Book review: Chinese transnational networks

Review of Chinese transnational networks, edited by Tan Chee-Beng (London and New York: Routledge, 2007)

A Game of Horns: Transnational Flows of Rhino Horn

A multi-sectorial regime of protection including international treaties, conservation and security measures, demand reduction campaigns and quasi-military interventions has been established to protect rhinos. Despite these efforts, the poaching of rhinos and trafficking of rhino horn continue unabated. This dissertation asks why the illegal market in rhinoceros horn is so resilient in spite of the myriad measures employed to disrupt it. A theoretical approach grounded in the sociology of markets is applied to explain the structure and functioning of the illegal market. The project follows flows of rhino horn from the source in southern Africa to illegal markets in Southeast Asia. The multi-sited ethnography included participant observations, interviews and focus groups with 416 informants during fourteen months of fieldwork. The sample comprised of, amongst others, convicted and active rhino poachers, smugglers and kingpins, private rhino breeders and hunting outfitters, African and Asian law enforcement officials, as well as affected local communities and Asian consumers. Court files, CITES trade data, archival materials, newspaper reports and social media posts were also analysed to supplement findings and to verify and triangulate data from interviews, focus groups and observations. Central to the analysis is the concept of “contested illegality”, a legitimization mechanism employed by market participants along the different segments of the horn supply chain. These actors' implicit or explicit contestation of the state-sponsored label of illegality serves as a legitimising and enabling mechanism, facilitating participation in gray or illegal markets for rhino horn. The research identified fluid interfaces between legal, illegal and gray markets, with recurring actors who have access to transnational trade structures, and who also possess market and product knowledge, as well as information about the regulatory regime and its loopholes. It is against the background of colonial, apartheid and neoliberal exploitation and marginalization of local communities that a second argument is introduced: the path dependency of conservation paradigms. Underpinning rhino conservation and regulation are archaic and elitist conservation regimes that discount the potential for harmonious relationships between local communities and wildlife. The increasing militarization of anti-poaching measures and green land grabs are exacerbating the rhino problem by alienating communities further from conservation areas and wild animals. The third argument looks at how actors deal with coordination problems in transnational illegal markets. Resolving the coordination problems of cooperation, value and competition are considered essential to the operation of formal markets. It is argued that the problem of security provides an additional and crucial obstacle to actors transacting in markets. The systematic analysis of flows between the researched sites of production, distribution and consumption of rhino horn shows that the social embeddedness of actors facilitates the flourishing of illegal markets in ways that escape an effective enforcement of CITES regulations.

p-BioSPRE-an information and communication technology framework for transnational biomaterial sharing and access

Biobanks represent key resources for clinico-genomic research and are needed to pave the way to personalised medicine. To achieve this goal, it is crucial that scientists can securely access and share high-quality biomaterial and related data. Therefore, there is a growing interest in integrating biobanks into larger biomedical information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures. The European project p-medicine is currently building an innovative ICT infrastructure to meet this need. This platform provides tools and services for conducting research and clinical trials in personalised medicine. In this paper, we describe one of its main components, the biobank access framework p-BioSPRE (p-medicine Biospecimen Search and Project Request Engine). This generic framework enables and simplifies access to existing biobanks, but also to offer own biomaterial collections to research communities, and to manage biobank specimens and related clinical data over the ObTiMA Trial Biomaterial Manager. p-BioSPRE takes into consideration all relevant ethical and legal standards, e.g., safeguarding donors’ personal rights and enabling biobanks to keep control over the donated material and related data. The framework thus enables secure sharing of biomaterial within open and closed research communities, while flexibly integrating related clinical and omics data. Although the development of the framework is mainly driven by user scenarios from the cancer domain, in this case, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia and Wilms tumour, it can be extended to further disease entities.

La spiritualité dans le cinéma transnational. Une théologie pour le 21e siècle autour des philosophies du cinéma de Gilles Deleuze et de Stanley Cavell

Cette recherche part d’un double intérêt. Pour la spiritualité, dont on entend beaucoup parler dans un 21e siècle inquiet et en quête de nouveaux repères. Et pour le cinéma, ou 7e art, phénomène culturel phare des temps modernes, qui reflète abondamment les problématiques et questionnements du monde. À une époque où on observe une tendance à l’homogénéisation culturelle, résultat de la mondialisation économique, cette thèse traite du « cinéma transnational ». Elles aussi, les œuvres de ce cinéma traversent l’espace planétaire, mais tout en conservant un solide ancrage local et une singularité artistique. Ce sont en bonne partie les films que l’on retrouve dans les festivals internationaux, tels Cannes, Venise et Berlin. Le cinéma traduisant toutes les interrogations possibles du présent, plusieurs films apparaissent donc porteurs d’un questionnement à portée spirituelle. Et ce, avec des moyens non discursifs, propres à l’art cinématographique. Ils invitent aussi à la rencontre de l’autre. L’objectif de la thèse consiste à décrire comment, par l’analyse d’une douzaine de films transnationaux, on peut dégager de nouveaux concepts sur la façon avec laquelle se vit la spiritualité à notre époque, en relation avec l’autre, et pourquoi cette spiritualité s’accompagne nécessairement de considérations éthiques. Pour accomplir cette tâche, la thèse s’appuie sur les travaux de deux philosophes, Gilles Deleuze (France) et Stanley Cavell (États-Unis), qui ont marqué les études cinématographiques au cours des dernières décennies, par des approches jugées complémentaires pour cette recherche. Le premier a développé sa pensée à partir de ce qui distingue le cinéma des autres arts, et le second, à partir de l’importance du cinéma pour les spectateurs et les spectatrices. Enfin, la thèse se veut une théologie, ou pensée théologico-philosophique, indépendante d’une tradition religieuse et au diapason des réalités du 21e siècle.

Blessed are the Peacemakers: Transnational Alliance, Protective Accompaniment and the Presbyterian Church of Colombia

The purpose of this thesis was to explore how Christian networks enable strategies of transnational alliance, whereby groups in different nations strive to strengthen one another’s leverage and credibility in order to resolve conflicts and elaborate new possibilities. This research does so by analyzing the case of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia (IPC). The project examines the historical development of the IPC from the initial missionary period of the 1850s until the present. Specifically, the purpose of the study was to consider how the historical struggle to articulate autonomy and equality vis-à-vis the U.S. Presbyterians (PCUSA) and paternalist models of ecclesial relations has affected recent political strategies pursued by the IPC. Despite the paternalism of the early missionary model, changing conceptions of social transformation during the 60s contributed to a shift in relations. Over time the IPC and PCUSA negotiated relationships in which groups both acknowledge a problematic history and insist upon an ethnic of partnership and respect. Today, PCUSA groups, in concert with the IPC, collaborate on a range of transnational political strategies aimed at strengthening the IPC’s leverage in local struggles for justice and peace. A review of this case suggests that long-established Christian networks may have an advantage over other civil society groups such as NGOs in facilitating strategies of transnational alliance. Although civil society organizations often have better access to important resources needed for international advocacy initiatives, Christian networks, such as the one established between the IPC and U.S. Presbyterian communities, rely on a history of negotiating power-disparity in order to elaborate relationships based on listening and partnership. Such findings prove important not only to how we conceptualize transnational alliance but also to the ways that we think about the history and future of Christian networks.

Racialized Sexualities within the Romance Tour Industry: the Influence of Affect and Emotion Upon Transnational Hierarchies of Desire

Online international introduction sites that offer romance tours to American men in search of a foreign bride are an important and rapidly growing component of the internet dating industry; the number of these agencies in the U.S. tripled from two hundred to six hundred in the past 10 years. Previous scholars have examined the so-called ‘mail order bride’ industry in order to demonstrate that the women involved are agents and not victims. Many scholars have also highlighted the importance of race in shaping American men’s desires in one particular region or country. My dissertation provides an important addition to the literature surrounding romance tourism by including participants from all three major regions associated with romance tourism: Eastern Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia. I collected the data for the dissertation by becoming a participant observer of a romance tour in Ukraine, Colombia, and the Philippines. I argue that romance tourism is an important example of the global intimate, and the ways in which globalized processes are created and sustained through everyday intimate emotions and interactions. By examining the ways in which the emotions of desire, disgust, and anxiety influence individual romance tour participant’s constructions of racialized hierarchies, the links between individual emotions and global systems are revealed. The concept of the global intimate challenges the hierarchy of scale that places the body, the home, and the intimate on a much lower level than the scale of the global or the national, and at the same time challenges the binary that divides the individual from the global. Through highlighting the different emotional negotiations that are constantly occurring in the romance tour industry, I highlight the important ways in which individual emotions and affects influence global processes on a large scale and vice versa.

Planning mobile futures : the border artistry of International Baccalaureate Diploma choosers

This paper reports on a study of students choosing the International Baccalaureate Diploma (IBD) over state-based curricula in Australian schools. The IBD was initially designed as a matriculation certificate to facilitate international mobility. While first envisaged as a lifestyle agenda for cultural elites, such mobility is now widespread with more people living ‘beyond the nation’ through choice or circumstance. Beck (2007) and others highlight how the capacity to cross national borders offers a competitive edge with which to strategically pursue economic and cultural capital. Beck’s ‘border artistes’ are those who use national borders to their individual advantage through reflexive strategy. The study explored the rationales and strategy behind the choice of the IBD curriculum expressed by students in a focus group interview and an online survey. This paper reports on their imagined transnational routes and mobile orientations, and how a localised curriculum limits their imagined mobile futures.

Comparing international television news : the case of violence presentation in Germany, Great Britain and Russia -- [in German : Gewalt in internationalen Fernsehnachrichten - eine komparative Analyse medialer Gewaltpräsentation in Deutschland, Großbritannien und Russland]

This is an important book that ought to launch a debate about how we research our understanding of the world, it is an innovative intervention in a vital public issue, and it is an elegant and scholarly hard look at what is actually happening. Jean Seaton, Prof of Media History, U of Westminster, UK & Official Historian of the BBC -- Summary: This book investigates the question of how comparative studies of international TV news (here: on violence presentation) can best be conceptualized in a way that allows for crossnational, comparative conclusions on an empirically validated basis. This book shows that such a conceptualization is necessary in order to overcome existing restrictions in the comparability of international analysis on violence presentation. Investigated examples include the most watched news bulletins in Great Britain (10o'clock news on the BBC), Germany (Tagesschau on ARD) and Russia (Vremja on Channel 1). This book highlights a substantial cross-national violence news flow as well as a cross-national visual violence flow (key visuals) as distinct transnational components. In addition, event-related textual analysis reveals how the historical rootedness of nations and its symbols of power are still manifested in televisual mediations of violence. In conclusion, this study lobbies for a conscientious use of comparative data/analysis both in journalism research and practice in order to understand what it may convey in the different arenas of today’s newsmaking.

Sport marketing on Fortune Global 500 websites

This research investigates how the world’s leading companies, the Fortune Global 500, use sportsrelated terms and phrases on their Web site. An automated process mirrored leading transnational corporations’ Web presence and then searched their sites. Analysis of about four gigabytes of Webbased text revealed regional and industry differences in how the world’s largest corporations use sports terms on their sites.

Union strategies in representing ‘new’ workers : the comparative case of UK and Australian retail unions

This paper is a comparative exploratory study of the changing nature of employee voice through trade union representation in the retail industry in the UK and Australia. In both countries, the retail industry is a major employer and is one of the few private sector service industries with significant union membership (Griffin et al 2003). The relevant unions, the Distributive and Allied Workers Union (USDAW) and the Shop, Distributive and Allied Union (SDA), are the fourth largest and largest unions in the UK and Australia respectively. However, despite this seeming numerical strength in membership, the characteristics of the industry provide unique challenges for employee voice and representation. The significance of the study is that any extension of representation and organisation by unions in the retail sector is valuable socially and politically, given that retail workers are often categorised a s vulnerable, due to their low pay, the predominance of disadvantaged labour market groups such a s women and young people, workers’ atypical employment arrangements and, in the case of the UK, variable levels of union recognition which inhibit representation (Broadbridge 2002; Henley 2006; Lynch 2005; Roan & Diamond 2003; Reynolds et al 2005). In addition, specifically comparative projects have value in that they allow some variables relating to the ‘industry’ to be held constant, thus reducing the range of potential explanations of differences in union strategy. They also have value in that the research partners may be more likely to notice and problematise taken-for-granted aspects of practices in another country, thus bringing to the fore key features and potentially leading to theoretical innovation. Finally, such projects may assist in transnational diffusion of union strategy.

White possession : the legacy of Cook's choice

Book Synopsis: From Terra Nullius to Land of Opportunities and Last Frontier, the European dream has constructed and deconstructed Australia to feed its imagination of new societies. At the same time Australia has over the last two centuries forged and re-invented its own liaisons with Europe arguably to carve out its identity. From the arts to social sciences, to society itself, a complex dynamic has grown between the two continents in ways that invite study and discussion. A transnational research group has begun its collective investigation project of which this first volume is the outcome. The book is a substantial multidisciplinary collection of current research and offers critical perspectives on culture, literature and history around themes at the heart of the Imagined Australia project. The essays instigate reflection, discovery and discussion of how reciprocal imagining between Australia and Europe has articulated itself and ways and dimensions in which a relationship between communities, imagined and not, has unfolded.

Quality assurance in higher education : for whom and of what?

Over the past two decades the quality assurance of higher education institutions has captured a growing interest as evidenced by the increasing number of national and transnational bodies engaged in this area. Yet as the first decade of the 21st century draws to a close, higher education systems and thus the regimes designed to ensure their quality are faced with significant complexity. Issues of accountability, authority and responsibility are paramount when responding to industry bodies, to globalisation and the transnational provision of higher education and to the use of market mechanisms. In this paper we raise some of the challenges for quality assurance for higher education presented by this growing complexity through the question, quality assurance in higher education, for whom and of what, highlighting our concern for a need to expand the centrality of accountability to include authority and responsibility as part of the quality assurance regimes for higher education