Space For Political Action Research Articles

‘What tools should we use?’: Politicized youth’s perspectives on digital activism in the Basque Country

As has occurred with all political activism, contentious counter-hegemonic activism has found a new space for political action on the internet. The massive expansion of digital space in recent years has increased the socializing importance of the field of communications, especially among young people. However, it is not known to what extent the use of internet-based tools has spread in the contemporary protest repertoires of young Basque activists. Based on qualitative research carried out with young pro-independence nationalist activists in the Basque Country in the period following the end of ETA’s armed activity, the main objective of this article is to analyse the scope and limits of digital activism from the point of view of these new political subjects. The principal finding is that activists construct hybrid communication systems, in which physical and virtual spaces are combined, and where their inheritance of a community-based counter-hegemonic political activism and experimentation with new forms have come together.

Auch ein solches Phänomen erinnert sich nicht von selbst: Der 11. September 2001 als Geschichtszeichen in Historiographie und Politik

Abstract This essay discusses the perception of 11 September 2001 as a caesura in historiography and politics. Based on a critical review of recent publications in history and reflections of key politicians, such as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the contribution scrutinizes the conventions of the historical discipline as well as popular narratives on history. In this respect, 9/11 has not triggered a sequence of separate events embedded in their social, political, economic and other context, but has generated as a particular historical event specific conditions for a historical assessment of globalization after 9/11 as well as space for political action as such.

The Concept of Emancipation as Political Action (Marx, Arendt, Rancière)

The text attempts to rethink the concept of emancipation and how it is structured as political action, while describing its historical origins and how it is further understood by the three important political philosophers: Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Rancière. All three of them – specifically and with substantial differences – understand politics as a space for political action that leads to emancipation in the name of equality. In order to determine the historical origin of the concept in more detail, the argumentation of the text rely upon its elaboration within the school of “conceptual history”, which deals with the historical semantics of terms and sees the etymology of and the change in the meaning of terms as forming a crucial basis for a contemporary cultural, conceptual, and linguistic understanding, and afterwards it links this “pre-history” with Marx’s, Arendt’s, and Rancière’s understanding of the concept of emancipation, and see how they differ and are related to each other, considering what theoretical conclusions about the concept of emancipation we can take from these relations. Particular interest is aimed at how the concept of emancipation is perceived today, who the subject of emancipation is, what the method and final goal of emancipation is, and, finally, how these understandings can help us in the present time when it seems that we need emancipation more than ever.

Radical democratic citizenship at the edge of life: young children, cafés and intergenerational and intersectional activism

ABSTRACT Current approaches to radical democratic citizenship seek to open up new spaces for political action and politicise ordinariness. However, a question remains as to the extent to which current radical approaches to citizenship include one of the most overlooked groups: very young children. This article focuses on radical democratic citizenship and early childhood (0 to 8 years old), where rights are often violated and activism is not always recognised, particularly in everyday public spaces. Drawing on critical reflections from recent research projects focusing on young children’s rights in everyday public spaces, I argue that radical democratic citizenship in early childhood can be conceptualised through intergenerational and intersectional activism and through an analysis of children’s ordinary political acts which render visible processes of radical change.

Ruptures et mutations du “m/oi” dans Le Corps lesbien de Monique Wittig

Monique Wittig’s theoretical and literary work interrogates identity as a space for political action. Through a critical analysis of essentialist feminism, Wittig attacks the political subject “woman” in order to denounce that it is impossible to liberate the women of patriarchal oppressions within the binary system of heterosexuality. Wittig argues that lesbians are not women. In The Lesbian Body, the writer deconstructs the feminine anatomy and subjectivity. The self is show as multiple, as a j/e divided by a slash. Wittig updates the very notion of subject, person, myself and another.

Density and Danger: Social Distancing as Racialised Population Management

A ubiquitous facet of collective social life in the age of COVID-19, social distancing(that is, the set of practices that aims to reduce the number of people in public spaces and maximise the distance between them) works to suppress viral spread by de-densifying public spaces; it redistributes people who are vectors for the virusby pushing them into their own domestic spaces. While the scale of these manoeuvres is in some ways unprecedented, the toll that the virus and its primary means of mitigation—social distancing—extracts along racial lines is at once unequal and deeply familiar. In this Position Piece, I examine social distancing as de-densification within a larger history of family planning and racialised population management in the context of ongoing fieldwork on the material and affective implications of contraceptive use in the American Midwest. In probing the grammar of social distancing—its distinctions between ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’ workers, services, and spaces and the ways in which such distinctions unequally distribute the labour of de-densification and its impacts on family planning—I elucidate how COVID-19 managements do not simply reveal existing racial disparities, but make them anew at a time when the fabrics of social reproduction are increasingly under strain. The dynamics of social distancing can thus be understood as continuous with ongoing attempts at racialised population management. Such an understanding opens a space for political action foreclosed by a narrow view of social distancing as crisis response.

Melodrama and the Production of Empathy in Manuel Puig’s El Beso de la mujer araña

Manuel Puig’s 1974 novel, El Beso de la mujer araña, investigates how empathy can be incrementally learned through a melodramatic storytelling pratice and, eventually, mobilized to effect political and social change. As Molina and Valentín, the two protagonists, coinhabit the same jail cell in Buenos Aires, Puig uses the sentimental, aesthetic and formal qualities of nineteenth-century melodrama, seen primarily through the Hollywood B-film, Cat People, to structure the reader’s understanding of how political, sexual, and class-based empathy is constructed inside Argentina’s first “Dirty War novel.” Puig employs the structure of melodrama as a means of mobilizing empathy vis-à-vis the psychological and physical body of the other. What develops in El Beso is a model for narrative empathy centering on the body as a vehicle for empathetic connection. Empathy, therefore, becomes a space for political action. This empathy is constructed through reading and the excess of identification, which in turn diminishes the self/other divide, and enables the surrender to touch and desire which subsequently shapes a new identity.

Construire la métropole sans vision métropolitaine : une analyse des politiques de transport à Genève

This article investigates the conditions necessary for the emergence of the city as a space for political action. It draws on the example of transport policies in Greater Geneva, where the pursuit of projects with metropolitan overtones was favored to the establishment of a new metropolitan entity. The current majority trend, in response to decades of liberal thought and 20 years of New Regionalism and urban governance, tends to promote vertical and horizontal project-centered coordination in a flexible and fluid manner, embracing private interests and civil society without institutional shackles. Yet, evidence of the operability of flexible forms of governance is not supported by a broad spectrum of empirical data. This article aims to answer two questions: First, is it possible to implement projects necessary for the metropolis without a metropolitan institution? Second, do the projects undertaken strengthen, or help to create, a metropolitan scale of intervention through the emergence of a metropolitan frame of reference?

Social Justice and the Environmental Commons.

In this chapter, we build on the scholarship on youth civic engagement by turning attention to the environmental commons as a space for political action. We begin with a definition of the term and arguments about ways that social justice is implied in it. Following that, we raise several psychological challenges to motivating action on behalf of the environmental commons and discuss the critical experiences and actions that can defy those challenges. Finally, drawing from Ostrom's empirical evidence opposing a tragedy of the commons, we discuss practices consistent with a social justice approach that nurture in younger generations an identification with and commitment to the environmental commons and discuss how this orientation would benefit human beings, democracies, and the earth.

Rousseau e Voltaire: duas perspectivas para a história moderna

Este artigo procura pensar qual a importância da noção de “liberdade” para o conceito de história em Rousseau e Voltaire. Em ambas as perspectivas de abordagem, a história moderna segue uma norma teleológica ou há um espaço para a ação política?

Race lines and spaces of political action among migrant youth

Recently proposed Anti-Racism Strategy established within a framework of the Australian Government's multicultural policy, People of Australia, identifies ‘youth engagement’ as one of the key areas that needs to be promoted and supported. Young people have been invited to join youth councils and youth forums and work with national, state and local policy-makers. Some have taken up this challenge and became public faces and active members of anti-racism campaigns. Others, however, either remained silent about the discrimination they face, or organised their own grassroots youth-based and youth-led initiatives. This paper discusses individual and collective responses to racism among young people in Australia, focusing on Melbourne, and examines possibilities in which racism, as a common experience among migrant youth, can be utilised to form alternative spaces for political action, challenging not only interpersonal, but also systemic forms of racism. By drawing attention towards institutional and systemic forms of racism, and the historical perpetuation of racist practices, these youth initiatives rely on legal measures, and argue that racism should be discussed in the context of the broader Australian society, not only in relation to minority groups.

The middle classes: An historic actor in today's global world

Saskia Sassen draws lines of shared experience between the protests of the ‘modest middle classes’ in diverse countries around the world, focusing on a common sense that the modern state is failing its people and a new conception of ‘the street’ as a space for political action and history‐making.

Limbaugh's Social Media Nightmare: Facebook and Twitter as Spaces for Political Action

When Rush Limbaugh made his now famous remarks about Sandra Fluke's Congressional testimony he set off a social media firestorm. The ensuing backlash cost Limbaugh many prominent advertisers and damaged his public image. In this study, we examine the characteristics that motivated some to engage in the social media conversation while others remained on the sidelines. We find that political information efficacy, or confidence that one has the knowledge and skills necessary to participate, dictate political engagement online. We discuss the implications of this finding for radio, communication and media scholars, and healthy democratic deliberation among young Americans.

Early Childhood Activism, Minor Politics and Resuscitating Vision: A Tentative Foray into the Use of ‘Intersections' to Influence Early Childhood Policy

Many postmodern and post-structural analyses of government policies affecting early childhood education stress the hegemonic nature of neo-liberalism and subsequently primarily focus upon identifying the manifestation of neo-liberal values in such interventions. An unintended and stultifying consequence of such analyses is, at times, to close off the possibilities of envisioning a positive engagement with, and role for, government policy. In addition, the primacy offered to localised knowledges can engender the development of policy responses which are not cognisant of more broadly based social impacts. In response, the authors proffer the use of intersections as key points for the development of analyses and action. This necessitates an active awareness of the ways in which local knowledges and experiences cross, or overlay, information generated from other sites, including disciplinary knowledges and analyses that may be classified as modernist. By utilising points of convergence, as well as understanding points of divergence, intersections can be used to open up spaces for political action that recognise and generate localised responses, whilst at the same time engendering policy that enables more broadly based social justice.

Evaluating participatory development: tyranny, power and (re)politicisation

Ever since participation entered mainstream development discourse, critics have attacked it as form of political control. If development is indeed an ‘anti‐politics machine’ ( Ferguson, 1994 ), the claim is that participation provides a remarkably efficient means of greasing its wheels. But do participatory practices and discourse necessarily represent the de‐politicisation of development? This paper aims to provide an answer in two distinct ways. First, it examines the ‘de‐politicisation’ critique, arguing that, while participation may indeed be a form of ‘subjection’, its consequences are not predetermined and its subjects are never completely controlled. Second, it investigates participatory development's ability to open up new spaces for political action, arguing that celebrations of ‘individual liberation’ and critiques of ‘subjection to the system’ both over‐simplify participation's power effects. To re‐politicise participation, empowerment must be re‐imagined as an open‐end and ongoing process of engagement with political struggles at a range of spatial scales.

Religion, Nationalism, and Transnational Civil Society in the Eritrean Diaspora

This article examines the emergence and significance of religion among Eritreans in the United States as a basis for building community in diaspora, reconfiguring nationalist identity, and constituting transnational civil society. It argues three related points: that religious identity and gatherings help mitigate against fractured political identities that have weakened secular diaspora associations; that practicing Eritrean identity through religion challenges the hegemonic power of the Eritrean state to transnationally control diaspora communities and dictate national identity; and that the very incipience of religious bodies as transnational avenues provides Eritreans in diaspora with an autonomous space to resist the state's totalizing demands. Through a critical ethnographic investigation of religious identity and church bodies in Eritrea and one United States diaspora community, the article shows that uneven transnational networks between the United States and Eritrea create new spaces for political action. Specifically, the relative autonomy of churches and the incipience of their transnationalism allow diaspora Eritreans to use religion in the constitution of an emergent transnational civil society.

Body Politics with Feeling: The Power of the Clothesline Project

The Clothesline Project uses t-shirt art to address the issue of violence against women. Others have argued that the Clothesline Project empowers women in general and female victims of violence in particular. In this article we attempt to deepen this argument, first, by tying it to the existing "faces of power" literature. Using this literature, we argue that the Clothesline Project empowers by creating a public space for political action, offering an alternative communicative medium, educating in a context of dismissal and silence, and contributing to social and cultural transformation. Second, we develop the notion of affective power and argue that it amplifies the practical power of the Clothesline Project.

Deploying soldiers, deploying words

An underlying assumption of this issue's theme is that not only can language be manipulated to serve political interests, but using language differently opens spaces for political action which can reinforce or go beyond existing parameters of thinking. Often, linguistic strategies enable political action, for good or ill, which previously would have been proscribed. In postwar Germany, the use of the military abroad was a taboo written in the blood of the Second World War. Yet in 1995 German combat troops were sent with overwhelming support as part of a peacekeeping mission to the former Yugoslavia, a location that nary a year earlier the German Foreign Minister had sworn German troops would never again encounter. How was it possible that in the course of one year the German government garnered parliamentary support and undertook a historic first with relatively little public debate? The usual answers, which lie in the pragmatics of politics—the exigencies of the NATO alliance, for example, or the sheer urgency of the situation in Bosnia—are seldom adequate to explain how such a decision came to be. For this we need to look at the workings of language and politics in the development of policy. The post‐Cold‐War/post‐unification era in Germany unsettled myriad concepts and terms, from German national identity to the meaning of war and peace. New situations have arisen with no clear guide to political action, and existing policy and identity discourses stemming from the Cold War found themselves struggling to establish themselves anew. A discourse establishes itself by controlling meaning—by setting the boundaries of interpretation. A discourse is said to prevail when it succeeds in establishing linguistic dominance over the meaning of key terms in a given context. Controlling meaning is a linguistic strategy that sets the parameters of the possible, both for understanding the past and for constructing the future. Becoming aware of this process aids both political and historical analysis, and the search for ways to transcend some of the more confrontative strategies and consciously move the interplay of discourses to a more hermeneutic level. Let us observe this process at work in the case of the first postwar deployment of German combat troops, exactly 50 years after 1945. I refer to the supporters of deployment as the “prevailing discourse"—these consist primarily of the governing conservative—liberal coalition and a majority of the opposition Social Democrats. Those opposed to the use of the German military abroad I refer to as the counter discourse. They are almost exclusively composed of the remaining Social Democrats, Greens, and the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS; the successor to the defunct East German Communist Party).

The Europeanisation of local environmental politics: Bathing water pollution in south‐west England

Abstract The influence of European environmental policy is transforming more than just the way that environmental protection is organised and implemented in the UK. The nature of environmental politics is also changing dramatically. The paper examines the implementation of the Bathing Waters Directive in the South West of England to illustrate how Europeanisation opens up new scope and spaces for political action. The legal standards laid down in directives such as the Bathing Waters Directive provide an authoritative yardstick which environmental pressure groups can use to exert pressure at the local as well as the national level. In turn, Europe becomes increasingly viewed in the UK as the moral arbiter of what counts as ‘pollution’.

Recovering Politics for Socialism: Two Responses to the Language of Community

AbstractSocialism is often defined in terms of “community,” or, as Professor John Wilson once put it, as a “society of friends.” Thus defined, it is contrasted with the competitive relations of bourgeois society. But in some recent theory and practice, political competition is taken to be a defining feature of a legitimate socialist order. The persistence of political institutions is thus stressed, both by Western socialist theorists and by reformers in Eastern and Central Europe, and the orthodox view that “state” is to be superseded by “community” is sharply rejected. These two critiques differ, however, in one major respect: for Western socialists, the state is to be legitimated by the principles of socialist rationality, while for many reformers of Eastern and Central Europe it is to be legitimated by political life itself. From this second point of view, neither “friendship” nor “rationality” responds to the tensions which a socialist polity, no less than any other, will face: for both these concepts, to the extent that they are taken to set pre-established norms, constrict the “space for political action, ” and thus remove the necessary conditions for legitimacy.