with a particular focus on TV series. Taking my own, as well as students, experience of escapism into TV series as a starting point, that is, their ability take us somewhere far away, something which has become more acute during the pandemic time since we remain more or less self-isolated because of the corona virus Covid-19, the article discusses escapism in relation to distraction and attention in life as well as within teaching, but also in relation to colportage, hope and social justice. According to Ernst Bloch, social justice cannot materialize without regarding things differently. Something that is often dismissed as mere escapism might be a seed for a new and more humane social order, as it can be seen as an “immature, but honest substitute for revolution” (Bloch 1986, p. 368). Drawing on Bloch’s understanding of colportage and hope, as well as Walter Benjamin’s understanding of mass culture and cinema, the article treats escapism and TV series not as something simple, but rather as possible seeds for a new social order and thus as having pedagogical possibilities (Hållander, 2020).