Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> Critical studies of globalization seek to unmask how this stage of capitalist history reshapes patterns of uneven development around the world. While globalization can reproduce long-standing patterns of North–South unequal exchange, in this paper, I focus on how capital mobility and competition contribute to uneven development. Drawing primarily on Neil Smith’s theory of uneven development, I offer a theoretical discussion of how capital’s capacity to seesaw from place to place in its search for higher profits—and the spatial competition between places that this capacity triggers—constitutes a source of unevenness. Regions, nations, and localities adapt to capital’s seesaw by offering, among others, cheaper labor and lower environmental regulation costs. While this can work for a time, advantages are either eroded by the unfolding contradictions of capitalism or competed away by the emergence of new areas. In the last section, I offer a tentative illustration of this argument with a brief examination of pollution havens and Special Economic Zones. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Chicago’s broader notorious reputation of gang and gun violence dominates popular discursive conversations about the city’s safety and stability. Through a critical structural perspective, this article explores the constitutive historical continuity and spatialized contours of racial capitalism in the facilitation of structured violence and organized death in city neighborhoods. These dynamics are most relevant where individualized and pathological narratives of interpersonal gang-based gun violence are rampant. The focus is on the context of Mexican Chicago, particularly the transnational site of Little Village. Using hyper-local examples on the environment, education, and labor-based economic markets, I showcase how this diasporic Mexican community is an instructive site highlighting the ongoing presence of colonially constituted structures of expropriation, dispossession, exploitation, and displacement endemic to the United States empire and its resultant violence. I suggest that gang-based gun violence is tied to broader death-making machinery, leading us to robust alternative conceptual frames and reactions when socio-politically engineered ‘crime’ and violence take place across urban city neighborhood spaces. I conclude with a paired abolitionist perspective and implications for critical sociology and the study of gangs specifically. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The concept of trusts, absent from the classical writings of Marx and Weber on capitalism, was introduced by Frederic Maitland and John Locke as an explanatory framework for the central institutions of capitalism. While these two theorists offered compelling arguments, they relied on intuition and utilized the concept primarily to justify the existing social structure. This paper aims to bring analytical rigor to this intuitive theory and proposes that critical theory embraces the idea of trusts as a critical conceptual tool to unravel the nature of capitalist institutions. Examining limited liability corporations, the modern state, and public debt, the incorporation of trusts into critical theory provides key advantages. First, it facilitates analyzing capitalist institutions in terms of rights and responsibilities, unveiling moral dynamics. Second, it highlights the role of personhood in distributing rights and responsibilities. Third, it can help understand why modern society is ensnared by the shackles of debt. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Over the last century, the South African state has periodically engaged in the practice of ‘exempting’ various migrants from their otherwise irregular immigration statuses. Always backed by official legislation, exemptions represent one way by which dominant capitalist interests have relied on the legitimacy of the state to meet their labour needs by sometimes employing undocumented migrants from the Southern African region. Through insights from sub-imperialism and bordering, this paper discusses historical case examples from policy articulations, parliamentary debates, secondary literature and archival materials. By exploring cross-national relationships of exploitation and differentiation, the paper argues that exemptions should be understood as attempts by which the contradictions of ubiquitous informal cross-border mobility and employment in a regime of unfree regional movement might be resolved. Exemptions also attest to the challenge of governing human mobility in a region invested with a historically vast infrastructure of producing, attracting as well as exploiting cheap migrant labour. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This paper utilises the concepts of social exclusion and precarity to explore the situation of migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on European countries, we first demonstrate how migrants were more likely to experience exclusion prior to the crisis and how they were further marginalised due to the public health measures. Second, we show how inadequate government support exacerbated the exclusion of migrants. Finally, we explore social ties of migrants during the pandemic, with a focus on local and transnational ties. The paper is based on qualitative data collected as part of the European Union (EU)-funded project RESISTIRÉ, which examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on vulnerable groups across Europe. Over 100 narratives with migrants were gathered during the project, and these were analysed to explore the multiple social exclusions experienced by migrants, as well as the ways they coped with being on the margins of receiving societies. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The religious dimensions of the QAnon movement and links with political violence have been noted by researchers. This paper furthers this scholarship by conducting an analysis of 121 religious images taken from QAnon Telegram channels over 18 months. Through adopting semiotic and hermeneutical theory, it is argued that QAnon religious imagery can be categorised into a series of types, all influenced by Christian theological themes. When interpreted in a Christian context, these images reveal a close relationship with US-based Christian evangelicalism and with Christian liberation theology movements. By presenting contemporary politics as an eschatological battle between the oppressed and oppressors, framed as the QAnon community versus the devil, the QAnon movement encourages political activism closely analogous to Christian liberation theology movements. This contributes to an explanatory framework for the connections between QAnon followers and anti-government protest and violence during the Covid-19 pandemic and the 6 January storming of the US Capitol. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Over the past several decades, video games have gone from single-purpose games to multi-faceted platforms. This article is a case study that develops ‘unending consumption’ to understand the political economy of video game concerts. Unending consumption is the expansion of the means of consumption under a subscription model. By applying unending consumption to the political economy of video games, I show how video game concerts are embedded in the current moment of capitalism. The new political economy of video games blurs the line between video games and music as distinct media—an element of convergence. While video games and music converge through a new form of unending consumption, I argue these changes create more gatekeepers and limit the ability of independent creators to make a living. </jats:p>