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The global rise of populism and concomitant polarizations across disenfranchised and marginalized groups has been magnified by so-called echo chambers, and a major public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic has only served to fuel these intergroup tensions. Media institutions disseminating information on ways to prevent the propagation of the virus have reactivated a specific discursive phenomenon previously observed in many epidemics: the construction of a defiled 'Other'. With anthropological lenses, discourse on defilement is an interesting path to understand the continuous emergence of pseudo-scientific forms of racism. In this paper, the authors focus on 'borderline racism', that is the use of an institutionally 'impartial' discourse to reaffirm the inferiority of another race. The authors employed inductive thematic analysis of 1200 social media comments reacting to articles and videos published by six media in three different countries (France, United States and India). Results delineate four major themes structuring defilement discourses: food (and the relationship to animals), religion, nationalism and gender. Media articles and videos portrayed Western and Eastern countries through contrasting images and elicited a range of reaction in readers and viewers. The discussion reflects on how borderline racism can be an appropriate concept to understand the appearance of hygienic othering of specific subgroups on social media. Theoretical implications and recommendations on a more culturally sensitive approach of media coverage of epidemics and pandemics are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the differential preferences towards corporate‐governance and other firm‐level characteristics by Domestic‐Institutional‐Investors (DIIs) and Foreign‐institutional‐investors (FIIs) in the Indian context. We use data across 25,065 firm‐years on institutional holding and deploy a series of univariate tests, a two‐stage Fama–Mcbeth regression and a discrete‐choice‐model for analysis. We substantiate our results from the main analysis using a series of robustness tests. Our results highlight some common preferences and dislikes among these institutional investors. Both FIIs and DIIs prefer larger firms with higher liquidity, which pay higher dividends and generate higher ROE. They both dislike expensive (high P‐B) stocks and stocks with high variability in earnings. However, there are also some visible differences in FII and DII preferences with respect to firm‐level traits like corporate‐governance, age, Tobin's‐Q and leverage. The institutional preferences are found to be sticky and do not change across market cycles. The findings could be of value to policymakers in India and, by extension, other emerging countries in understanding and regulating institutional inflows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservative Protestants in the United States have historically distanced themselves from gay men, lesbians, and transgender persons living with HIV based largely on fears of moral contamination which are propagated by disgust. We argue how disgust can implicitly reify social divides that engender condemnation and subjugation. However, we will propose that it is achievable to safeguard the traditional tenets of sexuality and gender among conservative Protestants and actively oppose misapplications of those tenets to exclude persons living with HIV. We will support our thesis by describing the work of a medical clinic founded on conservative Protestant ideology that serves hijras and kotis living with HIV in India. We will introduce how applications of recategorizing contact, cognitive consistency, and cultural scaffolding are formative in maintaining one's ideological integrity without enacting exclusion based on fear and disgust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]