In an example of Enlightenment ‘engaged research' and public intellectual practice, Euler established the basis of topology and graph theory through his solution to the puzzle of whether a stroll around the seven bridges of 18th-century Königsberg was possible without having to cross any given bridge twice. This ‘Manifesto' argues that, born in a form of cultural studies, topology offers 21st-century researchers a model for mapping the dynamics of time as well as space, allowing the rigorous description of events, situations, (...) changing cultural formations and social spatializations. Law and Mol's network spaces, Serre's folded time, Massey’s ‘power geometries’, Lefebvre's ‘production of space’ and ‘rhythmanalysis’ can be developed through a cultural topological sensitivity that allows time to be understood as not only progressive but cyclical, relationships and the ‘reach’ of power can be understood through ‘knots', and a topology of experience to model the ‘plushness of the Real' via extra- and over-dimensioned time-spaces that capture nuance while drawing on systematic conceptual resources. (shrink)

Decades of increase in external aid programs sparked a wide range of criticisms pointing to misaligned interests, lack of accountability, and the reproduction of developmental traps. The success of development from without is more likely if it generates domestic developmental agency. In this article, we contribute by conceptualizing and measuring dimensions of developmental agency. Our research analyzes the strategic case of European Union regional development programs in Eastern Europe, where this external organization spent nearly a decade on establishing local developmental (...) agency. We collected survey data of 1200 local organizations from two regions each in Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. We examine the post-accession position of organizations that participated in pre-accession assistance programs. We test a hypothesis of marginalization in the framework of recentralized developmental governance, and we examine links between patterns of pre-accession involvement and post-accession developmental agency. We identify factors that might make external developmental programs more likely to foster local developmental agency. (shrink)

This article investigates a puzzle in the rapidly evolving profession of advertising in post-socialist Hungary: young professionals who came of age during the shift to market-driven practices want to produce advertising that is uncompromised by clients and consumers, and to educate others about western modernity. It is their older colleagues—trained during customer-hostile socialism—who emphasize that good professionals serve their clients’ needs. These unexpected generational positions show that 1) professions are more than groups expanding their jurisdiction. They are fields structured by (...) two conflicting demands: autonomy of expertise and dependence on clients. We can explain the puzzle by noting that actors are positioning themselves on one or the other side based on their trajectory or movement in the field relative to other actors. Old and new groups vie for power in the transforming post-socialist professional field, responding to each other’s claims and vulnerabilities, exploiting the professional field’s contradictory demands on its actors. 2) The struggle is not between those who are oriented to the west and those that are not. Rather, the west is both the means and the stake of the struggle over historical continuity and professional power. Imposing a definition of the west is almost the same as imposing a definition of the profession on the field. In this historical case, “field” appears less as a stable structure based on actors’ equipment with capital, than as dynamic relations moved forward by contestation of the field’s relevant capital. (shrink)