New Forms Of Resistance Research Articles

Eerie Captures of Violence and Memetic Rhythmicality of Resistance during the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ Movement

This article adopts media-theoretical and somatechnics-focused approaches, as well as a post-cinematic framework to unpack the mediated, intimate, affective, memetic, and rhythmic ways in which the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ revolts and their violent suppression unfolded on- and off-screen. In this article, I ask the following questions: How can we understand violence in the hyper-mediated era of bodies capturing their own deaths online? What kinds of affects emerge from these mediated entanglements? And how can the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ feminist revolts complicate our understanding of the affective, post-cinematic, and somatechnical ways in which bodies and technologies emerge and converge, sometimes in violent ways? Through a conceptual analysis of Instagram and YouTube videos depicting marginalised subjects who were killed onscreen in Iran, or who posthumously appear joyous and alive through their mediated presence, I investigate the eerie affects of violence and mobilise the notion of memetic rhythmicality to unpack the novel ways in which resistance to structural violence are being enacted. To demonstrate the implications of the mediated capture of violence, as well as the new forms of resistance – for processes of feminist, political, and somatechnical becomings – I draw on somatechnical and hauntological theories ( Derrida [1993]1994 ; Mulvey 2006 ; Sullivan and Murray 2011; del Pilar Blanco and Peeren 2013 ; Cielemeçka 2015 ; Carstens 2020 ; and Geerts 2021 ), Mark Fisher’s (2016) notion of ‘the eerie,’ the Deleuzoguattarian ([1980]1987) concept of a Body without Organs, and Steven Shaviro’s (2023) ‘rhythm image.’

Reseña de «Estados mórbidos. Desgaste corporal en la vida contemporánea»

Estados Mórbidos. Desgaste Corporal en la Vida Contemporánea (Morbid States. Corporal Wear and Tear in Contemporary Life) is a feminist ethnography on the Central Sensitization Syndrome (CSS) −a disruption of nerve centres which causes chronic diseases such as fibromyalgia and chronic-fatigue. Méndez de la Brena takes distance from the hegemonic medical approach, and embraces an anthropological and a gender perspective to investigate the handling of the diseases and unravels new forms of resistance. The book can be briefly defined as a necro-political analysis of the disease in its material existence and of the production of knowledge and practices of resistance of women in a neoliberal context.

Self-Change as Global Change: Spiritual Activism and Its Place in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Legacy

This article looks at Gloria Anzaldúa’s under-explored and posthumously published work Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, which marks important developments for Anzaldúa’s legacy and philosophy, and is a culmination of her thoughts concerning identity, spirituality, aesthetics, ethics, ontology, and metaphysics. This work’s cornerstone concept, “spiritual activism,” provides activists with a radical new means of resistance that attempts to dismantle systemic oppressions that enable separatisms such as racism, sexism, classism, speciesism, homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, and even environmental degradation. In envisioning these social and ecological injustices as interconnected and intersectional phenomena, spiritual activism amalgamates spiritual technologies with political forms of activism. Spiritual activism views self-change as a means of global change in and of itself, making this connection more robust, visible, and explicit for Anzaldúa’s readership. It formulates a new metaphysics of interconnectedness with others, animals, and the earth itself in new ontological matrices that disrupt the cultural hegemony of Eurocentric, Anglocentric, and western cultures. Anzaldúa’s last work develops new forms of resistance via the critical and constant (re)shaping of our identity formations and ontological categories to make positive social change and global justice its highest priority.

New forms of resistance to the action of human parathyroid hormone analogues

New forms of resistance to the action of human parathyroid hormone analogues

Democracy, communication and information technologies: new forms of resistance and dissidence movements

Democracy, communication and information technologies: new forms of resistance and dissidence movements

The Oceanian Documentary Film: A New Form of Resistance

The Oceania Documentary Film Festival has been held annually in Tahiti since 2004. Known as FIFO, it celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2023 and now has an established reputation. The festival’s success is based on the development of Oceania documentary filmmaking, which has enabled filmmakers from Pacific communities to be proactive in building a shared identity. Environmental issues, the struggle for language preservation and gender issues are among the topics covered since the festival’s inception. In two decades of evolution, these identity-related productions have become militant, using the globalisation of images to bring the voices of Pacific peoples.

Hidden in Plain Sight: International Law and Marxist Praxis in the Life and Works of Merlin M. Magallona

Abstract Through symptomatic reading, we analyze the visible and the invisible – the explicit and the implicit – in the works of Filipino international legal scholar Merlin Magallona (1934–2022). We argue that Magallona's international legal thought was rooted in Marxist theory and practice and honed through the mode of production debates in the Philippine communist movement during the 1960s. Specifically, he developed a critique of the neocolonial division of labour and produced a materialist reading of international legal doctrines through “Postcolonial Self-Determination” – a synthesis of the antinomy of positivism and self-determination. In practice, his Third World Marxism led him to support the NIEO and resist UNCLOS through constitutional litigation based on the imperialist Treaty of Paris of 1898. Magallona's critique and praxis suggest new forms of resistance to the new imperialisms and underscore the imperative of a practice turn in Marxist international legal theory.

Pleasure, drugs, materiality and tensions in harm reduction in practice: The case of safer injection programmes

Drawing on ethnographies of a public health programme called ‘safer injection education’ (where people inject drugs under the supervision of harm reduction providers), this article explores how the materialities of drug use (such as paraphernalia and space) intersect with habitual behaviours and expectations. The article compares the diverse accounts of people who inject drugs with the biomedical knowledge of professionals to argue that people experience different forms of pleasure which challenge clinical understandings of addiction as driven by a desire to alleviate the pain of withdrawal symptoms. The analysis also critiques the assumption that people who use drugs are enslaved or unaware of their behaviours, showing instead that they are well aware of their patterns of psychoactive substance use and actively manage them in order to increase pleasure, and produce expertise and agency. During safer injection education sessions, people who inject drugs challenge normative assumptions and prescriptions on drug-related risks, and deploy practices and accounts that resonate with narcofeminist approaches, which produces solidarity between peers, social transformation and new forms of resistance to prohibitionist drug policy regimes and the pathologisation of drug use.

Challenging the “Data Body” in New Media Art, 1990s–Present

The 1990s offers a rich history of innovation through various technologies like the World Wide Web, the continuation of progress in biotechnology, and continuing advances in surveillance and artificial intelligence. Despite this, we have seen how these algorithmic technologies render users hypervisible while they remain opaque. In addition, these technologies also transform the individual into a data body—a being made of code, data, and information. Therefore, the body becomes ripe for extraction, manipulation, and the predictive logic of algorithmic technologies where we are no longer beings but simply understood as data. While many scholars have identified this phenomenon through the sciences and theory, it also stems from the field of art with artists and artist-activist collectives such as Critical Art Ensemble. Analyzing this often-forgotten history reveals the way that artists and activists were responding to this technological change by conceptualizing forms of resistance through artworks, performances, and activist projects. By looking back to the 1990s and the legacies of artists-activists as predecessors to many recent examples of algorithmic resistance by the recent generation of artists, we can think about how power persists and has evolved, how we are continuously rendered data bodies today, and what new forms of resistance may look like now.

Between ‘Cheeni’ and ‘Nupi Maanbi’: Transgender politics in Manipur at the intersection of nation and Indigeneity

ABSTRACT The 2020 crime thriller web series Paatal Lok featured a Nepali trans woman by the name of Mary Lyngdoh who is referred to as ‘Cheeni’ (a racial epithet for persons from India’s Northeast region and East Asia). The series has been lauded for its inclusive representation of a transgender actor, Henthoi Mairembam from Manipur, yet the choice of a Khasi name, ‘Mary Lyngdoh’, for a Nepali character as well as the use of ‘Cheeni’ as an alias raise multiple questions about racialization and queer politics in India. This arbitrary racialized characterization in Paatal Lok and its queer Northeast representation can serve as critical points of departure to examine the emerging LGBTQ politics in Northeast India. This paper attempts to highlight the convergences and incommensurability of LGBTQ politics in the region, particularly in Manipur, with that of mainland India. Against the backdrop of the history of militarization and conflict in Northeast India, LGBTQ individuals migrants from the region are further racialized in India’s metropolitan centers. This geopolitical alienation is felt by LGBTQ persons from the Northeast at the scale of the body. LGBTQ politics in Manipur represents a new form of resistance that introduces ‘Indigeneity’ as an identity and an epistemic category to counter the assimilationist projects of Hindutva’s authoritarian nationalism.

Indelible: Violence Against Women and Their Resistance to It in the Visual and Performing Arts in Italy and Beyond.

The visual and performing arts can be instrumental in exposing the complexity of the numerous forms violence against women and girls takes, and in exploring old and new forms of resistance. The articles in this special issue emerged from a three-year project of the Visual and Performance Studies Research Group funded by the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS) to examine the representation of violence against women and their resistance to such violence in Italy and beyond and contribute to analysis and understanding of how gendered violence and resistance to it are represented in the arts. A key strand concerned the arts in contemporary Italy, but its scope was broad and encouraged comparison with other societies in order to share significant aspects of the Italian situation with a wider audience, highlight the global scale of the problem, and help identify opportunities for collective resistance. This scope is reflected in the four pieces here, which examine the possibilities that different forms of representation can offer either to reinforce or contest violence against women.

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The Power Implications of the Shift to Customer Reviews: A field perspective on jobbing platforms operating in France

Customer reviews are a new type of third-party evaluation that has transformed how power operates over evaluated producers, and in so doing has attracted scholarly attention. However, this literature rarely addresses the power relationships operating between platforms collecting and aggregating these reviews. We address this blind spot by relying on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of fields, which we use to highlight that the reaction of producers to traditional third-party evaluations depend on, and reproduce, the domination of an evaluation intermediary over its competitors. Our qualitative study of the field of jobbing platforms in France reveals that producers react to customer reviews only on platforms accumulating relatively better stocks of reviews, in a self-reinforcing manner. Managers of platforms with smaller stocks of reviews resist by sheltering jobbers from reviews. Our study re-introduces field-level power dynamics between platforms to research exploring the forms of power that operate on producers subjected to reviews. It adds to studies of evaluation intermediaries by specifying that the accumulation of reviews underpins the power relationships between intermediaries in the customer review era and by identifying sheltering as a new form of resistance. Finally, it updates Bourdieu’s theory for the digital age by explaining that individuals’ accumulation of capital online relates to inter-organisational power dynamics.

Nnu Ego’s Chi, Subaltern Trauma and the Politics of Gendered Suffering in Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood

The objective of this paper is to analyze the strategic significance of Chi in The Joys of Motherhood and how it has been employed by Buchi Emecheta in the text to highlight gender inequality by chronicling Nnu Ego's plight in trying to adhere to the constructed, delimiting, normative notions and expectations of femininity, this paper aims to elucidate how Nnu Ego’s Chi, serves as a symbolic or metaphorical manifestation of the way female suffering gets reduced to non- being; using ‘trauma theory’ this paper underscores how through her, subaltern trauma is reified and reiterated and how she becomes a means of registering a new form of resistance to patriarchal injustice.

Migration, memory, and the insurgent temporalities of sanctuary

ABSTRACT Over the past decade, there has been a renewed interest in time within human geography. This temporal ‘return’ is especially pronounced in areas of migration research, where current scholarship examines the ways that asylum seekers are forced into racialized spaces of waiting and uncertainty. There has been less attention to the temporalities of resistance, the multiple ways that migrants and migrant activists disrupt the temporal frameworks of migration governance. In this paper I explore the ways that sanctuary practices achieve these forms of temporal disruption. Sanctuary challenges the flow of modern, progressive time by altering time’s rhythm and direction. It does so through four alternative time trajectories – historical-memory, legal, collective, and spiritual – that effectively challenge state hegemony over the meaning and control of migrant time. This challenge enables new forms of resistance to normative disciplinary temporalities associated with the control of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. It also explodes the linearity and stability of the modern present, revealing a constellation of subaltern movements contesting both the violent flows and blockages of racial capitalism. Through recognizing and refracting these global movements in what Allan Pred termed ‘a montage of the present’, an alternative spatio-temporality of modernity may be glimpsed.

Photodynamic therapy and combinatory treatments for the control of biofilm-associated infections.

The advent of antimicrobial resistance has added considerable impact to infectious diseases both in the number of infections and healthcare costs. Furthermore, the relentless emergence of multidrug-resistant bacteria, particularly in the biofilm state, has made mandatory the discovery of new alternative antimicrobial therapies that are capable to eradicate resistant bacteria and impair the development of new forms of resistance. Amongst the therapeutic strategies for treating biofilms, antimicrobial photodynamic therapy (aPDT) has shown great potential in inactivating several clinically relevant micro-organisms, including antibiotic-resistant 'priority bacteria' declared by the WHO as critical pathogens. Its antimicrobial effect is centred on the basis that harmless low-intensity light stimulates a non-toxic dye named photosensitizer, triggering the production of reactive oxygen species upon photostimulation. In addition, combination therapies of aPDT with other antimicrobial agents (e.g. antibiotics) have also drawn considerable attention, as it is a multi-target strategy. Therefore, the present review highlights the recent advances of aPDT against biofilms, also covering progress on combination therapy.

What Does It Really Mean to Be Union‐Free?

To say that we are living in a new age may be an understatement. Technology continues to revolutionize the way we communicate and learn. A single virus upended decades of relatively stable public health among developed nations around the world. Global economic sanctions are a new form of resistance to military aggression in Europe.

Learning to Resist and Resisting Learning

The COVID crisis has disrupted routine patterns and practices across all spheres of everyday life, rupturing social relations and destabilising our capacity for building coherent selves and communities by recollecting the past and imagining potential futures. Education is a key domain in which these hopes for the future have been dashed for many young people and in which commitments to critical scholarship and pedagogies are being contested. In a world of stark socioeconomic inequality, racism, and other forms of dehumanising othering, the pandemic serves not to disrupt narratives of meritocracy and progress but to expose them as the myths they have always been. This paper will explore forms of political resistance and the (im)possibilities for experimental pedagogies in response to the broken promises and unrealised dreams of (higher) education in the context of the COVID crisis. Reflecting on my own everyday life as a scholar and educator in a South African university, and in dialogue with students’ narratives of experience, I will examine the ways in which the experience of the pandemic has released and mobilised new forms of resistance to historical institutional and pedagogical practices. However, these hopeful threads of alternative narratives are fragile, improvised in the weighty conditions of a status quo resistant to change, and in which the alienation and inequality of the terrain are being exacerbated and deepened through a proliferation of bureaucratic and technicist solutions.

Assemblage thinking as a methodology for studying urban AI phenomena

This paper seeks to bypass assumptions that researchers in critical algorithmic studies and urban studies find it difficult to study algorithmic systems due to their black-boxed nature. In addition, it seeks to work against the assumption that advocating for transparency in algorithms is, therefore, the key for achieving an enhanced understanding of the role of algorithmic technologies on modern life. Drawing on applied assemblage thinking via the concept of the urban assemblage, I demonstrate how the notion of urban assemblage can work as an alternative way to explore the distributed and potential dimensions of what has been termed as Urban AI phenomena. Rather than seeing Urban AI phenomena as black-boxed, unknown and opaque, the notion of urban assemblage locates such entities within the wider contests of the city: urban places, communities and politics, where human-algorithmic relationships gather and disperse. In addition, this approach focuses on the potentialities of Urban AI phenomena—how algorithmic systems can operate differently through different aspects of the city—which can be seen to manifest new forms of resistance, collective actions and democracy. I use a case study of an algorithmic system designed to facilitate digital democracy—vTaiwan—to exemplify how assemblage methodology foregrounds the role of cities as spaces and places for exploring the democratic possibilities of algorithmic systems. This paper concludes with discussion of how the assemblage methodology contributes to serve as a bridge between critical algorithm studies and recent studies of platform urbanism.

El realineamiento de los registros generacionales y posicionamientos políticos y sociales de la juventud al este de Puerto Rico

In this article, we analyze the visions that university students have in the eastern part of Puerto Rico about the economic crisis and how it impacts their social and political positions. As well, how they define themselves and the lifestyles they promote. We understand that on the island we are witnessing a breakdown of the intergenerational consensus that responds to a complex reality, which has as its setting a country in crisis, mostly populated by adults, and oriented towards consumption and media culture. That idea of a future in which adults, inspired by intergenerational solidarity, would be responsible for directing the destiny of the new generations entered crisis, resulting in the creation of new forms of resistance and negotiation of young people against authority figures.