Spaces Of Action Research Articles

Gestão de pessoas no serviço público

With the changes taking place globally in the most diverse segments, many areas had to adjust to accompany such transformations. The field of people management was not different, influencing the most diverse spaces of action, both public and private. The aim of this research was to analyze the perception of the Technical-Administrative Servants in Education of the Federal University of Tocantins (UFT) - Campus de Araguaina, in terms of the training policies. To achieve this, we used descriptive and qualitative exploratory methodologies, through a bibliographic survey, and the application of questionnaires to servers with closed and open questions, aiming to contribute to the analysis of the results. In general, the research allowed to verify that in all the points surveyed, the agreement prevails that they are attended, according to the participants' perception. The best-evaluated points are, respectively, the promotion of training; wide dissemination; course objectives; planning based on sectoral needs; positive feedback from training; indication of priorities by the servers; participation of the servers in planning; clarity in the offer of courses; and, the participation of the target public. However, it was found that some points had higher levels of disagreement, such as participation of the target audience in the training actions; the participation of the servers in the planning; and, the lack of clarity in the construction of the schedule.

Beyond Resilience

Studies of queer and trans suffering, resilience, care, and vitalities are invariably also investigations into the difficult and painful articulations of lives that feel worth living and deaths that feel okay dying. The notion of resiliency, referring to a conditional state of overcoming difficult situations, neglects to fully encompass our understandings of risk, vulnerability, and life. This article explores the ways in which Washington, DC–based trans activists discuss shared coalitional labor as constituting that which renders viable life—or, in some cases, what they describe as deaths worth dying—in a contemporary moment that is distinctly violent. While health researchers have long noted the beneficial role that a coalition serves in better representing needs in research, this article focuses on how individuals meet their needs not through solitary and normative resilience strategies but within and through spaces of coalitional action. This approach to radical care and viable life encourages us to rethink how a necropolitics of trans life—lives marked as morally suspect and intrinsically disposable—coexists with a notion of trans vitalities that this article develops. Ultimately, embracing the concept of trans vitalities is not simply a refusal or disavowal of projects of normalization or the commodifiability of trans rights but, rather, a vigilance toward the violently homogenizing expectations of the heterogeneity of lived experience.

For diffident geographies and modest activisms: Questioning the ANYTHING‐BUT‐GENTLE academy

AbstractThis commentary interleaves autoethnographic reflections and qualitative data to develop two critical reflections on “gentleness” in contemporary spaces of academia and activism. First, somewhat autoethnographically, I question how normative styles of academic performance and self‐presentation often lead us to efface and devalue gentleness, and be complicit in presenting ourselves and performing research in ways that are ANYTHING‐BUT‐GENTLE. I argue that, consequently, all kinds of everyday academic awkwardnesses, worries, and anxieties have come to be positioned as non‐normative personal‐professional failings. Second, reflecting on research with young anti‐austerity activists in England, I consider the unsettling, but often characteristic, presence of modesty, awkwardness, and self‐doubt in spaces of activism. I argue that normative idealisations of “impact” within the contemporary academy can often lead us to value only those modes of social impact which are unabashedly substantial, muscular, large‐scale, self‐confident, and readily narratable as such. By contrast, I am often struck by the way that affirmative, transformative activisms are done and described in ways which are much more hesitant, self‐doubtful, or modest than this: for example, through narratives of “just getting on,” “just coping,” or “just what we do.” Through these reflections I argue that an attunement to gentleness should permit greater appreciation of awkwardness, diffidence, shyness, modesty, and self‐doubt in spaces of academia and activism. Moreover, I argue that these kinds of gentleness might form points of critique and solidarity within and against the ANYTHING‐BUT‐GENTLE academy.

Multifaith Third Spaces: Digital Activism, Netpeace, and the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change

Multifaith spaces typically imply sites where people of diverse faith traditions gather to participate in shared activities or practices, such as multifaith prayer rooms, multifaith art exhibitions, or multifaith festivals. Yet, there is a lack of literature that discusses online multifaith spaces. This paper focuses on the website of an Australian multifaith organisation, the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC), which we argue is a third space of digital activism. We begin by outlining the main aims of the multifaith movement and how it responds to global risks. We then review religion and geography literature on space, politics and poetics, and on material religion and embodiment. Next, we discuss third spaces and digital activism, and then present a thematic and aesthetic analysis on the ARRCC website drawing on these theories. We conclude with a summary of our main findings, arguing that mastery of the online realm through digital third spaces and activism, combined with a willingness to partake in “real-world”, embodied activism, can assist multifaith networks and social networks more generally to develop Netpeace and counter the risks of climate change collaboratively.

Being (co-)present: Reflecting the personal and public spheres of asylum seeking in relation to connectivity

This article links the personal use/meaning of information and communications technology for refugees and asylum seekers with their visibility/invisibility in public spaces. More precisely, it gives insights into how the personal and public spheres of asylum seeking interrelate when discussing connectivity. In doing so, I discuss the following research questions: How is connectivity embedded in refugees and asylum seekers’ everyday practices? And in addition, in which ways does this personal dimension interact with the public (structural level), given their increased presence in public spaces? In order to respond to the research questions, a qualitative-ethnographic approach was chosen for this study by adopting different research methods: Participatory observations, semi-structured interviews, expert interviews, and document analysis. Such an approach is fundamental to avoid a media-centric analysis without accounting for offline contextual lives, power relations, and experiences. As the results show the meaning of connectivity within the asylum experience raises a public as well as a personal dimension. As such the meaning of the Internet is based on the agency of asylum seekers given restricted access to public spaces and social support offline. Thus, the results reveal that both Internet access and experiences of transnationalism/displacement constitute and configure connectivity. Following this line of argument, connectivity widely compensates for the spaces of action, spaces of learning, spaces of interaction, and spaces for information that are missing offline, in the process of emplacing themselves in a new environment.

Engaging boys in gender activism: issues of discomfort and emotion

ABSTRACT This paper examines activist spaces for gender justice within two elite independent schools situated in an affluent part of the USA. Drawing on student interview data gathered as part of a broader study that sought to identify new educative approaches to addressing gendered violence, the paper explores attempts at these schools to engage boys in such spaces. With reference to two activist stories, the paper highlights the driving concern for including boys in discussions of gender justice (and, in particular, sexual misconduct and assault) as about ensuring their comfort. This concern is critically examined in light of the necessity of discomfort as central to gender transformative work. The paper examines how the emotional intensities of this work can both close down and open up conversations about gender justice and argues the significance of finding ways to support boys to critically explore these intensities towards engaging them in gender activism.

Redes e cidades: reflexões acerca da cidadania

Este artigo discute as implicações redes no mundo contemporâneo sob o prisma de novos espaços de atuação. A vida social coletivizada pelas redes se organiza de outros modos. O estudo cogita o conceito de cidadania entendido numa nova dinâmica do coletivo analisando a influência das redes refletida no poder de intervenção, reflexão e interconexão de relações sociais. O atual conjunto dessas expressões de comportamento coletivo define os contornos do que para nós significa uma reconfiguração em diversas esferas da sociedade: dos espaços de representação; na forma como o coletivo se relaciona nas cidades; nas relações de trabalho. A cidadania trabalhada no contexto das redes e numa cultura cada vez mais mediada por relações virtuais traz um marco analítico de novo tipo, nos dando pistas que a cidadania está se reconfigurando em suas bases, abrindo caminho para percepções de um novo protagonismo social. A cidadania na era das redes trabalha sob o signo da lógica colaborativa, do compartilhamento e da auto-narrativa de representação. Essas novas experiências nos interrogam quanto ao sentido de uma cidadania ainda em formação.

Institutional philanthropy and popular organising in Africa : some initial reflections from social movement activists

As popular forms of organising increasingly serve as sites for change in Africa, institutionalised private philanthropy, which has generally stayed away from such activist spaces is slowly engaging. While anecdotal knowledge exists, evidence-based analysis on these relationships is scarce. This study explored how African movements experience and see the role and nature of philanthropy in relation to their own functioning and objectives. It highlighted that it is not merely a question of whether it is appropriate for institutional philanthropy to engage, but the ‘how’ of engagement that matters most. As a result, different challenges and limitations emerged. The research reflected critical concerns raised by movements about philanthropic orientation, ideology, and practice, and called for radical mindset shifts from institutional philanthropy – particularly on aspects such as power, control, accountability, and impact – and provided practical observations for consideration.

Visual participatory methodology as a prompt for agentic creativity: Revealing views and visions of a teacher learning journey

By using activities such as visual participatory methodologies, pre-service teachers and university staff members are able to explore and extend their ideas of what it means to be a teacher. In this research project, I sought to prompt a visual dialogue between students and staff. The distance provided when using creative enquiry procedures such as photo-voice, collage, and drawing allows participants, as members of a teaching community, to detach from their assumptions and view themselves, knowledge, and meaning making in more subtle ways. The aim of this creative participatory study was to explore dialogic engagement concerning the learning-to-teach journey of Bachelor of Education (B Ed) students at a South African university. The visual-based interaction of student teachers and staff is revealed, and the movements towards the goal of teacherness laid bare. I make an argument for the use of visual and creative approaches as a means of collaboratively bridging complicated and difficult territory, moving beyond boundaries to spaces of creative action. An account of the potential of artful portrayals as both disruptive and coalescing devices is a key contribution of this enquiry.

Preempting Court-Civil Society Synergy: How China Balances Judicial Autonomy and Legal Activism

In the past two decades, two successive Chinese administrations have taken two drastically different and seemingly self-contradictory stances towards judicial autonomy and legal activism. Hu Jintao, under the banner of “harmonious society,” adopted a relatively mild approach towards activist lawyers while concurrently undermining court independence. The current administration, on the other hand, has taken the opposite route in an effort to promote “law-based governance,” severely limiting the space for legal activism while pressing for reform aimed at enhancing judges’ autonomy and professionalism. This study argues that the transition was motivated by a combination of three factors: the regime’s changing conception of its own legitimacy, the recent centralization of political power, and the regime’s continual desire to avoid synergy between judicial autonomy and legal activism, which it deems a threat to social and political stability.

Museums and the Traps of Social Media: The Case of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum

In this article I discuss both the recent threats as well as opportunities posed by social media to the activities of museums, taking into account social media’s importance as an evolving space of both social outreach and social activism. Recalling the controversies around the U.S. and UK museums’ social media responses to George Floyd’s death, I argue that museums run the risk of politicization and entanglement in controversial issues which are not necessarily linked to their profile and mission. I analyse museums’ social media guidelines, good practices, and mission statements, and posit that they play a fundamental role in integrating the new realm of the Web 2.0 into traditional museum activities. My main case study and example of good practice is the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. It has constantly embedded general ethical and educational principles and guidelines of Holocaust commemoration and education into its more than 60-years’ experience in dealing with and taming political and cultural controversies surrounding this memory site of universal importance, and this embeddedness lies at the core of its social media activity. Defined as an “online community of remembrance”, it consists of well-thought-out initiatives which aim at informing the public about the everyday history of the camp, involving itself in the current commemorations and anniversaries, and rectifying simplifications and misinformation about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. I also analyse the fundamental role played by the official social media profiles in managing the crisis which arose at the beginning of 2018 with the amendment of the socalled “Holocaust Law” in Poland.

Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race

Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race

Dr. Ride’s American Beach House by Liza Berkenmeier

Reviewed by: Dr. Ride’s American Beach House by Liza Berkenmeier Sean F. Edgecomb DR. RIDE’S AMERICAN BEACH HOUSE. By Liza Berkenmeier. Directed by Katie Brook. Greenwich House, Ars Nova, New York City. November 10, 2019. Liza Berkenmeier’s dynamic new play, Dr. Ride’s American Beach House, presents an underrepresented history of how queer women carved out feminist space for themselves in the early 1980s, following the period of gay liberation. While LGBTQ+ theatre about that era primarily focuses on HIV/ AIDS and gay men, this production empathetically pushed the epidemic to the side, for just a moment, demonstrating how Sally Ride became an icon for lesbians, symbolizing aspirational hope at a time when queer women were just beginning to find their voices. With its quiet, intimate, and minimalist staging, director Katie Brook’s production showed how the origins of queer activist spaces often began with casual conversations at intimate gatherings before growing to movements that continue to advance inclusive, queerer spaces. Click for larger view View full resolution An intimate moment between Kristen Sieh (Harriet) and Erin Markey (Matilda) in Dr. Ride’s American Beach House. (Photo: Ben Arons.) The production opened with two friends, Harriet (Kristen Sieh) and Matilda (Erin Markey), gathering for their weekly “Two Serious Ladies Book Club” (SLBC) meeting (named for Jane Bowles’s enigmatic 1943 feminist novel). While Matilda is married with a child and Harriet is saddled with a deadbeat boyfriend, clearly something clandestine and queer exists between these two women. The bosom friends expressed their Sapphic desire through a secret greeting in the form of song and an impromptu lap dance, flirtatiously exchanging the chorus of the 1965 pop hit A Groovy Kind of Love— a kind of lavender lingo that conveyed an Oscar Wildean sentiment for a “love that dare not speak its name.” Berkenmeier’s play suggests that such [End Page 371] brief encounters, potentially cut short by the pressures of partners and children at any moment, were the only time and place where women, like these, could find a space for queer fellowship. Brook’s staging of this liaison pulled back the proverbial curtain on the kind of secret spaces where queer relationships took self-protective sanctuary in the recent past. Sieh and Markey’s convincing intimate relationship was heightened by their offstage, ongoing artistic collaborations, in work such as in Tina Satter’s evolving performance piece Ghost Rings. Click for larger view View full resolution Kristen Sieh (Harriet) has her eyes opened by Marga Gomez (Meg) in Dr. Ride’s American Beach House. (Photo: Ben Arons.) Regardless of the freedom provided by their recurrent undercover rendezvous, Harriet and Matilda feel stuck in St. Louis, trapped by the normative insipidness of their lives. Their yearning for queer space was initially reflected in their choice of meeting place—the haphazardly decorated rooftop of the museum where Harriet lived and worked, repur-posed as a patio, with an expansive sky, represented at Ars Nova by set designer Kimie Nishikawa’s expansive cyclorama. The velvety blue sky portended Ride’s revolutionary trip to space the next morning, but it also provided a visual symbol for the cosmic challenges placed on same-sex couples during this period. The dilatory pace of the first scene shifted with the arrival of a lesbian nurse named Meg (Marga Gomez). Meg’s performance of confident out-ness, aided semiotically by Melissa Ng’s butch costume design and Gomez’s signature close-cropped hair, exploded the socially imposed walls of Harriet’s and Matilda’s lives, represented by their teased hair and vintage costumes that epitomized 1980s femininity. While Matilda expressed that she invited Meg to the SLBC meeting as a titillating provocation, it was Harriet whose world was unexpectedly ripped opened when Meg matter-of-factly revealed that her hero, Sally Ride, was a lesbian. This epiphany, that perhaps Ride is more similar to Harriet than she initially realized, ignited a fire within her to put an escape plan in motion, made real by a transition of Sieh’s physicality from passively frail to empowered and frenetic. When it is revealed that Harriet’s mother has just passed away in Florida, Harriet takes it as...

Evasão no curso de licenciatura em geografia da Universidade Estadual do Oeste do Paraná (UNIOESTE): indagações e complexidades

A evasão escolar no ensino superior é um tema que apresenta indagações e complexidades. A necessidade de ampliar e aprofundar o estudo sobre a evasão universitária remeteu este trabalho, de modo a compreender a questão da evasão no Curso de Licenciatura em Geografia da Universidade Estadual do Oeste do Paraná (UNIOESTE), Campus Marechal Cândido Rondon. O enfoque temporal ficou limitado aos anos de 2012 a 2015, desenvolveram-se levantamentos de dados e possíveis hipóteses da evasão, a fim de caracterizar as dificuldades encontradas pelos discentes na conclusão do curso. Para o desenvolvimento do estudo, optou-se pela pesquisa qualitativa, através da técnica de estudo de caso, com a participação de discentes evadidos do Curso de Licenciatura em Geografia, por meio de entrevista/questionário semiestruturado. Nesse contexto, o número de ingressantes no curso supracitado totalizou em 146 discentes. Destes, 53% se evadiram do curso. Dos 73 discentes evadidos relativos ao enfoque temporal, 53 discentes concordaram em contribuir com a pesquisa. Uma das razões mais fortes para o abandono do curso, segundo os retornos, é a dificuldade de conciliar trabalho e universidade, pois 85% dos evadidos desenvolviam atividades remuneradas ao desistirem do curso. Outro fator é que se verifica participação reduzida dos ex-alunos na vida interna da universidade, seja por falta de tempo, seja por falta de informações sobre seu funcionamento e espaços de atuação dos alunos na instituição.

An interprofessional perspective on healthcare work: physicians and nurses co-constructing identities and spaces of action

AbstractIn this article we develop a theoretical perspective of how professional identities in multi-professional organisational settings are co-constructed in daily interactions. The research reported here is located in a healthcare context where overlapping knowledge bases, unclear divisions of responsibilities, and an increased managerialist emphasis on teamwork make interprofessional boundaries in healthcare operations more complex and blurred than ever. We thereby build on a research tradition that recognises the healthcare sector as a negotiated order, specifically studying how professional identities are invoked, constructed, and re-constructed in everyday work interactions. The perspective is employed in an analysis of qualitative data from interviews and participant observation at a large Swedish hospital, in which we find three main processes in the construction of space of action: hierarchical, inclusive, and pseudo-inclusive. In most of the interactions, existing inter-professional divides and power relations are sustained, preventing developments towards integrated interprofessional teamwork.

The Development of Youth Parliamentarism in Africa

The article is devoted to one of the forms of political representation systems development – youth parliamentarism in Africa. It guarantees a balance between power and a society where young Africans are the majority of voters. Youth parliamentarism is a form of civil society development. It contains the idea of including young people in parliamentary activities, training new politicians and managers. The article provides a comparative analysis of youth parliamentary structures at both regional and country levels and shows the ways of improving the system of youth parliamentarism on the continent. The relations between non-governmental organizations of youth and the state are in focus; they have their own characteristics in different countries. The article shows the problems faced by youth parliaments in the process of their work, first of all, the secondary importance of legislative bodies in the system of state power in most African countries. The African system of values and models of their reproduction are an obstacle to the development of youth parliamentarism. Gerontocratic customs, which prevent the rejuvenation of the political class, are the most powerfull. The study argues that youth parliaments can play an important role in the formation of future African leaders in perspective, they expand the political space for young activists who become a link between the government and youth. And this allows for the politicians to reduce the degree of protest movements that spread in Africa after the “Arab spring”.

THE PEOPLE’S BOUROUGH PLAN OF ACTION: A COUNTER-PROJECT OF INSURGENT CITIZENSHIP1

ABSTRACT Porto Alegre is divided in eight Boroughs of Planning. Each Borough has a representative in the Urban Planning City Council (UPCC). In 2018 social movements organized to conquer this. From this, some of the Boroughs’ councilors felt the need to better inform themselves on the terms and subjects discussed in the UPCC, and to ensure that their local issues would be discussed. For that manner, the People’s Borough Plan of Action (PBPA) project was created by a coalition of social movements, the architect’s association (IAB-RS) and the university to perform counter-hegemonic actions. The project is based on the insurgent planning theory, which understands urban development from the standpoint of the global south as being essentially performed by communities, activists and grassroots strategies. Thus, the project moves across both invited and invented spaces of action in a non-binary relationship, with the aim of providing the grassroots movements of insurgent citizenship with technical assistance to support their claims and desires over the city they live. Regarding the City’s Master Plan revision, the PBAP represents a counter-plan related to the creation of differential spaces. Therefore, they create a moment of realization of the right to the city.

Choreographies of Dissent and the Politics of Public Space in State-of-Emergency Turkey

This article investigates a recent period in which dissenting activism has been shifted in Istanbul under the state of emergency (2016-2018). Based on an ethnography conducted with activists in feminist and LGBTQI+ demonstrations, anti-emergency decree vigils, and the Presidential Referendum protests, the study discusses how activists resist and undermine mobilization of violence through using the hegemonic tools of repression tactically, and choreographically. By employing Hannah Arendt’s concepts of “politics” and “isolation,” I examine that state agencies like the police forcefully disperse protesters and display authority, oppression, and occupation of public spaces by constantly creating an atmosphere of fear and insecurity. In opposition, dissenters practice and rehearse dispersal as a resilient choreography to once again relate each other against the forces of isolation. I suggest the term “tactics of dispersal” to define and analyze how activists depart from the central assembly of the social movement to create smaller, mobile, and ephemeral assemblies. In the city-scale, by scattering themselves in the city of Istanbul and mobilizing peripheries of the urban space, dissenters re-choreograph and subvert a thanatopolitical strategy of dispersal in favor of pluralism under political hardship. In the bodily-scale, activists claim the public sphere through the transience of folk dance. Whenever protesters depart from folk dance collectives to create new ones, they perpetually re-configure the area and initiate novel actions contingent upon their temporal and positional assessments during the dance. Such tactical applications of dispersal characterized by the smaller scale and transitory gatherings with ever-changing combinations of bodies at the peripheral space of urban activism manifest its great potential for collective agency and plural politics.

Vigilante video: digital populism and anxious anonymity among Japan’s new netizens

ABSTRACTOver ten years before the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Japan was reckoning with its own wave of Internet-fueled xenophobic activism in public spaces. Amid a second decade of recession in the early 2000s, nationalist activity coalesced in anonymous chat rooms and message boards in Japan. In contrast to the surprisingly inclusive space that prior rightist generations had inherited from imperial pan-Asian ideology and post-World War II experiences of shared social marginality, a new activist movement that came to be known as the Action Conservative Movement (ACM) pursued an aggressively xenophobic, racially framed form of nationalism, based not on the social margins but rhetorically grounded in the center of Japan’s middle-class society. This article identifies the centrality of self-made digital media and three genres of video work facilitating ACM mobilization of supporters from the virtual to the physical public sphere and explores issues around anonymity and truth telling such video work entails.

Feminist activism in digital space: Postfeminist contradictions in #WhyIStayed

Scholars have argued that digital spaces are key sites for feminist activism, which can be seen in the emergence of “hashtag feminism,” or the use of social media hashtags to address feminist-identified issues through sharing personal experiences of inequality, constructing counter-discourses, and critiquing cultural figures and institutions. However, more empirical research is needed that examines both the possibilities and constraints of hashtag feminism. Through a qualitative analysis of 51,577 archived tweets and semi-structured interviews, we trace the ways #WhyIStayed creates a space for feminist activism in response to victim-blaming related to domestic violence through voice, multivocality, and visibility. More specifically, we critically analyze postfeminist discourses within #WhyIStayed in order to examine contradictions within the hashtag event as well as how these postfeminist contradictions shape possibilities for feminist activism online.