Site Of Struggle Research Articles

Being and becoming through Facebook: morality, sociality, and reflection among young Turkish‐American Muslim women

AbstractRecent debates in the anthropology of Islam have centred on the relationship between ‘everyday Islam’ and ‘piety’. Some scholars have posited that these are two opposing theoretical poles, while others have described how religion permeates the everyday. I add to these debates by describing how, for one group of young Turkish‐American Muslim women in a piety movement, the everyday permeates religion. Specifically, my ethnography shows that the ‘everyday’, constructed as a site of struggle and reflection, is seen as at the core of being and becoming a Muslim. Their diverse and shifting responses to the ethical dilemma of how to emulate the Prophet's vefa (loyalty) after moving away from one another – specifically whether to engage with Facebook for this reason – show how piety and the everyday, and the sacred and the secular, infuse one another in complex ways in their moral projects, and hence how what is considered normative and pious need not be static and homogeneous.

A Decolonial Approach in English Language Teaching as a Lingua Franca:

Language is a social practice and, therefore, is embedded within social, cultural, political, and economic relations. According to Benesch (2001), language is a site of struggle, a range of discourses competing for legitimacy in specific social contexts where power is unevenly distributed. Due to its transnational and transcultural scope, English is increasingly understood as a Lingua Franca that challenges the ideology of the supposed superiority of the native speaker, as well as the concept of the nation-state and the interrelations between language, territory, and culture. Furthermore, since the establishment of the Modernity/Coloniality group (CASTRO-GOMEZ; GROSFOGUEL, 2007), theories of decoloniality have been widely discussed in various academic fields, including Applied Linguistics and English teaching and learning. For this reason, Souza and Duboc (2021) argue in favor of a more performative decolonial praxis in order to identify, interrogate, and disrupt coloniality in different spheres of contemporary social relations, including language teaching and learning. In this sense, this article aims to reflect upon the role of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in teacher education as a key concept for promoting a decolonial approach to English language teaching from the Global South.

Micro language planning as a contested space: evidence from a South African university

ABSTRACT Micro language planning is often framed as democratic, transformative, inclusive, and therefore, less contested as it reproduces community consensus and support. This is contrasted with macro or top-down language planning which is power inflected and weaponised to serve interests of the dominant class. Through a theorisation of institutional language policies as products of micro language planning, this article analyses the language policy of one university in South Africa and reveals that, contrary to this widely held view, bottom-up language planning is also a site of struggle and contestation. In particular, we focus on specific language policy provisions that reveal the university’s underlying disposition towards multilingualism and linguistic identities. The analysis reveals multi-layered contestations on multilingualism and identity inherent in the university’s language policy. While the language policy purports to foster transformation by promoting multilingualism through the university’s ‘languages of choice,’ it is not exempt from the vagaries of essentialist identity politics and macro level language ideologies which legitimise English and Afrikaans. By identifying only four languages for promotion, the language policy envisages a kind of ‘exclusionary multilingualism’ that disregards the cosmopolitan character of the university and the identities marked by indigenous African languages left invisibilised by the language policy.

The campaign for bodily autonomy and belonging in Grenoble, France: resisting epistemic violence, media discourse and othering

ABSTRACT Shared public spaces can be sites of struggle where cultural practices are positioned as ‘other’ in starkly different ways ranging from being celebrated to being stigmatised. This article presents a longitudinal case study of a campaign by a citizens' group (Alliance Citoyenne Grenoble) for changes to swimwear regulations within municipal pools in Grenoble, France. Ethnographic data reveals that the campaigners experienced forms of othering and epistemic violence through media and political discourse and lived experiences which directly impacted their sense of belonging. The study analyses those discourses and the strategies adopted by the group to resist forms of marginalisation.

Inner-witnessing as a spatial everyday practice in Ann Petry’s The Street

Some scholars approach Ann Petry’s portrayal of Lutie Johnson’s fate in the hostile background of The Street (1946) through a naturalistic and deterministic lens: the protagonist, a single black mother, dreams of improving her lifestyle by reproducing a white uppermiddle class model. Given Lutie’s gender and race her dreams are, following this critical method, condemned as impossible. This approach to Petry’s novel does not take into account the deep geographical analysis that the author provides of Lutie’s struggle. Employing a spatial paradigm, this essay aims to offer an interpretation of Petry’s novel that challenges traditional geographic patterns evident in the street’s urban description. Such opposition reflects Katherine McKittrick’s approach to the definition of ‘Black women’s geographies’ as sites of struggle. Analyzing the novel’s employment of everyday practices, such as communicative expressions, and Kelly Oliver’s notion of inner-witnessing as one of them, proves how Lutie Johnson’s subjective mapping constitutes an everyday practice within the novel. As such, Petry’s portrayal of Lutie’s creation of space through these everyday practices illustrates how in her interactions with the street’s dynamics Lutie provides a witnessing cartography of struggle that opposes traditional geographic interpretations.

Memoryscapes: The Evolution of Sri Lanka’s Aragala Bhoomiya as a People’s Space of Protest

Abstract The ‘aragalaya’ or the ‘people’s struggle’ was perhaps one of the most important and successful movements of Sri Lanka’s long history of democracy. In 2015, democracy prevailed, unexpectedly and against all odds, when Sri Lankans, unsatisfied with their political representation, ‘voted out’ a government. In 2022, just as unexpectedly and for the first time in its history, the people of Sri Lanka ousted a government through mass protest and uprising. The protesters, cutting across socio-economic class and arguably many other barriers, came together and marched to Colombo’s Galle Face Green, in parallel to each other and to each other’s goals. This time, they came to do more than simply oust a government but for an idea of justice, equity, democracy, and system change. This article explores the memories and perspectives of those who ‘lived’ on the protest site and the relationship between memory, place, and the social construction of space, as they reconvened for a memory-mapping exercise in co-creating public histories of the aragalaya (struggle) and the aragala bhoomiya (site of struggle).

Crimes against Reproduction

Secular animal trials were coincident with witch trials across Europe from the 1200s–1700s, peaking between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The trials’ similarity extends beyond simultaneity. Both forms of trials were preoccupied with what we call reproductive crimes: criminalized perceived deviance from reproductive norms that codified into an order facilitating the rise of capitalist modernity. In this paper we discuss secondary sources concerning the animal trials alongside feminist theories of reproduction, domestication, and anthropocentrism to suggest that animal trials, like witch trials, are sites of struggle over the domestication of reproduction. The animal trials are specifically a site of negotiation concerning the nonhuman world’s position within an ascendant domesticated reproductive order. In the trials, the domestication of reproduction thus entangles with the anthropocentric domestication of the nonhuman world. The empirical base of our analysis focuses on three arenas in which animals were incorporated into juridical structures as criminal subjects: bestiality, infanticide, and witch trials. The first two involved animals being tried directly in French courts, while the latter involved animals being implicated in British trials as witches’ familiars. Together, these appearances of animals provide an introductory window into how human–animal relations were 1) shaped by the reproductive anxieties and politics of the late Middle Ages and early modern period in these countries, and 2) marshalled towards the assembly of domesticated reproductive norms whose legacies persist into current frameworks of gendered and interspecies relationality. This imposition of a gendered order onto animality evidences the extent to which gendered systems of reproduction govern not only humans but also a wider terrain of life.

Decolonising feminist explorations of urban futures

ABSTRACT How do decolonial feminist urban imaginaries of urban futures begin to interrogate twenty-first century urban life? The urban futures signaled in this special issue highlight three dimensions of urban imaginaries. The first connects the privatization and commodification of urban infrastructures to state-based and capitalist discursive efforts to make the urban. The second concerns temporal convergences of past, present and future in visions of the urban that reproduce the recursive logics of coloniality by re-mapping the landscapes of urban inequality and dispossession through encounters with sedimentations of colonial and neocolonial formations. Third, authors take up the everyday as a site of struggle through which women’s negotiations and placemaking practices offer alternative urban imaginaries. These articles are based on papers given at the 2019 “Feminist Explorations of Urban Futures” conference organized by the transnational feminist research project, “Urbanization and Gender in the Global South: A Transformative Knowledge Network” (GenUrb).

Producing food utopia(s) at the UN Food Systems Summit: A thematic discourse analysis of Australia’s Summit Dialogues

Australia’s National Food Systems Summit Dialogues, held as part of the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), are examined here as a case study exploring the production of utopian narratives within food systems governance. A large body of literature has critiqued the UNFSS on the basis of democratic governance and corporate capture, and some authors have also linked these critiques to the processes of knowledge production at the Summit. However, little research has examined these processes at a micro level, exploring the discursive means by which narratives about the food system are produced in multistakeholder governance contexts. Recognising the UNFSS as a site of struggle and contestation between various ‘utopian’ visions for the future food system, this article asks: What kind of food utopias were produced at the Dialogues, and how? Thematic discourse analysis of the Dialogues – focusing particularly on elements of critique, experimentation, and process – reveal two distinct food utopias, based on technologically-mediated sustainability and multistakeholder participation respectively. This analysis reveals the ways in which ‘utopian’ narratives about food and agriculture are discursively constructed according to ideological assumptions – and, as in this case, may end up reproducing the status quo food system rather than offering the possibility of transformative change.

The Ambivalence of Alexander Berkman’s Anti-Prison Anarchism

Alexander Berkman’s 1912 Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist is a significant book in the development of American anti-prison politics, not despite, but because of its ambivalent approach to prisons. I trace through Berkman’s book and archive an unresolved tension between two approaches to the prison: advocacy for political prisoners, whereby the prison is a state tool for suppressing radical ideas, and advocacy against the politics of prisons, whereby the prison is an “aggravated counterpart” of social structures and a site of struggle. Berkman’s ambivalence between these approaches amid his memoirs and activism exemplifies the complex development of U.S. thinking on prisons and enduring tensions in contemporary prison politics.

The discursive tensions of Darija in Morocco's online news articles: A diachronic corpus-assisted approach

In keeping with a diachronic corpus-assisted discourse approach, this study explores the way Darija, the colloquial Arabic variety in Morocco, has been discursively constructed in online news articles over a ten-year timespan. To this end, a specialized corpus of over one million words was compiled from the news website Hespress. The study integrates the analysis of collocational frequencies and contextual examination of concordances, interrogating the links of the discourses encircling Darija with major sociopolitical events. Notwithstanding the local deep-seated linguistic rivalries and the prevailing standard-language ideology, the findings suggest that Darija during this period adopts a joint discourse of resistance with Amazighiya (Berber) against the Arabophone ideology, arguing for a consolidated constituency of Moroccanness, fundamental to the maintenance and (re)production of the country’s cultural identity. Such findings shed light on language as a site of struggle, in which issues of social and institutional inequities are negotiated between contested ideologies.

Black Feminism and the Failures of the Contemporary “Neoliberal” University Critique

This article interrogates critiques of the contemporary university elaborated by scholars under the umbrella of critical university studies (CUS) by grappling with the theoretical and conceptual commitments to neoliberalism as a framework to discuss the political economy of higher education and its concomitant practices. Through a Black feminist critique of CUS’s engagements with the “neoliberal function” of higher education, this article suggests the inability of neoliberalism as an analytical frame to consider the history of colonization and chattel slavery in the structuring of the contemporary university. Put another way, the emphasis on neoliberalism in many cultural critiques of the contemporary university disallows an analysis of Black fungibility as the internal logic of neoliberalism and the necessary relation that stabilizes the modern university and allows for the reproduction of post-slavery university subjects. Specifically, this argument coheres to the materialized scene of the university as a site of struggle. Reading Black student leaders’ denigration of the university through a Black feminist lens, this article invites a reconfiguration of the contemporary university critique that both constitutes the current neoliberal paradigm and exceeds the onto-epistemic configurations of the educational subject that enable the emergence of the “neoliberal critique” of the university itself.

Blended learning as a site of struggle: A critical realist analysis of students’ perceptions of blended learning and its impact on their sense of belonging

This study explores students’ perceptions of blended learning and its impact on their sense of belonging at a post-92 UK university. A critical realist framework that considers the interlocking domains of subjective experience, objective events and observations, and the mechanisms and structures that underpin them is used to situate these perceptions, while a mixed methods approach enables a multi-layered insight into the captured diversity of student experience. The quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that while the student self-reported experience of blended delivery is mixed, its perceived impact on academic performance is negligible. The effects of blended and remote learning on students’ sense of belonging, however, are profound and require a change in current practices to accommodate the affective aspects of learning and university experience. The study responds to the calls within the literature for more in-depth investigations of student experience, especially as regards student perceptions of that experience.

Where's the bathroom in this “mobile home”? Adding Water, Sanitation & Hygiene (WaSH) infrastructure to agendas on homelessness and digital media

Although access to water and sanitation have been recognized by the United Nations as human rights since 2010, that access continues to be a site of struggle in everyday life, especially among homeless populations. In this paper, we draw from two summers of a fieldwork-based course on homelessness and Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene in Denver, Colorado to consider whether a Google Map of public restrooms in the city might be useful for unhoused people. The paper's conceptual framework stems from Hartmann's idea of “homing”—which refers to how digital media can help unhoused people create everyday routines, exercise some control over their lives and spaces, and gradually create a safe environment—to consider whether the Google Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Map might help unhoused people integrate bathroom access into routines, rounding out the so-called “mobile home” to provide relief and personal agency. The effort runs up against digital literacy issues that mitigate “access” and point to the limits of techno-solutions. This paper points to the need to consider both media literacies and inclusive design in creating digital solutions to address issues faced by unhoused people. We also argue that planners should think holistically about how digital and telecom-focused “solutions” relate to other necessary infrastructures—in this case, public toilets and water access.

Language learners’ linguistic investment in ideologically framed language institutes: Forms of capital, ideology, and identity

Language learning in Iran is a site of struggle between two ideologically opposed spaces, state schools and non-state language institutes. This study drew on the construct of investment, which combines ideology, capital, and identity, to investigate the investment of Iranian English language learners at A1 and C2 proficiency levels at a non-state language institute. The learners in focus group interviews discussed different language-related resources influencing their investment, their expectations, and their language learning activities. The findings indicated that diverse ideological, cultural, and economic resources and imagined futures had led them toward investing at the institute. They were further found to be invested in diverse language learning activities beyond the pedagogical frame of the institute. Some aspects of investment, language-related beliefs, and identities varied across proficiency levels. Even though the ideological structures of these institutes are learner-centered, there are strong possibilities for enslavement to an extreme globally-oriented pedagogy or native-speakerism. It is hence suggested that state schools and non-state institutes draw upon more flexible language pedagogies embracing both local and global values.

Language Teacher Identity Outside the State-School Context

The importance of understanding language teacher identity is well-established in the existent literature. It has been shown to impact upon many aspects of teachers’ lives both inside and outside the classroom, such as wellbeing (Day & Kington, 2008) and self-efficacy (Canrinus, Helms-Lorenz, Beijaard, Buitink, & Hofman, 2012). The nature of language teacher identity is broadly categorised from a socio-cultural perspective, as dynamic rather than static, as negotiated in social interaction and (potentially) a source of struggle (Barkhuizen, 2017) or friction (Beijaard, Meijer, & Verloop, 2004). As this struggle with identity comes to the fore during periods of transition, when identity is seen to be challenged, the focus of research has largely been trained on pre-service or early-service teachers (Mercer & Kostoulas, 2018). The research in this paper addresses a teaching population who have thus far escaped the research gaze, but aspects of whose identity could be problematic and possible sites of struggle. Drawing upon a narrative approach, in case-study form, I examine how two established teachers (with four years or more service) who have been trained to work in the state-school context and who, for a variety of reasons are now working outside it, construct their language teacher identities. The findings point to the importance of the teachers’ own experiences as learners in their identity formation, and how emotion accompanies and acts as a driver of identity change as they seek stability and status on an uncertain professional path.

The Diversity of Solidarity Economies: A View from Danish Minority Gangs

The term “solidarity economy” is most commonly deployed to describe altruistic and socially beneficial ways of doing business, often in opposition to ones that are less so. Drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork among Danish minority gangs, this article seeks to open the discussion on solidarity economies beyond these traditional understandings by adding the perspective of gangs. It explores the more exclusive and violent aspects of solidarity economies, drawing on the analytical lenses of reciprocity and pooling. These dimensions afford the tracing of the conditions of solidarity within that group, rather than the mere verification of its absence or presence. I conclude that (A) solidarity economies are empirically multiple, operating on different and (a)synchronous planes as well as expressing themselves in different types; (B) solidarity is analytically beneficial for reading for economic difference; and lastly that (C) in this context, solidarity economies are inhabited as sites of struggle between two opposite, but specular forms of cultural fundamentalism.

‘Flood this Nation with the Bible’: Rev. Godfridah Sumaili, Politics and the People’s Bible in Zambia

Abstract Ever since the Declaration of Zambia as a Christian nation in 1991, the Bible has become foundational in the public of life, and often cited in public debates. This article employs symbolic power as an analytical tool to examine Sumaili’s state theology of the Bible which politicized and reduced the Bible in the public into a state apparatus for defining, shaping, and determining the meaning and content for governing Zambia. It proposes a Pentecostal public theology of the people’s Bible as a site of struggle against politics of dehumanization, oppression, exploitation, and systematic inequalities.

Reconceptualising the Silent Period: Stories of Japanese Students Studying Abroad

In this paper I attempt to reconceptualise the silent period from the perspective of situated learning theory to understand how it is experienced by adult second language (L2) learners during study abroad. The silent period has largely been regarded as a cognitive phenomenon during which some beginning L2 learners are unwilling or unable to produce the language they are learning. It initially attracted attention in relation to Krashen’s Input Hypothesis but, even though a number of studies were carried out in the 1970s and 80s, they have not been followed up, leaving a number of questions unanswered. Furthermore, these studies did not take into account the perspective of the learners who experienced the silent period. In the present study I conducted life-story interviews with Japanese university students who experienced a silent period during their study abroad. As a result, it was found that their silence was related to their intolerance of insufficient self-expression in the target language. The study suggests that the silent period is not to be seen as a period of incomprehension, rejection or abandonment of learning but a site of struggle and a pathway to finding new ways for self-expression and participation in the new language.

Do Bi/Multilingual Learners Play by the Rules of the Game? A Postmodern Approach to L1/L2 Use and Learner Investment

ABSTRACT The concomitant relationship among language, identity and power has been intimately connected to the ELT world. The bi/multilingual learner identity negotiation has been viewed as a site of struggle from a postmodernist perspective. To this end, learners’ existing capital in relation to their involvement in new capital is a significant issue in educational inquiries. In this narrative inquiry, the researchers aimed to uncover bi/multilingual learners’ beliefs of L1/L2 use in relation to learner investment. The data were collected through a biographical narrative, a life story interview, a reflection paper and a semi-structured individual interview from five preparatory school students. The findings reiterated the pervasive situation of English as a form of social, cultural and academic capital. The benefits of L2 regarding a new identity and community, better job opportunities and empowerment appear to have a negative effect on participants’ view of L1 as capital. The paper concludes that language teachers should draw on the principles of translanguaging pedagogy and call attention to the whole ecology of languages as valuable assets for meaning making.