Local Struggles Research Articles

The use of film documentary in social science research: audio-visual accounts of the ‘migration crisis’ from the Italian island of Lampedusa

The importance of visual evidence – and particularly films and videos – has become more prominent with the fast pace of technological development that has made filming more easily accessible. Since the early 20th century, films have been used as a data collection method in social science research, but less attention has been given to their potential for research dissemination. It is well documented that visual representations are powerful means to broadcast public discourses. The Arab Spring in 2011 and the increasing movement of people across the Mediterranean Sea are a case in point. Images and videos of people trying to reach Europe have contributed to the construction of what is often referred to as the ‘Mediterranean migration crisis’. In this article, we explore the process of making a film documentary about the people in the Italian island of Lampedusa, a key transitory site for migrants, and how they deal with the challenges of this ‘crisis’ while trying to respond to the local struggles of their isolated community. Drawing on the analysis of ‘audio-visual accounts’ – as the filmed verbal elaborations that broadcast themes emerging from social science research – we reflect on the potential and drawbacks of film documentaries for both knowledge production and research dissemination.

“Imagining a More Just World”: Interview with Julie Maldonado

AbstractIt is difficult to canonize anthropology and anthropological concepts, in part because of the creative tensions within the discipline's contradictions: a desire and deep respect for local knowledge with a global, comparative perspective, what might be called the “anthropological imagination.” Firmly rooted in—and in defense of—an inclusive vision of humanity, an anthropological imagination inspires “radical empathy.” It offers the scaffolding of a coalitional politics that values the specificity of local struggles but also reaffirms and defends humanity. We must identify the humanity in others, and the common humanity in their struggle, while affirming particular identities and challenging differential privilege: an anthropological imagination inspires radical empathy and solidarity, reminding us, in the words of the World Social Forum, that “another world is possible.” How people learn to cultivate this anthropological imagination and bring it in the service of marginalized groups is not generally discussed, and rarely taught. This article aims to bridge this gap. On October 10, 2018, Julie Maldonado, Associate Director for the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN), discussed her new book, Seeking Justice in an Energy Sacrifice Zone: Standing on Vanishing Land in Coastal Louisiana, via video‐conference with Mark Schuller's Anthropology and Contemporary World Problems class at Northern Illinois University. This interview offers one perspective of a career focused around advocacy anthropology that aims to reach public audiences and policy‐ and decision‐makers in ways that translates scholarly research into information that is most useful for problem solving and enacting change in response to our climate crisis.

Ten Years Into the Arab Uprising: Images of EU’s Presence, Practices, and Alternatives in the Mediterranean Space

Ten years into the Arab uprisings, how is the EU perceived in the Mediterranean region in terms of its democracy and human rights agenda? Based on a systematic inquiry into images of EU presence and practices through 144 recursive multi-stakeholder consultations with mainly civil society and grassroots actors in Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Egypt and Europe, we found that the EU presence is described as invisible, incoherent, preferable to other powers, ambivalent, unresponsive, ineffective, divisive, and even neocolonial. Its practices appear as depoliticizing, securitizing, and technocratic. While it is not seen as a model in the region, no new model is emerging. However, ideas for alternatives exist, namely embracing the local struggle for democracy, taking account of human security needs on all shores of the Mediterranean, and investing into a new two-way relationship where all voices matter equally. European Union, Arab countries, external perceptions, non-Eurocentric, alternatives

Imagining a Better Future: Anti-colonial Protest and Social Debates in Santo Antão, Cabo Verde, 1945–1975

AbstractHow did the populations of a remote Cape Verdean island—Santo Antão—construct and formulate their goals of emancipation and social reform in the late colonial period? This article revisits the experiences of anti-colonial mobilisation in the island in the late 1960s, bringing them together with other narratives of social needs formulated by Santo Antão's populations. Those include the fears of being recruited for plantation labour in São Tomé e Príncipe, the objective of obtaining the improvement of social infrastructure, and the local struggles for water that became again more acute between 1945 and independence. The article shows that local experiences of Cape Verdean populations, of both the islands’ elite and local peasants, sharecroppers and fishermen, were much more complex than a simple, straightforward narrative of nationalist sympathies and activity. The internal conflicts outlined here also point to the numerous struggles that would shake Santo Antão's society after independence.

Racism as a Workload and Bargaining Issue

My main contention is that racism should be read beyond the registers of discrimination, human rights, or harassment – rather, I approach racism as a workload issue that labour organizations and employers need to address at the level of collective bargaining. To illustrate this argument, I focus on racism and workload as it relates to Black faculty, faculty of colour, and Indigenous faculty in universities and colleges in Canada, although the argument can be applied to other job types and other places. While many unions have policies and statements in support of local, national and international anti-racist struggles, the idea of racism as a workload issue has not been seriously taken up by unions/associations, or for that matter by anti-racist activists on university/college campuses. I offer reasons why racism is a workload issue, and consider the potential role of unions in addressing racism.

Dispossession and dissent: migrant activism against mortgages in Madrid

ABSTRACT The Spanish right to housing movement has become a reference for housing struggles across the globe. Yet the movement’s marked diversity, particularly in a moment of rising xenophobia in Europe, has largely escaped notice. In this article, I reveal how Andean activists impelled the housing movement in Madrid, articulating lines of protest and methods of action that would then prove integral to the movement’s arsenal of resistance. In untangling the migrant history of the housing movement, I argue differential experiences with inequality and discrimination on the one hand, and alternative modes of habitation, cooperation, and social justice on the other mean migrants can serve as key catalysts in social mobilizations. In considering diverse social movements, meanwhile, I probe not only previous engagement in activist struggles, but also migrant lifeworlds that influenced later dissent. Again accounts that privilege extant transnational activist networks and/or local struggles over collective consumption, this methodological orientation demonstrates how to trace the role of modest transnational flows and subaltern geographies within contemporary social movement struggles.

A Beautiful Struggle: Reimagining Neighborhood Schools in Urban Communities

Background/Context Historians of education have chronicled the essential link between schools and communities from a variety of perspectives, exploring how ideology, material conditions, and political struggles have shaped public education. Viewing school reform historically allows us to see how schools are tied to their particular contexts, breathing in and out the values, beliefs, and conditions of local communities. This link is especially important to acknowledge in the high-poverty urban communities targeted by school reformers in the current policy landscape, which pits privatization against local democratic control of schools. This paper contributes to scholarship on school reform by portraying a local struggle to reimagine a longstanding neighborhood urban school in the context of an expanding marketplace of school choices. Purpose Our study uses an asset-based community school development framework to analyze the rich 90-year history of a particular school in the greater Los Angeles area. We were guided by the following research questions: (1) What are the multiple and overlapping demographic, political, educational policy, social, and economic contexts that have shaped or defined the history of the school since its opening? (2) How has this history shaped the community's relationship to the school now? (3) How does this history inform current efforts to increase public will and community engagement at the school? Research Design We conducted this historical case study as participants of a local design team comprised of university and school partners charged with re-envisioning a struggling neighborhood middle school as a K–12 university-assisted community school. Data sources included artifacts, primary and secondary historical sources, and in-depth semistructured interviews with a purposive sample of 14 current and past staff, faculty, alumni, parents, and community members. Findings/Results Our findings are visualized in a timeline that captures the school's reform history, changing demographics, and community context across three periods of school reform. We interpret this history by focusing on three tensions: reform means versus ends, public versus private goods, and critical hope versus despair. By grappling with these democratic tensions, we conclude, urban communities can counter the dominant policy discourse of failing and turnaround schools to reimagine the promise of neighborhood schools as anchor democratic institutions in urban communities. Conclusions/Recommendations We recommend that community school reformers consider local histories of neighborhood schools and their communities as important reform assets. Reflecting on these histories can help establish a shared understanding of education as a public good, affirm the linked fate of schools and communities, and set the stage for collective problem-solving.

Editorial

Editorial Margherita Zanasi The October 2020 issue has been published under unprecedented circumstances as the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply affected the academic and publishing communities. As scholars shelter in place and have very limited access to libraries and archives, carrying out research has become a challenge. Twentieth-Century China (TCC) is grateful to our publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP), for its response to this crisis. During the spring, the press granted free access to its journals (including TCC) to support scholars worldwide. JHUP was also able to print and deliver copies of the May 2020 issue. This October 2020 issue is also available in both electronic and print formats. The TCC editorial team hopes that all our authors and readers remain safe in these difficult times. With this issue, we welcome two new associate editors, Joshua Howard (associate professor at the University of Mississippi) and Jan Kiely (associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong). The two previous associate editors—Margaret Kuo and Yiching Wu—stepped down with the May 2020 issue. We thank them for all their work. The journal has greatly benefited from their contributions. This issue presents seven research articles. The articles of Federica Ferlanti, Cheng Yi Meng, and Mark Baker aim at shifting from a national to a local dimension the scholarly discussion on the rise and fall of the Nationalist Party and its attempt to gain centralized control over China’s resources. Ferlanti discusses the power struggle among different elite groups in Wannian County (Jiangxi Province) and the Nationalists’ attempt to dominate local politics in the aftermath of the Northern Expedition. Focusing on the wartime period, Cheng illustrates how the Nationalists’ drive for economic control affected the societal economy in Fengshun County (Guangdong Province) as the central government attempted to nationalize private toilets to gain direct control over night soil, an important fertilizer for wartime agriculture. Baker’s article centers on the city of Zhengzhou (Henan Province) during the summer of 1948, bringing to light the local struggles over refugees, taxes, corvée labor, and the militarization of the city. He concludes that these conflicts ultimately undermined the Nationalists’ authority. Wenwen Wang’s article explores the ideology of Manchukuo female education and the female students’ responses to its patriarchal and colonial objectives by examining female writings in school journals. Even if they eschew direct criticism of the colonial state, these writings clearly highlight “the tensions among colonialism, anticolonialism, patriarchy, and feminism.” Lu Pan explores the diverse imagination of Asian modernity projected by the exhibit Contemporary Art in Asia. Launched by Cathay Pacific in the [End Page 225] mid-1960s, this exhibit reflected a Hong Kong perspective of a cosmopolitan Asian identity that went beyond both national ideals and an Asia-West dichotomy. Aymeric Xu takes the Southern Society as a case study to explore Chinese conservatism in the 1910s and 1920s. In this article, Xu challenges the prevailing understanding of Chinese conservatism and of its “depoliticized” nature. Finally, Steve Tsang discusses the significance of Taiwan in the eyes of the Chinese government, arguing that its designation as “sacred territory” depends more on historical contingencies than objective geostrategic factors. This issue also includes one note on archives and sources, one review essay, and five book reviews. Nagatomi Hirayama introduces the qingcha diwei dang’an xiaozu dang’an (清查敌伪档案小组档案 archives of working groups for the investigation of records of enemies and puppets). Qiliang He’s review essay discusses two recent books on the publishing industry in modern China. The book reviews are available online through Project MUSE. They include Benno Weiner’s review of Melvyn C. Goldstein’s A History of Modern Tibet, vol. 4, 1957–1959: In the Eye of the Storm; Gina Anne Tam’s review of Joshua Hill’s Voting as a Rite: A History of Elections in Modern China; Andrea Goldman’s review of Hsiao-t’i Li’s Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China; David Clayton’s review of Lu Yan’s Crossed Paths: Labor Activism and Colonial Governance in Hong Kong, 1938–1958; and Kelly A. Hammond’s review of Taomo Zhou’s Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War. Finally, Federica Ferlanti...

Women and Children in the Machine-Made Lace Industry in Britain and France (1810–60)

This article addresses the part played by women and children in the machine-made lace industry in Britain and France (1810–60). Following Heathcoat’s 1809 bobbin-net invention, the formation of a machine-made lace industry in the East Midlands and elsewhere was driven by the men who operated the machines, the “twisthands.” But they were assisted by boy, who were expected to replace and refill the bobbins, and by women and girls who did most of the mending, embroidery, finishing, dressing, bleaching, and dyeing of the lace, much of it in the dark and damp rooms of houses. Working hours were long and toil was exhausting from a very early age. Although female lace workers featured prominently in local struggles, and were often highly skilled, they were nevertheless restricted to low-paid positions in the trade because of gendered notions of skill and occupation. When in 1841 Parliament discussed child labor, the regulation of hours was rejected for lace because of its domestic nature and because of competition from across the Channel. In the Calais area, British lace-makers had developed an industry much like that in Britain. But France was a different country, with a smaller-scale economy, and as a result was characterized less by the separation between home and work and the male breadwinner model. This article examines machine-made lace in view of the historical literature on the part played by women and children in industrialization in both countries. It focuses on the gendered segregation of the work and the respective wages of men, women, and children on both sides of the Channel.

Negotiating Relationships in Transition: War, Famine, and Embodied Accountability in Mozambique

AbstractIn conflict-ridden communities, justice specialists gather evidence through verbal accounts and material vestiges of violations committed by repressive regimes and during warfare, to eventually lay legal charges against alleged perpetrators. Anthropologists and sociologists engage with similar contexts but have included conventional bodily rituals, routinized practices, and commemoration practices as sources of knowledge of violent pasts and struggles for historical justice, although without the intention of determining legal accountability. This article shifts from the prevailing focus on repressive regimes and warfare to analyze the famine continuum and expands the procedures for gathering evidence of violations. It shows how, in one Mozambique community, a contingent combination of singular bodily actions, collective imagination and negotiations, and kinship norms evolved and became instrumental in two ways: contested fragments of evidence of violations perpetrated during the experiences of the 1980s famine were refined, and local struggles for accountability conveyed through bodily actions were sustained. The ensuing embodied accountability reshaped relationships by overcoming silence and denial, exposing ordinary perpetrators of violations, and cementing memories of guilt in the landscape. To capture the diversity of legacies of violations marred by fragile evidence, we must be attentive to the versatility of singular bodily actions. We need to consider the multiplicity of meanings, contexts, and perpetrators and how those in conflict zones struggle with embodied accountability.

Changing Water Regime: Remunicipalization in Indonesia under the Global Hegemony of Privatization

The research analyzes the emergence of water remunicipalization as counterhegmonic movement under the global hegemony of water privatization in Jakarta, Indonesia. In doing so, the author applies Gramsci’s theoretical framework of “Battle for Hegemony”, in understanding the dialectical relationship between the hegemony of privatization and remunicipalization as its opposing idea within the context of Indonesia’s water regime. Additionally, the author also uses the concept of “militant particularism” of Raymond Williams to explore the organization of remunicipalization as a counterhegemonic bloc. The opposing idea was materialized into diverse and particular struggles against privatization who connect themselves into one counterhegemonic bloc with a universal feature. Local struggles in Jakarta connected themselves under an anti-privatization movement or well known as the Koalisi Masyarakat Melawan Swastanisasi Air Jakarta (KMMSAJ). Later, KMMSAJ linked itself with a global struggle against water privatization with a counterhegemonic idea of remunicipalization. Nevertheless, the universality of remunicipalization does not necessarily eliminate the particularities of each struggle, as the dissemination of the idea and practice is appropriated to Indonesia’s political-economic context. By analyzing the organization of remuncipalization, this article intends to move the tedious discussion of water privatization that has been centralized to moral or legal human rights claims to a more productive discussion that explores an alternative idea.

Confronting extractivism – the role of local struggles in the (un)making of place

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the politics involved in local struggles against forestry extractivism. The forestry sector is dependent on vast areas of land for tree plantations. This creates deep-rooted conflicts between global corporations that seek access to natural resources and locals whose way of life requires the use of the same land.Design/methodology/approachThis study draws on a political ontology frame of reference and storytelling methodology to build on testimonies of three small-scale farmers who actively seek to resist forestry plantations next to their land in rural Uruguay. The stories reveal the impossibilities they face when raising claims in the public political sphere and how they lack the means to organise strong collective resistance.FindingsOne of the testimonies reveals how the farmers engage in a form of “politics of place” (Escobar, 2001, 2008) to counter the power of the proponents of forestry and the further expansion of plantations. This form of politics strengthens and politicises the ontological difference between extractive and non-extractive worlds. The farmers seek to build new imaginations of rural living and sustainable futures without the presence of extractive corporations. They fulfil this aim by designing community projects that aim to revitalise ancient indigenous legends, set up agro-ecological farms, and teach schoolchildren about the environment.Originality/valueThe struggles of the farmers indicate the territorial transformations involved in (un)making (non)extractive places and the need to expand the analysis of the politics involved in struggles against extractivism beyond social struggles.

Danish Colonial Healthcare Policy, St. Croix, Virgin Islands

Abstract(Post)colonial scholarship in recent decades has undergone methodological and conceptual revisions and scholars have increasingly adopted the premise that social and political transformations are the product of both global and local struggles. The goal of this paper is to position healthcare as an “imperial force field” by focusing on the development of a colonial healthcare system in the nineteenth-century Danish West Indies. I argue that challenging seemingly self-evident concepts such as healthcare forces us to recognise that interventionist healthcare was contested and negotiated at multiple levels. This paper mobilises archival and archaeological research from a plantation hospital at Estate Cane Garden, St. Croix, Virgin Islands, to provide a context for interrogating the practical negotiations of colonial healthcare policy. While colonial administrative documents and physician reports depict a rather narrow range of healthcare practices, archaeological evidence from a plantation hospital suggests that healthcare, within plantation institutions, was more heterogeneous than the documents indicate. The goal of this paper is largely methodological. It mobilises colonial transcripts and material culture in ways that disrupt and reimagine taken-for-granted assumptions to show how those most affected by colonial policies complicate colonial institutions via on-the-ground practices.

(Re)developing old apartment blocks in Hanoi: government vision, local resistance and spatial routines

ABSTRACTThis article examines experiences from redevelopments of old housing estate in Hanoi via a case study of old Soviet-style apartment estates (KTT), which represents one important layer of the city’s built environment. As redevelopment of these housing estates have recently attached attention from local public and media, this article looks at the recent practices and challenges facing by local government, property developers and residents whose involvement and tensions will be also examined to have a better understanding of the nature of changes as well as local struggles in their making and remaking of housing environments. Implication from this study of Hanoi’s KTTs will hopefully help informing policy-makers and designers in making technical planning and housing strategies for redevelopment projects in Vietnam and other Asian cities with similar social and cultural contexts.

A divided movement: urban activists, NGOs, and the fault-lines of a peasant struggle

ABSTRACTContemporary rural social movements in South Asia are increasingly dependent on NGOs and urban civil society networks to expand their local struggle to the national and even international levels. This development has shifted the political dynamics of rural social movements in unexpected ways as NGOs and urban activists affiliated with civil society organizations have supplanted older Left oriented political parties and local elites as the primary media for funding, communication and outreach for livelihood struggles. This article analyzes the dramatic rise of the Punjab Tenants Association (hereafter AMP), the land rights movement that is resisting the Pakistan military’s policy to monetize state-owned military farmland in Punjab. The aim is to underscore the new possibilities of such a movement and highlight the contradictions that were experienced by AMP as a result of its close association with NGOs, urban activists and civil society networks.

The Sephardi and Oriental Jews of Haifa and Arab-Jewish relations in Mandate Palestine

This article examines the development of the relations between Jews and Arabs in Haifa during the British Mandate period from the perspective of the Sephardi and Oriental Jews (Mizrahim). It focuses on the two Sephardi neighborhoods in Haifa: Ard al-Yahud and Harat al-Yahud. The article examines the character of the shared Jewish-Arab space that existed in both these mixed neighborhoods, which were inhabited by both Jews and Arabs. The character of this spatial system was exposed during the course of a local political struggle to secure representation for the Sephardi and Oriental Jews and to improve their social condition, as well as during periods of security tension. The article also examines the attitude of the Sephardi leadership toward the ‘Arab question’, and discusses the manner in which everyday life in Ard al-Yahud and Harat al-Yahud manifested the existence of an Arab-Jewish identity during the Mandate period.

The female memory factory: How the gendered labour of memory creates mnemonic capital

Within feminist memory studies the economy has largely been overlooked, despite the fact that the economic analysis of culture and society has long featured in research on women and gender. This article addresses that gap, arguing that the global economy matters in understanding the gender of memory and memories of gender. It models the conceptual basis for the consideration of a feminist economic analysis of memory that can reveal the dimensions of mnemonic transformation, accumulation and exchange through gendered mnemonic labour, gendered mnemonic value and gendered mnemonic capital. The article then applies the concepts of mnemonic labour and mnemonic capital in more detail through a case study of memory activism examining the work of the Parragirls and the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project (PFFP) in Sydney, Australia. The campaigns have worked to recognize the memory and history of the longest continuous site of female containment in Australia built to support the British invasion. The site in Parramatta, which dates from the 1820s, was a female factory for transported convicts, a female prison, an asylum for women and girls, an orphanage and then Parramatta Girls Home. The Burramattagal People of Darug Clan are the Traditional Owners of the land and the site is of practical and spiritual importance to indigenous women. This local struggle is representative of a global economic system of gendered institutionalized violence and forgetting, The analysis shows how the mnemonic labour of women survivors accumulates as mnemonic value that is then transformed into institutional mnemonic capital. Focusing on how mnemonic labour creates lasting mnemonic capital reveals the gendered dimensions of memory which are critical for ongoing memory work.

Natural Resources Matters: Capitalism and People’s Resistance Against Developmentalism in Adivasi Region of India

Capitalist development and its fallout dispossession have been contested in various place-based struggles in India. It has intensified capital accumulation, enforcing the vast majority of population, particularly the Adivasis (tribal people) in resource-rich territories, to displace and has affected their livelihoods by accumulating their cultural rights to land, water, and forests. The prerequisite capitalist logic of investment-induced dispossession has been contested in various place-based local struggles raising important questions about mass mobilization, resistance, politics of protest, identity, and solidarity. The study provides theoretical and empirical insight of the interrelationship between culture, power, and politics of corporate state developmentalism and the way it works in Adivasi resource-rich region. By discussing how different ploys and tactics employed by corporate to establish clientelist relation with nature, backed by the state through policy, have led to poverty and dispossession of the commons, this article argues that accumulation of the growth and national development subsume various discourses facilitated by different players involving populist belief and intentions which gradually develop a class character that corresponds with dialectic of the capitalism under the rubric and politics of imperial stage of capitalism. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and case studies, the article explores the process of how the Adivasis as a class encounter neoliberal capitalist development in Kalinga Nagar Industrial Complex and West Singhbhum. Initiatives like everyday resistance ‘from below’ in response to corporate land accumulation for developmental projects have further enhanced the ecological politics and class politics that will also be discussed in shadow of different theories of political economy and critical agrarian studies.

Vietnam in global context (1920–1968): looking through the lens of three historical figures

ABSTRACT This article explores the connectedness between Martin Luther King’s, Ernesto Guevara’s and Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas and anti-colonial resistance in Vietnam. By showing how three different local struggles were linked to the socio-political realities in Vietnam, the three can be seen as representatives of a way of thinking global and local in political struggles under the principle of anti-colonial resistance and universal self-determination. In this way, it is argued that looking through the lens of dissident intellectuals and political activists provides a methodological groundwork through which we can experience global intellectual connectedness that counterbalances existing Westerncentric perspectives on Vietnamese history. However, global intellectual connectedness has to be taken with a pinch of salt, because thoughts and ideas have always been defined by and modified under different socio-political circumstances, in this case: for the purpose of strengthening the national cause.

Genealogia e Agonismo

Este artigo baseia-se em sugestões teórico-metodológicas de Michel Foucault. Em especial,focaremos a analítica das relações de poder/saber, a genealogia, o agonismo, e as visõesdesse autor sobre justiça, veridicção e constituição dos sujeitos. Para sugerir como trabalha ametodologia genealógica, trazemos breves ilustrações sobre justiça de transição. Daí emergeuma sugestão de análise da justiça de transição que visa enxergá-la não como algo queapenas busque romanticamente a “verdade” e a “justiça”, mas também como uma verdadeirafrente de batalha cujo resultado dependerá das variações das relações de força em embateslocalizados. Sugere-se, portanto, que a genealogia é uma metodologia capaz de gerar análisesque fujam do maniqueísmo que estabelece, rigidamente, o “certo” e o “errado”, o “justo” eo “injusto”. E uma vez que a genealogia é, em si mesma, uma abordagem altamente política, parcial, ela busca questionar discursos que, ao contrário, se apresentam como neutros euniversais. Por isso ela se foca não em “objetos” rígidos e supostamente isoláveis do conjuntode acontecimentos sociais, mas interpela os acontecimentos, discursos e práticas de poder,interessada em identificar quais relações de poder e saber moldaram tal objeto.