Spaces Of Contestation Research Articles

The Politics of Memory: NLP Models as Liberating Artifacts

The main argument of this article is that natural language processing (NLP) projects of Indigenous African languages can be understood as an effort to restore and preserve Africa’s memory in the digital. Language has always occupied a particular place in the African decolonial imaginary. Several African states embarked on processes of Africanisation of postcolonial institutions in their respective national contexts. One of the main features of this project in many African countries was the restoration of African languages in education and public service. Taking a social constructivist approach rooted in science and technology studies and looking through the analytical lens of decoloniality in Africa, I conceptualise NLP models of Indigenous African languages as liberating artifacts. I mobilise decolonial theory to look at language as a technology that can be used to dis-member and re-member the African subjects of their memory of being as people. The coloniser erased the memory of the African subjugated by cutting off their linguistic connections and instead planted the European memory. From this perspective, decolonisation can be understood as a process of re-memberment that can be achieved through the return of the languages of those whose humanity has been denied or questioned. In this sense, NLP projects offer instances of the digital that represent spaces of restoration and negotiated digital futurities. I contend that these digital spaces in Africa are social spaces of contestation about what common investments should be made, what collective futures are desirable and what are the perceived material consequences of such shared imaginations.

Student protests at Boğaziçi University against Turkey’s authoritarian regime

Amidst the proliferation of authoritarian regimes globally, youth has been on the front lines against top-down politics, antidemocratic norms and values, exclusion from decision-making processes, the privatisation of higher education, the erosion of academic freedom, the stigmatisation of different lifestyles, precarity and environmental degradations. As part of the global authoritarian wave, Turkey has witnessed a comprehensive economic, social and political transformation under Justice and Development Party (AKP) governments. The governing party has deepened neoliberal transformation, plundered environmental commons, imposed a conservative lifestyle, eroded democratic values, attacked academic freedom and intensified polarisation, precarity and corruption in the country. One of the biggest challenges to the AKP government has come from student resistance against the appointed rector at Boğaziçi University (BU). In this research, I focus on how BU has become a space of contestation by students against authoritarianism in Turkey. Against the top-down appointment of the rector, Boğaziçi resistance started in demand of the democratic election of the rector, institutional autonomy and the defence of academic freedom. However, through naming the appointed rector as ‘trustee’, students at BU have unequivocally made a resounding declaration for democracy, not only echoing within the confines of their campus but reverberating throughout the country.

Inclusivity in Practice: Patchworks of Inclusion at Multiple Tracks in the Colombian Peace Process

ABSTRACT This article investigates the inclusion/multi-track nexus in the Colombian peace process. It theorizes inclusion in terms of design principles and process dynamics, analysing how they are enacted at track 1, track 3, and at the ‘intertrack’ level. Through semi-structured interviews with negotiators from elite talks, Colombia’s national dialogue of 2019, and grassroots dialogues the article shows how the inclusion/multi-track nexus plays out in practice, spelling out challenges of inclusion on different tracks. It shows how active participation and space for contestation is challenging and messy to implement, not least in contexts of power asymmetry, and yet visible in several contexts.

Tweeting the academic resistance in Turkey and Hungary: from cultural crisis to defending the nation

ABSTRACT This paper explores the reemergence of universities as spaces for the contestation of government policies in an era of illiberalism, rising nationalism and populism. We focus on high-profile contestations occurring at two public universities in Turkey and Hungary: Boğaziçi University and the University of Theatre and Film Arts, respectively. At both universities, attacks on democratic governance and liberal-democratic values have resulted in academic resistance that have played out on physical campuses and in online spaces. We conceptualise a virtual space as a space of contestation and analyse social media data to identify the dominant narratives of governments and their supporters on one side and resistance supporters on the other that gives the way to two major narratives: while right-wing imaginaries and pro-government actors frame the liberal and pro-freedom inclinations of universities as a ‘threat’ to the nation, students and faculty portray the government as the true threat to their rights and freedoms and knowledge production within what was once a ‘safe space’ in universities, thus framing themselves as the ‘true guardians’ of their institutions. Our analysis shows how universities have become contemporary flashpoints in and upon which broader political contestations over national culture play out.

Cloned Buddhas: mapping out the DNA of Buddhist heritage preservation

ABSTRACT This article considers how technological innovation transforms the value of religious materiality in Buddhist heritage reproduction projects in Japan. To illustrate the religiously and politically charged landscape of heritage care, I focus on the reproduction technologies developed by the Tokyo University of Arts researchers to create highly precise replicas of Buddhist heritage. One such ‘super clone’ replica of Japan’s National Treasure homed at Hōryūji temple in Nara – a 1400-year-old ‘Shaka Triad’ sculpture of Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha – was put on display at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum in Japan in April 2021. The ‘cloned’ statue is a highly precise copy that goes beyond the practices of exact duplication. With the use of 3D measurement, digital modelling technologies, and advanced casting techniques, this cloned religious heritage object transports the viewer back in time to the aesthetic moment of creation and allows them to experience anew the object’s affective presence as crafted centuries ago. In drawing on this example and its potential to intervene in other religious heritage reproduction projects globally, I argue that technology transforms religious heritage to generate alternative socio-economic afterlives of Buddhist objects. By analysing the scientific narratives and processes of heritage care, I show how the religious heritage reproduction is where the aesthetic, political, and economic dimensions of Buddhist material futures are imagined and realized. It is also a space of contestation between devotion, science, and memory-oriented practices of care in transnational heritage preservation.

Populism and cultural heritage policies: public statues in Europe

ABSTRACT Cultural heritage is a central domain for key populist themes of threats to national identity and protection of ‘the majority’ against cosmopolitan, ‘wokist’ elites. The article explores how differing government discursive strategies towards populism influence heritage policies. It takes the case of contested public statues. In France, the government has adopted a discursive strategy of ‘patriotic Republicanism’ that reduced the discursive space for contestation and policy has remained largely unchanged. But in Britain and Hungary, governments have increasingly adopted populist discourses, leading to countervailing discursive coalitions, contestation and change in agendas and decisions in both populist and non-populist directions. The proposition developed is that national governments pursuing populist discursive strategies triggers anti-populist discursive coalitions, with contestation and changes in agendas, institutions and individual decisions. Conversely, governments developing their own nationalistic discourses reduces the scope for populist ones but also leads to freezing of existing policies.

Evaluating the power of social media influencing mainstream media social representations of migrants in South African townships

The relationship between mainstream media and social media for news reporting is a complex one. Mainstream media news is relied on as a source of information on key social issues, carrying and reproducing the social representations of a society. South African townships have been reported as a hotbed of anti-migrant unrest, with the growing reliance on the communities’ lens through their social media representations shared online often considered by mainstream media as authentic sources of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). Townships are spaces of contestation for belonging and despite the diversity of those communities, there remains stigmatizing social representation between migrants and citizens, with communities attributing social ills to migrants. This study analyses how social media has influenced the reproduction of social representations in mainstream media of anti-migrant township unrest. Through a qualitative exploratory approach, mainstream news articles were analyzed for how social representations from social media are reproduced in mainstream media reporting. Social media representations reproduced in mainstream media reporting may risk perpetuating communication risks of othering, affect social cohesion in those communities, and fuelling mistrust among citizens and migrants living in South African township communities.

Contestation, negotiation, and experimentation: The liminality of land administration platforms in Kenya.

This paper examines diverse infrastructural interventions in the making of Ardhisasa, the Kenyan state's digital land information management platform, as a space of contestation, negotiation, and experimentation. We analyse the platformisation of governance through theories on liminality to explain the agency of various actors in shaping the digital state. We particularly zoom into the influence of two actors: the private actors in the land sector and the civil society organisations representing informalised residents, and how they exercise agency in the development of Ardhisasa. Drawing on interviews with state and non-state actors, secondary literature, and extensive experience within Kenya's land administration system, we trace the overt and covert exercise of power in the platformisation of land administration of Nairobi. Our central thesis is that, despite its progressive development, Ardhisasa follows the tradition of a long line of large-scale infrastructural or developmental projects that rarely deliver on their promise for improvement but rather further entrench marginalised groups due to its exclusion of the already existing, albeit informalised, land administration and transaction practices that meet the needs of the urban poor. We argue that Ardhisasa's perpetual state of becoming leads to the spatialisation of liminality itself.

Junior allies in wars of choice: Party politics and role conceptions in Danish and Romanian decisions on the Iraq War

Abstract When and how do party politics matter in junior allies’ decisions to engage in multinational military operations? Developing a new role theory model of party politics and multinational military operations, we put forward a two-level argument. First, we argue that the rationale for military action is defined in a contest between political parties with expectations of what constitutes the proper purpose (constitutive roles) and functions (functional roles) of the state. Second, we hold that material and ontological insecurities reduce political space for contestation and debate, but that junior allies tend to focus on role demands for ‘good states’ and ‘good allies’ rather than the nature and aim of the military operation. To unpack our argument, we analyse the debate among political parties in Romania and Denmark leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Concluding our analysis, we outline the implications for the changing security order and current debates in NATO member states on how to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

His Body Will Appear in All of the Mirrors: Explaining Christian Doctrine to the Nahuas in the 1548 Doctrina Christiana

After the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the first groups of friars arrived in Mexico to Christianize the native inhabitants of Mesoamerica. This task was anything but easy, as explaining Christian doctrine to the Indigenous people posed both a linguistic and a theological challenge. The need to learn Indigenous languages and to prepare doctrinal materials dedicated specifically to the Christianization of this land was a task that might have seemed almost impossible to conduct in a short period of time, yet by the 1540s, the first printed catechisms (doctrinas) in Nahuatl began to appear. One of the earliest and broadest of these works is the 1548 Dominican Doctrina Christiana en Lengua Española y Mexicana, in which the friars attempted to explain all of the principles of Catholic theology to the Indigenous people. This paper analyses how through highly detailed descriptions and a meticulous choice of vocabulary, the authors strove to impart the tenets of Christian doctrine to the Nahuas in such a way as to make it both fully understandable and as unlikely as possible to be misinterpreted. It points to the sources on which the friars relied while writing the text. The article formulates a theory that the creation of the Doctrina Christiana would not have been possible without the participation of the native speakers of Nahuatl in the project, even though their role in writing the catechism would have had to be hidden from the religious authorities. The Indigenous authors served as cross-cultural bridges in the process of preparing the doctrinal materials. On the one hand, they could therefore help to explain crucial parts of the doctrine to the Indigenous audience. On the other hand, allowing Indigenous concepts to permeate the Christian discourse often led to the creation of ambiguity and provided a space of contestation that could influence the understanding of the Catholic concepts by the Indigenous audience.

Memory Mobilization and Postconflict Stability in CôTE D’Ivoire: Analysing the Transmission of Conflict Narratives Among Ivoirian Youth

Abstract After violence ends, former conflict parties and their civilian supporters often disagree about the origins and causes of the conflict. Post-conflict states vary in how they deal with these competing accounts of the past, ranging from selective remembering to state-backed forgetting. However, conflict narratives that are excluded from the public sphere are not necessarily forgotten and may be passed on between generations within families, social networks, and communities. These unofficial and often biased accounts can threaten the stability of post-conflict societies when appropriated by political actors who seek to challenge hegemonic memory practices and/or the legitimacy of the state—a process that we define as memory mobilization. In this paper, we argue that memory mobilization is particularly likely to occur when (1) unofficial conflict narratives persist among certain groups and sections of society, and are transferred from one generation to the next; and (2) regime opponents and/or other political actors have sufficient political and public space for contestation. To evaluate our argument, we examine these issues in the context of post-conflict Côte d’Ivoire. Based on 905 secondary school student essays, we show that competing accounts are reproduced among young Ivoirians and that these could potentially threaten the country’s future stability, if misappropriated.

Re/visiting

In the summer of 2023, I received a surprising proposition from TURBA's managing editor, Dena Davida, inviting me to republish the chapter I contributed to the 2019 Curating Live Arts anthology (Davida et al. 2019) and reframe it in the context of the present issue. I accepted with enthusiasm, enticed by the opportunity to revisit an earlier piece of writing and understanding that such a privilege rarely presents itself to writers, let alone to early career writers! But as I gave the proposition more thought, I realized that it fittingly presented itself ten years after the inception of the curatorial project I discussed in my original text, Collective Walks / Spaces of Contestation. The exercise then provides an incentive to critically reflect on what has happened in the last decade, from both personal and socio-political perspectives. And indeed, there is much to take stock of. Re-reading my article, I am struck by the naiveté that transpires through the ideas I devised at the age of twenty- five, when I was taking my first leaps into the world of professional arts curation. Enamored with theory, unencumbered by convention, and moved by boundless energy, my younger self thought of artistic practice as a prism through which aesthetics can effectively mold the social. I wasn't so naïve as to believe that art can change the world, but I was convinced that the radical power of art lay in its capacity to disrupt, if only momentarily, the seemingly natural order of things. I thought of site-specific performance as a means to breach the surface of banal sociability. I conceived of aesthetic interventions into everyday life as tools for the creation of interstitial pockets of possibility.

The European Union in the Russian State Duma Debates, 1994–2004

Although the European Union (EU) was occasionally presented in a positive light in the lower house of the Russian parliament (the State Duma) in 1994–2004, there were also numerous criticisms of the EU and the “European community” in a broader sense. The discussions were accompanied by vocally articulated anxieties by those factions that were oppositional to the President and the Government but had a strong foothold in the parliament, such as the conservative Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), the rightwing populist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), and the rightwing Rodina (“Motherland”) Party and its predecessors. These anxieties pertained to Chechnya, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states as the spaces of contestation between Russia and the EU. The projects of (re)building the Russian (Soviet) imperial formation on the basis of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) or the Union State (of Russia and Belarus) were presented as alternatives to Western European integration based on the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The anti-EU rhetoric in the Duma, which came hand in hand with the denunciation of NATO, provided a discursive foundation for the eventual shift of the President’s and the Government’spolicy. The members of United Russia, the Government’s party without a clear ideology that won a constitutional majority in 2003, adopted elements of conservative and rightwing rhetoric of the formal opposition in 2004. This happened in the context of the EU enlargement when the issues of the accessibility of the Kaliningrad Region and the rights of the Russian speakers in Latvia and Estonia were discussed in the parliament. Later the same year, the start of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine became a further impetus for the Duma’s anti-EU discourse, a discourse that would soon become mainstream in Russian politics.

Whose autonomy, whose interests? A donor-focused analysis of surrogacy and egg donation from the global South.

This article provides a donor-focused analysis of how transnational reproductive donation intersects with issues central to bodily autonomy of surrogates and egg donors from the global South. Little is known about the autonomy of surrogates and egg donors, especially among those from the global South. This article addresses this gap by examining two key issues on surrogacy and egg donation-conflict of interest and recruitment market. With these issues, this paper presents contexts of the reproductive body as a space of contestation for autonomy. Analysis reveals that bodily autonomy is not an absolute entitlement available for surrogates and egg donors from the global South. Having bodily autonomy is a privileged disposition rather than a universal liberty for reproductive donors. The discussions in this work encourage further examination to understand the multi-layered experiences of reproductive donors from the global South, towards deeper interrogation of the processes of reproductive industry.

The ‘Translated’ Cityscape: A Study of Select Satyajit Ray Films

The present paper attempts to examine the ‘translated’ nature of the cityscapes in Satyajit Ray’s films. With a select reading of films like ‘Mahanagar’ (lit. The Big City, 1963) and ‘Pratidwandi’ (The Adversary also called Siddhartha and the City, 1970), I argue for the ways in which the city becomes a space of contestation, debate, negotiation and translation between clashing ideologies of the old and the new, the rural and the urban, the ancient and the modern. Ray’s films have been studied from several perspectives, in terms of thematic, stylistic and ideological development. However, it seems to me that the city and its ‘translational’ aspect have not received enough attention. The present paper proposes to understand the role the city plays in Ray’s cinema. As an avant garde film maker, Ray’s cinema is replete with moments of conflicting ideologies, transitions and crossovers. It seems to me that the city provides the base for several such negotiations and intersections in Ray. Using certain recent developments in Translation Studies, I propose to read episodes in select Ray films as indicative of a larger ideological and cultural shift necessitated and made possible by/in the new space of the city. As a translating and translated space, the city’s agency enables other changes and transformations which would not have been possible in the absence of this primary actor – the city. The present paper is an attempt to look at several such moments of intersections and translations that Ray’s films make available to us. 1 An earlier version of this article was presented at the17th International MELOW Conference on ‘Space, Place and Language in Literatures of the World’, Dharamshala, 9-11th, March, 2018. I am grateful to the questions and discussion from the audience and conference participants which helped me rethink some ideas presented here.

Authoritarian power and contestation beyond the state

ABSTRACT Research on authoritarian connections beyond the state requires a transregional practices approach. This special issue is an invitation to combine critical approaches to the study of authoritarian power by paying attention to spaces of contestation, authoritarian practices, as well as non-state actors and agency below and beyond the scale of the state. We focus on authoritarian practices and their spatial and temporal articulations in (1) transregional infrastructures, (2) global processes of capital accumulation and (3) nature-society relations. This enables us to capture the diversity of authoritarian actors and the interconnectedness of authoritarian power and forms of contestation across time and space. Drawing on logistics and infrastructure literature, we reconcile the contextualization of power relations with multi-scalar authoritarian practices beyond the inside-outside binary of national territoriality. We thus offer a conceptual approach to understanding the violent and repressive practices inherent to a continuum of different political settings, including liberal governance.

SOCIAL MEDIA FEEDS AMID THE ELECTION EVERYDAY: DIGITAL BOUNDARIES AND DISRUPTION DURING THE 2020 U.S. ELECTION

Ongoing political events can reshape the topography of our social media feeds and platformed experiences, destabilizing everyday routines of digital media consumption. The 2020 U.S. presidential election extended this disruption far longer than typical U.S. elections due to extended mail-in ballot counting and political unrest. Within this distinctive political milestone, I study how “ordinary” citizens consume, witness, and feel through social media during an ongoing election. My research centers on social media feeds as sites of political media exposure, examining election media experiences as well as the practices participants use to navigate their feeds as ever-shifting, ephemeral digital environments. I move away from top-down approaches to studying the social media feed by using a “small data,” observational interviewing technique that I term feed analysis interviewing to conduct three interviews each with 21 participants over the course of the election. Ultimately, my preliminary results suggest that participants understand their feeds as spaces of contestation between election affect and their “everyday,” “real,” and “normal” media lives. They use a series of sociotechnical practices to navigate and enforce these imagined boundaries, going beyond political avoidance to differentiate realms of political experience. While introducing a new methodological approach to study political communication and the social media feed, this research also challenges scholars to consider how “ordinary” citizens define and negotiate junctures of politics and everyday life in digital spaces.

Spaces of fluidity: articulating ‘politics of presence’ through place-based activism in Iqrit (Israel)

This article engages with the material geographies of colonialism in Israel/Palestine by looking at the site-specific cultural activities in Iqrit (Israel), a Christian-Arab village depopulated during the 1948 war in the region. We investigate the importance of material infrastructure – and material, bodily encounters with the site – as a basis for the place-based activist memory-work, as well as exposing the ways in which such activities contribute to the advancement of ‘the politics of presence’, understood as a manifestation of a continuous resilience vis-à-vis the discriminatory policy of the state. Our argumentation focuses on the importance of physical presence in specific geographical areas, shedding light on how place-based activities may contravene the expressed state policy by increasing the fluidity of the territory, creating spaces of contestation in which the traditional understandings of state authority partly dissolve. It also explores how the material reconfigurations of the place, and emotional-bodily investment in it, contribute to the semantic instability of the site, turning the place-based memory-work into a future-oriented project with important political aspirations.

Coloniality and the Mbuya Nehanda Statue: A Decolonial Analysis of Twitter Users’ Comments

ABSTRACT This paper interrogates debates that took place after the erection of the statue of Mbuya Nehanda, a Zimbabwean liberation war heroine. The paper employs thematic analysis and [Thompson, J. B. 1990. Ideology and Modern Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press] ideological schema to explore the underlying discourses and ideological assumptions evoked by the tweets that circulated on the Mbuya Nehanda Twitter hashtag (#MbuyaNehanda). Considering Twitter as an agonistic space of contestation and resistance, the paper examines the political and cultural significance of the Mbuya Nehanda statue at this moment in Zimbabwe’s history, bringing into focus the contestations over history, culture, and memory in the postcolonial nation. Findings reveal that the state’s politicisation of the memory of Mbuya Nehanda foils its attempt to create a collective remembering of her due to the fragmentations that exist in the postcolonial nation. This paper goes beyond critiquing the manifest discourses and tensions between the citizens and the state to consider the possibilities offered by the Mbuya Nehanda statue as a harbinger of new knowledges, not only relating to the continuities and discontinuities of colonial history and the present but to African spirituality as well. Using decolonial perspectives informed by epistemologies of the South, the article argues for epistemic pluriversality that recognises diverse forms of knowledge and diverse ways of being.

A consensus that impedes contestation: Debating migration-related diversity in post-terror Norway

This article draws on the post-terror setting of Norway to investigate interactions between consensus, contestation, and conflict in public debates about diversity. A consensus-oriented unity prevailed in immediate responses to the 2011 terror attacks that killed 77 people in Norway. Analysis of 40 semi-structured interviews identifies lingering perceptions that the following conditions limited the space for contestation after the attacks: the intensity of the initial unity expressions; the perpetrator's identity as a Norwegian, self-proclaimed Christian crusader; and broader patterns of limited space for nuanced contestation in diversity debates. Drawing on influential political theories on liberal democratic debate, this is an empirical inquiry into when and how contestation about migration-related diversity is impeded, and with what implications. The Norwegian case illustrates that too much consensus-orientation and inadequate space for nuance can further underline conflict and thereby impede citizens’ engagement with debates about migration-related diversity.