Search results for " cultural studies"
showing 10 items of 106 documents
Engaging the diaspora for economic gain: what can Latvia expect?
2020
Following the global trend of countries engaging with their diaspora populations, Latvia has expressed its commitment to its diaspora with the recent passing of the Diaspora Law. One of the stated ...
Brokerage from within: A conceptual framework
2021
Situated between various social worlds, brokers are highly mobile figures, in a physical and an ideational sense; they channel scarce information and resources, translate different languages and jargons, and mediate and facilitate between individuals and/or organisations, the local and the global, in a wide range of settings. Taking an in-depth ethnographic look at the actual work of brokers and their particular life stories, contributions to this special issue examine brokers’ successes and failures, their vulnerabilities and limitations, (changing) interests and motivations within the cultural contexts that these brokers are part of. By adopting a comparative perspective in a thematic an…
Brokers in the tea trade between China and West Africa
2021
Brokers have played important roles in the trade of green tea between China and Mali, from the 19th century when tea first came to Mali up to the present. They mediate between tea buyers and sellers, work on their own account, use soft skills, knowledge and networks and make a living from the commission they gain. This article examines the work of brokers in the tea trade, the social constellations in which they are active and the scope of their activity. Based on extensive field research in Mali and China, this article shows how brokers create their own jobs in a dynamic business landscape, which is often delimited by governmental policies, competing entrepreneurial activities and social …
A Folklorist in the Soviet Spotlight
2019
Abstract The article seeks to illuminate the ideologically motivated circumstances of Latvian folklore studies during the period of unconditional Soviet totalitarianism. With the strengthening of the Soviet occupation regime in Latvia in the late 1940s, many interwar folklorists became victims of ideologically motivated disdain and subsequent career limitation. ‘Bourgeois’ scholarship and the methods applied in folklore studies during the interwar period were denounced and recognised as harmful to the new Soviet order. The central part of the article presents a case study of one individual folklorist of the time, Anna Bērzkalne (1891–1956). Both increasing criticism of Bērzkalne’s folklore …
Chances and challenges of African entrepreneurial activity in times of crisis
2020
This special issue looks in new ways at the relationship between small-scale entrepreneurship, economic (and political) crisis, and the outcomes of neoliberal market economy in African countries. I...
Pirates or entrepreneurs? Informal music distributors and the Nigerian recording industry crisis
2020
This paper is based on field research in Lagos and seeks to examine a group of actors that is often neglected in the literature as well as in local discourses. I refer to these actors as informal m...
Using Focus Group in the Development of UNIPA Emotional Autonomy Inventory
2016
Adolescents' Emotional Autonomy from Parents A relevant tenet in developmental psychology is that adolescents are expected to achieve an autonomous functioning, independent from parents, to become reliant on their internal resources and responsible for their actions and decisions. Within this framework, emotional autonomy reflects the affective side of the largest process by which a young person acquires a more mature identity. It emerges when adolescents are capable to abandon dependence on parents and to individuate from them. Moreover, emotional autonomy implies a shift towards a less idealized conception of parental figures, the development of a more complex consideration of them as peo…
Celebrating March 8: a failed attempt at de-Sovietization?
2020
Despite its international history of gender equality activism, Women’s Day in the independent Baltic states in the twenty-first century resembles the way in which the day was celebrated in the Sovi...
Across regional disparities and beyond family ties: A Ghanaian middle class in the making
2021
Despite its fuzziness, the term middle class has become increasingly attractive in the past two decades, not only among social scientists and market analysts but also as a term of self-description ...
Attempts by non-Germans to obtain burgher rights in Riga in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
2020
The article deals with two unsuccessful attempts by non-German craftsmen to gain burgher rights in Riga, which would have entitled them to trade freely and keep taverns. In the early modern period,...