Resisting intersectional marginality by developing a mestiza consciousness : undergraduate women of color challenging and shaping power

This critical qualitative study explores how power shapes the experiences of undergraduate Women of Color engaged in activism and advocacy on social justice issues at the University of Missouri. The development and design of this study is grounded in a Critical Race Feminist (CRF) epistemology. The research questions were: 1) How does power shape the experiences of undergraduate Women of Color engaged in activism and advocacy at the University of Missouri? 2) How do Women of Color experience exclusion in their activist/advocacy work and/or spaces on campus? 3) What strategies do Women of Color employ to resist marginalization on campus " in and outside of activist work? The research focused on the experiences of five Women of Color undergraduate students at the University of Missouri, four of whom were in their fourth year at the institution and one of whom was a junior. More specifically, there was one Black woman, a Chicana, a mixed-race Mexicana who is also White, and two South Asian Indian women. the use of testimonios, plnticas, and sista circles, participants shared their stories and experiences. The identification of these frames and methods is partly a result of my own position as a Boricua, Woman of Color, who seeks to conduct research in a way that is liberatory and reciprocal for participants. The findings of this research were interpreted using intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991; Collins, 2019) and Mestiza consciousness (Anzaldna, 1997). I found four over-arching themes: Engaging and Adjusting Behavior, Culture of Exploitation, Distrust Confirmed and Cultivated, and Developing a Mestiza Consciousness. Overall findings demonstrate how participants activism largely came in the form of creating awareness for others, predominantly White people. In addition, findings showed how those with privilege and power regulate participants' emotions; a lack of intersectional praxis and analysis in all areas of campus life, including equity and diversity work; a performative diversity culture that haed in equity and justice; dominant representation reflecting political investments; and how the development of a Mestiza consciousness is used by participants to challenge intersectional marginalization. Finally, this study demonstrates how participants' consciousness and activist work are continuously evolving and how they work to meet their needs and find reciprocity in their activist and advocacy efforts.

Stimulant Frontiers

Stimulants have, in their own ways, played a leading role in shaping today’s globalised world. Their world-shaping power stems from their double role: as “agents” that stimulate bodies, and as things that “rouse and incite” capital. In this issue of Commodity Frontiers, contributions center on the histories and presents of some of the leading stimulant crops and the sites and processes of their cultivation, expansion, and transformations. Contributors variously consider stimulants from the perspectives of bodies and capital, sometimes touching on their overlaps.

Introduction

This chapter documents the shaping power of everyday economic markets on cultural politics in China. It examines how sellers, producers, and consumers of sexual representations shifted the boundaries of what counts as erotically transgressive: in other words, which kinds of depictions of sexuality should be condemned and controlled. The chapter then asserts that, about a century ago, China and many other societies around the world entered a new and ongoing pornographic stage in the history of such boundary drawing. In China, this phase built on, but is distinct from, an earlier vocabulary of licentiousness. Ultimately, the chapter argues, from a Chinese empirical basis, that key early-twentieth-century changes in conceptions of eroticism around the world were at least as rooted in the activities of historically anonymous people making, selling, and buying depictions of desire and sexuality as they were generated by intellectual discourse, elite cultural production, and state initiatives around sexuality and media.

Mutant worlds, migrant words: Rabindranath Tagore, Mahasweta Devi and Amitav Ghosh

Drawing upon the insights of Rabindranath Tagore, who coined the term viswasahitya to express his own understanding of comparative literature, this essay resituates translation as the cornerstone for new directions in world literature. While conventional understandings of world literature tend to reconfirm existing power structures and hierarchies, translation opens up the possibility of thinking beyond the national/global binary by interrogating the lines along which such binaries are conceptualized. Translation operates at the borders that are seen to divide cultures, languages, worldviews and geographies. This essay explores the dynamic relationship between translation and world literature within contemporary South Asian writing, through an analysis of heteroglossia, multilingualism and ‘translatedness’ in selected texts by Mahasweta Devi and Amitav Ghosh, opening up larger questions about multilingualism and also about the very discipline of comparative literature. Highlighting the role that translation has historically played in shaping power relations in the world, this paper projects the transformative potential of translation as the key to a radical reconceptualization of a world literature for the future.

Online engagement as a multimodal discursive practice: The case of Dubai Cares’ Facebook page

The paper examines the role of social media platforms in public relations engagement, focusing on the case of a leading non-profit organization in the UAE, namely Dubai Cares. Drawing on multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA), the paper analyses the textual, paratextual, and visual modes of communication deployed by the organization, and investigates their role as (multimodal) discursive practices in constructing engagement and shaping power relations between the organizations and its publics. A key finding of the paper is that Dubai Cares’ online public relations efforts to promote its international recognition and legitimacy often come at the expense of addressing multiple power differentials between the organization and its stakeholders. The paper demonstrates how approaching engagement as a multimodal discourse, where power relations are at play, helps transcend the limitations of instrumental interpretations of the notion of engagement, thus obscuring its inherent discursive and social dimension.

Economy

Chapter 6 presents two cases of billionaires whose pursuit of wealth in the global economy has broader political consequences. It looks at how Charles and David Koch have tried to limit climate change mitigation in order to protect the fossil fuel–based business interests of their conglomerate Koch Industries. The Koch brothers spread climate change skepticism via the funding of think tanks and public advocacy, and they finance campaigns boosting politicians that oppose climate change mitigation. In Rupert Murdoch’s case, his News Corporation has been his main political resource. He has used the opinion-shaping power of his media empire to extract favors from politicians abroad, especially in the UK, but also in Australia, by offering support (or threatening hostility) during election times.

Research Initiatives in Accounting Education: Transforming Today's Students into Accounting Professionals

ABSTRACT Accounting education is part of the causal chains that produce every accounting outcome of interest to researchers and practitioners because of its power to determine which people become accountants and to shape their traits through training. In this essay, I characterize the trait-shaping power of accounting education using a framework I call the “selection/transformation framework.” I then show how this framework can facilitate the generation of important, novel accounting education research questions using the examples of materialistic values among accounting students, the underrepresentation of Black people in audit firms, and the communication skills of accounting graduates. The research program I advocate would require the use of a variety of methods, but my examples focus on archival methods because of my familiarity with them and their relatively infrequent use in the accounting education literature.