Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Since Estonia regained its independence in 1991, the well-developed industrial town of Narva, located between Tallinn and St.Petersburg and populated predominantly by Russians, has turned into a problematic border town of the nationalising state of Estonia. Using the results of the study of social networks, conducted in Narva in 1999 by the team of Finnish, Russian and Estonian researchers, and my personal interviews and observations, I analyse the impact of nationalisation at a local scale and seek to answer the following question: how does social space, defined as ‘a complexity of social practices, systems of symbols and artefacts with a certain extension in time and (geographic) space (Pries 2001a,b) respond to the nationalisation of political and geographic space? As I argue, the social space of Narvans, affected by the nationalisation project of the Estonian state, is being restructured towards localisation and transnationalisation. Being discursively (and territorially) marginalised, excluded from the Estonian state, people maintain connections and build their life strategies either locally, in Narva, look for jobs across the border in Russia, or think about 'moving West'. In these conditions, the choice of citizenship, Estonian or Russian, is often determined by the need to maintain the freedom of movement within a person’s geographical and social space.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The notion of utopia, and that of utopianism as a world-historical movement, are reexamined while untangling the complexity of its modern association with Marxism. This is pursued as part of a broader effort in constructing a hybrid world-historical typology of utopianism in terms of utopystics, i.e., of a comparative/integrative framework that transgresses the habituated borderlands of utopia, mysticism, and science. In this process, utopystics is proposed as a hybrid east-west exercise in what Wallerstein has called “Utopistics,” distinguishing four (humanist, philosophical, religious, and scientific) types of utopianism from one another. While the latter three tend in their mode of political behavior to be antisystemic in nature, adopting an oppositional mode in the here-and-now in favor of building their alternative realities in a promised future, the humanist type is characterized by its othersystemic behavior, seeking to build other worlds in the spacetimes of the here and now. Using this typology one may associate the failures of Marxism not with its utopianism in general, but with the nature and limits of its specific (scientific) type of utopianism in contrast to the humanist model characterizing Marxism’s formative period. The point here is to redeem the value of utopanism in general and of humanist utopianism in particular in the framework of utopystic, othersystemic strategies for social change in contrast to the divided philosophical, religious, and scientific utopian strategies characterizing the predominant modes of opposition movements during the classical, medieval, and modern imperial eras in world-history.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The general objective of this paper is to analyze the contradictory cultural repercussions of the feminization of the labor force in the racialized and gendered socio-economic dynamics that take place in Cd. Juárez . This paper explores the ways in which sexist violence, social structures, and gendered patterns of domination are constructed, disguised, reinforced and disseminated in the official discourse of the neo-liberal state, particularly in regard to the killing of working class, brown young women. We are specifically interested in understanding the struggles of identity politics and representational tensions that occur in the construction of brown working-class young women by the state and different sectors of the border city of Cd. Juárez. This paper focuses on a specific kind violence against working class women in Cd. Juárez and some of the ways in which the State and other social forces have responded to the femicide that is taking place in the border. Using qualitative research methods, this paper explores questions of gender representation and resistance. Theoretical frameworks from cultural studies and feminist theory in addition to foundations provided by communication studies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This essay will explore "tolerance" in its application to rhetorical communities as a form of social capital within the broader context of a revived North American pragmatism. A review of communication-based literatures reveals that the building and sustaining of communities is perceived to be aided by an ethos of "tolerance" as applied social capital. The metaphor of "communication as a borderland" suggests, however, the weak character of this ethos. The melding that takes place in a borderland--the simultaneity of mixing, even as distinctions are held--better calls to mind an ethos of transcendence. This essay, then, will argue for supplanting "tolerance" with an ethic of "transcendence" in theorizations of community, civic communication, and public deliberation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper presents a theoretical framework and preliminary analytical results for the case study of telecommunications in the Pearl River Delta, a rapidly urbanizing region along China’s south coast. The author takes the Communication Infrastructure approach towards telecommunications, i.e. an ecological conceptualization of communication technologies as embedded in a storytelling system consisting of telecom providers, government entities, local residents, and mass media, all situated in a communication action context. A historical overview from 1978 to 2002 is provided. Then, drawn from intensive multi-method fieldwork, components of the regional telecommunications infrastructure are identified; and their interactions contextualized. Four generic types of disconnections (temporal-spatial breaks, stratificational gaps, institutional blockades, and social psychological dismissals) are proposed, leading to a more full-fledged discussion of (dis)connectedness dynamics, in which the system of telecom technologies is construed as a prism for the examination of the regional social ecology at large.