Radical Agendas Research Articles

GIScience III: Questions of time

In this, my third annual report, I contemplate inquiries about time as these might impact the work of GIScience. I review how GIScience grapples with, and thereby constitutes, the temporal dimension. I suggest that while efforts in critical cartography and critical geographic information systems have opened GIScience to alternative spatial representations and imaginings (sometimes beyond Cartesian analytics), unsettling temporal linearity in GIScience remains an important pathway to realize political and radical agendas for the field.

Review of “Constructing Community: Urban Governance, Development, and Inequality in Boston”

What does it mean to govern? What is power in municipal contexts and who has it? Who is community, and what role do they play in urban politics? Jeremy Levine addresses these questions in his book, Constructing Community: Urban Governance, Development, and Inequality in Boston. This case study profiles transformations in urban governance, charting the rise influence of community-based organizations (CBOs) and the declining influence of elected officials. The case study at the center of these analyses is the emergence and fate of the Fairmount Corridor—an area surrounding the Fairmount commuter line on Boston’s south side. The new infrastructure prompts numerous stakeholders to jockey for position to bring new resources or thwart negative impacts on their neighborhood. Levine reports, however, that despite the goal of developing and serving communities, community members—and even elected officials—were marginalized in the planning processes in which decisions were made. The primary contribution of this study is that it provides a new take on urban governance. At the center of Levine’s analyses are private nonprofits—like the Boston Foundation—who act as consultants and funders on many urban development projects. Funders, who operate largely through philanthropic donations, pick, and choose among projects proposed by CBOs. According to Levine, community organizations have become increasingly professionalized, with funders and CBOs becoming “more managerial, bureaucratic, and market driven… [and] market logics have replaced radical agendas” (6). Levine shows that because of neoliberal imperatives, funders must select those projects that are likely to be successful and generate renewed philanthropic support. The process becomes circular and the outcomes assure cumulative advantages for those neighborhoods that jump into the game with greater initial capacity. Because the power and influence of elected officials—and their state-funding sources—has been eclipsed by the rise of private organizations, other neighborhoods get ignored and left behind.

Левая дилемма Дж. Байдена и демократической партии

After two years in the White House, President Joe Biden, who was elected as a centrist, despite his success in implementing his social agenda by building a compromise with Congress divided between left-wing Democrats and right-wing Republicans, still embraces radical far-left agenda as the next campaign strategy. The Democratic Party consolidates in its progressive agenda which will dominate its ideological development. J. Biden’s formula for success – compromise and centrism, which brought him victory in 2020, over the two years of his stay in the White House proved to be precisely the working formula for interaction with Congress and implementation of social programs. After several months of record low ratings, in August 2022, the popularity of the President improved markedly, returning to the figures of September 2021. The 44% that he received in his support still meant that the majority of society did not approve of his presidency, but it was obvious that his efforts to advance his agenda were appreciated by the public. However, the most important thing about this growth is that it was provided by independent voters. It was their support that the President began to lose after only five months of his stay in the White House, their low assessment explained the depressing support numbers of Summer 2022, and only they could return J. Biden to the game on the eve of the midterm elections, turning him from a burden for his party into its hope. Still independent voters are the most difficult audience for parties and presidents, because unlike the emotionally charged core party supporters who are ready to positively evaluate the president just because he represents their party, the swing voters evaluate the results of the presidency, not the party affiliation. And the return of this electorate to Biden after several legislative victories was a positive assessment of the effectiveness of his government strategy based on compromise. Yet there are big doubts that the Democrats are ready to hear and accept this signal of the swing voters. The logical reorientation of parties towards independent voters and a necessary shift of the agenda to the center of the ideological spectrum is complicated by the instability of moods in this part of society, the complexity of monitoring and forecasting them. Given the prevalence of the logic of electoral struggle, which changes all the social functions of political parties, such a reorientation violates the current basic principle of the American parties’ ideological organization – the success of the agenda is determined by victory in the elections. With the dominance of this logic, it can be assumed that the left-wing vector of the Democratic Party’s development will increase, forcing J. Biden not only to strengthen the left rhetoric, but also to expand the left agenda of his presidency, especially if his party loses control over Congress. The whole domestic political process will be still determined by the ideological conflict between two radical agendas – far-left and far-right.

Another Face of Puritan Islam: Muhammadiyah and Radicalism among the Youth

The relationship of Muhammadiyah and radicalism has been both exaggerated or denied by a number of observers and Muhammadiyah’s inner circles respectively. In the lights of these two opposing views, this research seeks to investigate connections, possible links, and types of relationships between Muhammadiyah and radicalism among the youth in Indonesia. It assesses and compares Muhammadiyah’s religious doctrines with those of radical Islam’s. The paper confirms certain intersections between Muhammadiyah and radical Islam doctrines. Based on the case of radical Islamic movements in Lamongan, East Java, this research finds that the radical doctrinal intersections do not automatically transform into radicalism in Muhammadiyah milieu, but they developed and advanced outside Muhammadiyah. This relationship is reffered to as “elementary relationship”. When the radical potential developed, those radicalised activists subsequently separated from Muhammadiyah and left for a more radical Islamic groups. This stage is called “separation”. However, when those activists have fully transformed into radicals, some of them returned to Muhammadiyah, not to rejoin the organization, but to correct Muhammadiyah’s religious doctrine that they percive as false, and at the same time persuade Muhammadiyah’s youth to join radical Islamic fronts. This type of relationship is termed as “return-for salvation”. Furthermore, this paper also reveals that Muhammadiyah youth, especially those who are involving in Muhammadiyah autonomous organizations do not show radical tendency, although some of them are sympathetic to radical Islam agendas.

Trespassing on the Law: Critical legal engineering as a strategy for action research

AbstractThis paper proposes critical legal engineering (CLE) as a new methodology for legal‐geographic action research. While legal geography is on the rise, geographers rarely participate in legal or judicial process, and when they do – for example, as court expert witnesses – they merely respond to the pre‐established agendas of the legal system. I argue that legal geographers’ knowledge on the nature of law and its relations with society is a source of power that could allow them to set legal agendas and pluralise legal discussions. CLE assumes that legal geographers can put forward technical legal arguments, thus using law’s own tools to implement normative agendas implied in critical research. However, CLE demands a dialectical attitude that preserves the contradiction between political ends and legal technology – while pursuing both of them at the same time. As I show, CLE can realise critical agendas in three ways. First, it co‐opts the legitimacy provided by the legal system, lending it to the agendas that are otherwise perceived as “too radical.” Second, elevated by the law these radical agendas may gain greater power to influence political‐economic realities even before the legal outcomes are decided. Finally, CLE draws out of “technical” legal discussions into the heat of the public debate, thus politicising the law. Having developed this methodological proposition in the course of my research on urban movements, I illustrate it with the strategy of Berlin's campaign Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen (DWE), which has crafted a legal argumentation based on Article 15 of the German Constitution to pursue re‐municipalisation (or de‐privatisation) of housing.

“Fake Gays” In Queer Africa

Drawing on work with a Malawian LGBTI-rights nongovernmental organization (NGO), this article’s entry point is the “fake gay,” a person who, according to state political discourse and news media, allegedly fakes a marginalized sexual identity to gain access to foreign resources channeled through NGOs. For LGBTI-identified persons in the NGO’s orbit, meanwhile, fake gays—infiltrating inauthentic gays—breed fear and resentment amid circuits of scarce resource distribution and homophobia. This mythologized figure, rooted in racialized arbitrations of fake or real, sincere or cunning, reveals NGOs, dismissed in critical scholarship as “unqueer”—for spreading homonationalism, sapping radical agendas by institutionalizing liberal human rights frameworks, and smuggling in Euro-American logics of sexual modernity—to be unlikely sites of queer complexity. Reading NGO spaces as customary forms and drawing on discourse analysis and ethnographic vignettes, the author shows how ritualized practices associated with audit culture in aid economies (monitoring and evaluation, paperwork, counting) operate as queer sites of multiplying possibilities and emergences. Rather than expose faking as duplicity or insincerity, the author argues that faking and normalizing practices rooted in logics of standardization, quantification, and replicability are co-constitutive. In addition to proposing the fake gay as a mode of theory that draws attention to (queer) world-making practices within postcolonial aid geographies, this article broadens understandings of the (queer) customary beyond narrowly defined cultural practices such as customs, rituals, and traditions.

Book review: Bento’s Sketchbook, by John Berger

John Berger Bento's Sketchbook Verso: London, 2011; Xiii + 128pp, 120 colour illustrations: 9781844676842, 14.99 [pounds sterling] I first fell under Berger's spell as a student grappling with different forms of documentary storytelling. I soon discovered that I was not alone, for his work draws warm praise from many distinguished writers, including Susan Sontag and Geoff Dyer. Indeed, Dyer was so smitten by Berger's writing that he made an Alpine pilgrimage to meet his self-exiled mentor, launching his career with a critical study of Bergers oeuvre. His imaginative breadth, vision and style--if not his political engagement--are apparent in much of Dyer's subsequent polygenre success. Berger's latest book is another of his 'collaborations': this time, a collection of text and drawings based around the thoughts of the 17lh-century philosopher and lens grinder Baruch, or 'Bento': Spinoza. Its seemingly random assemblage of anecdote and reflection belong to a singular form of literary documentary ('Bergermentary', perhaps?) that the author has been developing for most of his career. Berger was an artist before becoming a writer, as, apparently, was Spinoza. However, after his death, Spinoza's sketchbook was lost, and for years Berger imagined what secrets it might reveal if it were ever found. Many of the stories here are triggered by sketches recalling past encounters with people, objects and places. Berger being Berger, the act of writing is always political, and he gets straight to Chekhov's point: 'The role of the writer is to describe a situation so truthfully ... that the reader can no longer evade it'. By focusing his thoughts around those of Spinoza --a thinker Berger has admired ever since he was a teenager, discovering that Spinoza was Marx's favourite philosopher--it becomes clear that Berger has several radical agendas he wishes to pursue, including a novel vision of kinship. Ultimately, he wishes to convert us all to mystical materialism: the realisation that we are all one substance with the Universe, and more importantly, with one other, thus squaring the circle of Marxist humanism with pantheistic monism. Spinoza's great intuition was to realise that there are more things in heaven and earth than were ever dreamt of in our own 'philosophies': 'Consequently thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended through this and now through that attribute'. Berger's methodology has always been to show rather than tell, and he carefully infers our shared humanity by means of anecdote, analogy and reflection, each meditation juxtaposed against a judiciously chosen Spinozan quotation. By the end, the anecdotes have melted away, leaving only a series of extracts strung together like exploding firecrackers to reinforce his main themes in the reader's mind--ambitious themes, concerning the limitations of perception, the illusory nature of perfection, the indifference of God, the essence of existence, the composition of the body, and the confrontation of confusion by accepting our human limitation. These intellectual pills are all sweetened by Bergers development of a range of amusing, uplifting and intriguing stories. To cite just one example, he recounts an amusing tale of attempting to draw Antonello's Crucifixion in the National Gallery on Good Friday, which riffs on subjects ranging through Easter, Sicily, Trafalgar Square, wartime piano recitals, perspective, solidity, public spaces, attendants, security, reason (or the lack of it) and a climactic expletive, all bookended by an apposite quote to tease out a suitably oblique moral, like a modern-day Aesop or La Fontaine. …

Civil society sphericules: Emerging communication platforms for civic engagement in Tanzania

This article explores the communicative practice of a Tanzanian NGO, Femina. Based on a tripartite model of engagement (Madianou, 2012) integrating speech, action and understanding, and drawing on fieldwork on the communication practices of Femina, I critically assess the forms of civic engagement the organization strategizes about and seeks to articulate amongst Tanzanian youth. Situated in the ‘perverse confluence’ ( Dagnino, 2011 ) between neoliberal and radical democratic agendas in the communicative practices of civil society-driven media platforms, Femina navigates between identities as an NGO, a social movement and a media initiative. In the context of the growing literature on social networking sites and their affordances, dynamics and structures, the case of Femina illustrates how a civil society sphericule emerges within the dynamic co-evolution of new and old media platforms. The study is furthermore an example of the difficult shift in civil society practice, from service provision to an agenda of public service monitoring, social accountability and community engagement.

Does counterinsurgency fuel civil war? Peru and Syria compared

This article analyses the conflict-fuelling effects of counterinsurgency on civil war in Peru (1980–1995) and Syria (2011–2012). Despite different escalation onsets, in both cases the state's response to the increasingly armed opposition intensified and protracted the conflict. The comparative analysis reveals five interdependent factors that were particularly influential in that regard: the state's denial of demands by certain segments of society; indiscriminate police and military repression; the impunity of state forces; and the expansion of non-state armed groups driven by radical agendas. The research has implications that connect research on terrorism with peace and conflict studies: first, the more the opposition's demands were responded to by disproportionate repression, the more likely became the option of armed insurgency. Second, due to the state's superior military resources, the insurgent groups increasingly applied terrorist operations. Third, at least in the case of Peru, the terrorist tactics put the state on the edge of defeat. However, the adjustment of the counterinsurgency strategy to a more bottom-up approach eventually gained the state the upper hand. The article ends with controversial reflection on how far the recent violence intensification by Syrian insurgents justifies the end; that is, regime change.

Beastly Measures: Animal Welfare, Civil Society, and State Policy in Victorian Canada

This essay analyzes the development of Canada’s animal welfare movement during the nineteenth century. Situating Canada’s experience alongside that of England and the United States, it identifies an enthusiastic but conservative response to animal welfare, which the author argues reflects the high level of dependence among the movement’s upper- and middle-class supporters on animals as resources, sources of labour, and objects of sport. In particular, it focusses on the participation of sportsmen, cattle ranchers, industrialists, foxhunters, veterinarians, and others who recognized in the movement both the material and the ethical benefits that might accrue from the improved treatment of animals. As such, the essay brings to the literature on animal welfare and animal rights a sense of the movement’s economic dimensions, or the ways in which material concerns regarding property and productivity converged with but also limited the animal welfare movement’s ethical parameters. In doing so, it accounts for the near absence in Canada of the more radical agendas that informed the movement’s civil society parameters elsewhere, and in turn the ways in which the moderate vision that informed the nation’s animal welfare nongovernmental organizations contributed to an equally moderate response on the part of the state.

Alice, Not Peter

Alice, Not Peter Michael Levy (bio) Radical Children's Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction, by Kimberley Reynolds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. I had the pleasure of serving last year on the ChLA's Book Award committee. We read a number of fine critical works, but for me one book stood out as the clear winner, Kimberley Reynolds's Radical Children's Literature. It's a small volume, but it's out to push a big claim and it takes direct aim at one of the most influential and controversial critical works of the past quarter century, Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1984). Although she finds things of value in Rose's book, Reynolds criticizes it for seeing "the child in children's literature (and by extension, children's literature itself) not as embodying the disruptive and creative force of Lyotard's monster-child, but as having an innately conservative effect on what can be written for children" (3). Her intent is to disprove this claim, arguing that children's literature can be radical, can "contribute . . . to the social and aesthetic transformation of culture by . . . encouraging readers to approach ideas, issues, and objects from new perspectives and so prepare the way for change" (1). Reynolds looks at the work of a number of modernists who either emphasized the importance of their childhood reading on their adult production or, going further, actually produced children's literature in accord with the aesthetic theories that guided their adult work. Her thinking, she says, is in part indebted to ideas developed by Juliet Dusinberre in Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiments in Art (1987), a book that Reynolds believes should be better known that it is. One of Dusinberre's most startling arguments, for example, is that Alice in Wonderland (1865) not only radically altered the course of children's literature, but in fact "ushered in the modernist movement in all its forms" (9) due to its enormous [End Page 223] childhood influence on writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. The stories adults present to children, Reynolds insists, "are blueprints for living in culture as it exists, but they are also where alternative ways of living are often piloted in recognition of the fact that children will not just inherit the future, but need to participate in shaping it" (14; emphasis in original). Reynolds argues that children's literature is attractive to writers with radical agendas for several reasons. Frequently, because they do not receive the same kind of attention given to work for adults, children's books essentially fly "under the cultural radar" (15), thus, for example, allowing them to serve as a haven for left-wing writers during the McCarthy era. Such books can play a similar role for artists with nonpolitical but equally radical aesthetic or social agendas. The creation of children's books can also be appealing because they allow entry into the realm of dreams and fantasy, a world often associated with childhood. Further, they make it possible to combine the written word with visual images in creative and often sophisticated ways, something rarely possible in work explicitly aimed at adults. The very plasticity of children's literature allows it to be used in the creation of new genres and movements; Reynolds argues that it was instrumental in the development not only of literary modernism, but also of magic realism, citing the work of Nesbit and Travers as early examples and Burgess's Lady: My Life as a Bitch (2001) as a more recent one. Reynolds's second chapter centers on radical picturebooks, beginning with attempts at that form by Woolf, Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. The first two works, although clearly modernist fiction in picturebook form, were not intended for commercial publication and had negligible influence on the genre. Stein's book, The World is Round (1939), however, was intended for commercial release from its inception and, Reynolds argues, "can be regarded as the beginning of a strong modernist vein in twentieth-century children's publishing" (30). Reynolds then discusses a variety of avant-garde and modernist picturebooks, from early...

With the Best of Intentions: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Physical Education Curriculum Materials

Much of physical education curriculum in the developed world and specifically in Australia tends to be guided in principle by syllabus documents that represent, in varying degrees, some form of government education priorities. Through the use of critical discourse analysis we analyze one such syllabus example (an official syllabus document of one of the Australian States) to explore the relationships between the emancipatory/social justice expectations presented in the rubric of and introduction to the official syllabus document, and the language details of learning outcomes that indicate how the expectations might be satisfied. Given the complexity and multilevel pathways of message systems/ideologies we question the efficacy of such documents oriented around social justice principles to genuinely deliver more radical agendas which promote social change and encourage a preparedness to engage in social action leading to a betterment of society.

Taking On the Stigma of Inauthenticity: Adorno's Critique of Genuineness

search for authenticity, nearly everywhere we find it in modern times, writes Marshall Berman in his book on Rousseau, The Politics of Authenticity, is bound up with a radical rejection of things as they are. ... desire for authenticity has emerged in modern society as one of most politically explosive of human impulses.1 Even those with less radical agendas, like Sigmund Freud, have been seen as sharing same desire. According to Lionel Trilling in his classic study Sincerity and Authenticity, Freud's insis tence on tragic dimension of human condition intention of sustaining authenticity of human existence that formerly had been rati fied by God.2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Trilling added, dreaded the inauthenticity

To erect above the ruined auction-block institutions of learning: race-women, industrial education, and the artifacts of nation-making in the Jim Crow South

Racial uplift became an acceptable forum for women's activism at the end of the nineteenth century only after women had endured for years the dual biases of racial and gender discrimination, both from within the Black community and from without. African American women's educational reform efforts were a primary force in creating a Black nationalist forum during the 1890s through the design and construction of normal and industrial schools in the South. This article contends that these women reformers were in fact modelling a kind of political architecture through the building of these race-based educational landscapes. Elizabeth Evelyn Wright, founder of the Voorhees Industrial School in Denmark, South Carolina, used the built environment as a political vehicle for communicating the collective needs of the race while establishing a social countermovement as Black Victorians. Wright saw education not only as a remedy for years of chattel slavery but also as a way of expanding the limited role of women in the often male-dominated process of Black community building through space-making. African American women were uniquely aware of the spatial power their social welfare institutions had in the making of what were radical agendas for social change and collective race-based advancement.

The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals and Chinese Political Culture 1898–1929. By Timothy B. Weston. [Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2004. xiv+325 pp. $60.00; £39.95. ISBN 0-520-23767-6.

Timothy Weston's study of Beijing University (hereafter, “Beida”) spotlights how modern Chinese intellectuals positioned themselves politically and socially in the early 20th century. Weston relies on the Beida archives, dailies, journals, and many other sources, to make four contributions. First, Beida's early history shows how literati humanists repositioned themselves during a period of great uncertainty. New style intellectuals had influence because they mastered Western and classical learning. Secondly, Beida's complex history did not break sharply with the past. Earlier accounts of the May Fourth movement obscure the efforts of intellectuals since 1898 to redefine their role. Weston suggests that May Fourth amplified a continuing progression of new and old ways of doing things. Thirdly, political tensions emerged when the university increasingly radicalized after 1911. No more than 20 per cent of Beida students were involved in the New Culture movement. A strong conservative undertow continually challenged radical agendas. Often we hear only the voices of the latter. Finally, Weston assesses Beida's history in light of how the May Fourth movement played out in different locations. In the 1920s, Shanghai replaced Beijing as the leading venue for urban China's cultural and intellectual leaders. Beijing increasingly lost status under warlordism, and the Nationalist shift of the capital to Nanjing refocused Chinese intellectual life on the Chang (Yangtze) delta.

The People's Show: A Critical Analysis

1990s heralded a new form of museum exhibition: The People's Show. A light-hearted celebration of popular culture, the concept has had phenomenal success throughout the United Kingdom. Beneath the humour, however, are more complex and radical agendas relating to cultural rights. paper explores the issues associated with the rise and possible wane of this museum-based popular cultural phenomenon.