Local Struggles Research Articles

Norita is the first of many self-managed community neighbourhoods to come: A conversation with organizers and residents of Barrio Norita Cortiñas in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area (Part II)

These two conversations with organizers and residents of Barrio Norita Cortiñas in Buenos Aires reflect the ongoing struggle for housing rights in Argentina. The discussions detail the development of the self-managed community, which emerged from land occupations in Guernica during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants highlight the collective efforts to secure land through self-organization and assembly-based decision-making, ultimately purchasing land to establish a neighbourhood for 62 families. The conversations explore the obstacles faced, including government repression, real estate speculation, and economic challenges, while also emphasizing the critical role of feminist leadership and multisectoral collaboration in their fight for land and housing rights. Additionally, the residents connect their local struggle to broader national and international movements for land reclamation and workers' rights. This underscores the urgency of solidarity and collective action in confronting neoliberal policies and housing precarity.

Norita is the first of many self-managed community neighbourhoods to come: A conversation with organizers and residents of Barrio Norita Cortiñas in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area (Part II)

These two conversations with organizers and residents of Barrio Norita Cortiñas in Buenos Aires reflect the ongoing struggle for housing rights in Argentina. The discussions detail the development of the self-managed community, which emerged from land occupations in Guernica during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants highlight the collective efforts to secure land through self-organization and assembly-based decision-making, ultimately purchasing land to establish a neighbourhood for 62 families. The conversations explore the obstacles faced, including government repression, real estate speculation, and economic challenges, while also emphasizing the critical role of feminist leadership and multisectoral collaboration in their fight for land and housing rights. Additionally, the residents connect their local struggle to broader national and international movements for land reclamation and workers' rights. This underscores the urgency of solidarity and collective action in confronting neoliberal policies and housing precarity.

Afro-Spanish countervisual genealogies of Blackness in Rubén H. Bermúdez’s Y tú, ¿por qué eres negro?

In Y tú, ¿por qué eres negro? Spanish photographer Rubén H. Bermúdez constructs a personal and autobiographical visual narrative of Afro-Spanish Blackness. Utilizing Nicolas Mirzoeff’s notion of the “countervisual” as that which runs counter to notions of visual authority and asserts the “right to look” by marginalized communities, I argue that the text calls attention to how viewers view the images and thus questions notions of visual authority that have determined how Blackness is seen in Spain. Y tú also employs countervisuality by using found images of US and international Black racial icons to show how these stand in for localized struggles of African and Afrodescendants in Spain. Y tú visualizes an Afro-Spanish subjectivity that argues for more inclusive notions of Blackness and the African diaspora as it simultaneously rearticulates normative ideas of Spanish identity. In doing so, the text underscores the power of images to reshape and challenge prevailing perspectives on identity, diaspora, and national and cultural belonging.

The relational state and local struggles in the mapping of land in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

ABSTRACT The article investigates how state-initiated participatory mapping, with the aim of legalizing Indigenous land, has implications for peasants' and Indigenous people’s struggles for control over land and resources. Empirically, the paper refers to a study of participatory mapping in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, initiated by the local government. We suggest that this practice of mapping can be seen as a new form of state territorialization that, in complex ways, mobilizes a range of actors across space under the framework of a participatory approach. However, participatory mapping also creates a new foundation for mobilizing resistance to states’ efforts to gain territorial control.

Urbanization and Bottom-up Politics in Palestine: The Case of Yatta

The West Bank (occupied Palestinian Territories) is a fragmented network of urban clusters while the rural area is slowly chipped away by Israeli settlers and military apparatus. Palestinians’ bodies are squeezed between checkpoints, razor wire, apartheid walls, military watchtowers, barracks but also between state bureaucracy, incorporation of labourers and cultural dispossession. The occupation through multiple devices produces dispossession and the national struggle explodes with violent and unforeseen forms against Israeli settlers and soldiers. The present paper is a reflection based on one year of fieldwork in Yatta’s urban cluster and its rural area in the southern West Bank. By analysing Israeli’s occupation law, the present work aims at explaining how the Palestinian urbanization process is forced under colonial rule with interlinked consequences on cultural and material dispossession, and youth liminal identities. Within the frame of this set of socio-spatial fragmented relations, the distrust of political parties is growing, and political forms are re-territorialized in local struggle. The research inquires why radical subjectivity is emerging in the Yatta social-spatial context produced by occupation law. How, despite the devices of Israeli occupation, aiming at drawing docile bodies and geography, the bottom-up political phenomenon emerging from Yatta’s urban context explodes in sudden violence.

Local struggles, global issues: The role of race and belonging within street renaming struggles in Berlin’s Wedding district

ABSTRACT Since 2004 there has been a debate surrounding two streets and a square in Berlin’s Wedding district that bear the names of perpetrators of German colonialism: should the streets be renamed or simply be rededicated to other German men bearing the same surnames? Through struggles over street renaming within the African Quarter of Wedding, we show how processes of marginalization, racialization and whiteness are negotiated through the situated materiality of local spaces, yet these negotiations are continually tied to wider national and global struggles. We draw on critical whiteness studies, as well as post- and de-colonial theory, to examine what discourses are employed by groups agitating for and against street renaming and how these debates are covered by the international, national and local media. The paper unpacks the disconnection between present day racializing practices and colonial histories, highlighting how recognizing racism is connected to how colonialism has been dealt with (or not) in Germany.

Community narratives on rural homelessness: Tales of terror and tales of compassion

Homelessness is often assumed to be mostly confined to urban spaces, leaving experiences of homelessness in rural contexts largely unexamined. The present study aims to understand the discursive context, or public understanding, of homelessness in rural communities. We examined community narratives related to the idea of “homelessness” in rural spaces. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 70 key stakeholders from four rural communities in the U.S. State of Maine. Participants were asked to give their impressions related to homelessness in their community. We conducted a systematic qualitative analysis of these interviews and our analysis was grounded in a critical discourse analysis perspective. Using Rappaport’s framework for understanding helpful and harmful community narratives, we identified three community narratives that harm by stereotyping or erasing homelessness in rural communities: Not Here, That One Guy, and Mainly Outsiders. We also examined counter-narratives that worked against each of the three primary narratives: It Looks Different, It’s More Hidden, and Local Struggle and Lack of Resources. The counter-narratives tell a different, more compassionate, story of homelessness in rural spaces. Our main goal was to analyze the “work” that each of these narratives were doing in terms of constructing different understandings of “rural homelessness.” The implications for policy and practice are discussed.

Introduction: Resistance and Survival – The Nuclear Era in the Pacific

ABSTRACT For many decades, historians, researchers, and participants have documented the history of the nuclear era in the Pacific Islands. They have highlighted the legacy of health and environmental impacts of 50 years of nuclear testing by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France between 1946 and 1996. Most official histories of Pacific nuclear testing present extensive technical detail of the development of nuclear weapons, evidence of inter-departmental rivalries, and vivid portraits of the scientists who built the Bomb. This state-sponsored literature, however, makes limited reference to the lived experience of the civilian and military personnel who staffed the test sites, or the Indigenous peoples whose land and waters were used for the testing programmes in Oceania. Despite a growing international literature on the health and environmental impacts of nuclear testing, the history of Pacific Islander resistance to the nuclear testing programmes is more fragmentary. In response, the authors in this special issue have foregrounded the agency of Indigenous activists, rather than the Western allies who campaigned alongside the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement. Their contributions add to a growing body of personal testimony by Indigenous nuclear survivors and resisters from around Oceania. This special issue includes a 1954 petition from Marshall Islanders to the UN Trusteeship Council, an example of the protests by Islanders that began in the 1950s, pre-dating the rise of the wider NFIP movement in the 1970s. Other articles highlight Fiji’s early foreign policy and the importance of the debate over nuclear testing in the formation of the South Pacific Forum; the importance of culture in Pacific anti-nuclear activism, through song, poetry, graphic design, and community theatre; the role of the regional NFIP movement in linking local struggles to the wider regional context, through pan-Pacific, Indigenous-led activism around self-determination; and connections between the NFIP movement and solidarity movements in the Global North.

Letters, Queer and Women’s Comix, and Making Community

This article charts the role of underground women’s and queer comics in the formation of local communities and liberation movements. It moves beyond an analysis of the comics themselves, considering the role that correspondence—between fans and editors, between artists and editors, between editors and publishers, between fans and artists—plays in crafting community through critical discourse, practical discussion, and commerce. It explores the tension between radical, sometimes anticapitalist organizing and the need of artists, publishers, and bookstore owners to make a living while supporting and being supported by their communities. Finally, it locates a tradition in the comics community of mutual support and encouragement, an “ethics of care,” that not only provided space for different and marginalized voices but saw in the production of comics a means by which to link individual and local struggles to emergent national liberation movements.

Digital Diaspora Activism at the Margins: Unfolding Rohingya Diaspora Interactions on Facebook (2017–2022)

This study maps the Rohingya diaspora’s digital engagement on Facebook and explores how their participation has transformed over the years. Using the CrowdTangle analytics platform, this mixed-methods study presents the Rohingya community’s collective engagement on Facebook across six years, from January 2017 to December 2022. It comprises 47 Rohingya diaspora FB pages that published 34,905 posts and received nearly 8 million user interactions. Revealing their yearly transformation in interactions on Facebook, this study uncovers their contextual embodiment—within the increasingly complex and ever-changing regional and global socio-political landscape. Three key insights emerged from our findings. First, memories of loss, suffering, and longing for home intertwine in Rohingya transnational digital connectivity. In this remembrance process, Arakan (Rakhine) remains the place of reference and the center of gravity in their multi-layered identity formation and political mobilization. Second, as a gateway to seek global attention and articulate their political grievances, Rohingyas compose a coherent, unified, and human rights-based discourse on Facebook. Through such framing, they create an oppositional consciousness, drawing positive attention to their plight and the injustice they have endured for decades. Third, Islam, Muslim solidarity, and the narrative of Muslim victimhood emerge as indisputable markers in their identity (re)construction and manifesting political resistance. Anchoring on Islam, they build bridges between the scattered diaspora members and transcend their local struggle to the global audience, cementing the nexus between their Muslim identity and discrimination by the Buddhist-majority Myanmar government.

The 1942 “Egg Expeditions” to Novaia Zemlia and the Struggle for Food in the Wartime Soviet Union

AbstractIn 1942 over 150 schoolchildren from the northern Soviet cities of Arkhangel'sk and Murmansk took part in dangerous expeditions to the Arctic Archipelago of Novaia Zemlia. Their aim was to collect eggs from island bird colonies and hunt seabirds in order to supply famished cities with eggs and salted birds’ carcasses. The voyages were part of the local struggle for food and a reaction to the Soviet government’s urgent call to use all available local resources to ward off large‐scale famine on the Soviet home front. This essay discusses the organization, the course, and the outcome of the expeditions, and evaluates the role of specialist knowledge, local economic tradition, and various agencies—from Soviet, party, and Komsomol organizations to Soviet economic trusts and individual actors—in bringing these expeditions to life. It argues that, rather than being a centralized campaign staged by the state, the struggle for food was largely fought on the local level, with regional institutions assuming substantial responsibility and demonstrating a significant ability to improvise in their search for food. Ultimately, the population’s efforts to survive the famine, and their association with the regime through their collective struggle for food, were important factors that strengthened Soviet resilience.

Unruly magic: Global resource extraction, witchcraft and resistance in Yaba Badoe's The Witches of Gambaga (2011) and Wolf Light (2019)

Following Giovanna Di Chiro's argument for a ‘coalitional’ approach to social reproduction as environmental issue, this article examines representations of magic and witchcraft in Yaba Badoe's young adult novel Wolf Light as registering the impact of neoliberal ‘extractivist heteropatriarchal capitalism’. Accusations of witchcraft were, and still are, associated with grabs for resources, wealth and class positions occupied by women. To this we could add the notion of the environment as a further realm under threat by increasingly toxic strategies of extraction and disposal. This article extends these conceptual frameworks to consider how Yaba Badoe's speculative text, set in Ghana, Cornwall and Mongolia, depicts feminised magic and transformative supernatural powers as ways of combatting global extractivism. Significantly, ecological destruction has yet to be adequately theorised in relation to social reproduction theory. So too its cultural registration in fictions from peripheral areas long associated with extraction. Through focusing on Wolf Light, this article will theorise how the book's formal mode, alongside its figuration of witches as eco-utopian earth defenders and transformative shape-shifters, offers forms of cultural resistance. Critically, the novel builds consciously on global histories of women's oppression – including the resurgence of witchcraft accusations in Ghana, as discussed in Badoe's research for her film The Witches of Gambaga, and early modern British witch hunts. These narratives are reinvested with a focus on local struggle and resistance as imagined through the text's three main protagonists, whose shape-shifting abilities and trans-border magical connections provide a way of protesting neoliberalism's compound crises of reproduction.

Networks of Power in the Nineteenth Century: The Sampradaya, Princely States and Company Rule

Abstract This article reconsiders a religious institution in India during the early colonial era as a manifestation of regional influence, or a non-statist public force. Founded by Sahajanand Swami, the Hindu devotional (bhakti) community known as the Swaminarayan Sampradaya expanded in the area that is today Gujarat in western India. The community arose as a source of popular influence in a region that lacked a dominant state at this time. Its creation was forged in relation to local struggles for power and resources, involving princely states, Maratha and East India Company powers, Kathi chieftains, and broader social and cultural changes in the nineteenth century. Historically examining the process of community expansion in the region through aspects like patronage and cultural production, I argue that the sampradaya’s articulation of devotion internalized political acumen to navigate material realities successfully. Effectively, the modern articulation enabled adherents to broker power from diverse networks and strengthen the community’s complex, multifaceted authority in Gujarat.

What is in a name? Alternative gender knowledge and the retrogressive worlding of radical right digital media

ABSTRACT The article explores the role of radical right digital media in alternative gender knowledge production during the 2018 “Referendum for Family” in Romania and critically reflects on the challenges it poses for feminist and LGBTQ+ local struggles for recognition and representation. Using mixed research methods for data collection and analysis, the article seeks to address two questions: What are the discursive articulations of gender in ActiveNews and their intersectional dynamics with sexuality, religion, national identity? What (normative) assumptions underpin alternative knowledge claims on gender in ActiveNews? The study aims to shed light onto an important aspect of anti-gender mobilization, which intends to create what in my view could be labeled a “retrogressive worlding.” The argument of the article is anti-gender campaigns endeavor to create a specific worlding centered on alternative gender knowledge, wherein digital media plays a key role. The findings reveal that alternative gender knowledge fabricated by ActiveNews discredits empirical data and conceptualization of gender, sexuality, family as socially constructed and historically malleable. The anti-gender tropes serve a “retrogressive worlding” that does not accommodate gender as analytical category or non-normative gender display and sexuality.

Book review - Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers' Fight for Municipal Socialism by Shelton Stromquist. 2023

Shelton Stromquist has written a long and very rich account of the international history of local socialist activism, often called municipal socialism. Drawing on various examples, Stromquist wants to shift the focus from national parliamentary politics and centrist narratives to the local level, where the labour movement was built. At a time when local struggles such as affordable housing are once again on the agenda of progressive activists, this book offers important insights into the early local history of labour politics and inspiration for contemporary activists and municipal socialists.

Critique and Catharsis: Jain-Vaiṣṇava Polemics in Early Modern Karnataka

Abstract The popularization of Madhva’s realist Vedānta was accompanied by forceful critiques of its alleged enemies. Although the movement’s challenges to other Vedāntas has been well studied, its sustained engagement with Jainism has not. The anti-Jain writings of Madhva’s followers offer an important but neglected perspective on the early history of Mādhva Vedānta and its rise to power. This article examines the anti-Jain polemics of an influential intellectual named Vādirāja Tīrtha (c. 1520–1600). By situating Vādirāja and his writings in the vibrant and volatile world of post-Vijayanagara coastal Karnataka, this paper treats the archive of anti-Jain polemics not as a record of timeless doctrinal disagreement, but as a repository of local struggles over patronage, livelihood, and influence. Reading interreligious disputes with an eye to local context allows me to make a larger point about polemics and community formation. Work on polemics has tended to focus on ideas of verbal warfare and destructive debate; this paper suggests, however, that acts of polemical othering in early modern South Asia were productive forms of boundary keeping and community formation. This paper argues that Vādirāja constructed and ridiculed the Jain other as a way to galvanize a coterie of beleaguered Brahmans in a moment of duress. Vādirāja’s anti-Jain writings, in other words, were condemnation as catharsis and community-building.

"The Light of Science and Religion": Women's Education, the Language of Conquest, and Emerging Midwestern Identities on the Illinois Frontier, 1830–1850

"The Light of Science and Religion"Women's Education, the Language of Conquest, and Emerging Midwestern Identities on the Illinois Frontier, 1830–1850 Jenny Barker-Devine (bio) In 1832, the frontier community of Jacksonville, Illinois, was "little better than a group of log cabins" amid the open prairie. For a small group of women recently removed from New England and the Mid-Atlantic, however, the burgeoning village was the site of "some important revolution." United by a conviction that women's education was "intimately connected with the best interests of our country," they founded the Ladies Association for Educating Females (LAEF) to create networks for teachers and distribute scholarships to young women. In 1834, LAEF secretary Caroline Wilder Baldwin imparted the urgency of their mission when she estimated that approximately 40,000 new teachers were needed to instruct the 1.4 million children bereft of schools in the western states. She pressed members to "take possession, and labor till we have a nation of educated mothers and well-qualified teachers; till the cloud of mental darkness which now hangs over us is rolled away, and the light of science and religion shines in unbroken splendor."1 Baldwin's framing of women's education as an issue of national significance was characteristic of White, Protestant, Yankee women who built educational institutions in Illinois during the 1830s. Motivated by Protestant theologies that characterized the American frontier as a dissolute, howling wilderness, women utilized a shared language of conquest to facilitate personal relationships and professional networks. Women educators believed they could transform communities and thereby shape the social and political destiny of the Midwest and the nation. By 1850, however, tensions with eastern women over finances and authority over education in the West led women in Illinois to develop new, midwestern identities. [End Page 37] The story of LAEF exemplifies the complex intersections of settler colonialism, gender, geography, education, and personal relationships. In his 2018 historiographic essay on this period in Illinois, historian John Craig Hammond calls for more focused community studies, arguing that the Mississippi River Valley is best understood "as a series of local struggles that were part of a larger imperial conflict for supremacy on the North American continent." When reconsidered as a borderlands, Illinois emerges as "a place of intense conflict and cooperation involving a multitude of peoples, nations, and conflicting imperial and local visions of settlement and development." In the early nineteenth century, Yankees embraced this contentious view of the Midwest, regarding it as a subregion of a larger American West that was an empty wilderness without Protestant churches and schools to safeguard against savagery. The only solution was an orderly settlement wherein regional values related to propriety, education, thrift, and free labor prevailed over those of upland Southerners.2 Jacksonville, Illinois, like many communities in the Old Northwest, faced immediate local struggles based on larger imperial conflicts. Before 1840, most White migrants into Illinois came from the South, bringing with them politics that favored rapid westward expansion and limited government. In 1825, southern Democrats named the town in honor of Andrew Jackson, their recently defeated, slave-holding presidential candidate. In 1828, John Ellis, a New England-born Presbyterian missionary, selected the village as the site for Illinois College (IC), the first baccalaureate institution in the state. Seeing the college as a vehicle for economic progress, local residents initially supported the enterprise. Ellis was further aided by the socalled Yale Band, a group of newly ordained Congregational ministers. They invited Edward Beecher, the son of the Reverend Lyman Beecher, and the younger brother of educator Catharine Beecher, to serve as first president. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, regional differences fueled town and gown tensions over religion, student behavior, curriculum, and abolition. Nevertheless, nearly two hundred years later, the IC website still celebrates the school's founders who "firmly imbued the new College with New England traditions and academic foundations."3 During the early nineteenth century, those academic foundations proved contentious. Public schools failed to materialize across the Old Northwest because state legislatures fiercely debated educational policy along partisan lines. Southerners tended to oppose state-controlled educational systems, while Yankees believed a public investment in educational institutions prepared [End...

Intersectional politics and citizen activism: An Israeli Mizrahi feminist lens

This article aims to rethink intersectional sites of solidarity carried out by coalitions of heterogeneous groups coming up from the margins of society. From this standpoint, I analyse intersectional politics through practices and processes led by feminist and other social justice grassroots activists together with citizen activists, that have helped give rise to political visibility of marginalised communities inside Israel. To address this issue, I critically discuss the interconnection of political intersectionality, coalition building, citizen activism, and its implications not only at the grassroots level, but also in local politics and institutions.This research is based on extensive fieldwork that took place in 2016 and 2018 in the most peripheral neighbourhoods of south Tel Aviv. In detail, I explore the role of one of the most well-known Israeli Mizrahi feminist movements called Ahoti (Sister) — for Women in Israel, in creating intersectional coalitions with other marginalised groups that mainly include long-term Mizrahi residents, non-Jewish African refugees and migrant workers. This cooperation between feminist activists historically engaged in grassroots movements together with citizen activists involved in new local struggles represents an original intersectional approach to multidisciplinary feminist research.

‘Emigrantes, Palestinos, Estamos Unidos’: anticolonial connectivity and resistance along the ‘Palestine-Mexico’ border

ABSTRACT Borders, barriers, and walls separate and divide. The construction of walls, militarization of borders, and confiscation of land can be observed throughout the histories of settler colonialism with violent material and bodily effects, especially as it has been inflected through the logic and structures of racial capitalism. And yet, as borders, barriers, and walls ‘harden’ through new security practices, local struggles emerge that transgress, cross boundaries, and express anticolonial connectivities. This article examines one case of this along the ‘Palestine-Mexico’ border, where we observe both the coordination between the U.S., Israel and global business in the ‘hardening’ of border regimes, and struggles against that border violence seen with protesters in Los Angeles demanding human rights for Latin American migrants and Palestinians or campaigns for a ‘World Without Walls’. It argues that these anticolonial connectivities are examples of boundary-crossing work that bridge gaps and separations maintained by colonial domination and become powerful acts of resistance against those regimes.

“To put an end to this damned thing”: Rebutting denialism strategies performed by people in situation of homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemics (Brazil)

In this article we highlight some responses of collective resistance by members of the National Movement of People in Situational Homelessness (MNPR) in the state of Rio Grande do Norte (Brazil), during the COVID-19 pandemics. In this context, this collective had to face a deep state of crisis, aggravated during the pandemic and as a result of its effects. During the months of July 2020 to August 2022, through a project funded by the National Research Council (CNPQ), we conducted participatory research within vulnerable social groups in order to help them strengthen their social and community organization in the face of the pandemics by analyzing and producing knowledge. The chosen ethnographic approach took place through virtual meetings, telephone contacts and a chat flow during the period in WhatsApp groups. As a result, we contrasted the potent local struggles of this movement with the denialist, negligent and pseudo-scientific attitudes of the Federal Government, which strengthened a genocidal process based on dehumanizing policies of neoliberal nature. We note that, even when the population mentioned dealt with the effects of a pandemic potentiated by structural racism and social exclusion, they organized creative coping strategies, and exemplified, through pedagogies of struggle, growing paths for the practice of citizen science.