Politics Of Everyday Life Research Articles

Dilema Demokrasi Elektoral

The practice of democracy is not the same as as its theory. People's sovereignty is often derailed by power-hungry political elites. Even though people in the Reform era are no longer expected to only play a limited role or merely as a giver or renew political legitimacy or as mere objects of political activity. It is worried because the practice of electoral democracy is felt further away from the spirit of democratic principles. There is still widespread behavior that justifies any means that is contrary to the values and principles of democracy, such as: politicization of SARA (suku, agama, ras, antargolongan) or politics of identity, criminalization of political opponents, dissemination of hoaxes, hate speeches, and intimidation, unneutral state apparatus, or election organizers, practices of money politics, sound auction and bribery, document forgery and manipulation of operating procedures. As a result, elected leaders often do not serve the people. All policies taken are often biased in the interests of the ruling elite or the interests of investors, and tend to be very minimal even without involving the people. In the future bad practices should not be continued and should be replaced by a shared commitment to establish substantial democracy by upholding law and justice. Stop the electoral democracy is only a lip-service of a five-year democratic party and must have a real contribution to the improvement of the nation. Electoral democracy must be an arena of healthy competition to get someone who is qualified and able to be a leader in an effort to realize common goals of just prosperity. If it fails to uphold a substantial democracy in everyday political life, then it does not only mean the castration of people's sovereignty or the failure of democracy alone, but the destruction of the Republic of Indonesia will be at stake.

Chinese migrants and the politics of everyday life in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACTWhile there has been a rapid migration of Chinese nationals to Zimbabwe following the ‘Look East’ policy, there has been little research on and about how the Chinese migrants relate and interact with locals and how they negotiate their social identities thereof. This paper examines Chinese small-scale traders in Harare, in particular their mundane forms of the everyday, with specific focus on their social and business practices, social relations and interactions with the locals. Drawing on qualitative ethnographic research with small-scale Chinese traders, workers and clients in Harare, this paper argues that as Chinese traders devise and deploy various tactics and strategies to adapt and get-by in the city of Harare, new and unique forms of Chineseness emerge akin to what some scholars referred to as ‘tactical cosmopolitanism’. The paper further reveals how Chinese mobility reconfigures the ways in which Chinese identities and Chineseness are enacted and articulated in Harare.

Parliament of things and enactment of third entities: object-subject/subject-object encounters from cuban urban gardens to United States’ robotic labs

ABSTRACTThings/objects/materials/nonhumans are integral components of everyday material ecology of humans. The nonhuman elements contribute to sociality, socialization and configuration of political subjectivities. We explore the dynamics of subject-object relationships via ethnographies of urban gardens and robotic labs. We trace the dynamics of man-plant relationships in urban gardens of Cuba and engineer-humanoid relationships in the United States to highlight how these relationships inform the politics and ethical complexity of human-centred ecologies. This collaborative effort offers two different case studies to broaden the notions of materiality while critiquing the relationality bound between subjects and objects instead of exploring the emergent properties of their relationship. Our ethnographies are a form of hands-on anthropology that outlines the third entity that emerges from the subject-object relationship and configures the material ecology of everyday lives. Our discussion contributes to the complexities of politics of everyday life and to the challenges of our contemporary era by highlighting the importance of details of everyday lives and how we craft relationships with nonhuman people.

The Personal Is Political Yet Again: Bringing Struggles between Gender Equality and Gendered Next of Kin onto the Feminist Agenda

In spite of feminist criticism of the welfare state, Norwegian society is frequently perceived as gender-equal. As a truism of public discourse, gender equality affirms a neoliberal understanding of individuals as able to act independently and to freely choose their course in life. This article disrupts that truism with an analysis of a transitional process that occurred to a seemingly free and gender-equal married woman whose everyday life took an unexpected turn at the age of 50 when her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Using an abductive method, we construct a narrative with this woman as the main character. We then use the narrative as an optical device for scrutinizing encounters between the notions “free and gender-equal woman” and “gendered next of kin”, analysing the situated becoming of gender and understanding the encounters’ potential for agency and resistance. The inquiry brings a pattern of gendered encounters into being, demonstrating how a seemingly free and gender-equal woman’s strength and independence become subordinating weaknesses in encounters with the welfare state. This paradox raises questions about the politics of everyday life in a presumably gender-equal society, brings new struggles onto the feminist agenda, and demands that the personal becomes political yet again.

Review: Mohamed Zayani, Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia

Review: Mohamed Zayani, <i>Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia</i>

Milestones in the Foundation and Role of the Most Significant International Organizations against Money Laundering in the European Union

In this two-piece study, the author introduces the most important international organizations and institutions fighting against money laundering of our time, through the main chapters of the formation of the international institutional system. The first part is focused on the creation of the international institutional system fighting against money laundering.By the 21st century the phenomenon of money laundering—with the need of the laundering of gradually increasing “dirty” money, mainly from drugs, weapons and human trafficking, prostitution and corruption—has become a worldwide problem. With the increasing organization of international criminal groups—taking advantage of the free movement of money and financial services—are using more and more refined techniques to get more profits with their illegal activities. Money laundering will not leave terrorism untouched—casting a shadow on our everyday life—as particular radical groups use every means necessary to lay their hands on money sources anonymously needed for their existence, as it supplies their destructive actions; and naturally procuring this money the best sources are the money laundered by criminals. Recognising the money laundering and the negative and destructive effects of new crimes on everyday economic, financial and political life based on laundering, the leading countries of the world started international legislation against money laundering and terrorism which laws and codes are strictly regulating the different financial and bank supervision of the nation states. Despite the onsetting difficulties and indecisiveness, it was clear for the European Union that only strong international collaboration—and the unified understanding of measures—is the only power to stop the spread of money laundering.

Drama Out of a Crisis? Poststructuralism and the Politics of Everyday Life

Time and again we have been told that poststructuralism is in crisis. Poststructuralism, we hear, is ontologically exhausted, epistemologically and normatively confused, and politically irrelevant to the contemporary economic and institutional conditions that have already domesticated, assimilated and recuperated it. While there is clearly merit and provocation in such critiques, for us, they underestimate the extent to which poststructuralist concepts can be transformed and made relevant to concerns we may have in our current political conjuncture. In order to counter those who would simply dismiss and depoliticise poststructuralist thought as crisis-ridden or politically outmoded, we will suggest that poststructuralism is a drama that we can productively participate in, here and now. Furthermore, we think this poststructuralist drama should be played out in the rough and tumble of everyday political life. There is what we will call a ‘politics of everyday life’ to be found in the poststructuralist archive, and the poststructuralist archive can be recast, revitalised and even transformed when placed into the light and life of the everyday.

Sportsmanship and Politics: Xenophon on Ponos and Democratic Competition

ABSTRACTEven though agonistic democratic theory espouses and celebrates competition, it seemingly lacks a coherent ethic for decent winning and losing in everyday political life. This article is an effort to fill this void by suggesting a practice-based, non-perfectionist ethic drawn from sport. Focusing on Xenophon's On Hunting, we argue that sport, properly defined, offers an appropriate experience with ponos (toil, suffering) that teaches citizens perseverance, humility, generosity, empathy, and stewardship. This sporting ethic, we argue, provides a more suitable model for winning and losing in public life than the martial basis of agonistic democratic theory.

Book Review: Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia

Book Review: Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia

Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia

Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia

Reading Popular Music Festivals through the Lens of Public Sphere

The core idea of Jurgen Habermas public sphere has to do with forming a public made of private individuals who participate in civic dialogue on issues of common interest. A public so formed generates public opinion through the formation of a communicative network. This essay argues that the communicative network of the public sphere which is known to be strengthened by its cultural connects through press and mass media can also be shaped by popular music culture like hip-hop, rock or electronic dance music. A cultural public sphere is comprised of numerous networks of mass and popular culture which help in shaping the participants’ articulations of politics, both public and personal. Cultural public sphere marks the entry of affective modes of communication as effectual participation in the politics of everyday life. In this article, the author tries to position the role of popular music cultures in the formation of a public sphere by studying three distinct forms of popular music- hip-hop, rock and electronic dance music. The idea is to understand the role of the communities formed due the affective mode of popular music and the efficacies granted to these social groups in the larger context of a public sphere. Another important dimension of studying these forms of popular music is to understand music festivals as active sites for the realisation of a public sphere. Drawing from Durkheim’s idea of how festivals harness within them a ‘collective effervescence’ which he found to be an integral element to aid in instilling feelings of solidarity in a community, this essays tries to locate the popular music festival sites within the framework of a cultural public sphere by conducting an in depth literature review on how the traditional public sphere is critiqued from the vantage point of a cultural public sphere; how popular culture texts and practices inform these critiques and finally how music festival sites act as public spheres.

Mohamed Zayani, Networked publics and digital contention: The politics of everyday life in Tunisia

Mohamed Zayani, <i>Networked publics and digital contention: The politics of everyday life in Tunisia</i>

Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia

Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia

Book review: Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia

Book review: <i>Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia</i>

Zayani, M. Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Zayani, M. Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Mohamed Zayani, Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia

<i>Mohamed Zayani</i>, Networked Publics and Digital Contention: The Politics of Everyday Life in Tunisia

“There is the Black Man’s Story and the White Man’s Story”: Narratives of Self and the Valence of “Stories” in Postapartheid Culture

SummaryTaking into its purview the marked tendency in postapartheid culture to emphasise self-narrativisation, this article examines “self-voicing” in conceptual terms, citing and discussing scholars who have commented on similar trends. The article then considers a more specific case in which narratives of the self loom large, namely Jonny Steinberg’s non-fiction work, The Number. In this book, Steinberg not only interweaves several instances of self-storying, but he also shows that narrative relays – in which the self becomes an entity that is susceptible to shaping – are themselves caught up in the politics of everyday life, and of cultural contestation more generally, rendering them contingent. The article concludes with a brief consideration of Achille Mbembe’s 2015 Facebook intervention in which he warns, in the wake of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, against the meta-text of an allconsuming preoccupation with the bogey of whiteness.

Networked publics and digital contention: the politics of everyday life in Tunisia

Foreword Acknowledgements I. Introduction: On Digital Contention and Everyday Life II. The Mirage of Progress: A Nation's Unfulfilled Promise III. A Crisis of Authority: Offline Activism and Simmering Discontent IV. Cyber Activism Comes of Age: Activists, Diasporas and Networks V. The Politicization of the Blogosphere: When Diarists Become Activists VI. The Battle over Internet Control: From the Web to the Street VII. Mediatizing the Revolution: The Appeal of Social Networks VIII. Post-Revolutionary Dynamics: Changes and Challenges Appendix Notes References Index

Sexual democracy, cultural alterity and the politics of everyday life in Amsterdam

ABSTRACTCultural and religious alterity, associated with postcolonial and labour migrants and their descendants, has become a matter of growing contention across Europe. Various scholars have discussed the situation in the Netherlands as exemplary of European anxieties about national cohesion and cultural homogeneity in which culturalized and racialized conceptions of the nation and its Others are central. Mepschen examines how these public discourses and politics are played out in the context of a pluri-ethnic, working-class neighbourhood in Amsterdam New West. Taking an ethnographic approach, he points to the ways in which ‘white’ Dutch citizens—imagined and construed as autochthonous, literally ‘born from the Earth itself’—come to recognize themselves in, identify with and appropriate the images and rhetorics that circulate within culturalist, autochthonic symbolic economies. Following up on his previous work, Mepschen focuses here on the role played by discourses surrounding sexual liberty and LGBTIQ rights in these dynamics. Continuing with an ethnographic approach, he foregrounds the complex interplay of religion, secularism and sexuality in the ‘making’ and ‘doing’ of autochthony in an everyday, local context, a complexity that is lost in much of the existing analyses of Dutch multiculturalism.

Mass-Observation, Left Intellectuals and the Politics of Everyday Life

Abstract This article examines the careers of a number of left thinkers who broke with the Communist Party of Great Britain in the late 1930s, committing themselves instead to a ‘politics of everyday life’ based on social investigation. Central to this moment was the social research organisation Mass-Observation, the sociologists of which argued that democracy should be built around the vibrancy and irreverence they identified in ordinary culture. This ambition gained its fullest application during the 1940s, as a number of former M-O researchers became influential in the social reconstruction effort, in Labour Party policy circles and, later, in post-war academic sociology. By tracing the sociological arguments of unaligned left intellectuals from the 1930s to the 1950s, this article emphasises the rich plurality of influences at play within British progressive thought in the mid-twentieth century—influences which spanned the worlds of far-left activism, literature, art, the social sciences, town planning and parliamentary politics. It also helps us to reassess the genesis of the first ‘New Left’ in 1956. This is often hailed as the moment when British socialists first started to appreciate ordinary culture, freed from political dogmatism. In fact, left intellectuals had been engaging with the politics of everyday life for at least two decades previously. Indeed, the nostalgic accent which some New Left writers placed on the traditional working-class group was but one facet of a more heterogeneous political tradition—one concerned to think beyond ‘class’ altogether, and to examine how culture operated at the level of the individual.