Counterpublic Space Research Articles

Civic education in informal settings: Black voluntary associations as schools for democracy, 1898-1959

ABSTRACT Historians of social studies and race have focused overwhelmingly on formal educational settings, textbooks, and curriculum, thereby overlooking the informal educational spaces valued by African Americans. This study examines civic education in informal settings by considering the educational programs of Black voluntary organizations. Hundreds of civic voluntary associations were formed after the Civil War, and they gave African Americans a counterpublic space to undertake racial uplift, promote education, and learn how to be a citizen. In this article, I focus on the activities of one organization, the Improved, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, or Black Elks, to reveal how African American communities valued education for democratic participation and taught civics to youth and adults through their educational programming. I argue that the civic education supported and taught by voluntary associations was perceived by African American communities as just as important as the lessons taught in school. This study holds implications for contemporary social studies researchers by revealing the fluidity of learning sites among home, school, and communities for African Americans.

Counterpublics and Hegemonic Ideology: Responses t Donald Trump’s Post-Hurricane Imperial Condescension toward Puerto Rico on Twitter

In April 2019, Trump criticized Puerto Rican politicians on Twitter for receiving $91 billion in aid from Washington and said Puerto Rico was taking money from the U.S. Even though Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, their political status is the result of a series of colonial policies that ensured an important degree of U.S. political control over their island. Combining topic modeling and network analysis of 8,256 tweets on Puerto Rico between March 29 and April 8, 2019, we examine the reactions to Trump’s tweets and study the discourses, contestations, and counter-hegemonic rhetorical articulations that attended the tweets. Most responses to the tweets allowed for the creation of a counterpublic space that challenged Trump’s depiction of Puerto Rico. However, these responses also reproduced the unexamined hegemonic colonial ideology at the heart of Puerto Rico’s unequal relationship with the US. We argue that by failing to acknowledge the colonial entrapment that defines Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States, even the counterpublic discourses against Trump’s rhetoric unwittingly reinforce the colonial relationship.

A place where there is no need to explain: LGBTQ Muslims, collective disidentification and queer space in Brussels, Belgium

ABSTRACT This article discusses the communities of support that LGBTQ people from a Muslim background in Brussels build with other racialized LGBTQ people, and the spaces of disidentification and resistance that these produce. It does so by analysing qualitative data collected over a year of ethnographic research with LGBTQ people from a Muslim background in Brussels. In particular, the article focuses on the functions that queer de color communities serve in the lives of research participants. It shows how communication in these often takes place on a non-verbal level, in contrast to a ‘pressure to explain’ that marks participants’ interactions in other contexts, and the sense of mutual recognition, understanding and political empowerment this communication produces. The article then discusses how the co-presence of LGBTQ people from a Muslim background and their collective resignification of cultural scripts produce counterpublic spaces that have the potential to disrupt social norms and dominant imaginations of difference.

‘Your home—away from home’: Tourist homes and hospitality as resistance

Tourist homes, private residences that rented rooms to traveling guests, were once a popular form of tourist accommodation in the United States. Reaching their peak in the early 20th century, tourist homes largely became obsolete as hotels and motels were able to provide relatively inexpensive and standardized forms of hospitality. As a result of their meteoric rise and fall, and the private nature of the lodging, tourist homes have been neglected in studies of historical tourism and hospitality. However, tourist homes occupied an important position in providing welcome and other forms of hospitality to travelers, particularly Black Americans, in the first half of the 20th century, and this role deserves to be recovered and recognized. An exploration of tourist homes listed in the Green Book, a Black American-centric travel guide published during the Jim Crow Era, reveals that tourist homes not only lodged travelers overnight, but also significantly contributed to forms of mobile resistance against white supremacy. Specifically, through a conceptualization of hospitality as resistance, tourist homes enabled opportunities for Black Americans to gain economic and social capital through processes of welcoming and establishing ‘Black counterpublic spaces’. Particularly through constructions of home-like environments, tourist homes presented spaces that served as moorings within larger mobility networks, countering white supremacist attempts to immobilize and disadvantage Black Americans. Given these contributions to resistance and Black mobility, tourist homes deserve to be included in studies of tourism, hospitality, and Black geographies as important sites of welcoming, resistance, and resilience.

Naming Performativity on Twitter

This article examines naming as a discursive performance deployed by antiracist feminists in Brazil. I analyze tweets referencing the names of three Black Brazilian women intellectuals: Marielle Franco, Lélia González and Djamila Ribeiro, seeking to unearth the way in which their names help to build counterpublic spaces of resistance involving notions of citizenship, belonging and democracy. Using platform studies and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis as a theoretical frame, I perform different operations of computational textual analysis to map most frequent users referenced and hashtags used, as well as most relevant topics. I conclude that naming grants a powerful role in building counterpublics’ identities, helping to constitute alternative intellectual traditions in Brazil. Linking a social media post with a name to a collective mobilization serves to establish and maintain cultural identity, combining ephemerality with a continuing legacy.

Revisiting Auburn Avenue: The Construction of an Afrofuturist Counterpublic Space

The black counterpublic, as a space where black people could exercise their discursive contestation and participatory deliberation, has too often served to produce a counter-discourse aiming at defying white hegemonic mode of rule and racialized categorization of members of society. In the same vein, Afrofuturism, as a burgeoning cultural movement in the United States, employs the Afrodiasporic experience as a backdrop against which to contest the white-narrated version of black history and to project a better future for people of African descent. Merging the underlying philosophies of the black counterpublic and Afrofuturism, this paper seeks to advance the notion of the Afrofuturist counterpublic as a more embedded concept that tends to address the past and future of the black experience in a more explicit and overt form. Drawing mainly on Inwood’s representation of the redevelopment project along Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, GA, as a contemporary form of the counterpublic, this article adds to his insights by suggesting that Auburn Avenue as a rehabilitated space is deeply informed by the undergirding tenets of the counterpublic and Afrofuturist theories so as to exalt it to a symbol of an Afrofuturist counterpublic.

Resistance and Counter-Zones of Indistinction

Agamben's concept, zone of indistinction, defines politically constructed, ambiguous time-space settings that are built by the sovereign, declaring the state of emergency, transforming the subjects into homo sacer. In this sense, a zone of indistinction is the space reproducing dominance and hierarchy. However, Agamben's analysis developed around this concept skips the reality of resistance zones which can be constructed by micro agents suspending the quasi-objective time-and-space settings organized in everyday-life practices. From this point of critical view, the article proposes a new concept, counter-zones of indistinction, which follows Agamben's analytical agenda from the side of non-dominant power relations. Thus, the article explains counter-zones of indistinction while it also analyzes the differences among counter-public spaces, heterotopias to make clear the conceptual boundaries. Hence, the article aims to contribute to Agamben's well-known study on the zone of indistinction.

Museum as Counterpublic Space: Performing Direct Testimony

Museum as Counterpublic Space: Performing Direct Testimony

Reimagining Queer Film Festival as a Counterpublic Space. A Case Study of Turkey’s Pink Life Queerfest

Reimagining Queer Film Festival as a Counterpublic Space. A Case Study of Turkey’s Pink Life Queerfest

Arab women’s activism in a transnational media landscape: negotiating gendered spaces

ABSTRACT In this essay, I discuss the implications of the transnational nature of Arab women’s online activism, exploring prominent examples and presenting three main observations and reflections that can be taken as questions for further research. This essay looks at the intersection of media, transnationalism, and women’s movements from a spatial feminist approach, and examines the opportunities and challenges faced by Arab women’s activism in counterpublic, mediated, and transnational spaces.

Dalit Counterpublic and Social Space on Indian Campuses

This article discusses three different university campuses in India (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Osmania University, and the English and Foreign Languages University) and their political and social environments with a particular focus on Dalit student activism from March to June, 2013, and from January to March, 2014 when this ethnographic research was conducted. It questions what place Dalit student activism, constituting the ‘counterpublic’ (Fraser, 1990; Warner, 2002), occupied in these campuses; how Dalit student activists interacted with other student political groups; what characteristic features the Dalit student activism had on each campus. This article discusses the changing power relations in Indian universities and the role of ‘social space’ (Bourdieu, 2018) in negotiating social statuses. Dalit student activists actively engaged in appropriating social space by installing Dalit symbolic icons on the university campuses, bringing up caste issues to public attention and thus temporarily turning certain campuses into ‘political strongholds’ (Jaoul, 2012) of the Dalit movement. Contributing to the recent scholarship on student politics in South Asia this article argues for the understanding of interactive relation between campus space and student politics, showing how Dalit students changed the campus space through symbolic appropriation and, conversely, how historically constituted campus spaces affected the nature of Dalit student activism in each of the discussed localities.

Hot weather, hot topic. Polarization and sceptical framing in the climate debate on Twitter

ABSTRACT Extreme weather events like the heat wave of 2018 reinforce public attention for climate change. Social media platforms facilitate, define and amplify debate about this topic. They give rise to counterpublic spaces through which counterpublics such as climate sceptics get a stage they would not easily get in mainstream media. Previous research suggests that sceptics use these spaces as safe havens, but also as bases for interventions in the hegemonic debate. Applying a multideterminant frame model, we analyse the Twitter debate among climate change ‘sceptics’ and ‘believers’. We study all tweets in which the heat wave was related to climate change and which were shared by Dutch and Flemish users between 28 July 2018 and 4 August 2018. Laying bare the worldviews underlying the frames of sceptics and non-sceptics, we first demonstrate the diversity of – unilaterally interacting – ideological interests. Building upon this analysis of the scope of the debate and analysing its form, we show that both groups mostly use similar antagonistic strategies to delegitimize and denaturalize their out-groups. We argue that these interventions promote polarization rather than a constructive agonistic debate. As such, this study refutes previous studies that consider sceptic frames as deconstructive and non-sceptic frames as constructive.

Cuerpos impropios apropiando el espacio expropiado: las luchas de las mujeres trans en Tijuana

Las ciudades están habitadas por una diversidad de sujetos en cuyos cuerpos se inscriben experiencias de vida cotidiana diferenciadas, pues tanto lo corporal como lo espacial están atravesados por múltiples ejes de poder. El género es uno de esos ejes dado que opera como sistema de clasificación doblemente binario: lo femenino/masculino y lo normal/abyecto. Ello produce cuerpos periféricos y, así, tramas de sentido que trazan los itinerarios experienciales de las mujeres trans al ser leídas como cuerpos transgresores de la norma de género. Empleando el grupo de discusión y el trabajo de campo experiencial, este artículo recupera la experiencia colectiva de las trabajadoras sexuales trans de Tijuana (México) en defensa de su derecho a la no violencia tras numerosos casos de extorsión policiaca, problematizando desde el cuerpo/emociones su habitar urbano cotidiano. Dentro de los resultados, se analiza la producción de espacios contrapúblicos que resemantizan lo público, lo trans y lo femenino.

#WeAreBeneficiaries: Contesting Poverty Stigma Through Social Media

AbstractShowcasing stories of welfare beneficiaries in their own words, a recent Aotearoa (New Zealand)‐based campaign called “We Are Beneficiaries” used social media to create a space of contestation to the widespread stigmatisation of poverty. While existing literature strongly emphasises the role played by traditional media in constructing and reinforcing stigma, and has more recently begun to explore resistance and contestation, relatively few accounts address efforts, like the We Are Beneficiaries campaign, that seek to destigmatise poverty stigma via social media. Accordingly, this paper argues that social media can serve as a counterpublic space for the destigmatisation of poverty. By discussing how the We Are Beneficiaries campaign refuted stigmatising narratives, critiqued institutions and sought to build solidarity among and with welfare beneficiaries, the paper draws attention to the potential of social media in the development of counterdiscourses as well as new political identities and claims‐making.

Reclaiming Stigmatized Narratives

The social stigma looming over disclosures of sexual violence discourages many women from publicly sharing their stories, limiting their ability to seek support and obscuring the epidemic of sexual violence against women. By inviting women to share their ordinarily silenced stories, the hashtag #MeToo surfaced a network of survivors to confront this stigma. Through a mixed-methods analysis of over 1.8 million tweets posted during the first two weeks after #MeToo gained widespread popularity in 2017, we map the landscape of disclosures that emerged and disentangle the effects of network-level reciprocal disclosures, or disclosures made in reaction to seeing others disclose. We detail how survivors disclosed a diversity of sexual violence experiences in solidarity with others, composing nearly half of all authored tweets and comprising a disproportionate number of interactions within the #MeToo network. Further, we show that the more disclosures an individual potentially saw prior to disclosing, the more likely they were to share details with their disclosure. We argue that such network-level reciprocal disclosures may have reduced stigma, creating a counterpublic space safe for disclosure which, subsequently, generated more disclosures. Our work illustrates how feminist hashtag activism, like #MeToo, can unify individual and collective narratives to dismantle the stigma surrounding disclosures of sexual violence. Content warning: This article heavily discusses issues of sexual violence against women.

The Waste Products of the American Dream: framing Black cultural pathology in the dominant news media in times of crisis

ABSTRACTIn The Waste Products of the American Dream I argue that the ability to influence the popular narrative that frames the Black communities' public existence is critical if the Black urban poor is going to draw the nation’s attention to the structural and historical forces that create and continue to perpetuate concentrated Black poverty today. More specifically, enticing white “common sense” fears about Black life, culture, and space became a strategic political maneuver that conservative politicians began to use in the late 1960s by suggesting that all “civil rights brought was rioting.” The mainstream media would reproduce these narratives of Black criminality to further demonize low-income inner city communities and its inhabitants as the culprits of urban decay, delivering the state from any blame for the creation of concentrated poverty and the spatial mismatch that went along with social isolation. To illustrate how this discursive politics works to frame North Minneapolis and its residents as always already deviant, I did a comparative reading of the 2011 North Minneapolis tornado media coverage between the historic Black press and local mainstream press. I did this to show how important it is for the creation of Black counterpublic spaces that the historic Black press maintains as a way to take control of the community's narrative while also highlighting how the mainstream press simply relies on readily available stock narratives of Black cultural pathology which blame the victims of disaster for their plight with an uncanny similarity to Hurricane Katrina coverage.

Degrees of Freedom: Exploring Agency, Narratives, and Technological Affordances in the #TakeAKnee Controversy

This study extends current research into social media platforms as counterpublic spaces by examining how the social media narratives produced by the #TakeAKnee controversy negotiate technological affordances and existing discourses surrounding American national identity. Giddens’ Structuration Theory is used to explore the nature of user agency on social media platforms and the extent to which this agency is constrained or enabled by the interplay between the systems and structures that guide social media use. Exploratory qualitative content analysis was used to analyze and compare tweets and Instagram posts using the #TakeAKnee hashtag shared in September 2017. Results showed that narratives are dominated by four themes, freedom, unity, equality and justice, and respect and honor. Users actively employ technological affordances to create highly personalized meanings, affirming that agency operates at the intersection of reflexivity and self-efficacy.

Tumblr as counterpublic space for fan mobilization

When the animated TV shows Young Justice (2010–) and Green Lantern: The Animated Series (2011–13) were canceled, fans of the shows campaigned together to have both shows renewed. I refer to this campaign as #saveYJandGLTAS, a hashtag frequently used on internet posts related to the campaign. This case study investigates how Tumblr served as a counterpublic space for this movement, while other social media platforms served as the more public face of this campaign. Through my analysis, I draw conclusions about how fandoms operate and the changes occurring as a result in the relationships between the media industry, creators, and consumers.

Performance as place preservation: The role of storytelling in the formation of Shankleville Community's Black counterpublics

ABSTRACTFrom 1870 to 1920, previously enslaved Texans founded more than 540 ‘freedom colonies.’ Since then, descendants left behind seemingly intangible Black geographies where evidence of their placemaking has disappeared. However, in Shankleville, Texas, settlement founder descendants sustained attachments to, and stewardship of, their communities, even as the population decreased and physical manifestations of place dissipated. To understand how place attachments are sustained in Shankleville, I analyze descendants’ stories, storytelling practices, and the spaces in which these performances take place. In these counterpublic spaces, descendants reproduce an identity rooted in a foundational story about their freedom-seeking, fugitive slave founders. Their ritual performances of these stories at a sacred spring in Shankleville cement attachments and catalyze descendants’ involvement in heritage conservation and preservation projects. The meanings and values informing these commemorative practices disrupt commonly held assumptions about Black community formation, Black heritage, and what constitutes legitimate preservation practice.

Saving space: strategies of space reclamation at early women’s film festivals and queer film festivals today

LGBT/queer film festivals provide counter-public spaces for marginalised subjects to formulate community, negotiate identity and rally under political banners. At the same time, screening work by LGBT* filmmakers interpellates spectators into a common subject position and locates discursively ‘homeless’ subjects in space and time. The creation of queer, urban, community space is particularly vital in the current context of rapid urban gentrification which has resulted in the steady decline of queer venues in many Western urban centres. This article argues strategies of space re/claimation mobilised by LGBT/queer film festivals today can be conceptually understood in relation to women’s film events of the 1970s. Women’s film festivals staged a direct challenge to the social reality of gendered access to space and proposed alternative modes of spatial configuration. Focusing on UK- and US-based festivals, I will argue that it was precisely the way in which women’s film festivals, feminist filmmaking practices and theory informed each other that facilitated a multi-layered reclamation of both material and discursive space for women. Drawing on Jose Muñoz's work in Cruising Utopia, I will further argue that the occupation of space at LGBT/queer film festivals constitutes a radical political act that carries with it the potential of a queer utopia.