The Sabbath Observer, the Idiosyncratist, and the Religious Organization: How the EEOC Imagines Religion at Work

Charged with enforcing Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission plays an overlooked but profoundly important role in shaping American religious life. While scholars of religion, law, and American culture have devoted a great deal of energy to analyzing the ways that federal courts define religion for the purposes of protecting it, they have paid less attention to the role of administrative agencies, like the EEOC. In this article, I argue that the private workplace offers a critical site for understanding how the state regulates and manages American religious life. I look to the EEOC's regulatory guidelines and compliance manuals as important sources for understanding the shifting relationship between religion, law, and work in the United States. I identify three modes of religiosity—or three types of religious actors—existing in tension in the EEOC archive, each bearing a distinct genealogy: the Sabbath Observer, the Idiosyncratist, and the Organization. While gesturing to very different notions of what religion is, the figures of the Idiosyncratist and the Organization both assume that demands of religion and work can be neatly reconciled. They presume that religion can be seamlessly integrated into the workplace without disrupting the functioning of capitalism. However, for those concerned about economic inequality, corporate power, and neoliberal working conditions, I suggest that it may be useful to revisit the EEOC's Sabbath Observer, who insists on the right to collective forms of life and value outside of work and the market.

Genealogías discursivas sobre la pandemia de covid-19. Reflexiones sobre un mundo postpandemia

El objetivo de este trabajo es realizar una reflexión crítica sobre la idea de un mundo postpandemia, a partir de la deconstrucción de genealogías discursivas sobre la pandemia de la covid-19. Se utilizó como punto de partida la idea de Michel Foucault de historia del presente, en términos de la deconstrucción de los relatos que dan cuenta tanto lo novedoso, en esta caso de la pandemia de la covid-19, como de las inercias discursivas del pasado que perviven en el presente. Se deconstruyeron cinco genealogía discursivas sobre pandemia. En primer lugar, se abordó el problema de la propia definición de pandemia, a partir de la crisis de la gripe A, gripe porcina o H1N1. En segundo lugar, se reflexionó sobre el impacto que tuvo la gestión de la crisis del H1N1 en las representaciones y prácticas discursivas de la pandemia de covid-19. En tercer lugar, se discutieron los marcos interpretativos y epistemológicos del gobierno de las crisis pandémicas en las sociedades del Norte Global. Por su interés discursivo se analizaron, por una parte, la construcción discursiva del gobierno de las epidemias, considerando las ideas de confinamiento y vacunación y, por otra parte, el gobierno de las infraestructuras vitales, como origen de la utilización metáfora de la guerra para el gobierno de riesgos y amenazas. En cuarto lugar, se reflexionará sobre el discurso de la (in)seguridad y sus dificultades pragmáticas en el gobierno de este tipo de crisis. Se utilizará la idea de la disonancia pragmática para dar cuenta de los problemas del discurso de la seguridad. En quito lugar, se criticó el discurso de la salud global y sus implicaciones en esta crisis, tomando como referencia tres relatos o narrativas: el relato sobre la seguridad en salud global, el relato sobre el mercado de productos sensibles, como los equipos de protección personal (mascarillas) y el relato sobre la producción de vacunas. A partir de la deconstrucción de estas genealogías discursivas plantearemos, a manera de conclusión, la idea de la crónica de un fracaso global, en relación con el gobierno de la crisis de la covid-19, agravada por la irrupción de una nueva crisis, la guerra de Ucrania. Proponemos finalmente una reconstrucción del discurso virus-céntrico, a partir de la idea de una espacialidad territorial y simbólicamente constituida organizada, configurada y materializada por múltiples tecnologías de significación, vinculadas bajo la figura de una red de actores propuesta por Bruno Latour.Alternate abstract:The objective of this paper is to carry out a critical reflection on the idea of a post-pandemic world, based on the deconstruction of discursive genealogies on the Covid-19 pandemic. First of all, attention is drawn to the fact that the countries of the Global North, apparently better prepared to face this crisis, have experienced a severe impact, particularly in the so-called first wave. This fact becomes even more relevant if we consider that the different indices that predicted a better capacity of these countries to face this type of crisis were initially distorted by the cases of Italy and Spain and, later;by other Global North countries such as the United States.To carry out these discursive genealogies, Michel Foucault's idea of the history of the present was used as a starting point, in terms of the deconstruction of the stories that account for both the novelty, in this case of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the discursive inertias of the past that survive in the discourses on the representations and the government of this type of phenomena. Five discursive genealogies on the pandemic were deconstructed. In the first place, the problem of the definition of a pandemic was addressed, based on the crisis of influenza A, swine flu or H1N1 and the criticism made by the Council of Europe in 2010 of the declaration of a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). Secondly, we reflected on the impact that the management of the H1N1 crisis had on the representations and discursive practices of the Covid-19 pandem c. The dissonance between the low impact of this crisis and the high spending by the countries of the Global North marked the initial management of the Covid-19 crisis, particularly in terms of reducing the perception of insecurity and the overvaluation of capacities. It became evident how the story of the impact of the crisis in Italy and Spain deeply marked the representations that were initially held about this crisis. Third, the interpretive and epistemological frameworks of the governance of pandemic crises in societies of the Global North were discussed. Due to its discursive interest, we analyzed, on the one hand, the discursive construction of the government of epidemics, considering the ideas of confinement and vaccination and, on the other hand, the government of vital infrastructures, such as the origin of the use of the metaphor of war to the governance of risks and threats in these societies. Fourth, we reflected on the discourse of (in)security and its pragmatic difficulties in governing this type of crisis.The idea of pragmatic dissonance is used to account for the problems of the security discourse. In fifth place, the global health discourse and its implications in this crisis were criticized.The survival of colonial and neocolonial narratives in global health, the weakening of the WHO due to the incorporation of interests of private actors such as multilateral agencies, banks linked to development discourses, multinational corporations and philanthropic companies were highlighted. The relevance of the biotechnological and biomedical discourse was also evident, based on the idea of the magic bullet. The critique of the global health discourse had three stories or narratives as its central reference: the story about global health security, the story about the market for sensitive products, such as personal protective equipment (masks), and the story about the production of vaccines. The problematization of the discursive genealogies related to the Covid-19 crisis made it possible to highlight the great difficulties we currently have in building a discourse that gives intelligibility to this type of crisis, especially from a global perspective. This difficulty allowed us to propose, by way of conclusion, the idea of the chronicle of a global failure (everything that could go wrong finally did go wrong), in relation to the government of the Covid-19 crisis, from the idea of the infelicity of the speech act proposed by Austin. This chronicle has been aggravated by the emergence of a new crisis, the war in Ukraine. We also propose the irruption of a disaster capitalism whose discursive performativity in relation to the pandemic was felicity, which is to say they achieved what they wanted: to significantly increase their profits. Finally, we propose as an alternative a reconstruction of the virus-centric discourse, which has permeated the discourse of experts, proposing the idea of a discourse based on territorial spatiality and symbolically constituted, organized, configured and materialized by multiple technologies of meaning, linked under the figure of a network of actors proposed by Bruno Latour. The virus is one more actor in this human and non-human network. What the virus does is expose the power relationships (knowledge/power) that account for the way this network is configured. More than the virus, it is these power relations that account for the vulnerabilities we experience due to the Covid-19 crisis. Everything seems to indicate that the new discursive practices in relation to this type of crisis should point in this direction.

Application of theory to literary tourism: a comparison of parasocial interaction theory and co-creation theory

During the COVID-19 quarantine, reading increased worldwide and with it the demand for literary tourism. While previous research has examined the motivations for literary tourists, no generalizable theory has emerged. After analyzing the previous work on literary tourism, this study compared the applicability of parasocial interaction theory and co-creation theory for literary tourists. This study conducted four surveys of both literary society members and the general public. Most of the antecedents of co-creation theory were significant for literary tourists while two of the antecedents of parasocial interaction theory were applicable for the public, although the overall model was supported. For researchers, this is one of the first papers to apply social science theories to literary tourism. For literary destinations, partnering with literary societies can attract guests who want to help create the experience for themselves and other society members.

The TraceTogether Matrix Has You – Surveillance, Rationalisation and Tactics of Governance in Singapore's COVID-19 App

In the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic, Singapore rolled out TraceTogether;a contact-tracing mobile app that uses proximity sensing to track the movements of its population. TraceTogether was initially voluntary, and used solely for contact tracing. By December 2020, the system became mandatory. This sparked a mass adoption that made TraceTogether possibly the most successful application in Singapore's Smart Nation initiative. When it emerged in January 2021 that the data had been used by the police for criminal investigation, images of a totalitarianism sprang to mind, where technology permits the state an invasive awareness of the movement of individuals. In this paper, we defer from common arguments that Singaporeans are intrinsically trusting of the government or have been conditioned to accept ‘Big Brother' modes of surveillance. Instead, we argue that the success of TraceTogether reflects a Singapore society that, through the rationalisation of surveillance, willingly participates in their own surveillance. In uncovering the genealogy of media discourse that surrounds TraceTogether, we highlight that it is the regular practice of voluntary surveillance, of subscribing oneself to the apparatuses of state control, rather than specific technologies, that characterises the Singapore surveillance state. We describe a matrix of reason, layered-on and normalised through media discourse, that exemplifies what Foucault has termed ‘governmentality', which asserts a government's power of control not over, but within, citizens. © Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence.

The author comes and goes: to translate sorrows and injustices in the chronicles and testimonies by Edilberto Jimenez Quispe

Among the problematics stated by the testimony genre of the 20th century legitimized by "Casa de las Americas ", the critic focused on the mediation of the intellectual and his solidarity with the informant. Something of these stories and their translations operates in the contemporary Andean testimony. However, recent artistic productions such as, those made by the Peruvian altarpiece artist and anthropologist from Ayacucho Edilberto Jimenez Quispe, introduce the image to the translation between the oral and the written to speak about sorrows and raise the genealogy of the Andean testimony. In this article, I pretend to trace a literary series which links the testimony of Jimenez Quispe with the Andean universe in, at least, two ways: the productions of both, Guaman Poma de Ayala and Jose Maria Arguedas. From the colonial antecedent, the series takes the introduction of the image as a squeaky discourse (Agnoli Quispe, 1998), which conveys an unspeakable pain, and, from Arguedas, the connection between the ethnographic area and the poetic view (Paoli, 1992), in order to build a knowledge which goes beyond the disciplines themselves. In Cungui, Violencia y trazos de memoria (2005) and Nuevo coronavirus y buen gobierno. Memorias de la pandemia de COVID-19 en Peru (2021), I track a cultural matrix which updates the journey of the colonial author and the contemporary ethnographer: the walker who comes and goes in the Andes, records sorrows and injustices, and translates worlds.

Smart cities: Key definitions and new directions

The chapter sheds light on the genealogy and the key definitions of the smart city concept. It reviews the underlying principles of smart cities and highlights their main contributions to dealing with climate change. The chapter points out that the concept has undergone many changes during the past 2 decades, promoting from a technology-oriented to a human-oriented approach. The COVID-19 pandemic is evaluated as a pivotal event in the concept's development, paving the way for broader acceptance of smart city initiatives within cities. The emphasis on achieving sustainable development and quality of life through ICT is considered a common theme among definitions for smart cities. The chapter outlines eight fundamental smart city principles: livability, sustainability, efficiency, security, resilience, productivity, inclusion, and transparency. Finally, the contributions of smart cities to climate change management are addressed in the six action areas of citizens, government, economy, mobility, and living. © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

America’s dark harbingers;a genealogical analysis of self-disposing right-wing subjects during the pandemic

This essay will review the emergence of the anti-public health practices of politically motivated individuals during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Thousands of Americans, largely part of the far-right and libertarian front, have died due to their insistence on ‘freedom’ from the imposition of public health and vaccine mandates. In the , I define these as self-disposing political subjects. The historical factors which compose such political characteristics are discursively rooted in the shifting economic interests of elite donor classes under neoliberal arrangements of society. This analysis will examine the emergence, pre-existing factors, and the contingencies out of which these practices have come about as an outcome of dominant power and neoliberal relations perfected through biopolitical and psychopolitical technologies. The target of this analysis will be to understand the multiple contingencies from which these self-destructive acts of political resistance come from, how they express neoliberalism in times of crisis and what we might expect as we face a future defined by climate crisis, and the receding waters of liberal democracy. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Digital contact tracing in the pandemic cities: Problematizing the regime of traceability in South Korea

Since 2020, many countries worldwide have deployed digital contact tracing programs that rely on a range of digital sensors in the city to locate and map the routes of viral spread. Many critical commentaries have raised concerns about the privacy risks and trustworthiness of these programs. Extending these analyses, this paper opens up a different line of questioning that goes beyond privacy-centered single-axis critique of surveillance by considering digital contact tracing symptomatic of the broader changes in modes of urban governance that renders our cities traceable, knowable, and governable through data. Based on archival and real-time analysis of South Korean national and local COVID-19 dashboards, online forums, and interviews with South Korean public health practitioners, this paper offers a sociotechnical analysis of digital contact tracing that looks at the various intersections of state-political, bio-political, and techno-political power dynamics. In contrast to popular narratives that attributed the success of the Korean approach to digital contact tracing to its collectivist culture and smart city infrastructures, this paper suggests that the case can be better understood by looking at both the macro-level shift in the forms of governance that takes on a spatialized and networked character and the micro-level formation of moral responsibility that shape one's conduct as a health and safety-conscious citizens. As the latest realization of the expanding regime of traceability in digital/urban governance, the development of digital contract tracing is seen to parallel with concurrent changes occurring in multiple domains of life including knowledge production, cultural memory, and individual subjectivity.

Redes sociales: el carnaval, el mito y el héroe

En el presente documento intentaremos no recurrir a determinismos, ya sean apocalípticos o integrados (Eco, 2004), sino que apelaremos a generar nuevas lecturas y preguntas desde una perspectiva crítica. De esta forma, nos proponemos abordar -en torno a las redes sociales- algunas concepciones teóricas sobre la figura del carnaval y la máscara, como también, desarrollar articulaciones en torno a la noción de exposición y del mito del héroe para repensar la participación ciudadana en la red. Transversalmente, se intentarán evidenciar las posibles tensiones en relación a la mercantilización de la cotidianeidad, a través de la instauración de necesidades, el consumo incesante y la manipulación subjetiva que subyace en ciertas estrategias del mercado vía redes sociales, intensificadas más aún en épocas de COVID-19. La máscara y los personajes que encarnan se materializan como analizadores que permiten visualizar aquello que podría estar detrás, lo oculto, y asimismo, posibilitan distinguir entre –lo que aquí denominamos- las identidades inventadas (usuarios) y las identidades construidas históricamente, aquellas que nos nombran y nos dan pertenencia en una genealogía (el nombre propio). En el complejo ordenamiento social y simbólico que producen las redes, entendemos que existen expresiones de múltiples violencias: de género, ambiental, económica, psicológica, violencias sobre los derechos de grupos, sobre los valores colectivos. Es decir, bajo la lógica de la reproducción social de las desigualdades, para que haya héroes debe haber caídos.Alternate :This article will not try to resort to determinisms, but rather appeal to generate new readings and questions from a critic perspective. We propose to address –regarding social networks- some theoretical conceptions about the carnival figure and the mask, and also, to develop articulations around the notion of exposure and the myth of the hero to re-think the citizen’s participation in the net. Furthermore, we’ll try to evidentiate the possible tensions with the commercialization of the every day life, through the creation of needs, non stop consumerism and the subjective manipulation underlying in certain market strategies via social networks, intensified even more in times of COVID-19. The mask and the characters represented are analyzers that allow us to visualize what might be beneath and so, they enable distinguishing between –what we here denominate- the invented identities (users) and the historically constructed identities, those that name us and give us belonging in a genealogy (our own name). In the complex social and symbolic organization that nets produce, we understand that there are expressions of multiple violences: of gender, environmental, economic, psychological, rights, the collective values. Under the logic of the social reproduction of inequalities, for there to be heroes it must have defeats.

Ongoing Recombination in SARS-CoV-2 Revealed through Genealogical Reconstruction.

The evolutionary process of genetic recombination has the potential to rapidly change the properties of a viral pathogen, and its presence is a crucial factor to consider in the development of treatments and vaccines. It can also significantly affect the results of phylogenetic analyses and the inference of evolutionary rates. The detection of recombination from samples of sequencing data is a very challenging problem and is further complicated for SARS-CoV-2 by its relatively slow accumulation of genetic diversity. The extent to which recombination is ongoing for SARS-CoV-2 is not yet resolved. To address this, we use a parsimony-based method to reconstruct possible genealogical histories for samples of SARS-CoV-2 sequences, which enables us to pinpoint specific recombination events that could have generated the data. We propose a statistical framework for disentangling the effects of recurrent mutation from recombination in the history of a sample, and hence provide a way of estimating the probability that ongoing recombination is present. We apply this to samples of sequencing data collected in England and South Africa and find evidence of ongoing recombination.

The Biopolitics of Social Distancing.

As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, new technologies are being leveraged to enforce social distancing requirements. I explore social distancing through the theoretical lens of Michel Foucault's biopolitics, with an emphasis on recognizing unauthorized movement and controlling circulation. Although reporting and widely shared data visualizations about COVID-19 have made many people newly aware that their movements are being tracked and surveilled, governments are already implementing new measures such as geofencing and artificial intelligence (AI)-based facial recognition to facilitate the enforcement of social distancing. The tracking of COVID-19 spread and social distancing behaviors of the public has made more visible the practices of biopolitics but also generated new opportunities for even greater surveillance and control. The current moment offers an opportunity to shift public perceptions about data surveillance, technological control, and the racial disparities of biopower, much in the same way that public perceptions around social media shifted during and after the Arab Spring. How we collectively respond to these biopolitical processes will, in part, determine how such power relations are articulated in the future.

The receptor binding domain of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is the result of an ancestral recombination between the bat-CoV RaTG13 and the pangolin-CoV MP789.

OBJECTIVE: In December 2019 a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that is causing the current COVID-19 pandemic was identified in Wuhan, China. Many questions have been raised about its origin and adaptation to humans. In the present work we performed a genetic analysis of the Spike glycoprotein (S) of SARS-CoV-2 and other related coronaviruses (CoVs) isolated from different hosts in order to trace the evolutionary history of this protein and the adaptation of SARS-CoV-2 to humans. RESULTS: Based on the sequence analysis of the S gene, we suggest that the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is the result of recombination events between bat and pangolin CoVs. The hybrid SARS-CoV-2 ancestor jumped to humans and has been maintained by natural selection. Although the S protein of RaTG13 bat CoV has a high nucleotide identity with the S protein of SARS-CoV-2, the phylogenetic tree and the haplotype network suggest a non-direct parental relationship between these CoVs. Moreover, it is likely that the basic function of the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of S protein was acquired by the SARS-CoV-2 from the MP789 pangolin CoV by recombination and it has been highly conserved.