Explore the vast range of titles available.

PurposeWith the launch of the Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP), the Canadian government named solidarity as a shared value and a driving motivation behind the FIAP. This paper explores how development workers understand and apply solidarity to their work, uncovering the opportunities and constraints they face.Design/methodology/approachIn-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 42 development workers from Canada’s federal development agency between 2019 and 2020. Transcribed data were coded by the author to identify how workers made sense of solidarity within the development industry.FindingsThe majority of workers were unsure of how to define or operationalize solidarity, demonstrating confusion. Commonality was routinely mentioned as a facet of solidarity, but workers understood this term in diverse ways, with some considering commonality as a precondition that inhibited a sense of solidarity with development partners in the global South due to differences in living conditions. About a quarter identified power and privilege as necessary considerations in the process of building solidarity, showing potential for bonds across the inequalities that define development. About 40% of workers identified the institutional structure of the organization as an obstacle to solidarity.Originality/valueThis paper presents original data from Canadian development workers, providing the first study of their understanding of solidarity as a development ethic. It shows the gaps between rhetoric and practice while recommending ways for development organizations to meaningfully engage with solidarity in their work.

The term ‘coexistence’ is increasingly being used by academics and practitioners to reflect a re-conceptualisation of human-wildlife interactions (HWI). Coexistence has become a popular buzzword and is central to several proposals for transformative change in biodiversity conservation, including convivial conservation. Although ideas about how to achieve coexistence proliferate, critical exploration of the framing and use of the term is lacking. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews, webinars and online and offline documents, this paper critically interrogates how ‘coexistence’ is being conceptualised and translated into practice. We characterise coexistence as a boundary object that reflects a broadly agreed on ‘hopeful mission’, while being flexible enough to be meaningful for a wide range of actors. We identify three main framings of coexistence, which reflect the ways of knowing, values and approaches of different epistemic communities. We find that although the idea of coexistence has the potential to help facilitate transformative change in wildlife management, so far it largely manifests in practice as a positive-sounding label for standardised packages of tools and incentives. We argue that as the meaning of coexistence continues to be contested, there is an opportunity for activists, academics, and practitioners to reclaim its transformative roots. We identify a role for convivial conservation within this agenda: to re-politicise coexistence through the concept of ‘meaningful coexistence’.

Sentiment analysis of online Chinese buzzwords (OCBs) is important for healthy development of platforms, such as games and social networking, which can avoid transmission of negative emotions through prediction of users’ sentiment tendencies. Buzzwords have the characteristics of varying text length, irregular wording, ignoring syntactic and grammatical requirements, no complete semantic structure, and no obvious sentiment features. This results in interference and challenges to the sentiment analysis of such texts. Sentiment analysis also requires capturing effective sentiment features from deeper contextual information. To solve the above problems, we propose a deep learning model combining BERT and BiLSTM. The goal is to generate dynamic representations of OCB vectors in downstream tasks by fine-tuning the BERT model and to capture the rich information of the text at the embedding layer to solve the problem of static representations of word vectors. The generated word vectors are then transferred to the BiLSTM model for feature extraction to obtain the local and global semantic features of the text while highlighting the text sentiment polarity for sentiment classification. The experimental results show that the model works well in terms of the comprehensive evaluation index F1. Our model also has important significance and research value for sentiment analysis of irregular texts, such as OCBs.

Words make worlds. The language of development defines worlds-in-the-making, animating and justifying intervention in currently existing worlds with fulsome promises of the possible. Wolfgang Sachs contends, 'development is much more than just a socio-economic endeavour; it is a perception which models reality, a myth which comforts societies, and a fantasy which unleashes passions' (1992:1). These models, myths, and passions are sustained by development's 'buzzwords'. Writing from diverse locations, contributors to this special issue critically examine a selection of the words that constitute today's development lexicon. Whereas those who contributed to Sachs' 1992 landmark publication The Development Dictionary shared a project of dismantling the edifice of development, this collection is deliberately eclectic in its range of voices, positions, and perspectives. Some tell tales of the trajectories that these words have travelled, as they have moved from one domain of discourse to another; others describe scenes in which the ironies - absurdities, at times - of their usage beg closer critical attention; others peel off the multiple guises that their words have assumed, and analyse the dissonant agendas that they embrace. Our intention in bringing them together is to leave you, the reader, feeling less than equivocal about taking for granted the words that frame the world-making projects of the development enterprise. Adapted from the source document.

In the fast-moving world of development policy, buzzwords play an important part in framing solutions. Today's development orthodoxies are captured in a seductive mix of such words, among which 'participation', 'empowerment' and 'poverty reduction' take a prominent place. This paper takes a critical look at how these three terms have come to be used in international development policy, exploring how different configurations of words frame and justify particular kinds of development interventions. It analyses their use in the context of two contemporary development policy instruments, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (prsps) and the Millennium Development Goals (mdgs). We show how words that once spoke of politics and power have come to be reconfigured in the service of today's one-size-fits-all development recipes, spun into an apoliticised form that everyone can agree with. As such, we contend, their use in development policy may offer little hope of the world free of poverty that they are used to evoke.

This article discusses the effects of two trends in contemporary biomedicine that have so far been largely addressed separately: the steering of fields through programmatic “buzzwords” and the projectified nature of contemporary health research, care, and promotion. Drawing on a case study of an Austrian diversity-sensitive health promotion project related to obesity prevention, we show how the articulation of these trends—governance by buzzwords and projectification—often leads to not unproblematic and often paradoxical outcomes. Buzzwords such as “diversity” become especially important in an innovation-driven environment encouraging a promissory rhetoric. At the same time, the project form shapes and restricts how buzzwords (as typically vague terms that need to be fleshed out) are articulated and translated into a specific project design. In our case study of an obesity prevention program, the need to translate diversity into a “doable” project encouraged the identification of seemingly clearly delineated target groups and thus promoted a rather narrow understanding of diversity, which stands in tension with much more fluid and context-sensitive ways of performing “diversity.” We show how actors grapple with these paradoxes. This restricts the full power a buzzword such as diversity could achieve in terms of social justice.

This article traces the centuries-long evolution of the concept and practice of empowerment, its adoption by radical social movements, especially women's movements from the 1970s onwards, and its conversion, by the late 1990s, into a buzzword. Situating the analysis in the context of women's empowerment interventions in India, the article describes the dynamic of the depoliticisation and subversion of a process that challenged the deepest structures of social power. The 'downsizing' and constriction of the concept within state policy, the de-funding of genuine empowerment strategies on the ground, and the substitution of microfinance and political quotas for empowerment are examined and analysed.

The phenomenon of “social media” has more to do with its cultural positioning than its technological affordances. Rooted in the broader “Web 2.0” landscape, social media helped engineers, entrepreneurs, and everyday people reimagine the role that technology could play in information dissemination, community development, and communication. While the technologies invoked by the phrase social media have a long history, what unfolded in the 2000s reconfigured socio-technical practices in significant ways. Reflecting on the brief history of social media, this essay argues for the need to better understand this phenomenon.

In the past years we have observed enormous adoption and use of digital technologies in almost all domains of human life. In this context, researchers and practitioners have been using the term “digital transformation” (DT) to characterize phenomena related to the changes caused by increased use of digital technologies. The progression and contributions of corresponding discussions significantly depend on a common understanding and conceptualization of DT. Accordingly, the information systems research community has started working toward conceptual clarity. Importantly, the current debate focuses on theoretical contributions by academic researchers. Hence, data on the practitioners’ perspective on DT is missing. Against this background, we investigated general understandings of DT in practice. Our analysis comprises data of N = 529 business decision-makers in the UK. Our results show a significant discrepancy between science (i.e., conceptualizations and definitions of DT in the academic literature) and practice (i.e., business decision-makers’ perceptions and corresponding survey responses). Specifically, for a large proportion of the respondents their decision to classify concrete digitalization examples from the literature as DT or no DT was largely independent of the degree of organizational change caused by the use of digital technologies. This is a surprising result, as high-caliber academic literature proposes this degree to be a critical factor to characterize DT. Another key finding is that a remarkable number of practitioners consider a digitalization initiative as DT based on the mere occurrence of specific buzzwords related to digital technologies in the corresponding descriptions. In particular, the buzzword “digital technology” led the survey participants to classify a definition as instance for DT. We discuss implications of our results and limitations.

Participation was originally conceived as part of a counter-hegemonic approach to radical social transformation and, as such, represented a challenge to the status quo. Paradoxically, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, 'participation' gained legitimacy within the institutional development world to the extent of achieving buzzword status. The precise manipulations required to convert a radical proposal into something that could serve the neo-liberal world order led to participation's political decapitation. Reduced to a series of methodological packages and techniques, participation would slowly lose its philosophical and ideological meaning. In order to make the approach and methodology serve counter-hegemonic processes of grassroots resistance and transformation, these meanings desperately need to be recovered. This calls for participation to be re-articulated within broader processes of social and political struggle in order to facilitate the recovery of social transformation in the world of twenty-first century capitalism.