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Studies that embrace socio-material theories, such as Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Assemblage Theory (AT), have proliferated in consumer and marketing research. Yet, despite their popularity, little effort has been devoted to reviewing the use of ANT and AT in these fields. This article reports on a systematic theory-based review of 44 articles published in 23 journals from 2003 to 2022. Through this review, we take stock of the divergent ways in which ANT and AT are deployed separately or are combined by scholars and find that both theories most often address aspects of relationality, object agency, and becoming in marketing contexts. Inspired by discussions from other fields, we reflect on how marketing scholars navigate the theories' similarities and (in)compatibilities and offer directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing substantially on epistemologies developed in the context of vulnerable populations and responding to calls for greater epistemic justice in marketing research, an intersectional framework involving positionality, partiality, reflexivity, and situated knowledges is proposed to reflect on undertaking market research with Muslim minority populations in non-Muslim majority countries. This population is often highly vulnerable due to stigmatisation, Islamophobia and processes of othering that affect Muslim consumer behaviour, practices and identity. The framework is derived from reflexive experiences of market research undertaken by the authors on and with Islamic consumers both on an individual and collective basis and from relevant literature. The framework highlights the relational nature of the research experience and the situatedness and positionality of both the researcher and researched. In the case of research with Muslim populations we also draw out the significance of religious identity, ideology and religiosity; intersectionalities, including gender; and religious and cultural power as framed by cultural and institutional practices and which affect notions of class and attitudes to the other. We propose an approach that helps overcome Muslim/non-Muslim binaries that flatten the lived notions of the Muslim experience and consumption practices and instead provide for a richer and more representative account of Muslim identity. However, this approach also heightens researcher sensitivity to the situatedness of Muslims within social norms and the implications that this has for anonymity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Discussing Advance Care Planning (ACP) with people living with dementia (PwD) is challenging due to topic sensitivity, fluctuating mental capacity and symptom of forgetfulness. Given communication difficulties, the preferences and expectations expressed in any ACP may reflect family and healthcare professional perspectives rather than the PwD. Starting discussions early in the disease trajectory may avoid this, but many PwD may not be ready at this point for such discussions. Consequently, the optimal timing to discuss an ACP with and for PwD is undetermined. This study explored the changing needs of PwD and experiences of social contexts that influence ACP initiation and revision and aimed to identify the optimal time to discuss an ACP with PwD. Methods: Narrative online and telephone interviews were conducted with 13 PwD and 23 family carers. Participants were recruited via the Join Dementia Research (JDR) Platform. Narrative analysis was used to identify patterns in the data, generating three narratives: Shifting Expectations; Relational Interdependency and Trigger Points. Results: The Shifting Expectations narrative indicated that PwD's needs shifted to co-constructed needs with their family as PwD's independence declined. This was reflected in the Relational interdependency narrative where PwD almost always co-created and revised their ACPs with trusted key persons who provided relational support. The Trigger points narrative indicated various points in time when PwD can effectively initiate and revise their ACPs, ranging from before the diagnosis to years afterwards, challenging the current suggestion of an early ACP initiation. Conclusions: This study highlighted the changing co-constructed needs between PwD and their families that influence how PwD initiate and revise their ACP. The identification of ACP trigger points - the pivotal events throughout the dementia journey - that prompt PwD and family members to discuss their ACPs were suggested, indicating that PwD can initiate and revise their ACPs throughout the disease trajectory provided relational support is available whereby key persons involved in their care are involved and agree with the decisions being made. Therefore, an alternative, relational approach to ACP with and for PwD is recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many languages of lowland South America, nominal, verbal, and adpositional/adverbial stems are divided into two large classes, relational and absolute, according to whether or not they demand a complement in a specific position, respectively. After proposing a working definition of relationality with wide cross-linguistic applicability, we offer a typology of the morphological devices that convert stems from either of these classes to the other, surveying various parameters for describing such relationalizing and absolutizing morphology (RAM). These include directionality, productivity, pervasiveness of relational lability, existence of suppletive pairs, relationality preservation in derivation, and the possibility of RAM stacking. We observe that restricted relational lability is a strong areal feature in Eastern South America. Finally, we discuss so-called contiguity inflection, a category that has been proposed for a number of South American languages, and show that it is epiphenomenal and can be decomposed into RAM and person inflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends the capabilities conception of individuals developed by Davis, understanding capabilities as relationships. I first introduced the main concepts that are useful for this extension, namely those of agency and capabilities. Then, I showed that agency refers to a rational and responsible exercise of capabilities through Ricoeurs analysis of Sens earlier works. I successively developed the concept of capabilities as relationships through the distinction between intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships: in this framework, self-scrutiny and relationality, respectively, become the leading capabilities of these two relationships. From this extension of the capabilities conception of the individual, two concepts arise with a certain strength, namely those of responsibility and relationality. This extension of the capabilities conception of the individual in economics also in terms of interpersonal relationships emphasises that this social conception of the individual is characterised by relationality. Thanks to responsibility and relationality, the capabilities conception of the individual might be applied in fields such as contemporary civil economy and ecological economics. JEL Classifications: B31, B410, B59, Z13 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human societies face planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. Conventional command-and-control approaches to manage these existential challenges have failed due to limited comprehension of relationships in social-ecological systems. To address this problem, we study the complex case of the disaster response to unprecedented floods in the Northern Rivers Region, New South Wales, Australia, in 2022. We apply a novel relational-systems model that identifies management structures, processes, functions and contents interacting at and across scales. The model helps identify the root causes in the inadequate disaster response that ensued in the Northern Rivers Region flooding. The root causes are a lack of systems-thinking competence, poor collaborative capacity, vulnerabilities in environmental management and deficient governance systems. The relational complexity concepts of self-organisation and socio-cultural organisation may further help explain variation in response to disasters in different socio-ecological contexts. Such understanding can inform individual and collective environmental action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction to this special issue, "Africa-Si(gh)ted in Spanish," presents readers with essays that illustrate the creative energy emerging in various countries in Africa and the diaspora. The works analyzed may be viewed as exophonic literature, demonstrating how contemporary African writers are shaping African Hispanic identities that defy colonial nation-state notions of belonging and assert the centrality of Africans in interpreting the world. The "Africa-si(gh)ted" approach' as we term it, involves simultaneously prioritizing perspectives drawn from African lived experience and reclaiming the place of Africa as an ever-evolving site of knowledge generation and negotiation about Africans and African-descendant people. We propose Spanish as a language of affiliation and relation amongst creators from different cultural traditions—drawing on Edward Said and Édouard Glissant respectively—to offer a deeper understanding of the novel communities of belonging that are being forged in African Hispanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-humanist participatory arts-based research (PABR) ethics of care raise critical concerns for how researchers orient themselves toward their projects and participants and seek to enact research with care, reciprocity, and respect. From a literature review and five case studies of PABR, I characterize the methodologies that embody critical participatory arts-based research based in values of care, reciprocity, and respect. Further, I critique my participatory visual inquiry project from a post-humanist PABR lens and further envision the co-production of knowledge with human and non-human, emergent participants as acts of care, reciprocity, and respect. In doing so, I open my research to rhizomatic and relational understandings of inquiry that foster alternative knowledges and ontologies about doing research in a community of emergent participants while questioning the ethical limitations of their unknowing and non-consenting participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every culture creates and keeps records. Archivists have a pivotal responsibility toward the relationality of the historical past to present societal structure to preserve records of evidential and historical value and ensure their accessibility. Despite cultural differences, archivists impose colonial theory onto Indigenous archival materials that result in a lack of context. Because provenance is a colonial construct, it is often challenged when applied to cultural materials. In this article, the principle of provenance is discussed and challenged, against the backdrop of Indigenous archival practice that centers relationality and reciprocity in stewardship. Highlighting the example of the Jean Chaudhuri Collection at the Arizona State University Labriola National American Data Center, archivists employed a storytelling provenance providing rich context and description about the impactful life of Indigenous activist, Jean Chaudhuri. By reimagining and employing a practical, alternative provenance method, the principle of provenance, expands to respectfully support and provide context that was lacking, resulting in improved accessibility to a collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous scholars argue that the reciprocal relationality of life should be taken more seriously in scholarship responding to environmental crisis; however, much of orthodox academia analyses the environment as a separate category through the physical and social science disciplines. This article shows how human exceptionalism, human centrism, racial discrimination, and Euro-American centric privilege interweave in academic institutions and practices, often invisibly and thus insidiously, to dismiss Indigenous scholarship and lived experiences. We explore how to meaningfully address these problematics, presenting examples from our academic practices to overturn colonial and imperial privilege. We present a more-than-disciplinary approach to undiscipline nature, knowledge, and peoples. We argue that this paradigm shift is best led by Indigenous leaders in relationality, whose expert knowledge inheritance already holds nature with society. We present an Indigenous, pedological approach, to help destabilise orthodox academic disciplinary approaches and organisational structures through foregrounding Indigenous learning and knowledge systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the research process and ethics of doing research with low‐income households in Stoke‐on‐Trent, UK, during the coronavirus (COVID‐19) pandemic. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with five mothers experiencing food insecurity, I argue that it is imperative that researchers employ 'care‐full', slow, flexible methodologies situated within everyday lives to ensure that research with vulnerable and precarious groups of people is not exploitative, especially during times of crisis. The emergency public health measures introduced to contain COVID‐19 in March 2020 acted like a brake on my research activities, slowing things down, limiting the methods available to me, and ultimately, provoking a reimagining of my original research design. I make two contributions. First, building on feminist geographical scholarship on care and reflexivity, and calls for 'slow' research that prioritises the shifting needs of researchers and participants, I suggest adopting a relational approach to take account of participant subjectivities in order to minimise disruption in their everyday lives. Second, through discussing the ways in which I employed the mobile phone to continue gathering data with participant mothers during COVID‐19, I build on nascent geographical and methodological conversations about the role of technologies in the design and implementation of care‐full research. In highlighting the limitations of the mobile phone as a research device in this context, I extend current limited understandings of utilising mobile phones to gather data in the course of conducting research with marginalised people. This paper reflects on the research process and ethics of doing research with low‐income households in the UK during the COVID‐19 pandemic. It argues for researchers to adopt a relational approach to take account of participant subjectivities in order to minimise disruption in their everyday lives. In discussing the use of mobile phone methods and their limitations as a research device, the paper extends current limited understandings of utilising mobile phones in the course of conducting research with marginalised people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I take up the "modes of production" presented by Eric Wolf in Europe and the people without history as a set of tools for broad, systemic, and critical thinking about diversity and change in economic and political organization, including the changing forms of capitalist accumulation and the sources, and limits, of capital's planetary preponderance. I argue that Wolf's analysis centers problematics of "making," "taking," and "relating" that are necessary to critically assess how our collective capacities to create and destroy are mobilized, directed, and appropriated within and across polities, institutions, and circuits of value. I further argue for the importance of a fourth problematic, "planning," highlighting the crucial political questions raised by the purposeful allocation of time, energy, and resources, as both actuality and potentiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation: Zeitschrift für Angewandte Organisationspsychologie (GIO) is the property of Springer Nature 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 article reflects if it is possible to decolonize memory in the former Soviet republics that have been gradually moving centrifugally towards different political allegiances. It is needed to go beyond the postcolonial/post-Soviet national optic and consider inter-imperial (Doyle) and non-nation-state post-imperial (Burbank and Cooper) models and other unrealized alternatives. The article focuses on coloniality of memory critically engaging with various concepts including "dismembering" (Thiong'o), "mankurtism" (Aitmatov), "Myalism" (Brodber), "multidirectional memory" (Rothberg), "double critique" (Khatibi), "species memory" (Kaiser and Thiele), and the "third way" (Wynter). It sets the goal of tracing possible paths for rethinking of what it means to remember in a human way and what it takes to engender a global mnemonic transversal network of solidarity for refuturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore how relational thinking in protected area (PA) conservation both converges with and diverges from neoliberal capitalism. Deploying political ontology as a relational mode of enquiry, we identify how modern world-making continues to undermine the goals of PA conservation by constituting it as a practice for demarcating society from nature. An emerging socio-ecological paradigm has seen PA conservation shift from protecting fortresses of nature to managing PAs as sites for selective forms of human immersion in nature. No longer overtly opposing society to 'Nature', this paradigm, however, continues to mask the relations that join nature's conservation to its destruction. Arguing that embedded practices of society-nature dualism reproduce the illusion that modern worlds stand apart from the rest of reality, we explore how the protected inside of PAs is co-created with the outside that threatens them. We describe a growing reliance of PA conservation on world-making practices that create PAs as sanctuaries of scarce and spectacular 'Nature' that drives neoliberal capital accumulation. While inspired by Indigenous practices of human co-becoming in earthly webs, our aim is to identify opportunities within contradictory modern legacies for practices of PA conservation that can recuperate the more-than-human condition. The interplay of life and death in conservation offers one such opportunity for PA practices that revive multilateral relations between diverse lives, human and otherwise. Through this example, we advocate for modest world-making practices in PA conservation that renegotiate the political and economic realities that threaten the Earth. Key policy highlights: Practices of modern dualism embedded in protected area (PA) conservation continue to create the illusion of social separation from nature. Protecting nature by seeking to seclude it from modern societies has strengthened the convergence of neoliberal capitalism and PA conservation. Socio-ecological thinking is yet to significantly challenge the relations that bind PA conservation to the causes of ecological degradation in modern societies. Connecting politics and ontology, we identify opportunities for creative departures in PA conservation that expose the relations between the protected nature within PAs and the threatened nature outside of them. We advocate for relational forms of PA conservation that contribute to political, economic and cultural transformations in modern societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the interplay between specific relations to nature and more abstract concepts and values regarding the nature of humans and nature and the relationships between humans and nature. We conducted Q sorts and interviews with 25 individuals who were growing plants in gardens, allotments or different kinds of agricultural settings in Scotland. We identified three discourses representing different ways of conceptualising human-nature relationships, namely: 1) Guardianship of fragile nature; 2) Partnership with powerful nature; and 3) Rational anthropocentric management. The different discourses implied different ways of approaching environmental issues and the right way for humans to relate to nature. While the three discourses represented different understandings of human-nature relations, there was also overlap and similarities amongst them. Cross-cutting themes included the notion of balance as a central aim of many 'growers' and learning as an important part of growing plants. The study also showed that the respondents' own practices did not neatly map on to single abstract perspectives, with individuals often drawing on elements of different discourses and commenting on their contradictions. Ultimately, this connected to the question on how to find the right balance between human and non-human interests. Bringing in a relational understanding and acknowledging the plurality of perspectives on human-nature relations, as well as their contradictions, overlaps and tensions, can open up the space for alternative narratives to be reflected in policies but also that structural and systemic changes are required for people to cultivate more benign relations with other-than-humans. Key policy highlights: We identify three discourses representing different ways in which people growing plants conceptualise human-nature relationships. Discourses imply different understandings of the role of humans, nature and environmental (biodiversity) management. Results point towards paradoxes and tensions and the struggle to balance different needs, often made more difficult by existing structural and systemic issues. A key question across discourses is how to find the right balance between human and non-human interests. Acknowledging plurality of discourses on human-nature relations, as well as their contradictions, overlaps and tensions, can open up space for policies to integrate alternative narratives and hence other types of behaviours and ways of being in relation to nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current solutions offered by Western sustainability science to address prevailing global environmental destruction and social injustice are still largely embedded in the Western knowledge system established by colonisation, limiting the efficacy of these solutions for a large part of the planet. Conversely, it may be reasonable to imagine that the concept of relationality is beneficial in all cultures and knowledge systems. Relationality, elementally referring to a web of relationships, as considered from an African Indigenous and local knowledge perspective, could play an important role in decolonising Western sustainability science. Two valuable approaches, namely ubuntu (humanness) and ukama (relatedness), as predominantly observed in southern Africa, are essentially immersed in human-nature relationality. This type of relationality considers everything as interconnected, and therefore that nothing happens in isolation, and that the well-being of humans is inextricable from the well-being of nature. The way relationality is approached in African Indigenous knowledge systems is inclusive, holistic and perpetual, broadening its usefulness to a large audience, making it a sensible contributor to decoloniality in sustainability science. A collective knowledge could emerge, including cooperative, multidirectional interactions with different types of information from diverse human and non-human sources, increasingly eradicating the relational divide among knowledge systems caused by persistent colonial discourse and attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: Contemporary Industrial Design, as professional and academic practice, exists intertwined with the global hegemonic power structures of coloniality (Buckley 1986; Escobar 2018a; Mareis and Paim 2020). Problematizing this situatedness, the effort of Decolonizing Design emerges as a twofold effort: first to unlink it from this structure, opening up for diverse understandings of Design and, second, to remove oppressive behaviors from Design. In this paper we present a decolonial intervention in an Industrial Design education in the Global North as an exploration of how to shift Design towards decolonial emancipation. From this project, we suggest the categories of listening, learning, and loving as guidelines for decolonizing Design. We conclude arguing that the work necessary to dismantle Design as we know it and explore decolonial directions demands that we continually work to break and counterbalance the allegiance to its Eurocentrism and oppressive ways of working. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to decolonize or undiscipline the anthropology museum? What happens when the museum is confronted by Indigenous and descendant communities who demand an ethic of care rooted in relational ontologies and epistemologies? This article features Indigenous creativity as it has disrupted 'business as usual' in anthropology museums. This is primarily evidenced by Fork Peck Tribes who confronted the University of Montana to enact a long-overdue repatriation. Additional examples from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard demonstrate diverse expressions of relationality among Indigenous and descendant communities. These interventions are analyzed through Critical Indigenous Theory to specify the ways in which Indigenous religious traditions refuse the narratives and norms of settler colonial knowledge production and undermine the imperial museological practices of preservation. Instead, relationality is prioritized in the caretaking of and connection with more-than-human entities and materials in the museum. This article emphasizes relationality and repatriation as religious acts that challenge assumptions embedded in imperial and settler colonial approaches to history and science. From various social locations and through multiple strategies, we see the active undisciplining of the museum by Indigenous and descendant communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite initial skepticism regarding the idea that narrative is a potent mode for generating multispecies justice, this afterword underscores the compelling arguments in the introduction to this special section. Then, the essay offers a response to several of the ideas, analyses, and examples presented by the essays in this collection, with a focus on conceptions of relationality, the subjects of justice, not-knowing but learning, and practices of world-building. It also offers brief interpretations of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's novel Noopiming in relation to concepts and questions raised by the special section. The afterword concludes by advocating for a multitude of practices within specific places and lifeworlds, practices that are rich with compassionate multispecies relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Practical Theology is the property of De Gruyter 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 article is concerned with understanding the causes and consequences of urban inequalities in London today. Focusing on the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea specifically, it explores the rootedness of inequalities in the borough. It does so through two interlocutors. The first is the urban scholar Ruth Glass, specifically re-visiting her 1961 book Newcomers for what it can contribute to our understandings of racial prejudice today. The second is Neville, a long-time resident of the borough who migrated to the borough from the Caribbean in 1961. By presenting the shifting contours of his life-world, the article reveals the value of historically deep and geographically situated accounts of inequality that surpass the empirical reach of more traditional quantitative methods. It concludes by calling for accounts of London that more directly place privilege and suffering, and poverty and profit, as interconnected phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This response to Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring the Implications of Life in the Universe raises concerns regarding whether Andrew Davison's traditional approach to Christian theology harmonizes with both the scientific study of life in the Universe and our lived experiences, and whether it can motivate a transition from theory to praxis. Specifically, I ask what traditional theology can offer in terms of meaningful ways of thinking about creaturely agency and co-creation, and whether traditional approaches can be reframed in relational ways that consider the primacy of love. Finally, I offer some suggestions regarding further development of a cosmic eschatology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the widespread use of digital media in our deeply mediatized society, parental mediation can be viewed as a dynamic and processual media practice that is integrated into everyday family life. We therefore advocate that parental mediation should be seen as part of the socialization that changes over time due to an ongoing stream of negotiations, instead of focusing purely on strategies. It is particularly important to us to show that this process is not only situational and procedural, but also relational. In the text, we present four case studies that illustrate how these aspects influence parental mediation. The cases were chosen from a longitudinal qualitative panel study with three survey waves. They were analyzed from the perspective of parents and children. The study itself focused on the process of socialization and its transformation through mediatization. On this basis we demonstrate that parental mediation is a relational process that is influenced by parents' own biography, by other parents, friends or the wider family context as well as by negotiations with the affected children and their media repertoires. Impact Summary: Prior State of Knowledge: Although a majority of studies analyze parental mediation, literature lacks the perspective of children on the topic. Further, there are almost no longitudinal studies on the subject. Novel Contributions: The article shows that parental mediation can only be fully understood as an element of socialization that is situational, dynamic, processual and repeatedly negotiated. It emphasizes relationality, as parental mediation depends on the biographies of the parents, people outside the family and the children involved. Practical Implications: Since parental mediation is not trivial, parents should be encouraged to seek support in this task. In addition, practitioners should take into account the relationality of mediation practices rather than pointing to an ideal way of parental mediating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the more than half a century since James Bedford reportedly became the first person to undergo whole body cryopreservation in 1967, the number of cryogenic 'patients' and people who have registered to be cryopreserved upon their death has slowly but steadily increased. These preserved 'patients' present problems for both bioscience and bioethics. But they also present problems for several core legal principles – including the concept of legal personhood in private law. This article introduces the concept of private law personhood and identifies its three core tenets: private law personhood terminates at death; it is focused on the self-interested individual; and it is ill-equipped to weigh the interests of the individual against those of society. This article argues that each of these core tenets is fundamentally challenged by the existence of cryopreserved individuals, who have an awesome and ongoing physical presence despite being technically dead, but are nonetheless entirely reliant on the care of the living for their ongoing maintenance – even when such care causes the living to suffer harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With planet-wide environmental unravelling ideas of multispecies and planetary justice are gaining multidisciplinary attention. They frame a set of ethical, moral and political obligations to life-on-Earth. While it is clear it is humans who bear the duties and obligations of justice, who or what is the subject of justice-beyond-human varies widely: Some limit the subject to sentient animals, others include all living things. We argue for a more expansive subject that includes both living and non-living matter. We claim that privileging living/life is an anthropocentric categorisation embedded in the foundational epistemologies and ontologies driving environmental damages, resource conflicts and mass extinction. An exclusion of matter from concerns of justice ignores multiple fundamental more-than-human relationships in humans' every-day material lives. We argue that the subject of planetary justice must be expansive – addressing sentient or not, living or not, animal, vegetable, mineral, and elemental – to be inclusive, applied, plural, and sustainable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of "resilience" is ubiquitous in global governance, extending from climate and ecological issues to practically all spheres of human endeavor. However, post‐pandemic discourses suggest that the concept may no longer be capable of synthesizing diverse and diverging geopolitical interests into common policy goals. Responding to what we see as an emerging "crisis of resilience," we reconsider the utility of the concept and advance "irresilience" as its critical relational "other." We argue that to make resilience meaningful in a "polycrisis," it is necessary to think about it dialectically and consider how it is undermined by the very actors that evangelize it. This article is categorized under:International Policy Framework > Policy and GovernanceClimate, History, Society, Culture > Disciplinary PerspectivesThe Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and PracticeClimate and Development > Sustainability and Human Well‐Being [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrialized agriculture, characterized by high inputs, large-scale monocultures, and confined livestock production, with a narrow focus on profit, is a major transgressor of societal and planetary boundaries. It fuels climate change, biodiversity loss, water and soil degradation, nutritional deficiencies, public health issues, cultural erosion, and socioeconomic inequalities. As early-career researchers in agricultural sciences, we are concerned about these systemic crises and recognize that participating in normative academic practices without reflection may reinforce the prevailing industrialized food system. Motivated by the dissonance between the potential impact of our work and our vision of a better future, in this paper we describe and challenge academic praxis in agricultural sciences to tackle the interconnected crises. We do this by developing a framework of two drivers of academic knowledge production, power and values, and two mechanisms, motives and relationality. We argue that in the current dominant food system, power is consolidated and hierarchical, driven by the values of growthism and reductionism, motivated by efficiency and productivism, and characterized by extractive and anthropocentric relationality. Furthermore, we highlight evidence of the negative outcomes associated with this system, including the challenges we face and may potentially contribute to as participants. We then envision transformed food systems through examples of counter-hegemonic knowledge production systems, grounded in agroecological principles, in which power is distributed and horizontal, the primary values are solidarity and holism, motives enhance sufficiency and sovereignty, and relationality is reciprocal and based on care. By examining the current system and offering examples of alternatives, we aim to help distinguish between research that upholds the statu-quo and research that fosters change. We aim to inspire ourselves and others to reconnect with our agency and contribute towards transformed knowledge systems where food systems, underpinned by the values of agroecology, are more capable of sustaining life on this planet in an equitable and just manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Architects' practice is characterized by a narrative of progressive unease about lack of autonomy coupled with a recent steer from professional figureheads towards the benefits of connected ways of working with other occupations, such as contractors and developers, rather than boundary protection. We explore this through a study of UK architects working on residential facilities for later life, involving semi-structured interviews with architects and ethnographic fieldwork of two building projects followed over time. We show that architects experience key stakeholders in their intersection on two axes: as 'virtual-embodied' and 'individual(s)-collective(s)'. Facility end-users (residents, staff) are encountered more commonly in virtual (abstract) than in embodied (tangible, visible) form, and as collectives rather than as individuals (as 'virtual collectives'). In juxtaposition, they tend to encounter clients (facility owners, developers), building contractors, and planners in embodied rather than virtual form and as individuals rather than as collectives (as 'embodied individuals'). We explore the consequences for architects' 'practice modalities', broadly defined as how something happens, is done, or is experienced. We show that 'embodied individuals' foster a practice modality of 'dependency and contingency' where stakeholders tend to have more sway, whereas 'virtual communities' enable a practice modality of 'autonomy and personal artistry'. However, 'embodied individuals' and 'virtual collectives' are mutually informing rather than independent sets of relationships; that is, they bear on each other during the architect's work, sometimes in challenging, even conflicting, ways. An analysis of how architects navigate this helps to understand how a build evolves as it does from architects' perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper delves into the character concept as applied to reproduction. Our argument is that the prevailing functional-adaptationist perspective falls short in explaining the evolution of reproductive traits, and we propose an alternative organismal-relational approach that incorporates the developmental and interactive aspects of reproduction. To begin, we define the functional individuation of reproductive traits as evolutionary strategies aimed at enhancing fitness, and we demonstrate how this perspective influences the classification of reproductive characters and modes, the comprehension of shared traits as resulting from conflicts of evolutionary interest between individuals, and the explanation of reproductive diversity. After outlining the shortcomings of this framework, we introduce an organismal-relational approach grounded in evolutionary developmental studies of reproduction. This view provides a revised classification for reproductive characters and modes and offers a new understanding of interorganismal traits that takes into account their inherently relational nature. Lastly, we present the research agenda that emerges from this approach, which addresses the core explanatory gaps left by the adaptationist perspective, including the explanation of reproductive homologies and homoplasies, the developmental constraints associated with the evolution of reproductive modes, and the evolvability of reproductive characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kinship relationality understands the world as alive and sentient, and positions humans as participants within interconnected ecological networks. Inherently, this worldview can challenge how many educators and learners have been trained in extractive, transactional, and sedentary cultures; that is, separated out of relationship. This article shares the work of a large urban public library in western Canada, and their 'Play Professor,' as they built and facilitated an outdoor play-based literacy program. Following the program, amid subtle and stark reminders of ecological disaster, we noted the possibilities and complexities when moving literacy learning outdoors. Guided by kinship relationality [Donald. 2021. "We Need a New Story: Walking and the wâhkôhtowin Imagination." Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 18 (2): 53–63. ], this article centres how conceptions of literacies might be expanded and nuanced to engage languages and stories already alive within the place-based ecologies where the learning occurs. Sharing vignettes of how the program unfolded, we sketch shifts in facilitation as other life forms came into the storied play. To support relational renewal in and through literacy practices we then bring forward the notion of kinship literacies and articulate three catalysts to support its growth: attuning to ecological stories, enhancing holistic practices, and expanding dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Millennium (03058298) is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. 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.)

We have reached the logical end of modernity as it lays waste to the natural world, discards people, and reveals its inherent and thus continual violence. Withdrawing our energy from and breaking down the constellation of modern beliefs, we can repattern ourselves and our communities for a life-giving future. In its structure and content, this article demonstrates a relationality approach to sustainability and climate education that undertakes practices to emplace humans back within the living world. Indigenous philosophies of place as well as posthumanism offer relational notions of time, space, place, and land to consider. Pedagogy-rich, the article provides practices for: restoring the history of modernity as a decolonial counternarrative; composting the most problematic beliefs and practices of modernity; providing tracings of and for possible futures; deriving pedagogical entry points of relevance to learners; and nurturing ways of being that can build a rooted, more life-giving way of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Healthcare organizations often confront multiple institutional logics that reinforce professional and departmental hierarchies and silos. Research in the field focuses on how professionals navigate such tensions through everyday practices that maintain, reinterpret or shift specific logics. In this paper, we take a practice perspective to explore the mediating capacity of values-driven practices as a bridge between different logics. Drawing on insights from a leadership programme delivered to 70 public healthcare staff across seven hospitals in South Africa, we argue that articulating values conflicts and shared values shape relational practices, which mitigate the pressures of hierarchy and conflicting logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While power is central to the study of global politics, pedagogy is often under-recognised as a central site of power within the discipline, shaping not only what is studied but who is invited into this scholarly endeavour. We advocate for subversive pedagogies that challenge the status quo by troubling the 'knowledge-transmission' model of education that sees learners as passive recipients of knowledge imparted by subject experts. We articulate three key dispositions in our pedagogical practices that allow us to acknowledge how existing power relations structure our teaching and provide alternative frames for learning with our students: slowness, relationality and care. First, we identify the challenges we face working in 'the academy at speed', advocating a slower approach to our pedagogical practice. Second, we articulate the central features of relationality and care that can accompany a slower pedagogy, offering new possibilities for how we engage our subject and our students. We finish by tracing these elements of subversive pedagogies across the contributions to this special issue, noting how intentional subversion and attentiveness to time, relationality and care centres the power inherent in pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematics education research tends to center on what Mathematics Teacher Educators-Researchers (MTERs) work on or the people (teachers and students) they work with. Rarely, research in mathematics education focuses on MTERs working with one another. This article decenters from these traditional foci and instead examines a heterogeneous group of MTERs describing their research collaborations for professional development efforts on social justice issues in mathematics education. The MTERs' paired conversations focused on their retrospective stories of their collaborations were analyzed using an Anzaldúan framework to name the different spaces of collaboration that MTERs identified. Results provide insight into how MTERs' identified binarized spaces linked to their identities and compounded by issues of power. Nevertheless, MTERs also identified spaces where boundaries were blurred promoting a nos/otras space of collaboration. We discuss how collaboration reaches beyond doing the same research work and sharing talent but also understanding the work of one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United Kingdom, around 20% of dairy farms house cows all year round. Research suggests that farmers value animal health and comfort over the expression of natural behaviour through grazing. The concept of natural behaviour is notoriously complex, however. The article reframes the topic of grazing through a relational approach to understand farmer views on the practice in Great Britain, using qualitative interviews. The article also considers critiques of the relational approach. In this study, participants were reluctant to see a distinction between farms that graze and those that do not in terms of animal welfare, but they also valued the positive affective experience of grazing their cows on their own farm. The article argues that the latter account is not adequately included in debates about grazing. What this account excludes is the situated nature and limitations of relationships on farm even when cows graze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although grief can have a profound effect on the workplace, the long-term lived experience of working after bereavement remains under researched. But how is grief experienced at work? And to what extent does this experience vary according to type of loss and form of work? Drawing on data collected through a qualitative online survey (n = 220), this article provides a sociological exploration of experiences of work after bereavement. The article will argue that while grief can be silenced in the workplace, work can also provide an important source of relational connection for bereaved individuals. It concludes by reflecting on the need to move beyond linear approaches to grief and work, highlighting the important intersection of social relations and place. By analysing experiences through a relational lens, this article seeks to offer an original contribution to the sociology of work, and to grief theory as applied in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recognition of natural entities like rivers, forests, and mountains as subjects of rights is becoming an important trend throughout the world. It is a result of efforts by legal and environmental activists, Indigenous groups, and civil society organizations united under – among others – the Rights of Nature (RoN) movement that contest the binary separation between human and nature. The International Tribunals of Rights of Nature (ITRN) play a unique role by issuing judgments based on this perspective. But are they pluriversal in the sense that allow the coexistence of different worlds? The argument here is that they can open spaces for the pluriverse, of different worlds relationally interconnected. This does not happen without complications, for hearings and proceedings can also be interpreted as pertaining to or coopted as modern/Western (liberal) understandings of rights. Yet, saying that tribunals are hybrid would be reductionist. This paper seeks to address this drawing from pluriversal relationality, political ontology, and cosmopolitics to identify the relational nuances that reveal the pluriverse. For this it focuses on the ways participants engage in the hearings, the roles they play, and the worlds they bring with them. This paper conducts an analysis proposing alternative viewpoints that can reframe and reground IR through relational approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article surveys recent Latin American artistic practices that privilege the fragment and embrace interdisciplinarity, thereby creating the conditions of possibility for a distinct way of being in contemporaneity. Coupled with the intervention of an active, emancipated reader/spectator, these practices produce objects, beings, communities, and events that alter what is experienced as "real". To describe this phenomenon, I propose the notion of the prosthetic condition, a non-ontological way of being proper to contemporaneity that affects entities that exist only conceptually, but that have the potential to operate as "real". By analysing two contemporary works – the creation of the prosthetic object in Mario Bellatin's Lecciones para una liebre muerta (2004); and the creation of a prosthetic being in Simón Hosie's la lavandera de Ciudad Bolívar (2008–2009) – I determine three main characteristics of entities affected by the prosthetic condition: they are artificial, come to fill a void, and produce real effects. The article concludes by considering the potential implications and effects of using the prosthetic condition as a tool to approach both contemporary artistic practices and relational ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Anthropology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell 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 analyses legal responses to the problem of debt taken out due to coercion within an intimate relationship. Coerced debt differs from other forms of domestic abuse, as it involves a contractual relationship between the victim and a third-party lender. Legal responses must consider whether the victim should be released from her contractual obligation. The paper employs a theoretical lens of vulnerability and relationality, examining lenders' duties to combat coerced debt, as well as contractual doctrines of undue influence and duress, which allow victims to have transactions set aside under certain circumstances. The paper argues that victims are being failed by an inadequate legal response. The law views vulnerability as an exceptional state and relationality as a constraint, rather than inherent features of the human condition. Through the social construct of the 'free market', lenders are consistently favoured by the law, with little obligation to ensure that transactions are free from coercion. The paper concludes with a call for the state to take greater responsibility for coerced debt and to allocate the risk differently than it currently does. This will promote higher levels of resilience for victims and allow them to escape abusive relational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on perspectives and experiences of Indigenous community members who have either created or are in the process of creating computer-assisted language learning courses for Indigenous languages and how these community members center relationality in the creation of the courses. We engaged a decolonizing and relational methodology to document Indigenous language courses and co-create knowledge with Indigenous language course creators. We conducted qualitative interviews with creators of 11 asynchronous Indigenous language computer-assisted language learning courses to learn how these creators enact relationality and cultural values in online language courses. From analysis of these interviews, five key themes emerged related to: (a) language planning; (b) partnering with technology providers; (c) Indigenous expertise; (d) decolonizing praxis; and (e) relational epistemologies. The researchers share ways that communities can center relational epistemologies when creating their own computer-assisted language learning courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental education has the potential to extend its transformative potential by reframing social and ecological justice as always interconnected. This paper introduces vulnerable reading as a method for unsettling anthropocentric and colonial influences on how educators conceptualise and respond to environmental precarity through a socio-ecological lens. It has emerged from a six-month walking project during which the authors developed vulnerable reading practices as they walked with young children, educators, and a weedy landscape in Boorloo (Perth), Western Australia. With a focus on reimagining pedagogies to be inclusive of multiple weedy ideas, bodies and voices, the paper uses empirical examples of practice to illustrate how vulnerable reading across temporalities, scales, disciplines, and genres draws attention to the complex relations humans share with weedy worlds. The paper shows how vulnerable reading is a feminist and anticolonial practice that makes visible the complexity of relations humans share with more-than-human worlds and is an example of ecosocial justice in action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how literature reaches a variety of different audiences and can effect practical change within a wider social ecosystem through the concepts of the 'wood wide web' and 'thinking mycorrhizally', developed here as part of a pragmatic 'sympoietics' of action. I first set out how these terms, stemming initially from forest ecology research and environmental humanities respectively, allow us to conceptualize literary texts as an epistemological species that both draws on and further contributes to our understanding of interspecies communication. What is at stake is therefore not just how we might live together in a broken world but how we might know about this living together and seek to do so in a more systemically just way. This particular kind of relationality is explored through the case study of contemporary German author, poet and performer, Ulrike Almut Sandig and her remediation of stories by the Brothers Grimm and the different kinds of communication that follow. The different routes for literature thus explored have repercussions for the role of the literary critic and his or her remediation of literary networks around the globe. These repercussions are teased out with an eye to very practical applications of literature, and the expertise of the literary scholar, in a variety of non-literary contexts but with a particular focus on working with professional government and community-based decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article leans on the dialogic exchange between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman in Sex, or the Unbearable (2013) as a theoretical springboard for a reading of two of Ulrich Seidl's Paradies trilogy films — Paradies: Liebe (2012) and Paradies: Glaube (2012) — to consider the role sex plays as a site of relationality in both. In connecting sex and the unbearable, Berlant and Edelman suggest that sex has both anchoring and disrupting properties. Bearing this duality in mind, I focus on the two middle-aged, female protagonists we encounter in the films, respectively a sex tourist and a sexually repressed Catholic proselytizer. I propose that through their experiences the films stage encounters with the unbearable. However, the unbearable is not connected to the depiction of sex per se; rather, it emerges from the various relational bonds between the protagonists. Advancing the notion of toxic symbiosis, I argue that relationality in Seidl's films is ambiguous: it can be beneficial for the characters and yet it is also a sign of their exploitation. Relationality thus troubles the reproduction of a social order that is steeped in a normative understanding of (corporeal) relations as constructive, supportive and worthwhile. Sex in Seidl's films is divorced from hegemonic meaning-making, underscoring resistance to totality, independence and control in scenes of relationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article explores relational perspectives in Ohrfeige, a novel by writer and former Iraqi refugee, Abbas Khider, and the essay collection, The Displaced, edited by the writer and former refugee from Vietnam, Viet Thanh Nguyen. Drawing on Judith Butler's relational ontology, the article discusses how these narratives critically intervene in today's climate of anti-immigrant rhetoric and intensified border enforcement as they re-humanize refugees, de-essentialize refugee vulnerability, disentangle vulnerability from passivity, and formulate nonviolent positions of resistance, protest and demand. Particular focus is paid to grotesque figurations of corporeality that demonstrate relational vulnerability and simultaneously function as a powerful mode for mourning and protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution focuses on the search for wellbeing at a time of the profound crisis of the Anthropocene, which demands that we move away from concepts of personal happiness and begin to imagine a more sustainable, relational wellbeing that includes both human and non-human partners. It argues that in this context female midlife is a fascinating terrain, which highlights the tension between the idea of happiness as a product of individual choice and the indisputable fact of our dependence on others. This article takes two recent German-language novels and explores the contrasting ways in which they figure their protagonist's search for happiness in midlife. Austrian writer Doris Knecht's Eine vollständige Liste aller Dinge, die ich vergessen hatte (2023) centres on a female protagonist who has experienced personal challenges and seeks to find greater happiness in middle age. Although Knecht's novel reveals happiness as a social construct, it ultimately remains entangled in the inward-looking logic of happiness and a good life as the product of individualist optimization. By contrast, German author Judith Hermann's Daheim (2021) situates the protagonist's search for happiness in midlife as part of a broader context of social and environmental crisis and tentatively suggests the potential for a relational wellbeing based in an awareness of the interdependence of humans and the natural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we enact a partial cartographic storying of reconceptualist turns in our work. We do this by situating ourselves in relation to each other and our work across time as a mode of tracing the (situated) possibilities that these turns have enacted for children-in-relation with worlds. In enacting this dialogic and cartographic storying, we collaborate in a way that is inspired by Black methodologies. This means that we intentionally think with liberatory possibilities in our work in early childhood education research and practice across modalities, disciplines, temporalities and geographies. Importantly, like Black methodologies this co-theorizing is also ontological; it is inseparable from our own relational becomings. Following an anticolonial ethos, we are interested in the liberatory potentials of our work, at multiple scales and in different but specific places. We attempt to enact the difficult task of (re)storying our childhood education research and practice in ways that pay attention to the interconnected presences and effects of white supremacy, human supremacy and colonialism, while simultaneously refusing to reinscribe a flattened damage-centred understanding of children, educators and their relational worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports on research that investigates older men's care practices and how their caring for others opens new ways of exploring the intersections of aging, gender, and care work. Using the concept caring masculinities as a sensitizing concept, the onus is on exploring patterns of power, interdependence, and relationality within men's care practices. Aging masculinities often remain constructed around paid‐for occupational work (in opposition to unpaid care work) despite the transition into retirement. Little work exists on how caring is at work in later life potentially transforming gender relations and enacted masculinities. Moreover, much of the research on aging masculinities have not considered the expansiveness of retirement and the discourses as well as subjective expectations around the activity in later life that create an uncertain terrain of socioculturally structured mandates to be navigated. This paper draws on data from two qualitative interview studies conducted with retired men in England and Germany, in which the role of caregiving emerged as an inductive theme in their narratives. The paper makes a specific contribution to developing empirical and theoretical knowledge of caring masculinities and power relations by providing insights on men's trajectories into caring, and how they make sense of their caring for and about others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]