Political Articulation Research Articles

CONTEMPORARY WOMEN ART AND ARTISTS: A STUDY ON FEW FEMALE VISUAL ARTISTS OF ASSAM

Art has always been an open filled for women artists and an important tool for social and political articulation from a gender perspective, so they have expressed many forms of repression and discrimination by using various media and by incorporating both traditional and modern-day motifs. A large number of them have been active even in the pre-independence era of India, as the visibility of women-made art production grew, which can be contributed to the prominence of Sunayana Devi of famed Jorasnako Tagore residence of Calcutta and Paris educated painter Amrita Sher-Gil with their pioneering works. My objectives are to study contemporary women artists in Assam in specific of recent time of last 30 years and their concerns on globalization, gender politics and ecology of Assam.

The multinational as a myth-prince of the global south: Writing back an emancipating imaginary to the global north

Three decades of discourse on rising emerging nations have failed to produce a theory of emerging multinational-led emancipation. This paper draws on the case of Huawei in China and the European Union (1987–2020) to theorize multinationals’ role in writing back an emancipating imaginary from the Global South to the Global North. Combining postcolonial theory of the multinational as a hybrid space, and a post-Gramscian lens on the multinational as a counter-hegemonic agent, I theorize the multinational as a “writing-back myth-prince.” The lens of a multinational as a writing-back agent and space from the global south radically broadens the emancipatory potential of the key postcolonial concept mimicry. It also affords a view on emancipation beyond the opposites and distincts of very different subject positions in the Global South and North. I identify four writing back phases, each of which involves the political and fantasmatic articulation of an emancipating imaginary from the Global South. I develop critical explanations of the four writing back phases, insofar as they reproduce inequality, disenfranchisement and oppression, and weaken the multinational as a space and agent of hybridity rather than essentialism.

Projectifying feminism: exploring the conditions for feminist politics in international development aid

As an organisational form, the project poses a challenge today for the possibility of articulating feminist politics, understood as feminist visions and ambitions. With a focus on women’s organisations working in international development aid, we examine how the project format and its managerial attributes shape the possibility of articulating feminist politics. Mobilising assemblage thinking on a material consisting mainly of interviews with project workers in women’s organisations, we show that these organisations engage in assembly work to fit their activism with the project format, such as translating feminist ambitions into bureaucratic procedures and notions of temporality, activating repertoires of expertise, and adopting marketised approaches to development. We conclude that the project format depoliticises feminist politics, although it does not make the articulation of feminist ambitions impossible. Assemblage thinking is suggested as a suitable framework for feminist research when investigating how contemporary governing arrangements influence the articulation of feminist politics.

Politicization after the ‘end of nature’: The prospect of ecomodernism

A growing body of literature has argued that environmental discourses in general, and climate change in particular, have a tendency to become depoliticized. In this article, I discuss how the mechanisms of depoliticization can be traced back to the commonly deployed nature–society dualism. By analysing ecomodernism, one of the most prominent articulations of politics in the Anthropocene, I assess the recent suggestion that the ‘end of nature’-thesis could provide a way out of this dualism and the related problem of depoliticization. I argue that while early ecomodernism showed great prospect in overcoming the depoliticization of environmental discourses by effectively challenging the externalization of nature from society, and critically questioning technocratic solutions, later ecomodernism displays a more depoliticized vision of environmental politics, one which once again separates nature from society, and places it in the realm of necessity, rather than contingency.

Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada

Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada

Engagement of Military Peacekeepers in Brazilian Politics (2011–2021)

Peacekeepers are seen as a UN tool for promoting domestic changes in host countries, but little is known about the political consequences when officers return home. During the last 10 years, Brazilian presidents appointed a significant number of former peacekeepers to key political functions. How and why do former peacekeepers end up so involved in government affairs? To answer this question, this paper focuses on the array of skills acquired by peacekeepers in domestic missions and reinforced abroad. Drawing on a set of semi-structured interviews and questionnaires to military, former political decision-makers, and researchers, as well as other primary and secondary sources, this paper details how political articulation, experience in conflict management, and prestige empowered Brazilian military officers to resume their tradition of intervention in politics. This paper also shows that peace operations can produce deleterious outcomes for troop-contributing countries in the Global South.

The Political Movement of the Muhammadiyah Youth Exponent in Supports the Precident and Vice Precident Candidates in the General Election

This research focuses on the political movement strategy carried out by young Muhammadiyah exponents who have gathered in the Progressing Indonesia House (RIB) and the Indonesian Pencerah Alliance (API). Young Muhammadiyah exponents in this case are young Muhammadiyah cadres who have attended the cadre process and structurally have served in Muhammadiyah autonomous organizations. In reading the strategies of the political movement, a theoritical framwork is used, namely the structure of political opportunities, mobilization of resources, and framing of collective action. This study uses a descriptive qualitative approach and the analysis uses the Nvivo 12 Plus software. The research data were obtained from the results of interviews, document studies, and previous research which were related to each other. The results of this study indicate that young Muhammadiyah cadres realize that the Muhammadiyah Association is currently increasingly occupying a strategic position, both in its existence and as a strategic partner of the government. The growth and development of this awareness has spurred the construction of strategic, tactical, and futuristic thinking amidst many strategic choices and political articulations. The emergence of a political movement in the 2019 presidential election which was initiated by Muhammadiyah young exponential cadres is proof that there is a polarization that occurs in Muhammadiyah young cadres and indirectly becomes a fighting arena for cadres who are diaspora in the realm of national politics.

From Black Lives Matter to EndSARS: Women’s Socio-Political Power and the Transnational Movement for Black Lives

The relationship between Black Lives Matter (BLM) and anti-police brutality movements abroad reveals the variety of ways in which Black feminist theories of justice have taken root in public discourse. The EndSARS movement in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and the world’s largest Black nation, illustrates the influence of BLM transnationally and some of the continuities and discontinuities between anti-police brutality movements across contexts. I examine these two movements in tandem and develop a theory of political behaviour that builds on transnational Black and African feminist insights. More specifically, I consider how Black feminist articulations of intersectionality, personal politics, and Black liberation have informed the language and organizational praxis of two of the largest anti-police brutality movements to have taken place in the midst of a global pandemic. Here, I argue that organizers, many of whom were women, leveraged social power, in the form of embeddedness in politically active communities, to effectively organize protests and demand for justice. Through this comparative analysis, I contribute substantively to our understanding of how social power engenders political empowerment for individuals and communities in spite of patriarchal systems of exclusion.

Urban Climate Insurgency

Abstract Urban climate insurgency refers to the ensemble of grassroots initiatives aiming to tackle climate change from a radical point of view. Insurgency in this case does not imply violence but rather refers to the radical rejection of the current socioecological system. While explicitly challenging planetary ecocide and climate-change effects, these forms of insurgency target all policies that make the urban condition yet more precarious, demonstrating that climate mobilization is inherently intersectional. The focus here is on the urban dimension of this global climate insurgency that unsettles the dichotomy between rural and urban. It is on the urban terrain, already fissured by racial capitalism but also traversed by antiracist and promigrant movements, that the climate emergency becomes a climate and social justice issue. This introductory essay offers a fresh approach to the new municipalist project and digs into its environmental agenda. From New York to Mälmo, from Rio de Janiero to Istanbul, passing through Jakarta, Bangalore, and Naples, this special issue explores the articulation of radical climate-change politics, the materialization of climate injustices, and grassroots reactions to these injustices in the urban sphere.

In Praise of Refusing the Questions

In Praise of Refusing the Questions

The Academic Study of Religion in Bibliometric Perspective

Academic conferences are among the most energizing gatherings of scholars and scholarship. When the North American Association for the Study of Religion pivoted to an online format for their 2020 Annual Meeting, a broader audience was able to enjoy the sophisticated social analysis for which NAASR is known. In this issue, NAASR joins the Bulletin as a content-partner in publishing some of the research featured during the meeting. Wesley J. Wildman (Boston University) shares his bibliometric research of social scientific publications in the field. F. LeRon Schults (Boston University) highlights how computational modeling and simulations can be used to examine religious phenomena as well as forecast sociological dynamics. And Daniel D. Miller (Landmark College) posits a framework he calls “queer democracy” to help readers historicize, complicate, and confound the articulation of Christian nationalist politics. Together these contributions speak to currents in theory and method being explored in the North American field.

Explaining the Chile–Uruguay Divergence in Democratic Inclusion: Left Parties and the Political Articulation Hypothesis

AbstractThis article develops a political articulation-based explanation of divergence in democratic inclusion between two champions of liberal democracy in Latin America: Chile and Uruguay. Political articulation scholars depart from the traditional reflection models of political parties as mere expression of preexisting social cleavages, highlighting the relative autonomy of parties’ practices and their strategic role in structuring state-society relations. My work extends this current trend in comparative-historical sociology to the Latin American Left turn after the demise of the market-fundamentalist Washington Consensus, empirically identifying a set of strategies that boost Left parties’ capacity to articulate on a specifically class basis. These strategies, I argue, are endowed with causal efficacy, driving democratic variation beyond the restrictions and opportunities of the institutional environment. Combining process tracing account of historical sequences with my own analyses of labor statistics, protest events, and party linkages and manifestos, I show that differences in Left parties’ ability to build linkages with labor and advance its institutional representation as a class actor are at the root of the divergence in political inclusion between these two countries. This finding has substantial implications for contemporary democratic theory: after neoliberalism, strongly organized mass parties of the Left may not be a necessary condition for a given democracy’s stability and consolidation, but they may be a sufficient condition for a particular democracy’s realization of the normative ideal of political equality.

Transcestral Resistance Methodology: Thinking about gender from theory, experience and political articulation

Transcestral Resistance Methodology: Thinking about gender from theory, experience and political articulation

Imagined inclusions into a ‘green modernisation’: local politics and global visions of Morocco’s renewable energy transition

Energy transitions in the Global South are typically said to sit somewhere between autocratic mega-projects with considerable fallout for local communities on the one hand, and promissory projects to foster a better, sustainable and more inclusive future on the other. Morocco’s ambitious energy strategy entails the construction of 20 concentrated solar power (CSP) plants across the country and aims to provide energy security and position Morocco as an exporter of green energy. While energy transitions usually reflect existing power hierarchies, this article focuses on the dynamics Morocco’s energy transition plan has set in motion at the local level in affected communities. Based on fieldwork in the province of Tata, where two CSP plants are planned, the article argues that the promising yet elusive vision of solar energy has created a space for political articulation and agency at the grassroots level. Morocco’s energy transition is conceptualised in terms of an imaginary of ‘green modernisation’ that operates in two diverging dimensions: as an ideological glue legitimising and reproducing the regime’s existing power by ‘greening’ its political-economic system; and as a site for novel forms of activism to problematise power structures and articulate demands for political participation, inclusion and public infrastructural investments.

Articulating the Pueblo Cubano: Women’s Politicization and Productivity in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959 to 1969

How do political actors forge social solidarity across preexisting axes of social difference? This article investigates how political elites undertaking projects of political articulation—understood as linking together diverse constituencies to create integrated political blocs—contend with preexisting cultural constraints embedded in the social fabric. I do so by tracing how the post-1959 Cuban regime attempted to build a population-wide revolutionary identity despite persisting cultural understandings of women primarily as apolitical housewives. Through systematic analysis of a large corpus of state discourse in the form of speeches and women’s magazines, I show how regime leaders negotiated, with varying degrees of success over time, the cultural constraints that gender posed to their unifying project. Ultimately, the regime’s initiatives to politicize women through including them in mass campaigns and radicalizing their traditional household tasks were relatively successful, but cultural backlash against women’s increasing presence in the labor force prompted the institutionalization of a gendered division of labor in the economy that traditionalized their initially radical entry into the workplace. Analyzing how political elites confront and manage social differences within political blocs promises to contribute to a better understanding of the political production of social solidarity and its downstream effects on categorical inequalities.

Constituent aspects of riverside isomorphic governance on the Ilha do Careiro (Amazonas, Brazil)

Understanding governance in rural communities in the state of Amazonas requires interdisciplinary knowledge, as understanding the network of political articulation involves a collection of knowledge. Despite the existence of numerous works related to this subject, an a prior state is presumed in the representation of the network of political articulation, which leads to an exacerbated role of the State, in the face of other forms of social organization. Hence, the objective of the article was to analyze the environmental governance in the São Francisco community, located on the Ilha do Careiro da Várzea, in the state of Amazonas. We built Venn diagrams of agriculture, fishing, and plant extractivism to achieve this. The evidence provided indicates that the existing governance in the studied community is an isomorphic governance, which is the materialization of organized molecular power, originating from the triumvirate correspondence between the activities developed on lands, in forests, and on waters.

Between institutional reform and building popular movements: The political articulation of agroecology in Brazil

Agroecology is increasingly seen to contain solutions that can be used for wider societal transformation. While debates have mainly focused on reformist versus revolutionary strategies, less attention has been paid to how such strategies connect to peasant demands and how they can be combined for agroecological transformation. In this article we study transformation by the agroecology movement in Brazil through the theoretical lens of political articulation. We show that peasants’ local demands for land, alternative farming and local markets were mobilised in an institutional politics to gain policy support and in a populist politics to create movements that pose a systemic challenge to authority. We then argue that the political viability of wider societal transformation lies in the ability to create movements and organisations that politicise peasants and embrace local demands. We conclude that attention should not only be paid to individual strategies and their immediate effects but also on how diverse politics combine, to build the material and symbolic capacity of the movement and their potential for transformation over the long run.

When protest humor is not all fun: The ambiguity of humor in the 2017 Romanian anti-corruption grassroots mobilization

This article focuses on the ambiguous ideological work of citizen-produced humor in protest. Using the case of the 2017 Romanian anti-corruption protests as empirical data, the article shows how humor can simultaneously signal grassroots creativity and resistance to power structures, and reproduce conservative gender and class hierarchies. Unlike other types of texts, humor presents itself as an innocent and light message, absolved of the need for critical scrutiny. However, protest studies need to engage in a more nuanced way with the ideological articulation of democratic politics via protest humor by asking not only how humor helps protest communication, but also how it achieves shared enjoyment, for whom, and to what consequences for the ideological articulation of democratic politics. The article concludes by proposing that researcher reflexivity can afford a new sensitivity to the ambiguousness of protest humor.

Retrogressive Mobilization in the 2018 “Referendum for Family” in Romania

ABSTRACT We approach critically the assertion that a referendum ultimately defends the “traditional family,” by examining the articulation of anti-gender politics in Romanian parliamentary debates. We contribute theoretically by employing the concept of retrogressive mobilization in plebiscitary circumstances. We show that in Romania the contours of retrogressive mobilization transgress both the ideological left–right cleavage, and even party loyalty. We demonstrate how the ideological work done for the fantasmatic logics of retrogressive mobilization articulates two antithetical narrative scenarios, both centering on the Orthodox “nature” of the Romanian nation, whose existence and survival are said to hinge on the protection of the “traditional family” from “LGBT ideology.”

Sovereigntism vs. anti-corruption messianism: a salient post-Soviet cleavage of populist mobilization

ABSTRACT This paper explores the commonalities of populist mobilizations in the post-Soviet region. It identifies a salient populist cleavage between two political projects that differ fundamentally about their focal point of political action: externalist sovereigntism and internalist anti-corruption messianism. While sovereigntism takes a defensive stance repelling foreign forces hostile to “the people,” anti-corruption messianism offensively tackles cronyism impeding developmental salvation for “the people.” The paper reconstructs six sovereigntist and anti-corruption projects, which have unfolded across different non-democratic regimes in Russia, Armenia, and Ukraine throughout the past decade. It is argued that the conflict between sovereigntism and anti-corruption messianism relates to a twofold, distinctively post-Soviet constellation: uncertainty over conflictual geopolitical abeyance and the exasperation over social closure due to the prevalence of oligarchical patronalism. In this context, both populist projects constitute powerful strategies of solidarity-forging under conditions in which other channels of political articulation have been either blocked or exhausted.