Spaces Of Action Research Articles

Under the Smokescreen of Horizontality: Gendered Leading Tasks within the Yellow Vest Movement

There is little scholarship on how gender impacts the construction of leadership in supposedly leaderless, horizontal social movements. In this study, I expand the concept of leading tasks, to get at the ways in which gender intersects with the critical organizing work of maintaining horizontal movements. Drawing on comparative data from 7 months of fieldwork conducted with two grassroots groups in the French Yellow Vest movement, I argue that horizontal organizing in the Yellow Vests (YVM) functions as a gendered structure which opens possibilities for women to take on important leading tasks: caring management, attentive listening, and superintendence. These analytically constructed, gendered leading tasks point to a tension inherent in horizontality: It creates leeway for women’s participation, while also functioning as a smokescreen for a process where group members reproduce traditional gendered expectations of women to do a “third shift” in organizing, characterized by nurturing and caring for participants and activist spaces. The study documents how women can be disadvantaged by this mode of organization. Thus, the concept of gendered leading tasks contributes to investigating how leadership is a gendered construct shaped by those who enact it, and the social structure that surrounds it.

Activist work is care work: conceptualising resistance in Indonesia and the Philippines through feminist ethics

This article draws on interview data collected in 2021 from Indonesia and the Philippines to argue that activist work should fundamentally be understood as care work. The first part of the article advocates for a novel inductive theorisation of intersectional care ethics in social movement studies and activist-centred research. The second part of the article utilises this conceptual framework to discuss the paramount role of women in grassroots activist spaces both on the frontlines and behind the scenes. The stories of resistance by women activists, which comprise the core of this article, help to illustrate how the patriarchy and other structures of power may simultaneously be subverted and reproduced in grassroots community spaces.

Introduction: Symposium on the Jewish Left

The Jewish left is having an intertwined renaissance and crisis, with a level of influence and growth not seen in decades. What explains the revitalization of the Jewish left? What can the older generation teach to and learn from the young generation? What are the possibilities for institution-building? And why should scholars care? To tackle these questions, Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA) organized a symposium on the Jewish left. Bringing together activists and theorists, scholars and practitioners, grandparents and grandchildren, the event worked to theorize the past and present to map the Jewish left’s path forward. Speakers included some of the leading voices of the Jewish left, representatives of progressive Jewish organizations, and provided a gathering space for scholars, students, and activists to examine the evolving role of the Jewish left in world affairs.

Touring Absences, Erasures, and Futures in the Unholy Land: A Religiously Literate Diasporic Reading of Palestine/Israel

Abstract This article examines a decolonial approach to teaching a course on Palestine/Israel involving experiential travel to the region. A decolonial syllabus studies absences, erasures, the multiple intersecting mechanisms and matrices of violence, and alternative futures as they inhabit subordinated pasts (histories) and the present in various activist spaces. We expand on other decolonial learning-in-context by underscoring the need for religious literacy. This is especially urgent because the land is a destination for apocalyptic, messianic, and birthright tourism designed to confirm and reinforce people’s redemptive scripts and fantasies about the land. The objective of the decolonial approach is not “metaphorical.” It is to dismantle the oppression of Palestinians, institute mechanisms for restorative justice, and draw ethical political maps. It is also hermeneutical, denoting the urgent need to dezionize Jewish consciousness. This article centers on those dimensions of our work that engage with pathways for decolonial Jewish political ethics in Palestine.

Towards a feminist praxis and pedagogy in higher education: knowledge-building and social action in Pakistan

ABSTRACT The fourth wave of feminism in Pakistan represents a significant departure from earlier movements, evolving into an intersectional force with widespread participation from younger women. Recent scholarship notes this shift, highlighting how activists are not only demanding equal rights but also critiquing the private/public dichotomy by centreing the intimate spaces where patriarchy is most entrenched. In light of this new phase in the feminist landscape, this article examines the overlooked narratives and experiences of women activists at the Feminist Students Collective (FSC), a student-led collective based in Lahore, Pakistan. It is argued that FSC activists employ a feminist praxis to analyse coloniality and neoliberalism’s entanglement with patriarchy in higher education and beyond. Through mediums such as writing, dance, poetry, theatre, and social media activism, they counter Eurocentrism in institutional spaces of learning and forge epistemic connections across class, religion, ethnicity, and social location in activist spaces.

Singing Blackness

In this article I propose the exploration of racial discourse in recent Black Caribbean rap and hip-hop productions. Rap and hip-hop are often used as a sociopolitical tool that—through writing and language—achieve to create activist movements. Specifically, I study the work of the Cuban hip-hop group Obsesión [Obsession] and of Cuban rapper Robe L Ninho and the work of Dominican rappers Circuito Negro and JNoa. I particularly focus on some of their songs that make of the genre an opportunity to approach the racial topic in their communities and a way to celebrate Blackness. This way, these hip-hop and rap songs break the most commercial, common, and expected pattern of lyrics that focus on topics that oversexualize the female (Black) body, that often objectify women, and that reproduce a patriarchal and heteronormative discourse. Instead, these songs, through the topics that they explore, aim to create community and craft a space for social activism. They do so, for example, by singing about hair (Obsesión and Robe L Ninho) and by singing about their Afro-Caribbean communities and their existence as Black people in their neighborhoods (Circuito Negro, JNoa). Among a variety of tracks, I mainly focus on songs that are connected in topic and that represent a continuumin the production of approximately the last decade. So, for example I analyze the songs “Los pelos [Hair]” by Obsesión (2014) and “N.E.G.R.O. [N.E.G.R.O.]” by Robe L Ninho (2022) that focus on Afro hair, celebrate the beauty of it, and denounce the prejudices against it almost a decade apart from each other. Then, I focus on the song “Revolufunk” by Circuito Negro (2011) and the song “Qué fue[What Happened?]” (2022) by JNoa. In this case also there is a generational gap between the artists that symbolize both the evolution of the genre and the consistency of the topics that they cover and that are connected to Blackness. In addition to the racial discourse and the connection of topics across the last decade, these songs also create an inter-Caribbean discourse that transcends the concept of nation and nationality and instead identifies with and shapes a message for Black Spanish-speaking Caribbean people. These songs reveal a poetic that adds urban sounds to a spoken word tradition and that mixes writing, oral tradition, and language in lieu to create a sociopolitical activist movement for Afro-Caribbean people. Also, by focusing on race in countries where the Black communities are often made invisible, they shed light on minorities that usually are relegated to the lowest layers of society. Thus, through their music, these artists raise awareness on their Blackness and on their communities, but they also create a transversal Afro-Caribbean narrative that connects and creates a sense of community among Blacks in the Caribbean in their native Spanish language. This study, so, represents an opportunity to shift a US-centered discourse on Blackness and race and opens new ways of living and understanding the African diaspora in other geographies.

Asking for solidarity: embodied feminist practices in digital space

ABSTRACT The Woman, Life, Freedom movement, beginning in September 2022, is a key chapter in the ongoing process of women’s rights activism in Iran. Social media has constituted a significant arena for asking for global solidarity with women in Iran since the initial days of this movement. The overall aim of this paper is to understand how TikTok users, including Iranian young women, have used the digital platform and transformed it into a virtual public space for media solidarity and transnational feminist activism. More precisely, it aims to shed light on how content creators, via their agency, rhetorically utilise and politicise the TikTok platform. In particular, we examine how they engage with audiences via the embodied form and affective performances in their attempt to persuade their audiences to viewership and solidarity action. The data in this paper consist of 107 top-ranked videos appearing under the hashtag #mahsaamini viewed through netnography, while the analytical method is multimodal rhetorical analysis with a focus on the mediality of the body in interaction. In addition, we adopt an embodied feminist framework and a decolonial perspective. The resulting analysis demonstrates how emotions function as one of the key elements in online mobilisation and protest in social media, not only as a motivational force but also as a part of the persuasive argument visually presented.

Challenging the local logics of oppression in times of post-colonial amnesia – a study of Ugandan LGBT+ activism in digital media spaces

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of an increasingly repressive environment, the study explores to what degree five established LGBT+ organizations use self-controlled digital spaces, Twitter and Facebook, during one month in 2022 to expose and challenge constructs that rationalize oppression of Ugandan LGBT+. The analysis revealed that digital media spaces were not used to challenge the local logics of oppression or contemporary processes sustaining oppression. Instead, spaces, often displaying a conspicuously uniform Western sexual rights language, focused on providing digital services and/or notification of offline services to the community and promoting the individual organization. The adoption of Western sexual rights campaign language, including using LGBT+ as identity labels to communicate Ugandan same-sex desires and gender identities, could be explained by the community’s dependency on international resources. The study’s contribution lies in its astute reminder – that the realization of digital spaces’ emancipatory potential is dependent on the political economy of the activists' context.

Towards a new progressive labour culture? Industry-oriented channels, bitter and precarious structure of feeling and worker solidarity in China

This article explores the progressive potential of commercial industry-oriented channels (IoCs), an emerging form of media produced by and addressed to workers of specific industries, on China’s digital platforms. Juxtaposing textual analysis with worker-audience interviews and participant observation, I found that despite the collusion of state surveillance and platform governance, IoCs prove instrumental in fostering resistive labour subjects and collectives among ordinary workers. This is due to IoCs’ genre convention and discourses, but more importantly, to worker-audience’s bitter and precarious structure of feeling that mediates their collective reception processes. The findings complicate our understanding of the potential of media/cultural production for labour resistance, highlighting the role of worker-audience in the circuit of progressive labour culture and the potential of commercial media in fostering radical class subjects. Drawing on the analysis, I further advance a model of worker media as double articulation, to open up more hermeneutic and action space for cultural labour activism.

Ukraine in Popular Culture: Editorial for a Special Issue

This special issue explores how popular culture shapes local, regional, national, and global perceptions of Ukraine amid the ongoing war with Russia. Integrating literatures on popular geopolitics, vernacular and aesthetic IR, and Ukraine studies, we delve into the complexities of the knowledge-making about Ukraine that takes place at the interstices of the everyday, the aesthetic, and the international. Given the mutually implicated relationship between popular culture and world politics, the popular representations of the Ukrainian subject both mirror and shape prevailing narratives, practices, identities, and power relations. But we also inquire into how popular culture serves as a space for political resistance and activism by those existing at the margins of world politics. By centering the Ukrainian perspective in all its multiplicity, the special issue helps to challenge the Western- and Russian-centric prism through which Ukraine has been approached in IR and related disciplines.

Active, dutiful and pragmatic: practicing green citizenship in urban China

ABSTRACT This study examines how eco-conscious citizens in urban China negotiate and practice citizenship in the everyday in response to the environmental and climate crises. Drawing on 45 in-depth interviews with participants in a ‘zero waste’ community and virtual observation, I explore how individuals articulate duties and rights, and act to claim their roles as green citizens. I argue that the changing socio-political conditions in China give rise to a particular type of green citizenship that is active, dutiful, pragmatic, and at the same time, gendered and classed. Motivated by a strong sense of duty toward nature and future generations, green citizens set realistic goals, commit to practicing sustainable consumption and building green families and communities. This form of citizenship, however, does not seek the expansion of rights and the enlargement of space for activism. This study offers fresh insights into research on citizenship, sustainable consumption and environmental activism in China.

‘Taking Responsibility for the White Collective’: Implicated Subjects and Transformative Justice in the United States

ABSTRACT∞ Transitional justice largely ignores that majority of actors who, though not directly responsible for violence, are structurally implicated in systems of injustice that (re)produce violence. Their absence is incompatible with the normative goals of the ‘transformative justice’ agenda, which include targeting the causes of (structural) violence, a project decidedly shaped by the presence of implicated subjects, especially in cases of historical injustice. This article engages a select group of implicated subjects – anti-racist white activists in the United States – to examine what their endeavours and struggles to reckon with their implication in the ongoing histories of racism and white supremacy can tell us about the boundaries of a transformative justice model. Drawing upon nine months of participant observation and 30 in-depth interviews within predominantly white activist spaces in the Greater Boston area, I contend that viewing transitional justice from the lens of implicated subjects serves to trouble the field’s transformative aspirations.

Female Leadership Roles: Subjectivity and Self-Representation

Abstract This article delves into the impact of digital activism on the leadership style of female-led non-governmental organisations operating under restricted access to opportunities. The focus is on Muslim sisterhood activism, examining the shift from offline to online activism led by the younger generation. The article analyses the barriers that have historically prevented Muslim sisterhood activists from playing leadership roles within the Muslim Brotherhood group and compares offline and online leadership roles using the case study of the Revolutionary Coalition for Egyptian Women from 2014 to 2023, with a focus on 2014. The study reveals that the younger generation of Muslim women has adopted a language that prioritises self-representation and body politics over religious discourse, indicating a heightened awareness of gender politics during the period between 2014 and 2023. To overcome state-imposed restrictions, the younger generation of the Muslim sisterhood has contradicted their well-established values on women’s roles and focused their political agendas on regaining popularity in Egyptian society. By exploring the impact of different political opportunities on women’s leadership roles through the political process paradigm, this article bridges a gap in the literature on resistant politics, feminism, leadership, and digital activism. The study shows that the younger generation of Muslim women is spearheading a strategic change in the resistant activist discourse, utilising the new digital space for activism to promote their cause.

The Evolution of Feminist Revolutionary Garments Against Patriarchy in the Fourth-wave Feminist Movement

During the fourth-wave feminist movement, a great deal of variation is produced in the forms and symbolic systems of feminist revolutionary garments. The relationship between feminism and fashion is complex during the feminist revolt against patriarchy. Some individuals view fashion as an instrument of patriarchal domination through the restraint of the female body. Some arguments believe that fashion, as revolutionary garments, can be borrowed as a method and catalyst for a feminist revolution. Social media has provided a wider digital space for feminist activism, and connections and collaborations between feminists from different classes and cultures have become easy to establish. Hence, easily recognisable logos and simpler symbol systems were the main hallmarks of this phase of feminist revolutionary garments. This paper focuses on the characteristics, advantages, and reasons for the emergence of feminist revolutionary garments in the fourth wave of the feminist movement by comparison with previous feminist revolutionary garments. Disadvantages and potential crises of these garments, such as excessive consumerism, still exist. Overall, the expressive potential of these revolutionary garments remains difficult to ignore.

A Living Martyrdom? Representing Life in Emigration in Katorga i ssylka

Abstract: Katorga i ssylka (Hard Labour and Exile, 1921–35) provides important insights into the personal details of revolutionaries’ lives as well as the (auto)biographical representation of members and deceased colleagues of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles. The journal facilitated identity formation at a time when many former revolutionaries found themselves politically marginalized by the Bolshevik rise to power, being a lieu de mémoire for revolutionary martyrs of all types. This article suggests that death or bodily harm as forms of martyrdom were only elements of a wider set of revolutionary practices of self-sacrifice. By drawing comparisons with similar practices in late-imperial revolutionary print culture, it suggests a continuity of practices in emigration across 1917. Such practices drew not only on the individuals and communities involved in publishing work but also the tropes and narratives in these representations. As membership of the Society was dominated by former Socialist Revolutionaries, studying the representation of life in emigration provides insights into the contestations of revolutionary memory during the 1920s and the ways in which members of the Society sought to find meaning in their personal experiences of political activism and that of their deceased comrades. The article explores the ways in which memoir and (auto)biography constructed emigration as a space of useful political activism, and provided the basis for the representation of emigration as meaningful self-sacrifice. This involved invoking tropes of suffering common in the memory of imprisonment and exile, while emigration brought with it new challenges linked to the experience of time passing.

Doing Social Space as a Chacterestic of Clinical Leadership Based on Advanced Nursing Practice - A Qualitative Ethnographic Study

Aim: The study aims to present and analyze the daily practices of Advanced Practice Nurses in hospitals and to reconstruct the constitutive spaces of action, especially in the context of clinical leadership. In doing so, a detailed picture of the prevailing social practices will be described. Research Question: How can Clinical Leadership be interpreted in dynamic work processes and their interaction in the hospital? Methods: An ethnographic research design including participant observation of nine Advanced Practice Nurses in two hospitals was conducted during the period 5/2020 to 8/2020. Data analysis included sequence analysis of participant observations. The study was classified as ethically unobjectionable. Results: This study shows how Advanced Practice Nurses connect people in the hospital through spacing processes and how they influence clinical care processes. The findings paint a detailed picture of the recurring everyday social practices of advanced practice nurses that are interwoven in a bundle and help to constitute and occupy social space. The results are presented in the Doing social space model. Conclusion: This process of reflection helps nurses and other health professionals to critically examine the conventions and rules that underlie their actions in clinical care and to explain the reasons for their actions. The findings should be of great interest as the actions of nurses can be explained and understood from both practice-based theoretical approaches and a spatial sociological perspective.

“Join the Coalition”: How Pioneer Journalism Communities Reimagine Journalistic Epistemology from the Periphery

This article examines how pioneer journalism communities reimagine journalistic epistemology from the periphery, and traces how ideas about journalism as a form of knowledge are embodied in their metadiscourses and enacted in their epistemic practice. Empirically grounded in metajournalistic discourse analysis of manifestos, event descriptions, and semi-structured interviews, this cross-national multi-method study explicates (1) pioneer journalism communities’ epistemic values found in the manifestos of 20 journalism startups from different parts of the globe and online descriptions of seven innovation-focused industry events; and (2) how pioneer journalism communities put these values into epistemic practice, based on interviews with 30 pioneer journalism producers from four startups located in different journalistic cultures—Bureau Local (UK), The Current (Pakistan), DoR (Romania), and New Naratif (Malaysia). The study findings suggest that pioneer journalism communities around the world imagine their knowledge production praxis as relational and meaningful, and through their metadiscourses and storytelling practices, create self-contained spaces of collective action, where publics play an equally important role in the negotiation of knowledge. Pioneer journalism communities around journalism startups/cooperatives go beyond their traditional epistemic role as facilitators of knowledge and adopt a semi-political, knowledge-based advocacy role, seeking to act upon their visions of “a better future” (Rappler).

Borderlands of Governance – Multilevel Cross-border Governance and Trajectories of Local Cross-border Ties in the Franco-German Moselle-Saarland Region

ABSTRACT In recent years, cross-border cooperation within the European Union – in particular between France and Germany – has experienced renewed “top-down” and “bottom-up” impulses towards a new multiscalarity. Focussing on the Moselle-Saarland region, we outline the relevance of local cross-border networks – conceptualized as “borderlands of governance” – for border-regional cooperation, which became particularly evident throughout the management of the Covid-19-pandemic. Making use of windows of opportunity offered by traditional “top-down” governance, borderlands of governance offer and perpetuate notions of alternative (cross-border) spatialities as relevant spaces of political action, both through practical spearheading of cross-border projects and through the representation of border interests within structures of multilevel governance.

The connective is communal: hybrid activism in online & offline spaces

ABSTRACT Based on work with three youth-led activist groups in Aotearoa New Zealand, we explore the hybrid relationship between online and offline activism. This hybridity serves as a ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 2004) that combines elements of collective and connective action. Our understanding of hybridity draws on and extends Bennett and Segerberg’s (2012) theory of connective action and MacDonald’s (2002) notion of ‘fluidarity.’ Building on their work, we interpret activist spaces as hybrid spaces where activist identities are constructed as both connective and collective. Hybrid activism contextualizes the ways corporeality remains central to the affective experience of many activist campaigns. The interacting affordances of each space generate possibilities for community organizing and community building that are qualitatively different than either on- or offline spaces alone. Communicative complexity Treré (2018) and activist self-narration are key elements of the hybridity that emerged in our study. In addition, the connective action properties of digital media were maximized when physical and digital campaigns were porous. Digital and material spaces are therefore co-constructing and complementary.

Media, Religion, and the Public Sphere

In the present study, I undertake to show that the public sphere can be constructed within the frames of a discourse loaded with religious symbols, either as part of religious institutions and manifestations, or, in a more interesting case, through the media discourse. I want to show that media functions as a ritualizing agent, which builds symbolic spaces of action and thinking. Journalists accomplish this by presenting events as if they had pre-established and immutable order and meaning, set within a religious system. The ritualization of the journalistic performance and the mythologization of the representation of events are some of the strongest tools for promoting a representation of events in a language loaded with religious symbols and to outline a public sphere constructed in a religious frame. Thus, using a sacralizing language, media creates a religious public sphere, which function as a liminal, subjunctive framework: it is possible to assume that now a new type of public sphere, defined by a religious frame, is developed, in a social context and symbolical frame that are totally different to the usual circumstances of a religious experience.