WHAT TO EXPECT
In Sister Insider, Roos Volkers offers an answer to a pressing question: can White people be allies to Black women – and if so, how? Writing as a White woman, she displays an impressive sense of self-consciousness as she reflects on the pain and anger experienced by Black women as expressed in the poems of Black feminists. Her suggestion to White people? To hold space as a type of listening that encourages Black women to continue to express their anger.
Ole van Vredendaal answers an oft-overlooked question: how does the practice of federal plea agreements in the United States fit into Montesquieu’s ideal of the separation of powers? In a careful side-by-side analysis of Montesquieu and plea-bargaining, he argues that plea agreements are fundamentally incompatible with the ideals expressed in the US Constitution.
Laura Vecoli, Insook Yoon, and Henry Oh perform a quantitative content analysis to chart the evolution of beauty standards in Miss Universe Contests. Their paper exposes the Miss Universe Contest as consistently perpetuating stereotypical Western beauty ideals over the course of its 67-year history.
In an analytically rigorous essay, Maurits van Halderen considers how the so-called Third Reich used aesthetics to demonstrate its fascist power. His paper takes an interesting approach by understanding aesthetics as a tool for promoting a ‘civic religion’, with its own mythical symbolism and liturgy. The key factor, he argues, is its power to present an alternative reality as the truth.
Natalia Derossi’s critical review of Memorias del Subdesaradollo (dir. Thomàs Gutiérraz Alea) focuses on the dichotomies that are established in the film. Her thorough analysis of the film’s content and cinematography discloses a reality dominated by Western/anti-Western revolutionary conflict. Alea’s objective – she claims – is to foster participation and contemplation in his viewers.
Bram Wiggers interrogates Hegel’s conception of the organic modern state in relation to the present-day state. His essay meticulously outlines the intrinsically interwoven metaphysics of Hegel, Hobbes, and Kant, and follows with a critique aided by Schmitt, Arendt, and Adorno.
In The Promise of Cosmopolitanism and the Potential for Resistance in the Global Network Society, Philipp Spengler departs from the Network Theory of Manuel Castells to propose a new way of understanding network behaviour. Situated in the context of the global capitalist mode of production, he reconceives network behaviour as subjectivation processes within nodes.
In Sex, Drugs, and Dieting, Rebecca Mikova applies strain theory and differential association theory to explore the origins and transmission of deviant behaviours within the modelling community. Remaining rooted in the real, an interview with a former model forms the basis of her analytical investigation.
Saira Sakalas makes a welcome contribution to the ongoing debate on cognitive gender stereotypes. Her partial replication of Stoet’s (2017) seminal paper challenges the stereotype that women are better multitaskers than men.
In Who Let the Dogs Eat, Shireen Balla considers an issue that has dogged her for years: the considerable population of stray dogs in her hometown of Bangalore. Her ecological analysis identifies the predictors of dog populations, and offers suggestions as to how these populations may be better controlled.
Natalia Derossi and Laetitia Van den Bergen investigate the growing phenomena of techno music. Their visual analysis – conducted close to home at Maasilo, a Rotterdam techno club – reveals a recurrence of opposing themes.
In an innovative example of using the contemporary to challenge the past, Chiara Lampis Temmink uses Kendrick Lamar to challenge Sartre’s assertion that only prose can be political art. Through her rigorous analysis of Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly using the theories of Ranciere and Mouffe, she demonstrates that music and poetry too
can be political.