Radical Praxis Research Articles

Challenging neoliberal time: Creating space for radical praxis in geography

Challenging neoliberal time: Creating space for radical praxis in geography

Why engaged critical urban research must place scholar policy activism at its core

I welcome and endorse Loretta Lees' call for a reconstituted critical urban studies tradition predicated upon polyvocal, intersectoral and co-produced research, dialogues and dialoguing and concurrent and compounding critical intelligences. In this short commentary, I make the case for placing scholar policy activism at the heart of such a tradition. I explore how and why critical urban research has come to view executive power as its arch nemesis. I argue that continued estrangement and jousting between the architects of radical praxis and those of policy practice is indefensible. I scope the contours of a new generation of policy engaged critical scholarship. We can no longer in good conscience fire missiles from inside the ivory tower and outside of the governing tent in the hope that better cities will result. If we are to be serious about ‘shaking up the city’, we will need to work with and on sources of power – to immerse ourselves in the epistemic communities which enjoy dominion over policy registers – and recalibrate the urban ‘partition of the sensible’.

The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections

The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections

Why we need intersectionality in Ghanaian feminist politics and discourses

ABSTRACT Although there is some scholarship on intersectionality focusing on African feminist movements, more work needs to be done to examine the importance of employing an intersectional framework to understanding feminisms in Africa. I critically analyze the advocacy work of four feminist groups on social media and digital media platforms. I examine discourses in contemporary feminist movements that are especially visible on digital media and proffer recommendations on how their work can embody an intersectional praxis. I argue that to truly embody a radical praxis in African feminist politics, it is imperative that we employ an intersectional lens to ensure that feminist topics that have historically been pushed to the periphery are centered in our theory and praxis. While digital media provides a platform for voices that would ordinarily be excluded in discussions on feminist activism, it is imperative to pay attention to how these platforms are utilized by activists to (in)advertently exclude the most marginalized from their feminist work. By applying an intersectionality framework to understanding African feminist discourses, we open ourselves up to driving feminist theory and praxis toward emancipatory interventions. This study draws attention to the importance of centering historically marginalized groups in mainstream Ghanaian feminist discourses.

Continuum of Carcerality: How Liberal Urbanism Governs Homelessness

A distinctive regime of the spatial governance of poverty is underway in Los Angeles, one in which the criminalization of homelessness is yoked to placements in carceral shelter and framed as the right to the housing. In this essay, we uncover the state violence inherent in such liberal urbanism by showing how such placements insert the unhoused into a system of carcerality while promising that they are the path to permanent housing. Seeking to trouble and critique the dominant paradigm of U.S. homeless management, Continuum of Care, we conceptualize a continuum of carcerality that stretches from encampment sweeps to seeming housing solutions. We find that the placements are a ruse, reproducing housing insecurity through exclusion, expulsion, and waiting, a structural condition that we term permanent displaceability. By focusing on an emergent mercenary entity, Urban Alchemy, and its expanding contracts for displacement and security, we show that there is a distinctive political economy associated with the continuum of carcerality. Our analysis is rooted in an ethnographic research methodology that centers the radical praxis of unhoused comrades. To this end, we foreground the demands of a homeless union that formed during the COVID-19 pandemic, UTACH, Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing, which uses the framework of “carceral housing” to hold the state accountable to its promise of housing while refusing the carceral contracts that accompany such a promise. We take up their critique as an example of the ongoing reinscription of the terms of tenancy under conditions of global racial capitalism.

Conjunctions of resilience and the Covid-19 crisis of the creative cultural industries.

This article compares the conjunctions of emergency resilience and ecological resilience that underpin the creative cultural industry (CCI) crisis. It first introduces three characteristics that socially construct the CCI crisis and its hegemonic practice of emergency resilience (time, disaster discourse, and the adaptation of aesthetic digitalization) and exposes multiple discourses – from the technologies of cultural statistics to corporate financial modelling – that construct an ideology of ‘resilience-as-deficit’. In contrast to this approach, the article develops three characteristics of ecological resilience: a focus on transition and the long term; resilience as a decentred strategy and networked resource; and aesthetic digitization as a radical praxis of adaptability. Examining arts impact and cultural policy reports, drawing on ecological, feminist and cultural resilience studies, and analysing a digital cultural event in Asia (the Singapore LGBT cultural festival, Pink Dot), the article argues that ecological resilience offers new capacities towards a cultural ecology that can nurture fair work, artistic innovation, economic growth and cultural vitality.

Radical social innovations and the spatialities of grassroots activism: navigating pathways for tackling inequality and reinventing the commons

In this article, by drawing on empirical evidence from twelve case studies from nine countries from across the Global South and North, we ask how radical grassroots social innovations that are part of social movements and struggles can offer pathways for tackling socio-spatial and socio-environmental inequality and for reinventing the commons. We define radical grassroots social innovations as a set of practices initiated by formal or informal community-led initiatives or/and social movements which aim to generate novel, democratic, socially, spatially and environmentally just solutions to address social needs that are otherwise ignored or marginalised. To address our research questions, we draw on the work of Cindi Katz to explore how grassroots innovations relate to practices of resilience, reworking and resistance. We identify possibilities and limitations as well as patterns of spatial practices and pathways of re-scaling and radical praxis, uncovering broadly-shared resemblances across different places. Through this analysis we aim to make a twofold contribution to political ecology and human geography scholarship on grassroots radical activism, social innovation and the spatialities of resistance. First, to reveal the connections between social-environmental struggles, emerging grassroots innovations and broader structural factors that cause, enable or limit them. Second, to explore how grassroots radical innovations stemming from place-based community struggles can relate to resistance practices that would not only successfully oppose inequality and the withering of the commons in the short-term, but would also open long-term pathways to alternative modes of social organization, and a new commons, based on social needs and social rights that are currently unaddressed.

Henri Lefebvre's conception of nature-society in the revolutionary project of autogestion

Henri Lefebvre's intricate material-dialectical approach to the nature-society problematic, taken together with his advocacy of a praxis oriented to total transformation from the ground up through autogestion, offers a unified, critical, and dialectical approach to political ecology. Unfortunately, his work in these areas has too often been interpreted as divided and fragmentary, splitting his radical analysis of the production of space-time from his critical praxis related to autogestion. We offer a corrective to this by elaborating briefly on his use of Marx's material-dialectical approach, outlining how Lefebvre brings this method to bear on the nature-society problematic, and how his theorization of autogestion points to a radical praxis aimed at overcoming the social-ecological contradictions of capital. His engagement with Marx's theory of metabolic rift, and his advocacy of a radical project of autogestion as part of the critique of everyday life, serve to place the underlying issue of alienation in spatial terms, offering geography a transformative perspective that avoids positing closed systems and attempting to exhaust the various meanings assigned to nature. In this, Lefebvre demonstrates how the nature-society problematic overflows issues of ontological framing and language, calling for a unity of radical theory and practice to overcome the separations.

Designing their own curriculum: How youth co-constructed a dance team that opposed traditional student–school relationships

This article draws from a two-year ethnography at an urban public high school to analyze how high school students came together around a shared love for dance to create a youth-led affinity space. The high school students, Black youth in their freshman year of high school, navigated the complexities of creating a dance team and collaboratively composing dances, which in this article are theorized as multimodal texts. The analysis reveals how the student dancers practiced vulnerability, engaged in play as radical praxis, and were seen as creative cultural producers within school. While youth of color live rich literate and culturally productive lives, their literacies are often obscured or devalued within school. Curriculum and pedagogies tend to prescribe specific ways of making meaning that limit how youth can express themselves by dictating language, literacies, and body movement. Thus, this article illustrates how youth-led spaces can create opportunities to nurture youth’s literate identities and reimagine relationships with each other and school.

Amerikan Aristocracy

Leftist political theory remains trapped between two dominant conceptions of sovereignty: the liberal conception of popular sovereignty and the decisionist conception of sovereignty as the power to declare a state of exception. This essay offers a historical critique of the liberal and decisionist conceptions of sovereignty and develops a descriptive theory of aristocratic sovereignty, which is more suited to the history and the needs of radical political theory and praxis. By tracing the genealogy of sovereignty through early modern European political thought to the founding of the United States, this essay reveals the debilitating shortcoming of notions of sovereignty derived from both Carl Schmitt and the liberal tradition and provides a basis for a distinctively radical analysis of the sovereign aristocracy in Amerika.

Refusing politics as usual: mapping women of colour’s radical praxis in London and Amsterdam

ABSTRACT This article explores an intriguing emergent organising strategy among women of colour activists in London and Amsterdam: a politics of refusal. In response to the triple catastrophes facing women of colour: the on-going roll back of social welfare states, the normalisation of the far right in everyday life and the xenophobic backlash against migrants, we find that some women of colour activists are deliberatively withdrawing from view and working outside of dominant left activist spaces. Rather than demanding recognition and rights from institutional actors and supposed allies, many activists appeared to welcome and embrace their marginalisation as this exclusion from mainstream life creates the possiblity for alternative ways of doing politics and being political. Drawing on the work of Audra Simpson, we attempt to map the contours of women of colour’s refusal politics and consider how refusal generates different approaches to sovergenity and ungovernability.

Radical Curation: Making Space for Black Childhood(s) in the Art Hoe Collective

Abstract In 2015, Black, genderqueer teen Mars and their partner Jam founded The Art Hoe Collective (AHC) with the goal of promoting young, queer artists of color. Since then, the AHC has developed into a fully formed organization involved in a range of artistic productions. One of the AHC’s most prominent projects is its Instagram profile, which operates as a curated exhibition of art from queer artists. This article focuses on the work of Black girls/children and women featured on the AHC’s Instagram gallery. I argue that the Art Hoe Collective enacts a radical curatorial praxis to disrupt institutional practices of exclusion in art by showcasing Black queer aesthetics and offering counter-hegemonic narratives about Black girlhood and blackness in general.

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

Radical praxis of computing in the PRC: forgotten stories from the maoist to post-Mao era

In his 1937 essay "On Practice (Shijian lun)", Mao Zedong argues for a distinctively Chinese model of communism that merges practise with theory, combining objective experience and subjective knowledge into a coherent dialectical process of praxis. This was, at the time, a radical idea within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the global communist movement dominated by Stalinism at its heyday. But it became institutionalized as a guiding principle of CCP, the ruling party of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949, which has led, among other things, to the establishment of one of the world’s most important computing industries since the 1950s. This article interrogates the idea of “radical praxis” and applies it to the Chinese contexts of the 1950s–2000s in developing a holistic, emic understanding of the computing industry from the Maoist to the Post-Mao era. As such, we aim at reconstructing plural histories of Chinese technology that are longer, less deterministic, and more imaginative than mainstream accounts that would begin, almost always, with Deng Xiaoping’s marketization reforms. Longer, because we trace the radical praxis of Chinese computing back to the 1950s with remarkable continuity. Less deterministic, because it has multiple trajectories full of unforeseeable twists and turns. More imaginative, because praxis is as much about knowing, theorization, and subjectivities as it is about doing, implementation, and embodied struggle. Drawing from policy documents, news archives, memoirs of key CCP leaders as well as secondary materials in both Chinese and English, this article reveals and discusses hidden stories of Maoist radical praxis.

Conditions of radical care: a response to Asha Bhandary’s Freedom to Care

ABSTRACT This article claims that Asha Bhandary’s theory of justice in Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture is right to stress the interdependency of justice and care in addressing structural oppressions, but wrong in upholding liberalism’s capacity for doing so. Against her procedural mechanism of education for caregiving skills in particular, I point to the critical and generative methods of social reproduction feminism and Transformative Justice as models of radical praxis in the collective work of politically centering and radically transforming cultures of care.

Jacobin Allegory in Thelwall's The Rock of Modrec

This essay seeks to show that The Rock of Modrec occupies an important place in Thelwall's oeuvre and in the early development of Jacobin ‘seditious allegory’. While scholarship has thus far ignored The Rock of Modrec on account of its apparent juvenilia and ostensible apoliticism, I argue that Thelwall's chivalric romance allegorizes the British spirit as a champion of liberty and universal emancipation, and that it does so for a popular audience. Furthermore, its protagonist serves as a model for Jacobin allegorical reading practices: Sir Eltram begins as a passive receiver of ‘politico-sentimental’ appeals but eventually becomes an active allegorical interpreter, capable of reading into texts the universal truth of democratic liberty for which the British Jacobins strove. The Rock of Modrec thus serves as both an early example of Thelwall's use of ‘seditious allegory’ and a meta-textual commentary on the importance of allegorical reading as Jacobin radical praxis.

Introducing, Notes from the Field

This is Flower Noble, the new Senior Editor of the Journal of Progressive Human Services: Radical Thought and Praxis. I have recently taken over Marcia Cohen’s role as Senior Editor due to her well...

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz: the Continuity and Legacy of a Critical Africana Human Rights Consciousness

This article places El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz’s praxis, as well as the Africana [Black] movement for freedom, into a human rights discourse. Exploring his evolution into an internationalist activist-theoretician in five rhythmic movements, if you will, the opening; the transitioning; the solidification; the influencing; and the continuities, it is the central premise of this article that in order to truly grasp the breadth and depth of the Africana [Black] struggle for freedom we must explore those involved and their contributions as a product of a critical human rights consciousness. Accordingly, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz becomes an archetype in this regard. This idea rests upon the assertion that his praxis, albeit incomplete, due to his untimely death, represents an important nexus in the Africana struggle for freedom, merging various manifestations of radical praxis into a clearer articulation of the Black radical tradition.

Jaka pedagogika krytyczna jest (nie)możliwa w Polsce i dlaczego? (Esej metakrytyczny z Henrym A. Giroux w tle)

The text undertakes the problematics situated between modernity and tradition regarding the reception of H.A. Giroux’s works in Poland, in a view of furthering the study of pedagogy and educational praxis. First, the author outlines the beginnings of openness towards critical pedagogy. What is underscored here is the 1980s’ main inspiration drawn from the resistance paradigm. Then, the author proceeds to the current state of Giroux’s reception in Poland. He illustrates differences among particular examples and levels of the said reception of Giroux’s pedagogy and of the scholar’s theoretical background. The emphasized disputes pertain especially to transcending metaphysics and relativism as a challenge faced by hermeneutical criticism and critical hermeneutics. Additionally, the “critical” horizon of the main handbook of pedagogy used in Polish universities is discussed. The author point to the wasteful efforts at instigating the breakthrough in the reception of critical pedagogy and he exemplifies them by an instance of misbegotten analysis of the allegedly delayed critical pedagogy of work. As a particularly positive example the author presents a new effort at developing critical hermeneutics (and radical praxis) for pedagogy by Andrzej Wierciński. In the concluding part written “in lieuof conclusions,” four lists of critical problems’ dislocations are provided; the problems are both convergent and related to one another, thereby redefining current research objectives and pertain to practical applications in educational praxis.

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Natalie Havlin and Jillian M. Báez In recent years, more light has been shed on the politics of citation in reinscribing power dynamics in the academy, especially in regard to gender and race. In a post on her academic blog feministkilljoys, Sara Ahmed argues that citational practices are a "rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies" (2013). She goes on to observe that citational practices play a key role in creating hierarchies in the academy that delineate the contours of disciplines. These contours include what are considered canonical or germinal texts in the field, and define the center and periphery of a given discipline. Attending to the centrality of citation in maintaining white, cisheteromale privilege in the academy, the movement Cite Black Women works toward making Black women's scholarship more visible. In order to do so, Cite Black Women "engages with social media and aesthetic representation (t-shirts) in order to push people to critically rethink the politics of knowledge production by engaging in a radical praxis of citation that acknowledges and honors Black women's transnational intellectual production" (Cite Black Women 2018). Christen A. Smith began the campaign at the 2017 meeting of the National Women's Studies Association in Baltimore, Maryland, by selling T-shirts that read "Cite Black Women" as a way to fundraise for the Winnie Mandela School in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Soon after, Smith joined with other Black scholars to form a collective who published their Cite Black Women resolutions with the following goals: 1) Read Black women's work; 2) Integrate Black women into the CORE of your syllabus; [End Page 9] 3) Acknowledge Black women's intellectual production; 4) Make space for Black women to speak; and 5) Give Black women the space and time to breathe. (Cite Black Women 2018) These resolutions resulted in the creation of the hashtags #CiteBlackWomen and #CiteBlackWomenSunday. In 2018 the Times Higher Education of London published a feature story on Cite Black Women and, moving outside of the academy, Essence magazine listed the movement as one of the top ten issues in their April 2018 issue. We foreground the work of the Cite Black Women collective in our introduction to this special issue of WSQ Inheritance in order to recognize and acknowledge Christen A. Smith's and the collective's important labor in centering the foundational intellectual and political role of Black women in feminist movements as well as in gender and women's studies. The #CiteBlackWomen collective focalizes key concerns that this special issue of WSQ and we, as general editors of WSQ, share: How does the transference of feminist knowledge production occur? Whose feminist scholarship is preserved, acknowledged, and passed on? How might feminist scholars grapple with the power dynamics of whose work is recognized and built upon in order to transform our scholarship and political practices? Indeed, the forty-eight-year history of WSQ exemplifies both past and ongoing struggles to build a radical politics of citation and legacy of feminist of knowledge production. In 1972 Florence Howe and the Feminist Press launched the Women's Studies Newsletter to share information about new program developments, resources, and the emerging National Women's Studies Association. In 1981 the editorial board and Howe renamed the newsletter Women's Studies Quarterly and expanded the focus to feature scholarship and reviews of new publications. From 1975 to 1982, the National Women's Studies Association copublished the newsletter and subsequently Women's Studies Quarterly. From its beginnings, WSQ was committed to accessible writing for a larger audience (not just academics) and attending to the most urgent issues facing women. In particular, much space was devoted in the newsletter to pedagogy from preschool to the college classroom. The earliest issues of the Women's Studies Newsletter from 1972 to 1981 regularly featured bibliographies and reviews of U.S. and international women writers, as well as recent publications and [End Page 10] feminist media for newsletter readers to incorporate into their newly launched women's studies courses in both high schools and universities. These early issues also published occasional articles and letters by women of color about the need to recover...