Historical Contest Research Articles

“Why Is America Interested in Islam in Turkey?”: Fieldwork and Problems of Gaining Trust in a Low-Trust Society

When researchers think of access disruptions, they tend to think of factors exogenous to a field site, those emerging from nationwide events or global crises. Especially in semiauthoritarian contexts, such as Turkey, where ongoing historical contestations (over human rights, minority rights, and freedom of expression) as well as current political polarizations have created a volatile institutional and social environment, ethnographers are more likely to find their fieldwork disrupted. In this essay, I draw attention to a different kind of disruption, one that arises from the endogenous character of the local field site. In particular, I discuss the impact of low interpersonal trust on fieldwork. While gaining access and establishing trust are universal challenges in ethnographic research, the issue is particularly a formidable one in Turkey.

‘I was not know for sure what be the Queen, Evan; was you?’: Fictions of Development in Amy Dillwyn’s <i>The Rebecca Rioter</i>

Amy Dillwyn’s The Rebecca Rioter (1880) combines attention to a historical contest over infrastructure with a narrative of personal development defined by infrastructural lack. Dillwyn thus uses the capaciousness of the novel form to offer a distinctly Welsh perspective on the connections between three intersecting nineteenth-century discourses of development: infrastructural improvement, education, and national civilization. The article begins by situating Dillwyn’s novel within the infrastructural imagination of ‘Victorian Britain’, examining how contrasting images of absent and intrusive infrastructure frame Evan’s recollections. I place the novel in dialogue with a central document in the political and cultural life of modern Wales: the 1847 Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales, which castigated the Welsh for their failure to develop in step with modern British civilization, citing linguistic and religious differences as key obstacles to advancement. On the surface, Dillwyn’s narrative reflects the report’s assumptions, depicting its rural Welsh setting as a wilderness, where modern infrastructures are only tenuously established. The second part of the article, however, explores how the novel complicates these initial impressions, revealing a text that is finely attuned to the complexities of Wales’s status in Britain. Overall, this article seeks to demonstrate that, while the novel’s form, especially Evan’s retrospective narrative, foregrounds the power of infrastructures to shape individual, communal, and national futures, the text continually modulates between the project of imagining shared, collective foundations of individual development and the expression of anxieties about infrastructures’ potential to suppress cultural heterogeneity and political dissent.

Narrating religious processions in Visigothic Iberia: a sociology of saintly power

ABSTRACT The sources for Visigothic-era Iberia include several vivid accounts of processions at which royal power was presented forcefully to the people. Narratives of the triumphs of the martyrs over their persecutors function very differently, as those who had formerly been subject to abject humiliation were turned into victorious emblems of local resistance to hegemonic imperial authority. This article argues that through their adaptations of hagiographical and martyrological traditions, the ecclesiastical authors of the Visigothic era articulated a vision of the ideal relationship between leaders and their followers that was constructed through the display of consensus and reciprocity. Stories about saints moving through and displaying their power within urban space, accompanied by their entourages (or enemies) in front of friendly (or hostile) audiences reflect an attempt to negotiate and assert control over contemporary urban space in the context of historical contestation. The inclusion of such examples in texts that were deployed repeatedly in liturgical contexts would have helped to shape expectations about the nature of power and its appropriate (and inappropriate) performance, also configuring thinking about relationships between those who saw themselves as belonging to the Christian civic community and those who were excluded from it.

A State of (Dis)unity and Uncertain Belonging: The Central African Republic and its Muslim Minority

Abstract This article examines how existing in a larger socio-political environment of contested national belonging shapes Muslims’ experiences in the Central African Republic (car). We draw on data gathered between 2017 and 2019 from various archival sources and in-depth interviews with Muslim religious leaders and non-Muslims in car’s capital, Bangui. We argue that through claims to autochthony a dual logic of exclusion co-occurs which shapes how Muslims experience their minority status. First, national level autochthony debates frame Muslim minority exclusion from the Central African national imagination. Second, at the Muslim intra-communal level, and particularly among religious leaders, autochthony encapsulates debates over “authentic” Muslimhood – fuelled not by contestation over Islamic practice and interpretation, but rather historical contestation based on ethnic exclusion. Specifically, we show that claims to “proper” Central African Muslimhood are premised on autochthony embedded in a dominant myth of primary settlement advanced by certain Muslim leaders.

The Production of Space at Pieter Roos Park: Public Space as a Lens into Johannesburg’s Changing Public Culture 1968–2019

ABSTRACT Johannesburg and South Africa’s history and contingencies of colonisation, apartheid and a complex transition to democracy shaped different iterations of Pieter Roos Park. I argue that the dynamics and contingencies of the park in turn played a role in shaping those same histories. Using public space as a lens into history is revealing of how the formation of different publics and their resultant conflicts have produced a public culture of contestation that is embedded in Johannesburg. These dynamics were refracted and reflected in Pieter Roos Park, the development, management and use of which contributed to the changing public culture of the city. Lefebvre’s spatial triad helps reveal how different drivers, motivations and processes interact to produce space, cutting through different levels of complexity and temporality in the interactions between public space and spatial (in)justice. Based primarily on archival research and interviews, this article shows how historical contestations that shaped the production of space at Pieter Roos Park demonstrate its shifting potential for publicness and spatial justice. This offers new insight into the micro-level realities of tensions and opposing sentiments that shaped public space and public culture during apartheid and the transition to democracy.

Jewish-Christian Identities in Conflict: The Cases of Fr. Daniel Rufeisen and Fr. Elias Friedman

The status of Jewish identity in cases of conversion to another religion is a contentious issue and was brought to the forefront of public attention with the 1962 court case of Oswald Rufeisen, a Jewish convert to Christianity known as Br. Daniel, which led to a shift in the way that the state of Israel defines Jewish identity for the purposes of citizenship. At the same time, however, another test case in conflicting interpretations of Jewish identity after conversion was playing out in Rufeisen’s own monastery, hidden to the public eye. Of the fifteen monks who lived together in the Stella Maris Monastery in Haifa, two were Jewish converts, both of whom converted during the Second World War and later immigrated to Israel. Both outspoken advocates for their own understanding of Jewish identity, Rufeisen and his fellow Carmelite Fr. Elias Friedman expressed interpretations of Jewish-Christian religious identity that are polarized and even antagonistically oppositional at times. This paper argues that the intimately related histories and opposing interpretations of Rufeisen and Friedman parallel the historical contestation between Judaism and Christianity. It investigates their overlapping and yet divergent views, which magnify questions of Jewish identity, Catholic interpretations of Judaism, Zionism, Holocaust narratives, and proselytism.

Reaching High: Translating Emergent Practices of Street-Level Drug Users to Institute Harm Reduction in Durban—Implications for Urban Governance

Problematic drug use is a growing problem in South African urban spaces. In Durban, as in other cities in the country, the dominant response of the capital-oriented Municipality has been to make drug use invisible through prohibition and a promotion of abstinence approaches. This governance mentality and technology has failed dismally, evidenced in the rise of street-level heroin use. During the COVID-19 hard lockdown, the municipality was forced to re-examine its governance approach to drug use, taking guidance from non-state actors in an attempt to more effectively reduce the harms associated with drug use. In tracing the historical contestations around street-level drug use in Durban, this paper shares the untold story of how, when prompted by an unforeseen crisis, a municipality was able to successfully shift its mentality and technology in governing street-level drug use. Drawing conceptually on nodal governance theory and the quadruple helix approach, it reveals the complexities of urban governance processes and demonstrates the power of political opportunities, the transformative role of unexpected consequences, and the importance of informed political leadership. It also shows how multi-stakeholder partnership projects can be a useful mechanism not only to implement innovative and creative policy goals, but also to build robust relationships to navigate the manifestation of informal urbanism. It also calls for governing through harm minimisation rather than through actuarial risk management approaches that are closely associated with a neoliberal agenda.

Indigeneity, Transgression and the Body: Orientalism and Biblification in the Popular Imaging of Palestinians

ABSTRACT This article considers how the representation of Palestinians in popular imaging has shifted from the nineteenth century to the current day. It will utilise a mixture of popular media, including photography, portraiture, film, political posters and television. This longitudinal study charts the relationship of Orientalism and biblification as imaging systems – and their respective connotations of familiarity and otherness – in delineating questions of indigeneity and transgression as they pertain to the Palestinian body. It will analyse how biblification and Orientalism have operated to effect transformations in the projection and reception of the Palestinian body, both in western and Palestinian authored imagery. This analysis is underscored with questions of class, urban-rural divides and modernity in Palestine. Analysing the continuities, contestation and transformation shaping the imaging of the Palestinian body, this article focuses on the figures of the fellah, the fedayee and the infiltrator. It argues the Palestinian body was transformed from an indigenous, biblified vestige to an orientalised outsider status, with continuing impacts on contemporary representations. It considers how the historical contestation of Palestinian bodies has continued to impact contemporary popular narratives.

Experiencia de articulación e integración en prácticas de docencia, investigación y extensión en educación superior

En este artículo se presentan diferentes procesos transitados desde la Universidad Nacional Río Cuarto en relación al camino a la integralidad. Se mencionan las acciones e historia del Consejo Social Universitario, como actor central de vinculación y articulador de las prácticas de aprendizaje, investigación y extensión, dado que deben darse de manera contextualizada e inserta en la realidad que se atraviesa.
 En tal sentido se avanza hacia la creación de mecanismos institucionales que den respuesta a las problemáticas, con programas institucionales. Se pretenden la integralidad, comprendida como la articulación de actores sociales y universitarios que conciben el hacer profundamente ligado al actual contexto socio-histórico. 
 Esta propuesta se encuadra dentro de los lineamientos generales acordados en el Estatuto de la Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto, en donde se expresa que la Universidad concibe a la extensión como otra forma de construcción de conocimiento articulado al saber científico. La extensión deberá abocarse al desarrollo del conocimiento práctico, experiencial, profesional e inductivo. Este conocimiento deberá generarse de manera local, transdisciplinarmente y tener finalidades prácticas, promoviendo la articulación y mutuo enriquecimiento de saberes.

Treason and Loyalty to the Royal Court: The Kan Narrative in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Khmer Chronicle Manuscripts

AbstractThe Kan narrative presents a series of events that are believed, by many Cambodians today including top leaders, to be the historical contestation for kingship between a commoner named Kan and members of the royal family during the early sixteenth century. Discussing the contents, the formats, the epistemology, and key figures bound up in the Kan narrative, this article provides insights on its contextual origins and reception as well as the texts that recount it. Rather than a proven historical episode, the narrative was effectively re-constructed by two groups of chronicle writers during the early 1900s in order to promote ideas about ‘treason’ and ‘loyalty’ to the throne. Uncovering the contextual origins and reception of the narrative not only allows us to understand the process whereby a long-held body of local scholarship lying outside the scholarly practice of ‘history’ in the present-day sense was used to shape collective knowledge, but also to see its profound impact on colonial and post-independence collective memory and culture.

Un cifrario in prestito per una lettera segretissima di Federico d’Aragona re di Napoli ai Re Cattolici nel BnF, Espagnol 318

This article presents the deciphering, as well as the reconstruction of the related historical contest, of an encrypted letter written by Frederick King of Naples to the Catholic kings, preserved in the ms. Espagnol 318 of the BnF. The cypher at the disposal of Joan Ram Escriva, the Spanish Ambassador in Naples at the time, was unusually used for its encryption.

"The Right to Have Rights": Assam and the Legal Politics of Citizenship

The historical contestations around documentary citizenship in Assam have led to a situation where people from ethno -religious minority groups find themselves at the fringes of citizenship. Through a closer look at case law being played out before Assam’s citizenship tribunals, this article seeks to explore the arbitrary bureaucratic barriers that are depriving people of their crucial right to access all other rights. This is framed in the context of the historical developments that have led to conflicts around identity in the region. Through my research, I argue that the use of documentation has served specific political goals which work in tandem with existing vulnerabilities to disenfranchise those who are already disadvantaged.

Dismantling the Master’s House: Toward a Justice-Based Theory of Community Economic Development

Since the end of the American Civil War, scholars have debated the efficacy of various models of community economic development, or CED. Historically, this debate has tracked one of two approaches: place-based models of CED, seeking to stimulate community development through market-driven economic growth programs, and people-based models of CED, focused on the removal of structural barriers to social and economic mobility that prevent human flourishing. More recently, scholars and policymakers have turned to a third model from the impact investing community—the social impact bond, or SIB. The SIB model of CED ostensibly finds a middle ground by leveraging funding from private impact investors to finance social welfare programs within marginalized communities. SIBs seemingly answer the call of local government law scholars of the New Regionalists movement who advocate for governmental mechanisms that facilitate regional cooperation, address equity concerns, and respect local government autonomy. However, this Article argues that the SIB model of impact investing will struggle to advance metropolitan equity due to its grounding in the politics of neoliberalism. After highlighting limitations of the SIB, this Article links contemporary debates about CED theory to historical contestations within the black community about economically-oriented racial uplift strategies. Placing historical figures, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, in conversation with more contemporary theorists of political philosophy, this Article offers an alternative conceptual framework of CED. Termed justice-based CED, this framing distinguishes a typology of social change that places democracy at the epicenter of the development debate and points toward the political principles of the solidarity economy as guideposts for law reform. The justice-based approach rests upon three core values: social solidarity, economic democracy, and solidarity economy. Taken together, this perspective reflects a vision of political morality that embodies one of America’s most foundational democratic values—human moral dignity.

Caste in Stone? Exploring Caste and Class Dimensions of Conservation Displacement in Central India

ABSTRACT This article explores the caste and class dimensions of the local resource politics of conservation displacement. Through long-term study of a conservation displacement site in central India, it interrogates how alliances and rivalries contoured along historical class-caste contestations result in differential patterns of recovery from “green grabbing” and exclusionary conservation. It is argued that contestations within and between subaltern social groups, traditional dominant castes and newly upwardly mobile peasant castes are geared towards cornering resource flows associated with the local welfare/developmental state. Given severely limited avenues of gainful employment for the rural poor in the neo-liberal era, access to the local gatekeeping economy shapes trajectories of accumulation and decline in the context of India’s new land wars.

Production/destruction in Latin America

Abstract Rural production has long been a central topic for social sciences and history of Latin America, and scholars have noted the ways that societies and environments form around productive systems. Inspired by Gastón Gordillo's 2014 book Rubble, this article introduces a Special Section of the JPE that shifts the focus to the inseparably destructive aspects of production. We acknowledge the temporal dynamics of booms and busts in Latin American commodity production, but challenge recent tendencies to glorify destruction as necessarily and positively creative. Framing the issue as a question for Science and Technology Studies, we argue that treating technologies as rubble can shed light on dynamics of historical change, social contestation, and environmental destruction that are too often overlooked. Key words: environment, Latin America, creative destruction, Rubble, science and technology

Fictionality Risen: Early America, the Common Core Curriculum, and How We Argue About Fiction Today

AbstractThis article explores the recent popular press debates about the Common Core State Standards and their curricular mandates about the percentage of reading that can be fiction in middle school and high school curricula. I suggest that early American arguments about fiction’s educational value can help us better understand today’s debates about fiction’s role in the classroom, because they reveal just how much is taken for granted in our contemporary arguments about fiction. The article argues that recent work on fictionality (and on historical poetics generally) allows us to come to a richer understanding of the terms on which early Americans valued fiction, bringing into view a series of historical contestations over fictionality’s cultural meaning and purpose. These contestations, in turn, reveal just how delimited a sense of fiction’s value and possible uses underpins our current debates. After a brief reading of Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797), the article explores how attention to these historical contestations over fiction’s value might lead to a reconsideration of the grounds on which we defend fiction’s educational value today. I close by considering the more general pedagogical implications of recent scholarship in historical poetics broadly construed.

The Limitations of Dignity: The Novel and Human Rights

The Limitations of Dignity: The Novel and Human Rights

(un)Doing the Next Generation Science Standards: climate change education actor-networks in Oklahoma

This exploratory research investigated how science education communities of practice in Oklahoma engage in translations of climate change education (CCE). Applications of actor-network theory to educational policymaking facilitate this analysis of the spaces of prescription and spaces of negotiation that characterize CCE in Oklahoma. Informed by key informant interviews with science education stakeholders and a survey of secondary science teachers, the results reported the perceived barriers to science education reform faced by educators in Oklahoma. Revisions of the state Priority Academic Science Standards (PASS) based on the nationally developed Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) emerged as a possible node of action in the advancement of climate science education in public schools. However, entanglements with historical contestations over evolution characterize the negotiation of standards revisions and suggest that climate change concepts may indeed be erased or muted. This research contributes to the emerging body of educational studies and policy research focused on the potential of the NGSS to increase CCE efforts in public schools.

Landscape, complicity and partitioned zones at South Africa Forest and Lubya in Israel-Palestine

In the historical and ideological contests of settler colonial conquest, the making of “landscape” out of land and territory is a powerful instrument in the visual and discursive constructions of nationalist perspectives. This article examines one such site, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) “South Africa Forest” in the Galilee, Israel-Palestine, cultivated upon Lubya, a destroyed Palestinian village. The article explores the significance of trees in dominant narratives of modern political Zionist discourses and non-Israeli Jewish nationalist discourses, in particular. It examines the modes of complicity to which JNF tree-planting has given rise and argues that a state-aligned seaming of spatial divisions, cognitive boundaries and ideological partitions enables the Nakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe, to be “erased from space and consciousness” (Kadman 2008). The article then turns to the film, The Village under the Forest (2013), which focuses on Lubya and South Africa Forest in order to examine what narrative and visual decisions were made in the film's attempt to address complicity with the erasures and bifurcated spatial imaginaries of Israel-Palestine's landscape.

Straddling Borders in Postcolonial Discourse: Delocalisation (Displacement) and Reconstruction of Literary Theory in Africa

This essay uses Edward Said’s generated travel theory and affiliated theorists to discuss the question of the points of origin and different travel trajectories of poststructuralism and feminism in African studies. It argues that poststructuralism hitherto largely considered incompatible with African aesthetics and postcolonial theorisations and formulations is incontestably rooted in Africa and has contributed greatly in breaking Western essentialist epistemological structures and enhancing a variety of African postcolonial concepts. The major travel itineraries of poststructuralism can be traced as such: In Africa it is inscribed in the politics of struggle and resistance to colonialism and imperialism, in Europe it assumes a philosophical emphasis based on disrupting and deconstructing Western logocentrism and phonocentrism, in America it takes the guise of theory and method in literary discourse. Third World diaspora in this location adopts it in formulating cultural, minority, new historicist and postcolonial discourses. Its re-entry into Africa through African and Third World diasporic formulations consolidates and amplifies its point of departure from this continent. The reception and contextualisation of Western powered feminist discourses by African feminists and female intellectuals demonstrates difference. The accommodation or incorporation of Western feminist poetics by the latter lends credence to spatial, historical, cultural transformations, resulting in alternative routes though with a certain degree of universal interconnectedness regarding the plight of women. Western feminism is not homogeneous, implying that its essentialist apprehension of Africa as homogeneous gives room for different cultural and historical contestations in a multi-cultured African landscape. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n3p169