This article examines a recent bizarre phenomenon on China’s Internet – the enormous popularity of a scatological Chinese neologism called diaosi, which literally translates as ‘dick string’. Seeing the diaosi phenomenon as a case of ‘infrapolitics’, a space of nuanced discursive practices mediating overt online politics and benign online entertainment, we analyse the ways in which an infrapoli...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to test empirically two major conceptualizations of parent-child relations in later adulthood-intergenerational solidarity-conflict and ambivalence paradigms-and their predictive validity on elders' quality of life using comparative cross-national data. METHODS Data were from a sample of 2,064 elders (aged 75 and older) from the five-country OASIS stud...

The “digital society” provides not only with new technology, but also with new concepts. Information plays a central role and becomes a valuable good, but knowledge cannot be reduced to information, and one aim for educators is to contribute in a “knowledge society”, not only an “information society”. A knowledge society is structured in networks, enriching the traditional hierarchies; a knowle...

Multi-agent systems defined on a network can be used for modelling the competition between companies in terms of market dominance. In view of the enormous size of the search space for winning strategies of initial configuration of resource allocation on network, we focus our search on the subspace defined by special local clustering effects, using the recently developed evolutionary computation...

By Dr. A.A. MacDonald, Director Coady International Institute In August 1982, the Coady International Institute sponsored a consultation on the development of workers' co-operatives. Workers' co-operatives were selected primarily because of their potential as instruments of human and institutional development. Moreover, during the past decade, there has been a significant resurgence of workers'...

In many ways, globalization created the problem of representation for feminist solidarity across the borders of the nation state. This problem is one of presenting a cohesive identity for representation in the transnational public sphere. This paper proposes a solution to this problem of a cohesive identity for women’s representation by drawing on the work of Paul Ricœur. What these women seem ...

Human rights discourse is central for the work of international social movements. Viewing human rights as a context-dependent and socially constructed discourse, this article investigates how it is used by a specific social movement – Israel-critical diaspora Jewish activists – and argues that it can simultaneously challenge and reproduce existing practices of domination. The article applies co...

This paper concerns resource governance in a remote Balinese coastal community, which faces severe environmental challenges due to overexploitation and habitat destruction. It explores some of the issues raised in 'social capital' debates regarding leadership and public participation toward sustainable natural resource governance. Given the strength of Balinese customary law and the high degree...

The concept of collective identity has been used extensively by social movement scholars seeking to explain how social movements generate and sustain commitment and cohesion between actors over time. Despite its wide application, collective identity is a notoriously abstract concept. This article focuses on the use of the concept in the literature on contemporary social movements and offers a c...

The paper uses the case study of the controversy regarding the construction of a mosque near the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in Manhattan, New York, to analyze the different theoretical approaches to the concept of solidarity. It is argued that the presence of affectional solidarity which is based on feelings of caring, friendship and love was very limited in the case under study. Instea...