A brief history of now: The past and present of global power

Exploring the rise and fall of global power from the mid-nineteenth century, this book tracks the long and interrelated trajectories of the most serious challenges facing the world today. Although at first the urgency of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020 seemed to take precedence over other global problems such as socioeconomic inequality and climate change, it has ultimately exacerbated these issues and created opportunities to address them boldly and innovatively. A Brief History of Now provides a bird's-eye view of world hegemony, economic globalization and political regimes as they have evolved and developed over the last two hundred years, providing context and insights into the forces which have shaped the Western world. Presented in an accessible and engaging narrative, the book addresses key contemporary challenges and explores the repercussions of a technological revolution, the potential instability of democracy over the coming years, and the urgent struggle to tackle climate change. With his book, Diego Olstein helps to answer pressing questions about our world today and provides a roadmap for analysing future trajectories. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021. All rights reserved.

Editors' Preface

[...]many authors suggest that the ideas and critiques and activist struggles that established the field either remain or, having shifted away, are now being revisited. Yê´n Lê Espiritu, in her article in this issue, looks at the ways critical refugee studies demands the global study of race, imperialism, and war, beyond the domestic landscape of what some consider Asian American studies. Jean-Paul R. Contreras deGuzman, and Douglass Ishii in a separate essay, share candid reflections on the life of contingent labor in the university and what is being asked of a field that claims to center critiques of power and work for transformative justice.

Love of Empire by Dissociations

In the past two years, as the whole world has been deeply mired in the COVID-19 pandemic, we may have observed neoliberal capitalism's crisis of care: exposed and exacerbated by the global pandemic, made explicit alongside examples such as the collapsing of health systems, the shortage of care labor and overwork of nurses, the serious outbreaks in aged care facilities, the increased burden of domestic labor and care work due to school closures, and the worldwide rise of domestic abuse. Feminist calls for economic independence for (mostly middle-class) women to work for equal pay as men certainly do not resolve the care problem but, instead, further obscure colonial divisions of labor under which the racialized labor mostly from formerly colonized nations is made to fill up the gap.2 I consider the discursive formations of love as a point of departure to review how the global pandemic bears on our everyday practices of intimacy. The historical effects of racialized displacement can be seen as consisting of three sets of often-dissociated social relations during the pandemic crisis: archetypical angel-heroines in white (nurses), angels in the house (housewife and mother), and fallen angels (prostitutes).3 During the pandemic, many of us constantly experience fears about the health systems being overwhelmed, even while we express growing appreciation for the essential care provided by health workers. The virus eventually spread to the teahouses of Taipei's Wanhua neighborhood—also known as an adult entertainment red-light district in Taipei. Since Wanhua was reported as the center of a major cluster, the workers in the sexual venues, in particular, became a singularized target of public criticism.

Cannabis: Global Histories ed. by Lucas Richert and James H. Mills (review)

Peter Hynd replicates verbatim the language of excise reports in British India to narrate the colonial state's apparently successful fiscal measures to lower cannabis sales and maximize revenue. Besides misnaming Hemchunder Kerr as Dutt and misidentifying the Garhjat in Orissa as Gujarat sixteen hundred kilometers west, Hynd concludes that the infrastructure of cannabis revenue extraction by an oppressive colonial force is that reasonable but rare occasion where "modern governments stand to learn a thing or two from the example set by the British Raj.” Behind the story of the GW Pharmaceuticals product Sativex, Suzanne Taylor uncovers years of lobbying by middle-class citizen groups like the Multiple Sclerosis Society in the 1990s that pushed for controlled medical research on cannabis and gave it a respectable face. [...]the editors' invitation to a renewed research agenda around this assessment, tediously termed "globalization without globalizers,” is constrained by their neglect of the teeming scholarly assessments and critiques of the category "global” and the framework "globalization.” More importantly, in 2022, even as emerging mass spectrometry research on cannabinoid non-psychoactive acids at the Linus Pauling Institute suggest their potential to successfully bind Covid-19 spike proteins against human epithelial cells, states in the Global South continue to face restrictions from global narcotics control institutions on scientific studies of cannabis.

The Geopolitics of Anti-Asian Violence: Cold War Contradictions In the Era of "Building Back Better"

In this formulation, the US-ROK Alliance—what the State Department deems the "linchpin of peace, security, and prosperity" in the region—stands not as a form of military occupation or imperial clientelism, but one of righteous defense from regional bogeyman such as the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).3 The endemic violence of US militarism—from sexual exploitation in military "camptowns" to the extralegal status of US servicemen—is rendered a mere footnote to a program of liberal internationalism which claims to preside over what the US military euphemistically terms a "Free and Open Indo-Pacific. "4 Blinken's easy distinction between the singular act of the Atlanta shootings and the routinized violence of US imperialism speaks to the contradictions at the heart of the Biden administration's aspiration to restore both racial liberalism and global US power.5 Since the campaign trail, platitudes about restoring global US leadership have made up the core of the Biden administration's foreign policy platform. [...]Biden pitched his presidency as a means to reinstate the era of racial liberalism in order to "restore the soul of the nation" from the crude racism of the Trump era.7 Asian /Americans have been cast to perform the work of legitimation under the intersecting projects of racial liberalism and US hegemony—from the symbolic inclusion of Asian /Americans into the US national body to the incorporation of allied Asian states into a US-led orbit of militarized peace.8 On the one hand, Asian /Americans have become a performative symbol of a reascendant racial liberalism. What does it mean, then, in a region still shaped by Cold War imperialism, to proclaim that "America is back," as Kamala Harris did on her first trip to Asia as Vice President in August 2021?13 Even more, how do we make sense of the declaration of a "new" Cold War, emerging as it does from the unfinished business of an "old" Cold War that never ended?

A community psychology for migrant justice: Critically examining border violence and resistance during the COVID-19 syndemic.

This article explores the magnifying lenses of the COVID-19 syndemic to highlight how people racialized as migrants and refugees have been-and continue to be-disproportionally harmed. We use empirical evidence collected in our scholarly/activist work in Europe, Africa, South Asia, and the United States to examine migrant injustice as being produced by a combination of power structures and relations working to maintain colonial global orders and inequalities. This is what has been defined as "border imperialism." Our data, complemented by evidence from transnational solidarity groups, show that border imperialism has further intersected with the hygienic-sanitary logics of social control at play during the COVID-19 period. This intersection has resulted in increasingly coercive methods of restraining people on the move, as well as in increased-and new-forms of degradation of their lives, that is, an overall multiplication of border violences. At the same time, however, COVID-19 has provided a unique opportunity for grassroot solidarity initiatives and resistance led by people on the move to be amplified and extended. We conclude by emphasizing the need for community psychologists to take a more vigorous stance against oppressive border imperialist regimes and the related forms of violence they re/enact.

Decolonising the curriculum: US Study Abroad: London Architecture and Urbanism - Albertopolis, South Kensington

This article focuses on ways of decolonising the curriculum of a one-semester London Architecture and Urbanism course taught differently across several US Study Abroad programmes in London. These introductory courses took place in the seminar room and out in the field. With the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a greater focus on teaching in open spaces. The courses are principally structured around the capital's key public developments. Many of the sites have an older historical antecedence. They were largely built between the mid-eighteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth century during the time of the Empire and the Industrial Revolution. While the Empire has gone, London continues to transmit ideas revolving around the cultural hegemony of a politically, economically and socially superior nation through its urban histories. These histories are sometimes explicit, but are more often hidden, as they become subsumed into London's evolving cityscape. On this basis, introductory architectural courses that outline the city's development, by default, recapitulate the values of British cultural imperialism. This article examines how London's architectural history and imperial visions can be re-evaluated through the lens of a culturally responsive teaching and learning study abroad platform.

From Yellow Peril to Model Minority and Back to Yellow Peril

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some perceptions of Asian Americans in the United States shifted as anti-Asian hate crimes escalated. However, little is known about how these shifting views manifest in K-12 schools. This qualitative case study uses Asian critical race theory to examine how two Southeast Asian American students faced exclusion and erasure before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and how their Southeast Asian American teacher advocated for them at a public elementary school in the Pacific Northwest. Implications include how researchers can pursue inquiries about Asian American students' holistic development and how in-service and pre-service teachers can address anti-Asian xenophobia.

Universal Basic Income, Social Justice, and Marginality: A Critical Evaluation

Struggles for economic justice have historically centered around the fight for jobs and higher wages, but universal basic income (UBI) seeks to distribute wealth outside of labor by giving every citizen an unconditional and universal minimum income. This paper critically assesses the policy ofUBI and asks what ought to be taken into consideration and addressed before the first practical implementation ofUBI on a broad scale. Three issues are outlined: UBI in relation to histories of oppression and the danger of a neoliberal universal basic income;UBI and the issues of citizenship, border imperialism, and social solidarity;and how UBI could affect the carceral system and the incarcerated. The essay argues that UBI runs the risk of reproducing precarity and inequality if not crafted with the needs of marginalized communities in mind and theorizes what a socially just UBI might look like if it was designed to confront these challenges.

Centering the lens of social justice

Palliative care is rooted in the conceptualization and application of whole-person care. The field of social work is rooted in a commitment to social justice emanating from an analysis of how power, privilege, and oppression impact everyone. This chapter explores theoretical frameworks to both complicate and clarify lived experience of patients, families, and self through systems of power as well as tools for reflection to catalyze self-awareness. The intent is to understand the impact of the pervasive sociopolitical systems of oppression, namely imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. The chapter also explores the theories of the ecological systems model, intersectionality, and antiracism, as well as the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the many public murders of Black people in the United States by police. It then explores the theories of ecological systems theory, intersectionality, and anti-racism to set a backdrop for the text at large while suggesting the possibility that palliative social work is always a social justice practice. Importantly, intersectionality can be used to better understand experiences of power and oppression, and the ways one person can experience both. Social workers working in healthcare can ask themselves how they are aligned with and perpetuating unequal systems of care. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Between nation and empire: how the state matters in global health

The role of the state has been underplayed in scholarship on global health. Taking a historical view, this paper argues that state institutions, practices and ideologies have in fact been crucial to the realisation of contemporary global health governance and to its predecessor regimes. Drawing on state theory, work on governmentality, and Third World approaches to international law, it traces the origins of the 'health state' in late colonial developmentalism, which held out the prospect of conditional independence for the subjects of European empires. Progress in health was also a key goal for nationalist governments in the Global South, one which they sought to realise autonomously as part of a New International Economic Order. The defeat of that challenge to the dominance of the Global North in the 1980s led to the rise of 'global governance' in health. Far from rendering the state redundant, the latter was realised through the co-option and disciplining of institutions at national level. To that extent, the current order has an unmistakably imperial character, one which undercuts its declared cosmopolitan aspirations, as evidenced in the approach to vaccine distribution and travel bans during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Love of Empire by Dissociations

In the past two years, as the whole world has been deeply mired in the COVID-19 pandemic, we may have observed neoliberal capitalism's crisis of care: exposed and exacerbated by the global pandemic, made explicit alongside examples such as the collapsing of health systems, the shortage of care labor and overwork of nurses, the serious outbreaks in aged care facilities, the increased burden of domestic labor and care work due to school closures, and the worldwide rise of domestic abuse. In this short essay, I situate neoliberalism's care problems as a displaced process of imperial racialization in long-standing feminist debates over the "labor of love", returned to us by COVID in the form of crisis. I argue that the impacts on domestic care during the pandemic are intimately connected with colonial divisions of labor when outsourced surrogate intimacies are vicariously performed by racialized third world labor. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of American Quarterly is the property of Johns Hopkins University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Solanki reviews The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic by Barbara Katz Rothman.

A New Time of Reckoning, a Time for New Reckoning: Views on Health and Society, Tensions between Medicine and the Social Sciences, and the Process of Medicalization

This article seeks to capture variations and tensions in the relationships between the health–illness–medicine complex and society. It presents several theoretical reconstructions, established theses and arguments are reassessed and criticized, known perspectives are realigned according to a new theorizing narrative, and some new notions are proposed. In the first part, we argue that relations between the medical complex and society are neither formal– nor historically necessary. In the second part, we take the concept of medicalization and the development of medicalization critique as an important example of the difficult coalescence between health and society, but also as an alternative to guide the treatment of these relationships. Returning to the medicalization studies, we suggest a new synthesis, reconceptualizing it as a set of modalities, including medical imperialism. In the third part, we endorse replacing a profession-based approach to medicalization with a knowledge-based approach. However, we argue that such an approach should include varieties of sociological knowledge. In this context, we propose an enlarged knowledge-based orientation for standardizing the relationships between the health–illness–medicine complex and society.

Decolonising Myself: Navigating the Researcher-Activist Identity in the Urban South Pacific

This paper charts my path from observer to action researcher – and my ex post realisation that a transition had happened in my work. This transition happened on the fly, in the field, without me critically reflecting on it at the time, while I was studying evictions in Port Vila, Vanuatu, South Pacific. My ethics came into direct conflict with my research approach, and I chose to change my approach. I theorise my transformation in the modernity/coloniality literature and close by offering strategies to students and other researchers who are looking for ways to engage more deeply with, and give something back to, the communities they study.

Internationalization in Higher Education: Equity, Affordability, Epistemic Democracy? or Social Reproduction and World-Systems Stratification?

This autoethnographic paper exposes the multiple barriers encountered by an international doctoral female student in the United States: health issues especially Covid-19, institutional, political, geopolitical, knowledge production and economic factors. Reproduction theory, the world-system analysis and intellectual imperialism are used to examine these factors exposing the illusion of equity in international higher education and its role in perpetuating the imbalances and exclusion of large groups of people and entire countries. Contrary to the narrative, international students are often part of these large excluded groups of people but are not regularly included in the discussion.

Biologisms on the left and the right

Victorian Britain saw the rise of biologism, the practice of attributing biological cause to that which is explicable either wholly or in part by environment. Its most extreme expression was eugenics, first disseminated by Galton through Macmillan’s Magazine in 1865. I explore early British eugenics as a biologistic discourse centred on class which took aim primarily at the “residuum”, or “submerged tenth”, the section of the working class alleged to be least productive. It was framed by racism, the biologism on which much late-Victorian imperialism was based. I consider ways in which biologisms inform distinct twenty-first-century discourse and practice, from policies around child benefit to Covid19, and focus on one thread of biologistic thought as it extends to debates on gender identity – the idea that gender is both a feeling but also innate and brain-based. I conclude that gender identity theory risks, however inadvertently, reinscribing biologistic ideas and stereotypes.

Toward an Eclectic Film History Survey

Drawing attention to film's many uses beyond entertainment challenges students to rethink their object of study and its historical context. [...]the ability to access a wealth of nontheatrical materials online-and for free!-makes them especially valuable in the age of online teaching, austere university budgets, and the precarious financial state of many students and contingent instructors in the time of COVID-19 and its continued fallout. [3] [#N3] Qven pie context of WWII, showing an excerpt from a "process film" about industrial production[4] [#N4] to support the war effort or footage from an army training film is a valuable way to show how film was mobilized to instruct enlisted soldiers through nontheatrical channels. To contextualize the Golden Age of Mexican cinema during the 1930s anddOs, I spoke to the country's strong tradition of nonfiction during the silent period with an excerpt of footage from the Mexican Civil War shown in Memorias de un Mexicano [https: / /youtu.be /gSbZtOObesY] (1950t. a compilation of work by the early Mexican filmmaker Salvador Toscano reassembled by the director's daughter. If I were to teach the course again, I could include Egypt and Bark with Imperial Airways [http: / /www.eafa.org.uk /catalogue /3284] (1932)-an amateur film shot by Ruth Stuart, whom I learned about via the Amateur Film Database [https:// www.amateurcinema.org /index.php/ filmmaker/ ruth- stuart] -or one of many travel films shot by Helen Miller Bailey, available via the University of Southern California's Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive. [http://uschefnerarchive.com /project/baileyfilms/] In a more commercial vein, the films of Aloha Wanderwell [https: //www.alohawanderwell.com/] . many of whose works have been preserved by the Academy Film Archive, could

Alternatives

The inequitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines that we see today must be situated within the historical context of colonialism, global capitalism, and the othering of the Global South. The effects of these structural factors have resulted in an exclusive preoccupation with profitmaking through vaccine manufacturing at the expense of humanitarian concern. The deliberate neglect in the vaccination of those in the Global South will enable the virus to survive and mutate in marginalized parts of the world. Notably, in our globally-connected world, this neglect will provide opportunities for new variants to flourish and spread, thus contributing to the likely emergence of new pandemic threats in the future. This paper is part of the SPE Theme on the Political Economy of COVID-19.

COVID-19 and Imperial Value: Commodity Chains, Global Monopolies, and Catastrophe Capitalism

Why has the COVID-19 pandemic manifested itself differently in different parts of the capitalist world-economy? The analysis here examines the way in which the system of “imperial value,” as articulated by Samir Amin and others, has governed the relations of individual nation states to the onset of SARS-CoV-2. The result is enormous disparities between the Global North and the Global South, as well as between countries that are relatively more capitalist and those that are relatively more socialist, along the socioeconomic spectrum. The impact of COVID-19 is thus mediated by a country’s position within the global value chain dominated by monopolistic multinational corporations. In this way, the structure of the contemporary world system has only served to worsen the global effects of the pandemic, in line with the general character of today’s catastrophe capitalism. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Critical Thought is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)