Oppositional Narratives Research Articles

The role of critical remote sensing in environmental justice struggles

Since the 1970s, remote sensing has been used to monitor the environment, address national security concerns, and manage Earth resources within a market framework. However, environmental organizations can also utilize remote sensing data infrastructure to support oppositional narratives, legal processes, and direct action. We present a framework for the socio-technical practice of remote sensing in alliance with those communities and organizations that are struggling for environmental justice on the global commodity frontiers. Positioned at the intersection of critical geography and political ecology, we examine the ways that critical remote sensing has been adopted in five major types of environmental conflict: struggles opposing fossil fuel exploitation, timber extraction, intensive food production, water management practices, and the effects of mining. We present a baseline inventory of remote sensing resources that are useful to the five conflict types and are freely accessible online. A global perspective on the planetary environmental crisis is essential, and we suggest that remote sensing practitioners can, through workshops or online tutorials, help environmental justice organizations towards independent use of remote sensing data. The local communities should then determine whether remote sensing products can contribute to their struggles.

What distinguishes conspiracy from critical narratives? A computational analysis of oppositional discourse

AbstractThe current prevalence of conspiracy theories on the internet is a significant issue, tackled by many computational approaches. However, these approaches fail to recognize the relevance of distinguishing between texts which contain a conspiracy theory and texts which are simply critical and oppose mainstream narratives. Furthermore, little attention is usually paid to the role of inter‐group conflict in oppositional narratives. We contribute by proposing a novel topic‐agnostic annotation scheme that differentiates between conspiracies and critical texts, and that defines span‐level categories of inter‐group conflict. We also contribute with the multilingual XAI‐DisInfodemics corpus (English and Spanish), which contains a high‐quality annotation of Telegram messages related to COVID‐19 (5000 messages per language). We also demonstrate the feasibility of an NLP‐based automatization by performing a range of experiments that yield strong baseline solutions. Finally, we perform an analysis which demonstrates that the promotion of intergroup conflict and the presence of violence and anger are key aspects to distinguish between the two types of oppositional narratives, that is, conspiracy versus critical.

Imagined Musical Geographies in a Global Age: Views from Jodhpur, Istanbul and Buenos Aires, c. 1870–1930

Abstract This collection of papers explores the intellectual history of music in global context during the period between around 1870 and 1930. Following an introduction that discusses the state of the field, each of the three papers presents a case study that explores the intersection between music and global history from diverse perspectives. The first paper discusses a Hindi music treatise published in 1896. By situating this work within multiple ‘significant geographies’, the paper highlights the limitations of ‘global’ approaches that neglect the more immediate musical, social and intellectual environments of their subjects. The second paper analyses the intersection between music and Islamic modernism in the late Ottoman Empire. It argues that a Eurocentric understanding of music history propagated by earlier reformists was succeeded at the end of the nineteenth century by an oppositional narrative that drew on the geopolitical imaginary of pan-Islamism. The final paper discusses the work of the Argentine composer Alberto Williams, particularly in relation to his views on race and national music. The paper demonstrates how contemporary scientific theories such as positivism and Social Darwinism contributed to a narrative of national musical development that created hierarchies of musical genres and excluded Argentine composers of African descent.

Changing the Narrative through Mothers, Daughters, and Sons

Abstract This article offers a reassessment of the ties between the families of two half-brothers, ʿ⁠Abd al-ʿ⁠Azīz and ʿ⁠Abd al-Malik sons of Marwān ibn al-Ḥakam. The first succeeded their father as caliph, while the second was governor of Egypt at the turn of the eighth century. The modern historiography has made much of ninth- and tenth-century narratives of opposition between the two. Those narratives are reassessed with a focus on how ties of kinship were used as a literary tool to build a distinctive memory of the Marwanid family. Even if moments of competition are recorded between the two, the families of those two men were instrumental to the success of the Marwanids as a caliphal family. The focus here is on marriage ties between their sons and daughters as well as on how the sons and their fathers participated in the same marriage patterns. The paper offers to shift our perspective by placing emphasis on family members that are usually not given proper attention: mothers, daughters, sisters and a wider pool of sons.

The Shifting Labour Process in Professional Care: Recreating Dominance and the Managerialised Mental Health Social Worker

Abstract Though the rationalisation of health care has been well documented, less is known about its impacts on mental health social workers. Drawing on qualitative data collected from 120 interviews and the qualitative comments on a Canadian four-province survey, the article explores the shifting labour process through profession-linked and organisational care strategies. The article argues that power is shifted from mental health social workers to management through stratagems including managerialism, biomedical hegemony and team-based care. These processes are complex and dynamic, travelling along professional divisions and logics, appearing neutral and scientific rather than as conduits reinforcing neoliberalised approaches to health care provision. Social workers’ resistance to these models of care is similarly complex and professionally based, though with strong elements of gendered altruism and social justice themes. Though this article draws on Canadian data, the analysis is likely highly applicable to other managerialised contexts including the UK. The article contributes to the intersection of Labour Process Theory and moral economy theory by highlighting the operation of a unique form of engagement referred to here as resistance-as-engagement. Overall, mental health social workers revealed strong oppositional narratives and identities pivoting on their marginalised position within team-based care, medical professional hierarchies and narrow, neoliberal approaches.

Decoloniality in danger or being boosted? An exploration of ECOWAS positions and conflict management in the Western African region

This paper aims to explore the notion of decoloniality by examining the decisions and actions of the ECOWAS in response to the coup d’état in Burkina Faso in 2022, as well as other comparable sanctions imposed on Mali and Guinea during internal crisis challenges. These topics were raised and debated in various mass media outlets. For this purpose, readers are invited to imagine, based on ideas interpreted from official positions of the ECOWAS, or perceptions of them, expressed in academic narratives and the media, if decoloniality could be boosted or is in danger, following the decisions, actions, and positions of the ECOWAS. The interpretations through the lens of decoloniality portrayed in African narratives, and these explorations are characteristic of qualitative analysis. In examining how ECOWAS manages potential crises in the region, particularly in the cases of Guinea, Mali, and Burkina Faso, we can identify basic features of decoloniality. Taking a social-constructivist perspective, we can explore how African narratives of development can inspire critical resistance. Specifically, we must consider how power and relationships based on power can be decolonized to prioritize a people-centric view of development. In analyzing the use of violence and safety in the actions of the ECOWAS, we can determine whether they boost or endanger decoloniality. The academic community has shown considerable interest in the impact of the ECOWAS on the political climate of Western African states. However, it is important to consider the philosophical perspective on how the portrayal of ECOWAS actions and decisions can affect the narratives of opposition, anti-ism, and power dynamics. Specifically, in the case of internal conflicts, these portrayals can direct the debate on whether decolonization, as a theory, cultural movement, or process, can continue the work of African resistance initiated during the decolonization process which remains unfinished.

Curricular Countermovements: How White Parents Mounted a Popular Challenge to Ethnic Studies

In this critical ethnography, Ethan Chang investigates how white parent-activists organized an oppositional movement to ethnic studies. Drawing on critical whiteness studies, cultural studies, and studies of countermovements, he argues that these parents crafted an oppositional narrative that positioned white, Christian, American boys as victims of ethnic studies curricula. Chang then traces how the parents leveraged this narrative to forge a coalition with disability advocates and to “digitally suture,” or bind, their local ethnic studies countermovement to broader right-wing populist activism. Data includes eleven months of participant observation, 146 public school board testimonies, and twenty ethnographic interviews. The article concludes with a discussion of how studies of curricular countermovements might inform scholarly and activist attempts to divest from whiteness and make ethnic studies available to all students.

(In)coherent subjects? The politics of conceptualising resistance in the UK asylum system

Many accounts of resistance within systems of migration control pivot upon a coherent migrant subject, one that is imbued with political agency and posited as oppositional to particular forms of sovereign power. Drawing upon ethnographic research into the role of creativity within the UK asylum system, I argue that grounding resistance with a stable, coherent and agentic subject, aligns with oppositional narratives (of power vs resistance), and thereby risks negating the entangled politics of the (in)coherence of subject formation, and how this can contain the potential to disrupt, disturb or interrupt the practices and premise of the UK asylum system. I suggest that charity groups and subjects should not be written out of narratives of resistance apriori because they engage with ‘the state’: firstly, because to argue that there is a particular form that resistance should take is to place limits around what counts as the political; and secondly, because to ‘remain oppositional’ is at odds with an (in)coherent subject. I show how accounts which highlight a messy and ambiguous subjectivity, could be bought into understandings of resistance. This is important because as academics, we too participate in the delineation of the political and what counts as resistance. In predetermining what subjects, and forms of political action count as resistance we risk denying recognition to those within this system.

Evolving Rasūlid Narratives of Opposition to Sultan al-Manṣūr Nūr al-Dīn ʿUmar (d. 647/1250) in Yemen

Abstract The Rasūlid chronicles of the reign of al-Manṣūr Nūr al-Dīn ʿUmar b. ʿAlī b. Rasūl depict its first ruler as steadily consolidating the political foundation of the sultanate. Most of these reports clearly portray the dominance of the sultan in Yemen during this period. But a few reveal the limitations of his power in a more complex political landscape, such as an aborted military campaign against a local tribe, an insurrection by a Zaydi sharīf, and the sultan’s assassination by his own military. These specific narratives of opposition to the sultan, however, progressively change over the course of their production from the late 13th century until the first half of the 15th century, as the strength of the sultanate initially peaks and then slowly declines. As a result, the ambiguity of al-Manṣūr ʿUmar’s authority in these narratives is largely reduced, and the historical memory of the sovereignty of the emergent Rasūlid sultanate solidifies in increasingly ideological ways.

“The happiest city in England” Brighton’s narratives of diversity between “success stories” and sidelined issues

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the literature on diversity. Through a focus on the local government, I enquire if the dominant narrative of Brighton and its community entails the multiple identities encompassed by the concept of diversity. If that is not the case, what significance does effectively lie behind it? And which are the consequences of this? Informed by qualitative research, this article compares the local government's narrative on the city and its community to the oppositional narrative shared by members of grassroots BAME associations. Brighton markets itself as an open-minded city: mainstream sources, such as the University of Sussex, portray it as “the happiest city in England”, arguing that it thrives thanks to its diverse community. However, the data gathered reveal how very often representatives of the local government discuss “diversity” while actually referring to gender identity and sexuality and how this selective understanding has overtime generated resentment in racialized communities.

Managing digital contention in China

ABSTRACT This paper explores new developments in cyber content management strategies in China by highlighting the rise of participatory, peer-to-peer censoring practices, and examining how the People's Daily have responded to the contentious events in the top 20 public opinion incidents of 2016, to illustrate how official media uses different types of management strategies to mediate and demobilise contention, on top of information containment strategies such as censorship. I also discuss briefly the creation of a Digital United Front which seeks to incorporate social influencers and cyber elites into mainstream political institutions such as the CPPCC. Not only do these strategies further undermine the formation of a political locus opposite the state, they continue to subsume previously oppositional narratives into grander narratives of stability and national progress. Online political participation in Chinese cyberspace must seek further paternalistic protection from Party authorities in order to legitimise their contention. Although this strengthens the Party-state's claim to legitimacy, ultimately this weakens the emergence of civil society in China as the only form of contention that can survive is those that are legitimised by the Party-state, and the political space oppositional to the state remain closed off.

Dance, music and cultures of decolonisation in the Indian Diaspora: towards a pluralist reading

ABSTRACTDecolonisation is a creative process, as well as a historical and political one. This article outlines key issues in researching the creative processes of decolonisation with reference to dance and music in the Indian Diaspora. It begins with Gandhi's ‘experiments with truth’, which first developed a political reach in the context of Indian indenture within the British Empire but left a fractured legacy in the decolonising era. Their conceptual import frames a discussion on participatory research, dialogic pedagogies and intellectual responsibility. The notion of dialogue contextualises examples of musical collaborations, as well as intellectual exchanges between Gandhi and two of his interlocutors: Ambedkar and Tolstoy. These shift discussion from an oppositional narrative of decolonisation towards more complex views of cultural and intellectual interactions in decolonising processes. The final section introduces the volume's case studies, which collectively encourage a pluralist reading of dance and music in the cultures of decolonisation.

Room for (Materiality's) Maneuver: Reading the Oppositional in Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water

Room for (Materiality's) Maneuver:Reading the Oppositional in Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water David T. Mitchell (bio) and Sharon L. Snyder In an important work of narrative theory regarding oppositional storytelling, Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative, Ross Chambers argues: "For deprivation of the power to speak is most usually not literal: if one excludes infants and animals, and those who are held incommunicado … what is usually meant by the phrase is exclusion from the powerful positions of 'preexisting,' socially derived authority."1 The idea appears as commonsensical enough: [End Page 150] removal of the power to speak usually occurs not in the material sense of being incapable of articulating with a voice but as closure from opportunities to seize narrative authority. Thus, this argument of socially imposed voicelessness enables Chambers to explain how narratives offer a platform for alternative voicings of marginalized experience that work to achieve "shifts in [the domain of] desire" in order to inaugurate alternative futures of investment in devalued lives.2 Our argument here moves alongside Chambers's argument regarding the provision of "narrative oppositionality" as an alternative space from which to speak experiences of social devaluation.3 Yet we also intend to extend the parameters of narrative theory— and media studies—to include materially voiceless subjects that Chambers could envision only as exceptions to the rule organized around participants who are infant(ilized), animalized, or otherwise "held incommunicado." Further, our argument works alongside recent film studies analyses of the politics of the audio track, specifically the authority of voice-over to externalize the otherwise suppressed interiority of voiceless subjects.4 Rather than "give voice" to voiceless subjects in a humanist mode that overvalues spoken communication as a most valued possession of embodiment, we argue that neo-materialist modes of storytelling offer other avenues for valuing the alternative capacities of nonnormative subjects, particularly human and nonhuman animals. Bodies that might be enlisted among those that are materially "incommunicado" include the mute disabled protagonist Elisa (Sally Hawkins) and the warbling amphibian figure (Doug Jones) who populate the 2017 Academy Award-winning film by Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water. All of Chambers's categories of exceptional (i.e., literal) voicelessness are on display in this fantasy universe to materialize the deprivation of the power to speak for those occupying "peripheral embodiments."5 Whereas voicelessness is often regarded as a metaphor for political powerlessness, we foreground actual communication disability as a way to explore a more phenomeno-logical representational strategy at work in the film. In The Shape of Water, representations of speech communication prove innovative in their deployment of a neo-materialist approach to disability. Neo-materialism involves an encounter with the more "lively agential realism" of matter that counters the tendency to discount forms of embodiment as passive, inert surfaces awaiting ideological imprinting, as is often the case in social constructivist-based readings.6 First, the protagonist, Elisa, is a woman who [End Page 151] literally cannot vocalize her thoughts because her communication "disorder" (i.e., muteness) leads her to use sign language as an alternative pathway for expression. For example, in one scene the head of security at the OCCAM Aerospace Research Facility (her place of employment), Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), sexually threatens Elisa in the infantilizing language of patriarchy: "You're not much to look at. When you say you're mute, are you silent entirely or do you squawk a little? I don't mind those scars or that you can't speak either. Kind of gets me going."7 For Strickland, muteness represents an inferior characteristic of voicelessness that is also a sexual turn-on, as Elisa would not be able to articulate refusal; yet the first two forms of objectification also position her as a child, one he can easily control beneath the patronizing tutelage of government-based, paternalistic oversight. In this exchange Strickland references Elisa as desirably incommunicado, sexually exploitable, and thus deserving of her minimum-wage employment as one of the "shit cleaners" at OCCAM. What Chambers might analyze as the political silencing of femininity by heteronor-mative aggression surfaces in Elisa's experience of voicelessness, an inability to talk...

English

In this study, we learn how audiences make sense of a non-dominant text that is conveying a non-Western story about the Global War on Terror (GWOT). The audiences affective narratives affirm Deuze’s argument that media is not separate from our lived experience; we live in media rather than with media. This study was conducted on an urban campus in the Pacific North-West, with film audiences of over fifty Saudi Arabian, Baharanian, Iranian, Iraqi, Yemeni, and other Arab and non-Arab Muslims. Multiple screenings of Hindi language film, My Name is Khan, shows that it speaks to a global, transcultural, primarily Muslim audience that has lived in the pall of a world changed by 9/11. As audiences, they weave an oppositional narrative of security, multiculturalism and Muslim identity. While their visas define them as students, their experience as simply Arab or Muslim women and men situates them, in a wider articulation of their transnational identity. Key words: Media, audience, ethnography, qualitative research for media, Muslims, Islam, Indian cinema, transnational, Bollywood.

On naming Arab revolutions and oppositional media narratives

The unfinished Arab revolutions produced unsettling conditions, sectarian wars, counter-revolutionary wars, proxy wars and transitional democracies. US and Arab media responses could not find effective words to describe them and their underlying geopolitical implications. Whether to name them ‘protest’ or ‘unrest’, American mainstream media initially welcomed the events with a cautious curiosity while Arab media favoured a romanticized coverage. But as the protests spread fast and continued, a more dominant popular narrative in the US shaped by the ‘exceptionalist’ perspective about the Middle East emerged. This article explains how dominant discursive framings deployed a form of ‘nature talk’, specifically through names, phrases and locutions such as ‘Arab Spring’, ‘Jasmine revolution’, ‘Arab transition’, and horticultural words like ‘flower’, ‘rose’ and ‘blossom’ to describe the Arab uprisings. Because of an intellectually limiting media-produced racial vernacular during the period of mass protest, this dominant mainstream narrative spoke about the events either by using neo-imperial language that characterized the revolutions as an Islamist threat or by employing culturally reductionist vocabulary which infantilized protesters. The goal here is to place specific media frames and images that such linguistic constructions create and disseminate within the context of power relations, the politics of naming and knowledge production.

Can Narratives of White Identity Reduce Opposition to Immigration and Support for Hard Brexit? A Survey Experiment

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union highlights the importance of White majority opposition to immigration. This article presents the results of a survey experiment examining whether priming an open form of ethno-nationalism based on immigrant assimilation reduces hostility to immigration and support for right-wing populism in Britain. Results show that drawing attention to the idea that assimilation leaves the ethnic majority unchanged significantly reduces hostility to immigration and support for Hard Brexit in the UK. Treatment effects are strongest among UK Independence Party, Brexit and White working-class voters. This is arguably the first example of an experimental treatment leading to more liberal immigration policy preferences.

Intersections of History, Media, and Culture

Intersections of History, Media, and Culture

Change trumps tradition: the Atlantis project of Léon Krier, 1986–1992

In 1986, Hans-Jürgen Müller commissioned Léon Krier to design the Atlantis project. Müller, the owner of an art gallery in Germany, planned to host think-tanks at a remote location in Tenerife. His plan was to foster the preservation of European culture, one that for Müller sets standards for proper manners and good behaviour through art and cultural activities. The artistic and architectural setting mediated and cultivated these standards, the demise of which caused the crisis Müller saw in the world. For Krier the project was affiliated with the Rational Architecture exhibition of 1973 and the Reconstruction of the European City Movement.The reception of the Atlantis project is coloured by three factors. First, from the beginning of the 1970s to the early 1990s, Krier went from being included in a select group of teachers at the AA School, London, to becoming an outsider to that same group and its intellectual sphere. Second, the client for the project wanted to be a pioneer in the cultural sector and use its larger socio-political influence for ideological purposes. And finally, in the specialised press and popular media, Krier, the clients, the project, the ideological statements, and a diffuse mixture of all of this, were often negatively received.The Atlantis project came at a decisive moment in Krier's career. At the same time, the project's history is emblematic of a crucial turn in architectural discourse. The oppositional narratives within post-modernism had gone from possible rapprochement to complete antipathy. The Atlantis project itself was never constructed, and with it the idea that a renewed traditional discourse could belong to one unified architectural agenda emerged and also evaporated.

The Contentious History of the International Bill of Human Rights by Christopher N.J. Roberts

The Contentious History of the International Bill of Human Rights, by Christopher N.J. Roberts. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015. xiv, 237 pp. $32.99 US (paper). Historical scholarship on has been critiqued for using history to affirm the inevitable rise of rights. Human have been presented as the ultimate utopia, rather than an ideology shaped by conscious choices and historical accidents. Several recent studies have therefore highlighted the limitations of the linear and triumphalist narratives that dominate scholarship. These new histories go beyond the triumphs of to draw attention to the underlying tensions and contestations that have shaped the development of the idea. In this book, Christopher Roberts contributes to the emergent genre of contested histories by exploring the conflicts and opposition that underscored the development of the International Bill of Human Rights (IBHR) at its mid-century moment of inception. The story of contemporary rights, Roberts points out, is incomplete without these oppositional narratives because they shaped what has become in our world. Although are held to be a universal good, this book shows that there has not been universal agreement about the nature of the concept. After WWII, individuals, organized groups, nations, conservative leaders, and progressive scholars objected to the emerging idea of universal for numerous reasons. The concept of as a response to the carnage and atrocities of the war was anything but self-evident. The process of drafting a nonbinding Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and binding Covenants was defined by deep-seated disagreements. Imperial powers such as Great Britain and influential political factions in the United States resisted the inclusive discourse promised by universal because it threatened the colonial order and domestic racial hierarchies. In the US, professional organizations such as the American Bar Association, the American Anthropological Association and the American Medical Association rejected parts of the new concept. Even progressive thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Mohandas Gandhi were skeptical of the value of a universal regime. Beyond the confines of intellectual and diplomatic debates at the United Nations, Roberts shows how opposition to universal also manifested in public discourse. Proponents and opponents of American internationalism sparred loudly in newspapers and magazines, newsreels and radio shows, and on the floor of Congress about the implications of universal for the mixing of the races, the future of colonialism, national sovereignty, and the spread of communism. Roberts cautions, however, that highlighting the opposition to universal should not be read as representing a normatively critical approach to the history of rights. Opposition directed at the UDHR or other instruments were more or less contentions of particular representations of social and political relationships rather than a rejection of human rights per se. …

Building coalitions: The interconnections between feminism and trans* activism in Spain

What made current Spanish feminism shift toward transfeminism? Based on in-depth interviews and literature reviews, we explore what factors facilitated the participation of trans* women in Spanish feminism. Tracing the history through relevant events such as the National Feminist Conferences, it becomes clear that trans* women participated in the 1993, 2000, and 2009 conferences, posing relevant issues regarding prostitution, transgenderism, and the political subject of feminism. Our research allows a break with global oppositional narratives, in which these movements are in conflict, and highlights the importance of understanding the vernacular nuances that take place in a particular geopolitical context.