The how of political acting: Infrastructural improv through social choreography – Local case studies in Helsinki

Urban spaces are choreographed orders. This is evident not only in the architecture and infrastructure but also in the organisation of people’s movements. The article explores the question of how public spaces are re-figured through choreographic orders and movement practices. To this end, the concept of social choreography in urban space is outlined. Social choreography describes the relationship between macro- and microstructure, order and practice. On the one hand, it shows social spaces as choreographed spaces. Choreography is understood here as normative and representative. Its order regulates the flow of movement and thus also controls the patterns of social perception and experience. On the other hand, social choreography addresses an emergent order, which develops in social situations. This perspective focuses on the movements and physical interactions that conventionalise or undermine and disrupt the established order. The relationship between macro- and microstructure is illustrated using the example of artistic interventions and choreographed protest cultures.

The article investigates the ascendency of the cafe in the current period of urbanism. I suggest that “going for a coffee” is less about coffee and more about how we connect with others in a mobile world, when flexible work hours are increasingly the norm and more people are living alone than any other period in history. The cafe also plays a role in the development of civil discourse and civility, and plays an important role in the development of cosmopolitan civil societies.

Social Spaces and New Media: Some Reflections on the Modernization Process in China

For a few months, in 2020, the constant flow of people around the world stopped almost entirely because of the pandemic. Borders were closed, cities placed under blockade and various states of exception restricted or completely abrogated the right to move. The restrictions on movement created a new social choreography of daily movement in the urban public space that became a vast laboratory for political gestures based on movement. A new choreography that obeys social distancing guidelines started to be seen in the Israeli public space. But there were also other movement-based reactions to the new situation, ones that subversively disrupted the rules of exception and ones that resisted them out loud.

This practice-led research is situated at the intersections between spatial design, somatics, sound art, sitebased performance and social choreography. A creative practice that thinks through doing, it interrogates the potential of a choreoauratic site-based performance practice to bring attention to the politics of public places, somatically, architecturally, and socially. A new term choreoauratics is cultivated out of this practice-led research. It argues for the convergence of prosthetic listening and choreography as a critical spatial practice. Participatory choreographies intervene in public spaces, working poetically towards a recovery of the imperceptible, disappearing and the lost. Performing in the margins, the practice orchestrates an emergent form of public activism. Social choreographies for the ears affect and politicise the way we inhabit and incorporate spaces. A new kind of subjectivity emerges through headphonic sound technologies and choreography. This activates the subject and the city in collisions and convergence, coming together in the striated, dispersed virtual space of listening prosthetically. Engaging in the unspectacular, the practice treads lightly, tuning into the intensities of the poetic, sound, the voice, place and the moving body.

Conceptions of “human nature”, of motivation for social behavior and of good and bad are inevitably integral parts also of the sociologist’s work. Wilhelm Reich’s life-energetically based work represents a “paradigmatic shift” in the bio-psycho-social study of our motivational basis and of our family and other social relations. The present paper sketches the basics of Reichs findings and conceptualizations concerning the fundamental pulsatory energetic life functions and the socially inflicted inhibitions and perversions of them, as well as their manifestations, for instance in the sexual orgasm and in the infant’s suckling the mother’s breast. The paper sketches the ‘functional identities’ between healthy/unhealthy life-energetic functioning on the level of the individual and on the level of social relations and their change. It is argued that family relations, socialization practices and other social relations and cultural items should thus be studied in terms of their life-energetic functioning. Bodily and psychological structures and processes, as for instance in parents and children, and the simultaneously occuring social and cultural structures and processes, for instance in the family, should be studied with reference to their underlying common life-energetic functioning dysfunctioning. The unity between character structures and processes and social structures and processes is to be found in the common, underlying life-energetic functions. The above is related to Freudian, Marxian and Freudo-marxian conceptions. Reich’s finding about the mediation of the economic-ideogical structure into the mass psychological need structure of the next generation through the family by way of the parents’ character structure and their socialization practices is sketched and the conditions for life-negative versus life-affirmative social and family change are summarized. Parson’s analysis of the relation between personality and the social and cultural “system” and of sexuality, socialization and the family is in part compared with and criticized from Reich’s findings. Life-energetic analysis is applied also to some recent family sociological conceptualizations. Questions for further analysis of family, socialization and social change are raised.

Paula Brown Glick: A Retrospective

Networks of Modernism offers a new understanding of American modernist aesthetics and introduces idea that networks were central to how American moderns thought about their culture in their dramatically changing milieu. While conventional wisdom holds that network rose to prominence in 1980s and 1990s in context of information technologies, digitization is only most recent manifestation of networks in intellectual history. Crucial developments in modern America provide another archive of network discourses well before advent of digital age. The rise of railroad recast American landscape as an assortment of interconnected hubs. The advent of broadcast radio created a decentralized audience that was at once medium's strength and its weakness. The steady and intertwined advances of urbanization and immigration demanded reconceptualization of community and ethnic identity to replace failing melting pot metaphor for nation. Indeed, signal developments of modern era eroded social stratification and reorganized American society in a nodal, decentralized, and interpenetrating form--what today we would label a distributed network that is fully flattened and holds no clustered centers of power. In this ferment of social upheaval and technological change, moderns found what we would today term the network, though they did not have vocabulary for it that we do now, to be a versatile model for their aesthetic experiments in representing social space and social relations. Whether they used figuration of network as a kind of formal experiment to negotiate tensions between dispersal and unity, fragment and totality, or took network as a subject in itself, as seen when dealing with crowds or public spaces, network was a way for writers and artists to conceptualize and explore their rapidly changing society. Through readings of works of Randolph Bourne, Jean Toomer, Anita Loos, John Dos Passos, and Nathanael West, Networks of Modernism positions network as defining figure of American modernist aesthetics and explores its use as a conceptual tool used to think through rapid changes in American society.

This paper explores approaches to the management of external public space, both now and in the future. The paper is in five parts. The discussion begins with an exploration of why public space management is universally an important concern by drawing from literature that argues that the quality of public space has declined, and that a greater engagement of the public sector in its management is required. Next, the research methodology is discussed which sought to investigate the management of public space in England as an example of trends and responses that point to a broader international concern. The approach included both a national survey of the state of play in public space management and a series of case studies that sought to explore innovative practice. Third, the results of a national survey are briefly outlined, with discussion following the same structure as the survey itself. Next, the results of detailed interviews with 20 local authority case studies that exhibited interesting or innovative practice in the local management of public space are presented. In a final part, conclusions are drawn which confirm that this is an area of public sector responsibility in need of significant investment and reform, but also that top-down initiatives from national government are beginning to inspire a burgeoning range of local government initiatives below. Therefore, although public space management remains a fragmented area of local government activity, a number of local authorities are beginning to establish a corresponding bottom-up agenda that seems to map a potential way forward for the future.

Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast. Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617: The Anti-Poetics of Theater and Print. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. xii + 246. $99.95. In light of the state of political dialogue over the past few years, a book on seems quite timely, even if its focus is on early modern English literature. And, indeed, many of Prendergast's insights on the aesthetics and contexts of may apply to our particular moment. Whereas Prendergast shows how writers like Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey seem to be at each other for aesthetic pleasure and competitive bonding, rival news networks (whose audiences are becoming ever more segregated) compete for ratings as well as apparently revel in the aesthetic experience of conflict itself, as do their audiences. This is particularly true of the opinion shows, and--as in the example of the Poet's War between Ben Jonson, John Marston, and Thomas Decker--this competitive and vicious rivalry does not always appear to run as deep off-air as on. (I recall, for example, the circulation of a photograph of Keith Olbermann and Sean Hannity smiling together when they bumped into each other at a baseball game. Olbermann later said that politics stops at the bali field, and some of their fans were disappointed that these figures would cavort with their respective enemies.) Regardless of our twenty-four-hour news networks' hunger for any ratings-grabbing dramas, however, their rhetoric remains in many regards far tamer than that which the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century railers leveled at each other (with the possible exception of the epithets designed to deny the legitimacy of President Obama's tenure in office). It is the scatological, violent, bawdy, erotic, and transgressive nature of to which Prendergast turns her attention in this book. In her lengthy introduction, Prendergast demarcates her topic by differentiating from other forms of polemics and invectives such as satires, libels, squibs, and epigrams, defining them as texts whose densely packed and hyperbolic insults give a far stronger and more consistent experience of anger and aggression, even as these display their authors' playful delight in experimenting with the rich rhetorical possibilities inherent in railing (13). She further lays out the scope of her project by placing these works in the context of print and theater, which, Prendergast argues, spur these writers to seek larger, heterogeneous audiences and serve as sites of aesthetic experimentation for railers. She also introduces the wide range of contemporary theorists--such as Lauren Berlant, Michael Warner, Rene Girard, and Judith Butler--that she will employ in order to understand the ways that controversies make use of an anti-aesthetics comprised of metaphors of sexuality, disease, and gender transformation of their opponents (and sometimes themselves) to create aggressive homosocial bonds. The first two and a half chapters develop Prendergast's thesis that provide a space for aesthetic experimentation and homosocial, often eroticized, ties between male authors through discussions of the Marprelate controversy, the Harvey-Nashe pamphlet wars, and the theatrical poetomachia involving Jonson, Marston, and Dekker. In the Marprelate controversy, argues Prendergast, the aesthetic experimentation and aggressive eroticism occur through the use of perverse metaphors by both the Martinists and anti-Martinists, which work against their theological arguments as the transgressive language overwhelms the and the participants become implicated in their own erotically transgressive words (66). The Harvey-Nashe pamphlets contain many of these same elements, though the discursive subject of this exchange is rather trivial, which highlights the language even more. In addition, the print exchange--which involves writing for a larger anonymous, heterogeneous audience, and which links the writers in rivalrous bonds--is set against the more traditional manuscript and institutionally based male bonds associated with Cambridge University. …

Editor-in-Chief Max J Skidmore announces Westphalia Press books, and again announces a forthcoming work: an anticipated special issue of the journal, with the theme of childhood poverty in the Middle East. He also describes this current issue, Volume 10, Issue 2, of Poverty and Public Policy, the second quarterly issue of 2018, the tenth-anniversary year of the journal's publication. I am pleased again to announce to readers the publication of a PSO book from Westphalia Press, Unworkable Conservatism (2017). I am the author, and the book deals with the principles American conservatives and libertarians espouse, the difficulties of implementing those policies based on those principles, and the unsatisfactory effects those principles have on policy in the rare instances when they are implemented. Also, it is my pleasure to announce the recent publication of another Westphalia Press book, Donald J. Trump's Presidency. This book presents original essays by scholars from around the world, each from a different country. Every author presents a different perspective on the Trump administration in the United States. This volume is co-edited by Dr. John Dixon, and by me. Dr. Dixon is familiar to readers of Poverty and Public Policy, both as a contributor, and as Board member/Editor-at-Large. This is another example of the vigor of Westphalia Press, the publishing arm of the Policy Studies Organization. I also remind readers to watch for a forthcoming special issue of Poverty and Public Policy on the subject of “Child Poverty and Youth Unemployment in the Middle-East.” Dr. Dixon will be the Special Editor for that issue, which will appear later in 2018. This current issue of Poverty and Public Policy, volume 10, issue 2, is the second issue of our tenth anniversary year. The lead article is “Child Support and Income Inequality,” by Yoonsook Ha of the School of Social Work, Boston University; and Daniel R. Meyer and Maria Cancian, both of the School of Social Work, University of Wisconsin-Madison. This article, by presenting vital information that should be taken into consideration in implementing new child support regulations that were made final by the U.S. Government in 2016, makes a substantial contribution to the literature. Next, comes “Understanding the Implications of a Punitive Approach to Homelessness: A Local Case Study.” This is another highly significant article, and it comes from Jennifer Wilking, Susan Roll, David Philhour, Peter Hansen, and Holly Nevarez all of whom are from California State University-Chico. They study the efforts by Chico, California, to implement public safety policies and to respond to concerns from local residents by adopting ordinances forbidding sitting or lying in commercial districts and other public spaces. They document the effects of the ordinances, which significantly increase arrests of the homeless, spread enforcement away from the downtown area, and raise costs far above figures released by the city's police. Shifting our attention away from the United States to Europe, we offer “The Origins of the ‘Cause of the Poor’: Logics of Appropriation of a ‘New Social Problem’ in Spain (1960–1990),” by Joan Cortinas of the University of Arizona. Her study defends the idea that new social policies are preceded by a process of requalification incorporating new categories. She finds that the transformations have transnational implications, and affect countries with different welfare state regimes. Next, comes a section consisting of papers given last Autumn in San Francisco at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. These come from the panel sponsored by APSA's Caucus on Poverty, Inequality, and Public Policy (sponsored both by the APSA and the Policy Studies Organization), on the overall theme “Speaking Truth to Power,” considering whether political science in the United States remains relevant. Special Section Speaking Truth to Power Papers from the Special Panel, APSA Caucus on Poverty, Inequality, and Public Policy APSA Annual Meeting, San Francisco, September 2017 Political scientists devote great energy toward forecasting, but rarely deal with the content of policy, thus failing to consider “speaking truth to power.” [NOTE: The Policy Studies Organization published the conference version of this paper as “Speaking Truth to Power: Has Political Science Become Irrelevant to Policy?” Proceedings of the Policy Studies Organization, New Series, No. 32 (October, 2017)]; the PSO gives permission to publish here. Political science research reflects the trend toward mathematization that has become increasingly dominant in the social sciences. Unfortunately, complex mathematical models do not reflect reality and have little relevance to public political discourse. Moreover, much of the quantification in political science research of fraught with fallacies. The author identifies numerous instances of misuse of statistics by prominent social scientists, especially with regard to criminal behavior. The last several decades have seen the rise of neoliberalism in political science, leading to six major changes. These include: the rise of scholarly “objectivity” as a means of deterring critical analysis; the decline of public intellectualism and publicly accessible studies; the marginalization of practically relevant research; the decline of methodological pluralism; the aversion to political philosophy and political theory; and the devaluation of teaching in favor of research. Political science is in decline because it has become too focused on methodological precision, has lost contact with public policy, and recruits only among academics. To become more vital and relevant, it must use a wider range of methods, recover a voice on policy issues, and expect much more government experience from its recruits. [NOTE: an earlier version of this article appeared in German, in Indes. Professor Mead received the following permission: Dear Professor Mead, Dr. Micus, the chief editor of Indes, has asked me to inform you that you have our permission to republish your article. Best wishes, Danny Michelsen Book Reviews— We have no book reviews in this issue. As always, however, we stress that reviews of relevant books are vital to the scholarly process. Thus, we continue to seek thoughtful reviews of such books, and we invite those who are interested in becoming reviewers to communicate with our Book Review Editor, Dr. Virginia Beard, at [email protected]. Max J. Skidmore Editor-in-Chief University of Missouri-Kansas City

Cities large and small are increasingly using public safety policies to address local concerns about homelessness. In 2013, Chico, California, followed suit by passing several ordinances, most notably, a “sit‐lie” ordinance that prohibits individuals from sitting or lying in commercial districts and other public spaces. Broadly, this article explores the implications of this punitive approach to homelessness. Specifically, relying primarily upon arrest data extending over six and a half years, we explore how enforcement of the sit‐lie ordinance affected arrest rates of homeless individuals, as well as the geographic location of those arrests. Our expectations are supported—arrests of homeless individuals increased significantly in the “post sit‐lie” period, and the location of arrests clearly shifted away from the downtown area. Finally, given economic motivations of the ordinances, we estimate the costs to city law enforcement of policing the homeless population and find that costs are nearly twice as large as police department estimates.

A once-cohesive community, whose members carried out a variety of activities involving group-wide co-operation, changed over the course of six decades into one in which there was little or no broad-scale participation in anything. This urban community's members still strongly identify themselves with it and maintain their closest social relationships within its boundaries, but its once-flourishing public life has all but vanished. Such decline, especially in cities, is not unusual (e.g., Kiel 1993). The community examined here, however, has some unusual features, the most notable of which is a social structure based on a two-section system. One of the hypotheses to be tested here is that the cohesiveness of the community, as seen in its ability to act as a group, depends heavily on competition between its sections in some contexts and overall unity in others. A further hypothesis is that government decisions stimulated ethnic antagonisms within the community, thereby disrupting the unity of opposing sections whose boundaries are based not on ethnicity but on differences in the areas from which their members' ancestors came centuries ago. This antagonism, the hypothesis continues, contributed to the decline in overall cohesiveness, which in turn played an important part in the decline of activities involving group-wide participation. In this article the specific hypothesis will be tested with data from a community that has a social structure rather different from what is found in most other urban communities. The more general hypothesis cannot be tested by data from a single community, but the conditions for its testing in comparative studies will be indicated. SOCIAL STRUCTURE IS LIKE AN IMMUNE SYSTEM Although social structural changes of the sort just mentioned are probably never the only element in community changes, including the decline examined here, a more general hypothesis is that they appear to play a central part in bringing about or, in circumstances different from those described here, checking the effects of other factors. Social structures, through providing the bases for social relationships, are central to the nature and extent of the effects of other influences on community life because it is through social relationships that most other aspects of life are experienced by members of any group (Swartz 1991:304-11). These other aspects of life include processes such as political activities, decisions by central or state governments, changes in economic circumstances, demographics, and in the community's physical condition and location; that is, in what might be summarily referred to as the general phenomena characteristic of contemporary urban life. All of these affect the community through the changes they produce in the social structure, which in turn lead to other changes. The unusual social structure of this community is relatively unimportant from the perspective of the general issue of assessing the different parts in community change played by social structures, in contrast to such exogenous influences as outside political processes and decisions, economic and demographic changes, and cultural changes outside of the communities. It may be that a system depending on group opposition is easier to study than more diffuse structural arrangements, since changes in the involvement of members in oppositional activities can be readily observed and contrasted with activities where overarching unity is displayed. Otherwise, however, the case to be analyzed can be taken as a limited test of the proposition that social structural change has a universally central role in community change regardless of the nature of the structure of the particular groups being examined. When the social structure changes, the experience and response to other aspects of life are affected by that change, often as the direct results of what happens in those aspects of life. …

Sufficiency is an indispensable strategy for sustainable development that is gaining growing attention in both the scientific and the political sphere. Nevertheless, the question of how sufficiency-oriented social change can be shaped by different actors remains unclear. There are many different concepts of sufficiency and all of them entail certain notions of social change. However, these notions of social change remain mostly implicit. By conducting a semi-systematic literature review on sufficiency and transformation, this article makes explicit notions of social change in various concepts of sufficiency. Additionally, these notions are structured and discussed concerning their possible contribution to a broader socio-ecological transformation to advance the debate about sufficiency-oriented strategies. The literature was sampled by a systematic search in the databases of Web of Science and the ENOUGH-Network, a European network of sufficiency researchers, and complemented by texts known to the author. In total 133 articles, books and book chapters were reviewed. The sufficiency concepts were analyzed regarding two dimensions: the goal of and the approach toward social change. Various ecological and sometimes social goals that different concepts of sufficiency pursue were identified. Some scholars operationalize the social and ecological goals in a sufficiency-specific way as consumption corridors or a pathway toward a post-growth economy. Furthermore, three different approaches to sufficiency-oriented social change were identified: a bottom-up-approach, a policy-making-approach and a social-movement-approach. Specific contributions and limitations of these approaches were identified. The three approaches differ regarding the role of conflicts and the conceptualization of behavior and social practices. By interpreting the results utilizing the Multi-Level-Perspective of Sustainability Transition Research and Erik O. Wright's transformation theory, synergies for sufficiency-oriented social change were identified. The review founds a theoretical basis for further empirical and theoretical research on shaping sufficiency-oriented social change.

This paper aims to characterise the relationship between modernity and sociology in the context of secularisation, urbanisation and solidarity. The emergence of sociology as a discipline has been connected with the emergence of modernity. While modernity emphasises a different society and social structure, sociology has become the most critical part of this interpretation and its attempt to understand and explain. The study aims to explain the strong relationship between the basis of modernity and sociology by examining the work of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber which are one of the first studies to understand the new society understanding of modernism. The differences of modernity caused the social actors to be in doubt about themselves, and ontological insecurity emerged in this context. Some of the ideas have developed by sociologists about social change process will be examined in this context. Durkheim and Weber focus on the study of social order, change and social relations, which is a significant concern showing two basic methodological and theoretical ideas in the sociology tradition. Weber and Durkheim's optimistic and pessimistic attitude towards social change will be questioned in the conclusion section. The definitions of modernism and sociology will be discussed in order to determine Durkheim and Weber's long-term theoretical studies and methodological assumptions in sociology against the social change in the nineteenth century.