Sociopolitical Agency Research Articles

Hope, Agency, or Disconnect

Social cohesion and agency in Blacks have not been sufficiently explored in a culturally relevant context. The current study ( n = 242 Black college students) explores the concept of racial cohesion, or the intersection of racial identity, common fate destiny, and sociopolitical agency by determining the psychometric properties of the Racial Cohesion Questionnaire. Confirmatory factor analysis established that the Racial Cohesion Questionnaire had two factors, Racial Agency and Psychological Cohesion. Additionally, racial ambivalence and disconnect was measured by the Black Racial Dissonance Inventory, which was determined using exploratory factor analysis. Racial cohesion and dissonance were also investigated for their relationship with community engagement and racism stress.

Rethinking detention and deportability: Removal centres as spaces of religious revival

This article investigates the effects of confinement on the religious subjectivities of migrants who have been held in British removal centres, elaborating connections to broader debates and mobilizations over the boundaries of citizenship and belonging. It draws on geographic scholarship on affect and the emotions to shed new light on the embodied experiences of detention, its wider socio-political effects and the complex links between intensified religious identities and politics. I argue that removal centres are acting as spaces of religious revival. African ex-detainees' narratives of their confinement dwelt repeatedly on their experiences of religious renewal, and the article explores how Christianity and the Bible provided bodily, narrative and performative ways of coping with, and countering the fraught ‘affective atmosphere’ within detention centres. Faith was a source of energy, hope and strength, created ‘communities of practice’ within and beyond the removal centres, while religious narratives affirmed detainees' humanity. Some expressions of faith underpinned directly political messages, intersecting with ideas about the self as a rights-bearing subject. By including religious responses in debates over the effects of the restrictive border controls, the discussion not only highlights dimensions of non-citizens’ socio-political agency but also demands a rethinking of the broader socio-political consequences of detention and deportability. The article is based on interviews with ex-detainees, chaplains and members of detainee visitors' groups as well as official inspection reports.

Place markers: Tracking spatiality in Brazilian hip‐hop and community radio

ABSTRACTCommunity radio and hip‐hop constitute sociopolitical agency in the (sub)urban, working‐class neighborhoods of São Paulo. Practitioners and performers have defined themselves, in part, by their success in “conquering space” and, in turn, have created a productive public sphere. Members of both groups consistently describe what they do as public exchange, a viable and visible option on the part of the disenfranchised to engage in a Habermasian ideal sphere of civic agency. In this article, I argue that it is this epistemology of knowledge as exchange coupled with a sociogeographical presence that make hip‐hop and community radio provocative to local residents and periodically irritating to state authorities.

Digital Flânerie: Illustrative Seeing in the Digital Age

This paper investigates a contemporary flowering of flânerie similar to that which Walter Benjamin analyzed in the first decades of the Parisian arcades. The flâneur has resurrected in a new space of the recent past as the computer hacker of digital culture. There is, however, a significant difference between the two figures' ways of relating to the world that gives the hacker an important socio-political agency - with which Benjamin tried, unsuccessfully, to imbue in the flâneur.