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As one of the most successful pieces of transnational popular culture, we rhetorically analyze the compelling critique of neoliberal capitalism in the 2020 anime film, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train. Alongside this criticism of neoliberal capitalism, we theorize relations of mujō (無常/impermanence) found in the film, foregrounding this Buddhist principle to advance ways of being that resist neoliberal capitalist impulses. We forward three tenets that emerge in our analysis of this film: (1) recognizing that all beings are embedded within shared entanglements; (2) holding all beings responsible to serve others; (3) transcending the bounds of death by passing the torch of omoi (想い/human feeling). We argue that Mugen Train's protagonists, the Demon Slayers, embody mujō that demonstrates how those under capitalist subjugation can only be liberated by recognizing human community grounded in such a relational ethic. We thus situate relations of mujō as a critical rhetorical theory that releases us from the neoliberal capitalist pursuit of mugen (無限/limitless). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this text, I attempt to trace the possible transformations of the concept of artistic practice due to an exhausted use and appropriation by institutions and how this might be connected with the dominant social and economic structure which – let's call it by its name – is neoliberal capitalism. The text emerged from a need to think further on the question of 'what dance practice can and could become in our wider environment at this moment in time?' included in the editorial letter of Choreographic Turn #7: Deborah Encounters, a 5-day event organised and produced by Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia which took place in Ljubljana in April 2023. This edition was focused on the notion of dance practice and was curated by Dragana Alfirević in collaboration with Jana Jevtović, Dejan Srhoj and Jasmina Založnik. 'Deborah Hay and four of her collaborators from different periods of her and their work' were invited 'to expose the notions, forms of work and outcomes associated with dance practice.' I participated, as part of the 5th round of the project Critical Practice Made in YU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Profil súèasného výtvarného umenia / Contemporary Art Magazine is the property of Kruh Sucasneho Umenia Profil and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The contemporary phase of capitalism has led to an intensification of the process of "accumulation by dispossession," which entails a growing conflict between territorial displacement and indigenous resistances. These conflicts manifest in projects for autonomy that take on diverse forms. Here, we address the origins of these various concepts of autonomy while focusing on their corresponding dilemmas and strategic choices across different historical contexts. Finally, we look at the examples of Zapatista autonomy in Mexico, the experiences of the Purépecha community of Cherán, and the Mapuche struggle in Wallmapu/Chile, three distinct models where organizational processes themselves forge new collective subjectivities meant to confront neoliberal capitalist dispossession. La fase contemporánea del capitalismo ha generado una intensificación del proceso de "acumulación por desposesión," lo cual implica crecientes conflictos entre el despojo territorial y las resistencias indígenas. Éstas se manifiestan en formas diversas de proyectos de autonomía. Analizamos el origen de las variantes del concepto de autonomía, enfocando en sus correspondientes dilemas y sus opciones estratégicas en diversos contextos históricos. Finalmente, consideramos las experiencias de la autonomía zapatista, la comunidad purépecha de Cherán, y la lucha mapuche en Wallmapu/Chile, tres modelos distintos en donde el propio proceso organizativo forja nuevas subjetividades colectivas para enfrentar el despojo del capitalismo neoliberal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Direito e Práxis is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Prostitution is the heart of an international business that has grown in recent decades in the context of economic globalization and closely linked to the criminal economy. The sex industry has developed at the intersection of three systems of power: the patriarchal, the neoliberal capitalist and the racial / cultural. These three dominations are at the origin of the violence that prostituted women receive. At the same time, prostitution reinforces another founding institution of patriarchal systems, hegemonic masculinity.

The article tries to map the perspectives of the post-communist East on its own communist past, as envisioned by four writers and their relevant novels: the Michal Ajvaz (The Other City, 1993), Mircea Cărtărescu (Blinding, 1996), the David Albahari (Leeches, 2006), the Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, 2009). I argue that these novels -- which take the form of mysteries and/or draw on conspiracy theories -- resort to specific genre tropes in their attempt to render in an allegorical code the deficits in the cognitive mapping of the post-communist period. This blank spot concerns the project of post-communism as an evasive totality which the East has been constantly trying to grasp, after being confined in the cognitive labyrinth of the neoliberal capitalism that has predominated since the demise of communism in central Europe in 1989. My study relies on Fredric Jameson's view that conspiracy theories are indicative of deficiencies of cognitive mappings. Subsequently, I analyse the four novels in a World Literature frame. These terms help in interpreting the ways in which the literatures of the former Eastern Bloc relate to their own past, but also to the new planetary conscience pushed forward by neoliberal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Community & Physician / Toplum ve Hekim is the property of Turk Tabipleri Birligi / Turkish Medical Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the capitalist world-system, the gendered dynamics of power often deny women autonomy to their own bodies, force upon them the responsibilities of care work and motherhood while criminalizing abortion to further subjugate the feminized body. The sexist state, Lola Olufemi (2021: 3) argues, discriminates against women in allocating resources, “…reinforces gendered oppression by restricting women’s freedom and ensuring that poor women have no means to live full and dignified lives.” By analyzing two novels—Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby (2018), translated from French by Sam Taylor, and Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born (2022), translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey—this paper examines how neoliberal capitalism exploits women’s labor and often reduce them to being mere vessels for reproduction. The texts present the commodification and exploitation of women’s labor who inhabit the gendered and uneven world-system. Drawing on the theorization of the combined and unevenness of the modern world-system by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), social reproduction, and feminist theories from scholars like Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Verónica Gago, Silvia Federici, Lola Olufemi among others, this paper aims to critically examine the exploitative care work, reproductive labor, and the body politic as depicted in the two texts, arguing that neoliberal capitalism turns women into disposable commodities.

With the deployment of neoliberal capitalism in Latin America the limits of the liberal democratic system in Latin America become increasingly narrow, the irreconcilability between representatives/represented and/or rulers/governed shows its agonizing side.This thesis is spread with notoriety in the intellectual circles of the left, which we share, however in this work we seek to show the immeasurable of the crisis, crisis that does not even escape the so-called "progressive" and "leftist" governments, hence the term: "crisis without exit", or "blind exits", without satisfactory results - at least in the short term - that give birth to a new kingdom or civilization, not ruled by the "Market God". The contribution of this documentary research consists precisely in presenting concrete results that demonstrate this affirmation through a systematic study on the most important social revolts and rebellions (r/r) that occurred between 1989 (El Caracazo') and 2023 (the Peruvian uprising), which show an entire political system in crisis [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the capitalist world-system, the gendered dynamics of power often deny women autonomy to their own bodies, force upon them the responsibilities of care work and motherhood while criminalizing abortion to further subjugate the feminized body. The sexist state, Lola Olufemi (2021: 3) argues, discriminates against women in allocating resources, "...reinforces gendered oppression by restricting women's freedom and ensuring that poor women have no means to live full and dignified lives." By analyzing two novels--Leïla Slimani's Lullaby (2018), translated from French by Sam Taylor, and Guadalupe Nettel's Still Born (2022), translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey--this paper examines how neoliberal capitalism exploits women's labor and often reduce them to being mere vessels for reproduction. The texts present the commodification and exploitation of women's labor who inhabit the gendered and uneven world-system. Drawing on the theorization of the combined and unevenness of the modern world-system by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), social reproduction, and feminist theories from scholars like Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Verónica Gago, Silvia Federici, Lola Olufemi among others, this paper aims to critically examine the exploitative care work, reproductive labor, and the body politic as depicted in the two texts, arguing that neoliberal capitalism turns women into disposable commodities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brandon Cronenberg's Infinity Pool addresses issues of privilege and globalization in strikingly original ways. Part of the distinctiveness of Infinity Pool comes from the daring science fictional conceit around which it is built, and part comes from its willingness to explore extreme sex and violence in ways that tilt into body horror. In addition to collapsing the boundary between sf and horror, Infinity Pool undermines binary oppositions of all kinds, suggesting that the kind of binary thinking that defined the world system in earlier eras can no longer be maintained in an era of neoliberal capitalist globalization. Infinity Pool, though, demonstrates that the collapse of these binaries is not necessarily a good thing. Ultimately, the extreme nature of this film helps it to conduct a critique of the extreme nature of the global neoliberal system that dominates the world of the early twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers assessment practices within the neoliberal conditions of higher education by posing questions to conceptions of value. As a motivating thrust, this article asks: might there be generative potential that remains unexplored, due to assessment’s direct linkage to the production of human capital? With its central emphasis on value, this article turns towards Brian Massumi’s Postcapitalist Manifesto: 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value (2018). Guided by Massumi, I compose speculative propositions with which to explore the potential for a postcapitalist reworking of value within the context of assessment. The propositions offered in this paper by no means exhaust the emergent potential of re-thinking assessment, yet my aim is to sow but a few generative seeds that might expand on the potential of what (else) assessment might do. In engaging assessment otherwise, this article foregrounds assessment practices that are pertinent to the creative arts (with particular interest in the pedagogical convention of the studio crit), not as a means to suggest that arts-based disciplines have a superior and well-resolved approach to assessment, but rather to leverage the already tenuous relationship between arts education and assessment. As its objectives, this article aims to (1) contribute to the underrepresented discourse on the assessment of creative arts in higher education and to (2) explore the potential for re-imaginings of arts-based assessment practices to leak into the wider discourse of assessment as a whole. The intention is not to deliver fully formed methodological formulae but to think through assessment with propositions that might be expanded upon through speculative experimentation and future inquiries.

This writing addresses a theme that is that of organized peoples as collective subjects of resistance to neoliberal capitalism and at the same time as creators of new worlds. The living experience of the peoples is the compass for theoretical reflection and to project the type of transition that we are experiencing towards the other worlds that are being built and the ways in which each people is defending them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings sociology to European integration. The author claims that even though the European Union is a unique entity, it can still be analyzed in the framework of international relations. Therefore, the sociological theory of stratificatory differentiation can be applied to European integration. From the formal point of view, all EU member states are equal and remain sovereign actors in international relations; the EU is conceptualized as a network organization. However, this paper concludes that there is an unofficial stratification in the organization based on cultural and economic differences. Western core EU states (France and Germany in particular) constitute the higher stratum; the new (post-communist) member states occupy the subaltern status. The tentative claim of the author is that this unofficial stratification results in a differentiated impact of EU policies on the interests of EU member states.

Object-oriented ontology [OOO], alternatively known as flat ontology or as a branch of speculative realism, has recently been developed and presented as a non-anthropocentric attempt to construct an ontology, a metaphysics, or both. In this paper, I will look at the texts of Graham Harman, probably the most vocal of all the theorists working within the framework of OOO, in order to show that the many flaws of this approach end up legitimizing a neoliberal capitalist worldview and reinforcing its contradictions. Also, one of my goals is to answer a current misunderstanding of object-oriented ontology as posthumanism; OOO is not a posthumanism because it rejects any political discourse and criticism. On the contrary, as we will see, OOO explicitly opposes the new posthumanist materialisms.

Tipping has been a legally recognized form of labor remuneration in the United States for many decades, but it is experiencing a resurgence outside of its usual confines in the hospitality sector. The proliferation of the practice is bound to the long-term economic shift into services, as well as the more recent expansion of the gig economy. Tipping informalizes the wage relation, incentivizes the worker in precarity, and internalizes social relations of subordination, and is thus a highly effective technique of labor subsumption particularly suitable for the idiomatic kind of social dependencies and subordination required by an increasingly 'neo-feudal' capitalism. Around the spread of the practice, there is an apologetic liberal discourse on freedom and 'choice' that emphasizes the supposed advantages of tipping for the worker subjected to it, over and above the increasingly problematic wage relation. Drawing anecdotally on a critical insider-ethnography of laboring in the restaurant industry of the Hamptons (Long Island, New York), and by enlisting a Neo-Roman concept of liberty, the article attempts a critical reappraisal of liberal claims regarding tipping as a form of remuneration in the so-called 'service sector'. Instead, we indicate how tipping actually produces more appropriately governable worker subjectivities for capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing the gendered dimensions of family violence remains a key focus in the primary prevention of violence against women (PVAW) in Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian communities. What is seen as more important for Indigenous communities in PVAW is addressing the legacies and ongoing impacts of colonisation on Indigenous people, families, and communities. This focus on decolonisation deviates from settler PVAW programs where the emphasis is on challenging hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy. In this paper, I consider the importance of critiquing the western logic of colonisation within both Indigenous and non-Indigenous PVAW programs through examining the links between hegemonic masculinity, colonisation and neoliberal capitalism. I draw attention to the inherent violence and corrosion within processes of colonisation that adversely affect the social and emotional wellbeing and relationships of Indigenous and non-Indigenous men (albeit in very different ways) and argue the importance of a decolonising approach for addressing gender-based violence within Indigenous and non-Indigenous programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research study is theoretically based on postcolonial ecocriticism: a critical paradigm for the rigorous scrutiny of the impacts of European colonialism and American neocolonialism on the ecology of postcolonial states. The theoretical concepts under the rubrics of which the selected literary text "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" (2013) has been scrutinized are taken from the works of Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, and Feldman and Hsu, the pioneering and key theoreticians of postcolonial ecocriticism. Feldman and Hsu postulate that the global unequal distribution of environmental burdens is vitally linked to the racial inequality, geographically uneven development, and global stratification of the North and South, while Huggan and Tiffin argue that Euro-American politico-economic manipulation and extortion of postcolonial economies make them subscribe to a capitalist growth model that is both demonstrably asymmetrical, and carries a potentially devastating environmental cost. The literary text "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" (2013) by Mohsin Hamid, a Pakistani English novelist, is a highly merited fictional work with the narrative being woven around the rise of a lower-class protagonist to riches and power. The novel has been previously academically explored from postmodern, feminist, linguistic, and a broadly approbatory ecocritical perspective; however, it significantly portrays negative images of postcolonial ecology as well. This study, by exploring the thematic connections between neoliberal capitalism and environmental dilapidation, fills a research gap in available academic works on the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting with European colonization, African natural resources in particular and nature in general have been coveted and exploited mainly in the interest of Euro-American industrialized countries, with China as a recent major player from Asia. Interestingly, the incessant quest by some Western NGOs, institutions, and governments to protect and conserve African nature not only are inspired by ecological and climatic concerns but also often tend to propagate a false image of Africa as the last Eden of the earth in order to control Africa's resources. Using literary texts, this article argues that some Euro-American transnational NGOs and some of their governments sometimes conspire with some African governments to spread global capitalism and green colonialism under the pretext of oxymoronic sustainable development as they attempt to conserve a mythical African Eden. Utilizing three novels and one play from the Congo Basin, namely In Koli Jean Bofane's Congo Inc.: Le Testament de Bismarck (2014), Assitou Ndinga's Les Marchands du développement durable (2006), Étienne Goyémidé's Le Silence de la forêt ([1984] 2015), and Ekpe Inyang's The Last Hope (2011), I contend that such Euro-American environmental NGOs and their governments sometimes impose and sustain fortress conservation (creation of protected areas) in the Congo Basin as a hidden means of coopting Africa's nature and Africans into neoliberal capitalism. For the most part, instead of protecting the Congo Basin, green colonialists and developmentalists sell sustainable development, undermine alternative ways of achieving human happiness, and perpetuate epistemicide, thus leading to poverty and generating resentment among local and indigenous populations. As these literary texts suggest, nature conservation and sustainable development in the Congo Basin should not be imposed upon from the outside; they should emanate from Africans, tapping into local expertise, and indigenous and other knowledge systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the second part of a two-part series, beginning with the July 2024 issue of this journal, exploring the diversity of Indigenous autonomies confronting neoliberal capitalism and their dilemmas and strategic choices. Esta es la segunda parte de una serie de dos, comenzando con el número correspondiente a julio de 2024 de la presente revista, que exploran la diversidad de autonomías indígenas frente al capitalismo neoliberal, así como sus dilemas y opciones estratégicas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reads Esther David’s book Ahmedabad: City with a Past as a tropical flâneuse’s exploration of the city of Ahmadabad. To this end, the article draws from Baudelaire and Benjamin’s idea of the flâneur, and re-articulates this masculine and temperate character. Esther David, the decolonial tropical flâneuse, critiques neocolonialism, manifested through the nexus of capitalist globalization, rapid urbanization and consumerism that has drastically altered the face of the city. This is done mostly by bringing out Ahmedabad’s hybrid identity of an old heritage city and a modern metropolis. The paper further analyzes the flâneuse’s connection with the postcolonial identity of the city and her endeavour to extend flânerie to domestic interiors exploring their relationship vis-à-vis the city.

Copyright of Community & Physician / Toplum ve Hekim is the property of Turk Tabipleri Birligi / Turkish Medical Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Canadian health system is often perceived as excellent. However, a closer examination of the political economy of health in Canada shows a radically different picture. It is a picture of persistent inequality and a history of the inability to address such inequality. Despite numerous public policy interventions to address preventable health inequalities--that is, health inequities--this societal problem persists. This research addresses how and why health inequities, especially class, race/ethnicity, and gender health inequities, persist in Canada and how to reduce such differences through public policy action. To address these questions, I performed a critical realist review, focusing on the political economy of health and policy change. Then I conducted a thematic analysis of the interview data gathered from 23 semi-structured interviews with leading Canadian policy academics, activists, and advocates. The results demonstrate that the capitalist economic system; the co-constitutives of capitalism, namely colonialism, racism, and sexism; and maldistributive public policies primarily cause health inequities in Canada. Canada's health inequities reduction requires pushing for redistributive public policies; uniting and strengthening labor unions, civil society groups, and social movements; and engaging in electoral politics. Reducing health inequities may involve struggling within and against capitalism and struggling for socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Časopis za Zgodovino in Narodopisje is the property of University of Maribor and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This introductory chapter explores the lyric's potential as an active agent of change and offers an overview of contemporary discourses on the status of poetry in late capitalist contexts. Our approach synthesizes recent theoretical, philosophical, and poetic scholarship to facilitate a more comprehensive and nuanced analysis of the numerous aesthetic and conceptual agendas of twenty-first-century lyric writing. We re-theorize the nexus between lyric poetry, politics, and neoliberal capitalism in order to think through the ways in which different poetic forms as well as lyric language and practices shape, transform, or resist political and capitalist discourses--but also to reflect on how the lyric and the theory of the lyric have themselves been shaped by these discourses. We propose lyricism as a compelling analytical tool with which to grasp effective and affective dynamics of poetic production and reception, and as a space where the poem can resist simple classification and straightforward commodification. In taking seriously interventionist strategies employed in poetry to tackle the crises triggered or exacerbated by neoliberal capitalism, this chapter is a springboard for contemporary poetics interested in readings of poetry beyond a reductive analysis that focuses either solely on formal features or on content. It is thus of immediate relevance to literary and cultural studies, as well as the social and political sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Jamie Ranger reviews Lee Artz’s 2022 book ‘Spectacle and Diversity: Transnational Media and Global Power’.

Critical political economy of the media investigates how changes in the array of forces that exercise control of media institutions liberate or limit the public sphere. South Africa’s political economy of transition from apartheid to democracy was notably characterised by the emergence of new black capitalist interests merging with established white capital to refashion multi-racial capital, facilitated by a Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) strategy that aimed to address the racial injustices of the past. These changes greatly impacted media ownership, diversifying a previously racially homogenised and localised apartheid media market. The ‘new’ South Africa also moved from racial capitalism to neoliberalism as its economic system. This study investigates whether these ownership diversity changes in the South African print media market in the first twenty years of its democracy (1994–2014) liberated or limited the public sphere. A total of 684 newspaper front-page and editorial articles were analysed using both quantitative and qualitative content analysis, to aggregate as well as investigate deeper meanings and associations in diversity trends. South Africa’s neoliberal economic context substantially informs the nature of print media content transformation and diversity, which is found to be elite driven, marking the emergence of class continuities. This despite a specialised BEE affirmative action programme envisaged to cultivate transformed and diverse media content through transformed ownership. The study concludes that attempts to transform, diversify, de-westernise, and decolonise the media systems in post-colonial countries will be futile if the power of neoliberalism to perpetuate class inequalities and the race dynamics of the past remain underestimated and unaddressed.

In this article, I examine the relationship between state, ethnicity, territoriality and neoliberal capitalism in the tribal areas of highland Northeast India, where I focus in particular on the socioecological and socio-political corollaries of its rediscovery as a resource and capitalist frontier. In so doing, I apply (capitalist) 'desire' and (ethnic) 'closure' as key analytics to capture the contentiously unfolding history of the region's present. This article shows how new resource and capital flows lead both to the production of capitalist 'desires' and socioecological destruction through the privatization, acquisition and depletion, mostly by ethnic tribal elites, of communal assets now embedded in newly capitalist relations, and to the intensification of a politics of exclusive ethnoterritorial belonging and rights. The latter comes in the form of volatile social processes of ethnic 'closure'; an increasing preoccupation, that is, on part of tribal ethnic communities with the protecting, patrolling and legislating of ethno-territorial rights. The upshot of this is a dialectic between new neoliberal connectivities and ethnic 'closure', one that ensues in a frame of the specifics of governance and law in highland Northeast India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Glasnik Slovenskega Etnološkega Društva is the property of Slovene Ethnological Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper brings sociology to European integration. The author claims that even though the European Union is a unique entity, it can still be analyzed in the framework of international relations. Therefore, the sociological theory of stratificatory differentiation can be applied to European integration. From the formal point of view, all EU member states are equal and remain sovereign actors in international relations; the EU is conceptualized as a network organization. However, this paper concludes that there is an unofficial stratification in the organization based on cultural and economic differences. Western core EU states (France and Germany in particular) constitute the higher stratum; the new (post-communist) member states occupy the subaltern status. The tentative claim of the author is that this unofficial stratification results in a differentiated impact of EU policies on the interests of EU member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dacoromania Litteraria is the property of ACADEMIA ROMANA Filiala Cluj-Napoca Institutul de Lingvistica si Istorie Literara "Sextil Puscariu" and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Amidst a crisis in the US racial state over the summer of 2020, typically "politically" averse professional sports leagues proliferated anti-racist statements. We see the sudden advertising of corporate values and politics by sports leagues as stemming from the development of socially conscious marketing (SCM) in recent years. Marketers celebrate commercials such as Nike's Dream Crazy (2019) since they amplify the political speech of activists, such as Colin Kaepernick, and advertise ways for consumers to engage in ethical consumption. Using discourse analysis of marketing literature on SCM and textual analysis of SCM commercials shown during sporting events, we show that SCM appropriates dissent against neoliberal capitalism in order to legitimate capitalism and resist systemic change during a moment of crisis. We conclude that while we can continue to expect professional sports leagues and other brands to appear "woke," we should not expect to see change in the exploitative conditions that make them profitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In approximately the last four decades, neoliberalism has reigned as the structure of Western economies, chiefly the United States. However, neoliberal capitalism and an environment synonymous with deregulation, "free" markets, and limited government intervention in economic matters has repeatedly led to crises and crashes in history. The Scourge of Neoliberalism examines the actions of past presidential administrations since 1980, and explains how neoliberalism's allure has kept it afloat for so many years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How could queer activism for social change be possible in an authoritarian but neoliberal environment? What does neoliberalism imply for queer struggles in non-Western contexts where liberal democracy is absent or non-existent? This article introduces the concept of 'quiet politics' to establish a new theoretical lens for understanding queer organizing under global capitalism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interview data on the rise of corporate diversity activism in Singapore, it analyzes how queer employees navigate the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism in multinational corporations. The concept of quiet politics helps us understand the nuanced ways in which queer subjects 'quietly' mobilize themselves through a negotiation of neoliberalism, queer politics, and the authoritarian government that persecutes homosexuality. In doing so, this article challenges the Western notion of queer liberalism and sheds new light on the complex entanglement of neoliberal capitalism, corporate diversity, contentious politics, and queer activism from a global perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to consider how white privilege functions in late modernity, this article engages with issues of identity and political economy to theorise the impact of racist discourse on Roma, Gypsies, and Travellers in the United Kingdmom (UK). The article specifically problematizes the increasing aggregation of Roma, Gypsies, and Travellers as one community of difference in the UK. The article expresses the author’s concern that contemporary discourse and associated policy developments have racialized communities, and in doing so negated them through a failure to acknowledge the breadth of experience of Roma, Gypsies, and Travellers. The article makes a theoretical argument, evidenced by a comprehensive review of literature in the social sciences and key policy documents in the UK. It also incorporates an analysis of reports produced by UK government and civil society organisations over the past 15-year period. The article argues that the categorisation of Roma, Gypsies, and Travellers as one community of difference has occurred due to the embedded racism within contemporary European society that functions through and is augmented by neoliberal capitalist norms. In conclusion the paper argues that the norms of neoliberal capitalism, that are typified by individualism, competition, and the primacy of capital over human experience, allow the perpetuation of this racist discourse that is not challenged by narratives of inclusion but rather is augmented by them.