This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. ...Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.
This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. ...Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.
The aim of the present article was to investigate how and why Afro‐descendant decolonial activists in Belgium morally typecast their group when discussing their struggle to challenge the status quo. ...Ten Afro‐descendant activists from different associations or movements active in Brussels were interviewed, and the interviews were examined through a thematic content analysis using the following themes and sub‐themes: moral typecasting (positive agent, positive patient, negative patient, and negative agent), the period of time (pre‐colonial, colonial, and present times in Belgium), and perceived strategy. Overall, our analysis revealed that the interviewees referred to multiple moral statuses. The association of sub‐themes allowed to investigate how and why the moral statuses were mobilized. We thus concluded that moral statuses were used in reference to both past and present times and that their mobilization was recognized as being strategic to challenge the status quo. The results were interpreted in light of decolonial actions and minorities' strategies to challenge the ingroup situation and to motivate its members.
Recent debates in migration studies target the non-reflexive use of categories that derive from nation-state- and ethnicity-centred epistemologies. However, what a category is and how categorization ...works remain undertheorized. Our paper addresses this gap. Through a qualitative study on experiences of Othering among migrant descendants in Zurich (CH) and Edinburgh (UK), we scrutinize the perspectival, political, and performative nature of categories. We show how the persons informing our study were highly reflexive when using the category migrant descendant: They contested, negotiated, and navigated it in multiple ways. Although this specific category is firmly embedded in the "national order of things", it ultimately proved to be inclusive. We argue that reflexivity in the field can not only create space for the often-muted voices of research participants, but also helps to overcome important pitfalls that derive from issues of legitimacy, representation, and power relations in scientific knowledge production.
Understanding the molecular programs that guide differentiation during development is a major challenge. Here, we introduce Waddington-OT, an approach for studying developmental time courses to infer ...ancestor-descendant fates and model the regulatory programs that underlie them. We apply the method to reconstruct the landscape of reprogramming from 315,000 single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) profiles, collected at half-day intervals across 18 days. The results reveal a wider range of developmental programs than previously characterized. Cells gradually adopt either a terminal stromal state or a mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition state. The latter gives rise to populations related to pluripotent, extra-embryonic, and neural cells, with each harboring multiple finer subpopulations. The analysis predicts transcription factors and paracrine signals that affect fates and experiments validate that the TF Obox6 and the cytokine GDF9 enhance reprogramming efficiency. Our approach sheds light on the process and outcome of reprogramming and provides a framework applicable to diverse temporal processes in biology.
Display omitted
•Optimal transport analysis recovers trajectories from 315,000 scRNA-seq profiles•Induced pluripotent stem cell reprogramming produces diverse developmental programs•Regulatory analysis identifies a series of TFs predictive of specific cell fates•Transcription factor Obox6 and cytokine GDF9 increase reprogramming efficiency
Application of a new analytical approach to examine developmental trajectories of single cells offers insight into how paracrine interactions shape reprogramming.
Does political violence leave a lasting legacy on identities, attitudes, and behaviors? We argue that violence shapes the identities of victims and that families transmit these effects across ...generations. Inherited identities then impact the contemporary attitudes and behaviors of the descendants of victims. Testing these hypotheses is fraught with methodological challenges; to overcome them, we study the deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944 and the indiscriminate way deportees died from starvation and disease. We conducted a multigenerational survey of Crimean Tatars in 2014 and find that the descendants of individuals who suffered more intensely identify more strongly with their ethnic group, support more strongly the Crimean Tatar political leadership, hold more hostile attitudes toward Russia, and participate more in politics. But we find that victimization has no lasting effect on religious radicalization. We also provide evidence that identities are passed down from the victims of the deportation to their descendants.
The Pacific region of Colombia, like many sparsely populated places in developing countries, has been imagined as empty in social terms, and yet full in terms of natural resources and biodiversity. ...These imaginaries have enabled the creation of frontiers of land and sea control, where the state as well as private and illegal actors have historically dispossessed Afro‐descendant and indigenous peoples. This paper contributes to the understanding of territorialisation in the oceans, where political and legal framings of the sea as an open‐access public good have neglected the existence of marine social processes. It shows how Afro‐descendant communities and non‐state actors are required to use the language of resources, rather than socio‐cultural attachment, to negotiate state marine territorialisation processes. Drawing on a case study on the Pacific coast of Colombia, we demonstrate that Afro‐descendant communities hold local aquatic epistemologies, in which knowledge and the production of space are entangled in fluid and volumetric spatio‐temporal dynamics. However, despite the social importance of aquatic environments, they were excluded from Afro‐descendants' collective territorial rights in the 1990s. Driven by their local aquatic epistemologies, coastal communities are reclaiming authority over the seascape through the creation of a marine protected area. We argue that they have transformed relations of authority at sea to ensure local access and control, using state institutional instruments to subvert and challenge the legal framing of the sea as an open access public good. As such, this marine protected area represents a place of resistance that ironically subjects coastal communities to disciplinary technologies of conservation.
In the neighbourhood Caminos a la Libertad, located in the north‐western part of Quito, every November, a group of Afro‐Ecuadorian women called the Community of Saint Martin & The Martinas pay ...tribute to Saint Martin de Porres “the Black saint of the Afro‐descendant community.” This celebration is relevant in a context in which the Afro‐Ecuadorian inhabitants of the neighbourhood suffer segregation, racism, and discrimination. What happens in the microcosm of Caminos a la Libertad is, in part, a reflection of the experience of the whole Afro‐descendant population in the capital: A city which has historically created an image of itself as white‐mestizo, and where the presence of Afro‐descendants has been systematically rejected. Based on ethnographic work, participant observation and semi‐structured interviews, in this article I analyse how this community uses the image of Saint Martin de Porres and his celebration to combat racism, promote social cohesion and ethnic and gender empowerment in the neighbourhood, by creating “places of enunciation” and “spiritual citizenship.”
Resumen
En el Barrio Caminos a la Libertad ubicado al noroccidente de Quito un grupo de mujeres afroecuatorianas denominadas Comunidad San Martín & Las Martinas rinden homenaje cada noviembre a San Martín de Porres “el Santo Negro del Pueblo Afrodescendiente”. Esta celebración es relevante en un contexto donde los habitantes afroecuatorianos del barrio sufren segregación, racismo y discriminación. Lo que sucede en este microcosmos de Caminos a la Libertad es en parte, un reflejo de lo que vive la población afrodescendiente en la ciudad capitalina. Una ciudad que históricamente se ha construido he imaginado como blanco‐mestiza y en donde la población afroecuatoriana ha sido sistemáticamente rechazada. Por medio de un trabajo etnográfico basado en observación participante y entrevistas semiestructuradas, analizo en este artículo cómo esta comunidad utiliza la imagen de San Martín de Porres para combatir el racismo, promover cohesión social y empoderamiento étnico y de género en el Barrio, creando “lugares de enunciación” y “ciudadanía espiritual”.
ABSTRACT
For the past thirty years, the Brazilian government has recognized dozens of sites and cultural practices of Afro‐descendant groups as national heritage, including the historical maroon site ...Quilombo dos Palmares. As this site has gained international notoriety, academic research has focused on the value of this historical landmark for commemorating Afro‐Brazilian heritage. This article looks to the ambiguous effects of such commemoration on contemporary people living in the area, some of whom are being forcefully evicted from the site in connection with its heritage status. The article addresses the vulnerability experienced by these residents, as it highlights broader issues associated with multicultural and heritage‐recognition policies in Brazil. Specifically, I analyze the policies protecting contemporary maroon descendants and sites to reveal why Palmares residents making claims on their land and heritage fall outside of state recognition. I argue that as these policies have become an increasingly powerful mechanism for protecting Afro‐Brazilian and minority groups, they have also acquired the capacity to hurt the most vulnerable individuals within these communities. Two very different types of heritage stand to be protected at Palmares: one of the historical maroons and their contemporary kin, and another of the structurally unequal system that inadvertently replicates the oppression it intends to dismantle. In the context of massive inequality that disproportionately affects blacks, maroon descendants, indigenous, and other minority populations in Brazil, it is critical to consider how political strategies for redressing ethnoracial inequality may also end up perpetuating segregation.
RESUMO
Ao longo dos últimos trinta anos, o governo brasileiro tem reconhecido como patrimônio cultural dezenas de espaços e práticas culturais de grupos afrodescendentes, entre estes, o espaço histórico do Quilombo dos Palmares. À medida que este local tem adquirido notoriedade histórica internacional, a pesquisa acadêmica tem priorizado a importância do local no que se refere à comemoração do patrimônio cultural afro‐brasileiro. Meu trabalho analisa as consequências de tal reconhecimento patrimonial na vida de populações que residem atualmente nesta região, algumas das quais estão sendo expulsas à força do local, devido à declaratória deste como patrimônio cultural. Analiso também as vulnerabilidades experimentadas por tais populações, no contexto da problemática mais ampla das políticas multiculturais de reconhecimento do patrimônio no Brasil. Especificamente, examino as políticas de proteção aos quilombos e indivíduos quilombolas, e analiso como e por que o Estado não reconhece as reclamações de terras e patrimônio feitas pelos residentes de Palmares. Minha tese é que embora tais políticas venham sendo poderosos mecanismos de proteção aos grupos afro‐brasileiros e às minorias, têm também adquirido uma capacidade desproporcional para prejudicar os indivíduos mais vulneráveis daquelas comunidades. Assim sendo, a declaração de Palmares oferece proteção a dois patrimônios muito distintos: um é dos quilombos históricos e seus descendentes contemporâneos, e outro, do sistema estruturalmente desigual que tem como consequência inesperada a replicação da mesma opressão que a própria política visava a desmantelar. Dentro do contexto de desigualdade massiva no Brasil, que prejudica desproporcionalmente as populações negras, os quilombolas, os indígenas e outras minorias, é de suma importância considerar como as políticas atuais que visam à reparação da desigualdade etnorracial também levam à perpetuação da segregação.
PDF
