Politics Of Everyday Life Research Articles

When political talk translates into political action: The role of personality traits

Discussing politics in everyday life is quite common but it is not clear how talking politics should prompt the desire to become politically active. We compared two ideas: information gain, i.e., political talk translates into action when people receive information about activities and organizations; and social influence, i.e., political talk translates into action when people perceive their friends as politically active. Our main goal was to address the role played by two personality traits – Openness to Experience and Agreeableness – within these processes. Adopting a longitudinal design (N=895, sample of youths surveyed twice), we found that political talk promotes political participation over time when people perceive their discussion partners as politically active and that this effect is especially pronounced for agreeable people. Findings from this study provided support to the idea that political talk translates into political action under the condition of social influence and for people who are particularly susceptible to social conformity.

Machiavelli: A Portrait, by Christopher S. Celenza

Machiavelli: A Portrait, by Christopher S. Celenza. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2015. 256 pp. $24.95 US (cloth). What is there left to say about Niccolo Machiavelli? We are amid a flurry of anniversaries marking five hundred years since important milestones in Machiavelli's life. It seems that every year we are treated to more and more speculative texts, of greater and lesser degrees of seriousness, that attempt to apply the supposed insights of the Florentine secretary to management science, the conduct of business, even gender relations. He clearly remains on the brain and, because Machiavelli always thrust the burden of interpretation back on his readers, he finds reinterpretation in each generation. Christopher Celenza's spare yet elegant portrait breaks little new ground in our understanding of this seminal figure. Nonetheless, for those seeking an introduction to Machiavelli, it's a great starting point and is highly effective in addressing the question with which the author begins: why do we remain so fascinated by Machiavelli? There can be few historical figures who have elicited such a wide range of portrayals as has Machiavelli, from stenographer for tyranny to misunderstood advocate of liberty. Celenza explains why we must avoid such simple and lazy characterizations. First, Machiavelli was not what we would call a systematic thinker. He did not seek to offer programmatic solutions to the challenges of everyday political life. Instead his advice for men of state prescribed flexibility, foresight and decisiveness, a combination that called for different solutions according to the circumstances. Second, Celenza stresses that Machiavelli, like many Renaissance thinkers, worked out his ideas in conversation with others, using them as sounding boards, editors, and critics. Thus the image of Machiavelli, taken from his famous letter to Francesco Vettori, of a sage retreating to his scrittoio to converse in private with his beloved Ancients, is in fact deeply misleading. This focus on the social dimensions of the Machiavellian corpus is welcome. While Celenza ably describes the intellectual building blocks of Machiavelli's thought (especially his reading of ancient historians like Livy and Polybius), he points out that Machiavelli was not a scholar. Just as important to the formation of Machiavelli's outlook was his esperientia --Celenza emphasizes in particular the time he spent alongside Cesare Borgia as well as his role in organizing a militia for Florence while serving the Soderini regime. Machiavelli was an insightful observer of people, from the past and in his own day--he had, per Celenza, a proto-anthropological sensitivity. Certain human behaviours are timeless, whether in the pages of Livy or the streets of sixteenth-century Florence. Indeed, this interface between past and present was a recurring tension in Machiavelli's life and works; Celenza insists that Machiavelli was aware that he was vulnerable to accusations of excessive praise of the past, especially as he got older. …

Children, education and politics in everyday life: children, education and politics at a time of conflict – the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)

When studying any aspect of the lives of children during the Spanish Civil War, or an institution or educational model of that time, it becomes clear that many factors come into play, none of which can be considered in isolation. Children’s lives are inextricably bound up with the context in which they unfold and while academic research strives for concrete realities, it is only through the juxtaposition of a range of studies which explore the varied dimensions that make up community life that we can begin to gain a more panoramic vision of that context. This article, then, sets out to examine the impact of the communities within which the children of that time lived, communities that in large part were generated by the political and ideological struggles of the period.

Financialization of the Household and the Politics of Everyday Life

Financialization of the Household and the Politics of Everyday Life

Anguish, anger, and folkways in Soviet Russia

Anguish, Anger, and Folkways in Soviet Russia offers original perspectives on the politics of everyday life in the Soviet Union by closely examining the coping mechanisms individuals and leaders alike developed as they grappled with the political, social, and intellectual challenges the system presented before and after World War II. As Gabor T. Rittersporn shows, the little people employed in their daily lives not only helped them endure the rigors of life during the Stalin and post-Stalin periods but also strongly influenced the system's development into the Gorbachev and post-Soviet eras. For Rittersporn, citizens' conscious and unreflected actions at all levels of society defined a distinct Soviet universe. Terror, faith, disillusionment, evasion, folk customs, revolt, and confusion about regime goals and the individual's relation to them were all integral to the development of that universe and the culture it engendered. Through a meticulous reading of primary documents and materials uncovered in numerous archives located in Russia and Germany, Rittersporn identifies three related responses - anguish, anger, and folkways - to the pressures people in all walks of life encountered, and shows how these responses in turn altered the way the system operated. Rittersporn finds that the leadership generated widespread anguish by its inability to understand and correct the reasons for the system's persistent political and economic dysfunctions. Rather than locate the sources of these problems in their own presuppositions and administrative methods, leaders attributed them to omnipresent conspiracy and wrecking, which they tried to extirpate through terror. He shows how the unrelenting pursuit of enemies exacerbated systemic failures and contributed to administrative breakdowns and social dissatisfaction. Anger resulted as the populace reacted to the notable gap between the promise of a self-governing egalitarian society and the actual experience of daily existence under the heavy hand of the party-state. Those who had interiorized systemic values demanded a return to what they took for the original Bolshevik project, while others sought an outlet for their frustrations in destructive or self-destructive behavior. In reaction to the system's pressure, citizens instinctively developed strategies of noncompliance and accommodation. A detailed examination of these folkways enables Rittersporn to identify and describe the mechanisms and spaces intuitively created by officials and ordinary citizens to evade the regime's dictates or to find a modus vivendi with them. Citizens and officials alike employed folkways to facilitate work, avoid tasks, advance careers, augment their incomes, display loyalty, enjoy life's pleasures, and simply to survive. Through his research, Rittersporn uncovers a fascinating world consisting of peasant stratagems and subterfuges, underground financial institutions, falsified Supreme Court documents, and associations devoted to peculiar sexual practices. As Rittersporn shows, popular and elite responses and tactics deepened the regime's ineffectiveness and set its modernization project off down unintended paths. Trapped in a web of behavioral patterns and social representations that eluded the understanding of both conservatives and reformers, the Soviet system entered a cycle of self-defeat where leaders and led exercised less and less control over the course of events. In the end, a new system emerged that neither the establishment nor the rest of society could foresee.

Transforming Alyosha into Superman: Invented Traditions and Street Art Subversion in Post-Communist Bulgaria

On June 17th 2011 graffiti artists transformed the West side of the Monument of the Soviet Army (MSA) in Sofia, Bulgaria. MSA comprises part of a spatial environment where the invented traditions of the Bulgarian state interact and compete. The art of provocation challenges those invented traditions and opens up the potential for alternative readings and discursive practices of the past and present, contrary to the official political and NGO discourse. As such it subverts ideological symbols in a fashion similar to the carnivalesque. The graffiti art provides the potential to reevaluate, bridge and connect a violent past with an equally violent present, as well as pose questions about the future. It signifies the presence of history and politics in everyday life.

Неокорпоративізм як механізм взаємодії між державою та групами інтересів

У статті розглядається неокорпоративізм як механізм забезпечення стабільних та продуктивних взаємовідносин держави і суспільства. Ключову роль у системі цих взаємовідносин відіграють групи інтересів, які репрезентують головних акторів цього процесу – бізнес та громадянське суспільство. Діяльність таких груп інтересів, що шукають шляхи впливу на процес прийняття рішень і на переорієнтацію владних структур відповідно до інтересів своїх членів, є фактором повсякденного політичного життя України. Тому тема неокорпоративізму все більше привертає увагу вчених, постійно зростає кількість теоретичних і дослідницьких робіт присвячених розгляду досвіду неокорпоративізму на Заході і аналізу взаємодії груп інтересів і держави в умовах переходу до неодемократії. Автор робить висновок, що українській державі слід створити правову нішу для легітимного функціонування підприємницьких спілок та асоціацій, що зможуть легітимно впливати на політику державних органів і визначити, з одного боку, допустимий оптимум коридору економічної свободи, а з іншого - максимально вмонтувати механізми ринкового саморегулювання в структури реалізації функцій держави.

Crafting, Cooking, and Constructing Histories: Women and the Politics of Everyday Life along the Falémé River (ca. AD 1000–1900)

Recent archaeological research in Africa has moved to illuminate the dynamic ways in which cultural identities such as ethnicity and caste have intersected with regional histories. Along these same lines, this paper focuses on the roles of women within the processes of frontier and periphery that shaped, and were shaped by, daily life within the precolonial landscape of Upper Senegal. Focusing on historical and archaeological evidence from past settlements along the Faleme River, this paper explores how the production of pottery vessels, and their use within domestic routines of food storage and preparation, may have played into political economic relations between and beyond local communities during the second millennium AD. Insofar as these craft and culinary practices lay within the gendered domain of women, they add insight into the contributions of craftswomen and female household makers to local and regional histories.

Affect, Consumption, and Identity at a Buenos Aires Shopping Mall

This paper explores the built environment of a shopping mall in light of recent theoretical interventions that stress the affective dimensions of everyday political life. By drawing on sixteen weeks of ethnographic fieldwork at a shopping mall in central Buenos Aires, Argentina, I explore how retail affects are unevenly distributed across a diverse public, and how different bodies, in turn, affect the mall in particular ways. In short, this paper explores embodiment as an affective experience that coheres around raced, classed, and gendered bodies at the mall. As such, this paper helps clarify how ethnographic research can benefit from nonrepresentational theory and the ‘new materialism’ literature that challenges prevailing conceptual approaches to the politics of consumption.

Enclaves, insecurity and violence in Karachi

This article presents conditions of insecurity and violence in Karachi in relation to an emerging geography whereby the city is fragmented into various enclaves of business, leisure and residence. Such enclaves have proliferated as a response to impotent public security in the face of rising urban violence and insecurity. Focusing on residential enclaves, which are primarily privately securitized spaces that attempt to restrict unwanted circulation, I emphasize the paradox of Karachi’s enclavization. Although the city is fast morphing into an archipelago of enclaves, Karachi continues to be drawn into a vortex of violence, and residents remain insecure. In this article, I investigate this paradox through a relational study of enclavization, insecurity and violence. I argue although enclaves in Karachi emerge as a tactic to deal with everyday insecurity and violence, the socio-political conditions generated by processes of enclavization create circumstances that produce a continuum of violence. This argument is illustrated through an analysis of two case studies, Clifton Block 7 and Sultanabad, which are both residential enclaves within Karachi. The case studies are an output of qualitative field research that focused on the politics of everyday life within enclaved spaces in relation to the city ‘outside’. Analysis demonstrates that enclaves are spaces of subjectivity that also create contradictions of security and insecurity, and generate vulnerabilities of inclusion and exclusion. The article also demonstrates how such enclaves emerge as urban political actors that shift existing state–society relations. In conclusion, it presents a critical analysis of emerging connections between enclavization and insecurity, which proves that the causes and consequences of enclaves, insecurity and violence exist in a continuum.

Doctors that Harm, Doctors that Heal: Reimagining Medicine in Post-Conflict Aceh, Indonesia

ABSTRACTThis article explores the fears and desires that conflict survivors invest in biomedicine in post-conflict Aceh, Indonesia. After examining common criticisms of Acehnese doctors, I go on to discuss the practise of Acehnese medical travel to Malaysia and the desirable depictions of biomedicine that are generated through cross-border clinical encounters. Building on Pinto [2004. Development Without Institutions: Ersatz Medicine and the Politics of Everyday Life in Rural North India. Cultural Anthropology, 19(3):337–364], I argue that in the post-conflict period, biomedicine acts as both a site of terror and ‘point of imagination and longing’ that guides my interlocutors' understandings of the changing world around them. The article brings debates about medicine and violence into dialogue with a body of post-conflict ethnography, showing how popular imaginaries of biomedicine can shape the process of post-conflict world building.

Polyvocal ethnography as a means of developing inter-cultural understanding of pedagogy and practice

The research project described in this article began because two early childhood organisations, one in England and the other in Ireland, were interested in sharing their ideas about pedagogy. The proposal was to collect data about pedagogic perspectives and practices from one preschool setting linked to each organisation so that similarities and difference between them could be raised and possible implications for further training and development could be discussed. The methodology used was polyvocal ethnography, drawing on the method used by Tobin et al. (1989. Preschool in Three Cultures. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Two episodes from a day in the life of each setting were filmed and the staff teams were invited to discuss and critically reflect on their own and each other's practices. These discussions provided the data. To begin with, the data was analysed in terms of established ‘best practice’. Then, with encouragement from two ‘critical friends’, the researchers shifted towards more critical engagement with the data, raising questions about the values, goals and agendas embedded in the identified pedagogic practices. The shift generated troubling perspectives, uncertainty, conflict and more questions than answers. The article focuses on the challenges in critical reflection and the researchers' ‘felt’ experience of conflict. It alerts the practitioner researcher and the reader to the cultural, political and personal aspects in research and proposes an obligation to engage in argumentation (Shotter, J. 1993. Cultural Politics of Everyday Life. Milton Keynes: Open University) or ‘agonistic politics’ (Moss, P. 2007. “Meetings Across the Paradigmatic Divide.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 39: 229–245) so that ‘dominant discourses’ and ‘taken-for-granted truths’ are challenged. It advocates the use of polyvocal ethnography as an education tool that can make critique between teachers and learners possible. While the scale of this research is extremely limited and the findings consequently extremely tentative, the method has the possibility of generating more democratic debate, more hegemonic resistance and more openness and honesty among practitioner researchers.

The influence of transformational policies on the operational competitiveness of South African businesses

Since the dawn of democracy in South Africa in 1994, transformational policies such as black economic empowerment (BEE) and affirmative action (AA) have increasingly and inextricably become part of the everyday political, economic and social life of its populace. As a result, South African businesses are subject to a whole array of mandatory regulations which ostensibly influence their operational capabilities to effectively and efficiently compete in national and global markets. In a survey of the largest 500 (including the top 100 JSE listed) companies in South Africa, it appears that transformational policies are positively supported and endorsed, although their impact on the operational competitiveness of these companies is largely unclear and unknown. A number of warning signs, however, are now being detected from reports in the popular media and in the academic literature about the possible negative consequences of such policies. BEE malpractices, which basically result in the continuation of past injustices against the majority of poor and unskilled people of the country, are becoming increasingly evident. Even more alarming is the fact that the corruption, nepotism and self-enrichment that accompany most BEE transactions are attributed to the ruling ANC political elite.

Yi Tae-jun’s Long Novels and the ‘Politics of Everyday Life’ as a Critique for the Total Mobilization under Japanese Rule

Yi Tae-jun’s Long Novels and the ‘Politics of Everyday Life’ as a Critique for the Total Mobilization under Japanese Rule

The Child-Body-Politic: Afterword on ‘Children and Young People's Politics in Everyday Life’

The phrase ‘body-politic’ is often deployed to mean all of the people comprising a given ‘political’ unit, perhaps a country, nation or state, and sometimes conceived as the multitudes ruled over b...

Children and Young People's Politics in Everyday Life

This Special Issue presents a decennial follow-up to the Space and Polity 2003 Special Issue ‘Political geographies of children and young people’, edited by Chris Philo and Fiona M. Smith. The foll...

America, modernity, and democratization of everyday life: Japanese women's magazines during the occupation period

During the post-war occupation period in Japan (1945–1952), a number of political and legal reforms were conducted under the GHQ/SCAP's initiatives. Enhancement of women's rights was one of the major targets of GHQ/SCAP's policies, and existing studies have examined if the reforms have actually achieved the democratization of Japanese gender relations. This paper challenges some of the assumptions made in previous studies, and has revealed how images of women and femininity were recreated and consumed during that time. Rather than discussing how GHQ/SCAP democratized Japanese society, this study explores how ‘democracy’ was re-conceptualized in Japanese women's magazines, which were some of the most popular and influential forms of cultural media during the period. The paper demonstrates how the notion of democracy was understood as a way of life, rather than as a particular type of political structure, and how white middle-class American women were illustrated as the model of Japanese women. The author discusses how the Occupation period was a time where the notion of democracy was integrated into women's everyday life sphere, and America became the reference point in the Japanese woman's everyday life politics.

The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France: Foreigners, Undesirables and Strangers

Shannon Fogg’s valuable tome is an amended version of a doctoral thesis undertaken under the expert guidance of Sarah Farmer. Fogg offers a ‘bottom up’ approach, exploring how everyday life in the period 1939–1944 affected social attitudes towards groups of outsiders in the Limousin region, in other words the Corrèze, Creuse and Haute-Vienne départements of central France. The author emphasises how the value of specific regions changed as a result of the war and occupation. The Limousin had been an area of little strategic value and very limited political clout. During the Occupation, the region became something of a haven: it sheltered numerous groups of rural resisters, known as Maquisards, but also various categories of refugees: Alsatians, Spaniards, Roma/Gypsies and Jews. Central to the everyday concerns of locals and refugees alike were the difficulties of finding enough to eat. By 1944, 24 per cent of the letters intercepted by Vichy’s postal censors made reference to food shortages and by that stage official ration cards were offering perhaps as little as 900 calories per day, when recommended daily category intakes are of between 2400 and 2800. Fogg describes how city dwellers transformed themselves from passive shoppers into active hunter-gatherers with excursions into the countryside to find provisions. Faced with the difficult circumstances of the occupation, she argues that communities saw refugees not only as strangers but also as potential threats, or indeed sometimes benefits, to their local economy and culture.

‘A true Iraqi’: blogging from the Green Zone in post-invasion Iraq

The use of digital spaces to record everyday experiences and speak against oppression has taken on different forms throughout the Middle East over the last decade. Following the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, Iraqi women used online spaces to grapple with the politics of everyday life – growing up and working in war-torn Iraq. In this paper we engage with one Iraqi woman – Neurotic Iraqi Wife (or ‘Neurotica’) – who works and blogs from Iraq’s Green Zone. Neurotica questions her presence in the Americanized Green Zone and agonizes over her identity as a married ‘Iraqi expat’. Her blog tells a story of movement, struggle, alienation, longing and nostalgia. In her blog, Neurotica practises a digital self that questions political processes, occupation, intervention and her own presence in Iraq. Her blog offers a glimpse into a life-world shaped during a time of war, social chaos and violence.

Interrupting practices that want to matter

PurposeThis article aims to explore construction, production and distribution of environmental information in social media. Specifically, the focus is on people's accounts in social media of their everyday life practices aimed at leading what are considered environmentally friendly lives. The article seeks to establish how through the reproduction of alignments of certain everyday and domestic practices with environmental destruction and protection situated information on the environment is constructed and made available.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on a qualitative, interpretative analysis of content, materiality and form of blogs and of their enmeshed social media applications, dedicated specifically to aspects of environmentally friendly everyday life. The blogs were selected from an interlinked set of 60 Swedish language environment blogs.FindingsFormal, topical and social arrangements give priority to certain material conditions and practices that then underpin a set of dominant versions of a greener life, while others remain submerged. The routinised alignment of certain practices with the environment is indispensable for environmental information to work. However, breaking with routines and re‐arranging practices is what makes them possible in the first place. De‐routinisation and the culturally non‐habitual character make for the informational value of material practices and of practices of engagement.Social implicationsThe study contributes to the understanding of what makes environmental information meaningful in everyday life. This has potential implications for policy making and information campaigns in the area.Originality/valueEnvironmental issues are an underrepresented area of research in LIS. This article contributes to the development of this research area in the field. Furthermore, uniting a practice approach with a theoretical interest in everyday life politics is a novel addition to studies of social engagement in online environments.