Spaces For Dissent Research Articles

Beyond the Grey Zone: The Production of Space in Eastern European Neo-Avantgarde

The spatial metaphor that dominates the historical overviews dedicated to neo-avantgarde art of Eastern Europe from the last decades of state socialism is the “grey zone”—a metaphor deeply rooted in the dichotomies of Cold War discourses, which understood the “socialist space” as being roughly split between an “official” and an “unofficial”/underground/hidden space of dissent. However, the grey zone metaphor fails to account for the diverse, complex, and nuanced ways in which unconventional art practices from the region engaged with a wide range of spaces, from the institutional (and official) ones to spaces of everyday life, delocalized spaces of a likeminded artistic community, and to the space of the image understood outside of the confined territory of traditional practices. By engaging a theoretical perspective drawn from the so-called “spatial turn” in the post-colonial discourse, I will try to argue that the “species of spaces” (Kemp-Welch) defining the neo-avantgarde art practices in the region were not conquering but were producing cultural and socially relevant spaces while blurring/widening the conventional boundaries of art’s territory, and that this complexity cannot be understood by relying on the binary terminology of the geopolitical discourses of the Cold War.

“Hum Kaagaz Nahi Dikhayenge” (“We won’t show our papers”): The Narratives of Bodies and Belongings at the Anti-CAA Shaheen Bagh Protests 2019-20

The Shaheen Bagh protests of 2019-20 were a nation-wide performance of dissent against the Indian citizenship laws CAA, NRC and NPR that would religiously discriminate against Muslims. Began and led by Muslim women from the neighbourhood of Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, the protests engendered critical conversations around the nation, the gendered body, space, history, and legal citizenship. The essay is a critical exploration of the counter-narratives the protestors performed against the State’s discriminatory, divisive and violent narratives, through the lens of performance studies. The bodies of the protestors became spaces of dissent and the bearers of the multiplicities of the nation, the corporeality of the individual, the domestic space, the Muslim neighbourhood, and the protest space expanded, encompassing, and even creating, the nation itself. The essay, thus, argues that as the protest site became a space of multiplicities, the protestors built the nation(s) of their secular imagination and their disidentifications presented the excess that the State could never fully regulate.

Terrace Dissent in Urban Western Sahara: Between Plazas and Homes

AbstractSince 2018, domestic Saharawi houses in occupied Western Sahara have become tactical sites for organising dissent. The move to interior spaces came as a collective retreat from the city's public plazas. This retreat from extravagant plazas illustrates that the turn toward interior spaces was a tactic in front of destructive occupation power rather than a withdrawal. This article explores Saharawi spatial production of dissent under two different political moments. I ask, what spaces of dissent do people under occupation animate when the city is mobilised against them? This paper is based on ethnographic engagement with encounters between Saharawis and Moroccan security forces that led Saharawis to construct the house as its own public. I demonstrate interiorising the exterior by analysing homes’ terraces as the new space of urban dissent in the Western Sahara. As such, the terrace appears as a new space and a new tool of and in urban insurgency.

Philosophy, education and visceral politics of the now

The essay looks into the pedagogical role of philosophy in shaping the practice of dissent. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s radical understandings of philosophy as a machinic assemblage, it redeploys philosophy as a pedagogical tool which gathers traction from social events and remains invested in a dissensual politics. As a machinic assemblage committed to a dissensual politics philosophy works alongside collective modalities of enunciation that operate outside conventional structures of the academia. Such assemblages of enunciation often inhabit a zone of critical inarticulacy brimming with the promise of new kinds of knowledge. How does philosophy critically interact with spaces of dissent along lines of gender, caste, ethnicity and nationalism to enable novel critical interventions? Deleuze and Guattari’s answer redirects us to a pragmatic engagement with philosophy which involves the manufacture of new pedagogical concepts as part of a schizoanalytic apparatus of protest. These concepts often emerge out of a visceral response to events unfolding around us. Needless to emphasize that such a philosophy which emerges out of a praxial encounter with life cannot be framed as an institutional staple, but takes shape as part of a visceral politics of the now. What then is the role of pedagogy in shaping an ethics of dissent and how can such a pedagogy mobilize plebeian acts of resistance in the sphere of the everyday?

Meme culture and social media as gendered spaces of dissent and dominance

Technology mediated communication has promulgated the usage of widespread images on social media under the guise of generating humour/irony. On the one hand, these handles are being utilized to voice stimulating issues; on the other, they can be held accountable for perpetrating distressing conditions for girls/women who face hostile rhetoric at work against them. Mansplaining, anti-feminist and off the mark comments filtered through memes are common and become carriers of mishandled social, cultural, racial and political tropes. The proposed paper attempts to critique visual misrepresentation and misreadings of tropes/messages channelized through memes on social media, alongside the study the scope of visual literacy at the intersections of feminist media studies. This can lead to a more nuanced understanding of meme culture as spaces for dominance and counter narratives of misogyny. The paper draws on theories and conceptual frameworks developed in the field of cultural studies, visual studies, communication studies and offers an interconnected critique of the subject.

Resisting citizenship amendment act: Universities as spaces of dissent

Resisting citizenship amendment act: Universities as spaces of dissent

“The Ripping Apart of Silence”

This article explores the gendered sound world of anti-abortion protests outside U.S. abortion clinics. These clinics are spaces of dissent where, on a daily basis, protesters congregate to vocalize their opposition to abortion. We employ the concept of sonic patriarchy, the sonic counterpart to the male gaze, to explore how anti-abortion protesting dominates the aural space surrounding abortion clinics and is used as a vehicle for controlling gendered bodies. Protesters use megaphones, speakers, and yelling to infuse the soundscape of the abortion clinic with an overwhelming cacophony that people must enter to receive care. This article reconceptualizes how we think about sound and violence by emphasizing how the everyday sounds of anti-abortion protesting are perceived and experienced as violence by people seeking abortion services. This domination of the sound world engenders a form of nonconsensual listening, in which it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to ignore the sonic performances of protesters. We also discuss the additional labor that clinic staff and volunteers must provide to shield patients against this volume of sound, as well as the affective and physical consequences of entering this sound world to receive healthcare. Furthermore, we describe the inherent difficulties in regulating sound and the importance of understanding the intent and context of sound-making in identifying certain sounds as violent. We argue for a more rigorous regulation of sound-making outside of clinics, as it perpetuates not only abortion stigma but also gendered sonic violence on all people who enter abortion clinics.

Spaces of Dissent: Violence and Cuban Catholic Resistance, 1959–1961

This article examines why the Catholic clergy's political response to the Revolutionary government increasingly resulted in violence from 1959 to 1961. This article focuses on two spaces—churches and public Catholic celebrations—where violence between Catholics and government forces received the most attention. Violence erupted at these spaces when they functioned as spaces of political dissent. Tracing the evolution of these spaces of dissent adds to more recent understandings of the clergy's political influence, which seems to have increased during this period. The decline of Cuba's free press and the position of Cuba's remaining press to denounce clerical opposition as illegitimate contributed to a heightened interest in the clergy's political messages. Catholic spaces operated differently than the press, which made Catholic public dissent more resilient because it was more difficult to control or close. The transformation of Catholic celebrations into spaces of dissent also highlights the emergence of a more coherent Catholic political identity that could challenge the government's vision of a loyal revolutionary. Given the resilience of Catholic resistance and the movement of people to Catholic gatherings, pro-government forces resorted to violence mainly to cripple opposition clerics' political voices and eliminate their spaces of dissent.

Contesting deep sea oil: Politicisation–depoliticisation–repoliticisation

Between 2010 and 2017, the New Zealand Government undertook a range of subtle yet disturbing tactics to create a legislative environment that enabled deep sea oil exploration. This included forms of public endorsement, policy documents and legislative change that prioritised further oil development in the country to create a certain common-sense around increased fossil fuel extraction. In response, a range of communities and autonomous Oil Free groups have emerged to contest both the legislative changes and this underlying common-sense. We draw on this example to respond to calls within geography and political science literature to situate analysis of contemporary politics in empirical contexts. We use Rancière’s thought combined with the frames of politicisation, depoliticisation and repoliticisation to explore the entangled nature of government and oil industry actions, and community climate change activism. We argue that while there were clearly attempts by government and the oil industry to close down spaces of dissent and limit debate around fossil fuel development to technocratic questions of health and safety, the effects of attempts at closure are paradoxical. Such attempts at closure are always incomplete and at times, mobilise people to contestatory action. We show how activists have strategically drawn on certain discourses to exert claims of, and for, equality in public debates around the pressing issue of climate change.

Humanizing the Sacred: Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Gender Justice in Malaysia

Humanizing Sacred: Sisters in Islam and Struggle for Gender Justice in Malaysia. by Azza Basarudin. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2016. Softcover: 330pp. Sisters in Islam (SIS) is a non-governmental organization (NGO) that advocates for Muslim women's rights in Malaysia. The NGO works within an Islamic framework, reinterpreting sacred texts through a feminist lens. Members of SIS have been labelled as deviants by Islamic authorities, have had their books banned, received threats and had a fatwa issued against them. Humanizing Sacred is a richly detailed ethnographic account of this path-breaking organization. Basarudin's book has two goals. The first is examine the possibilities and challenges of translating feminist interpretations of Islam into grounded activism effect change in social mores and legal codes, and illuminate how women's activism within Islam is a space of dissent and of remaking 'Muslim' self and identity (p. 5). The second is to explore activism as space for women transform themselves into political actors and visible women subjects in public sphere (p. 6). The work of SIS in understanding primary sources of Islam, such as Quran and sunna (practices of Prophet that include hadith, traditions/ narrations) through a feminist reinterpretation allows for a vision of Islam that is kind, compassionate and compatible with human rights values of equality and justice. This new form of knowledge-making challenges patriarchal interpreters and traditional religious institutions. This book examines SIS' struggle reclaim women's human dignity as believing Muslims and call on their communities re-evaluate communal and moral obligations, as well as ensure that Islam remains a 'living' religion (p. 5). Carefully researched and thoughtfully written, author's writing style draws on Kirin Narayan's enactment of hybridity, interspersing narratives with analysis as a strategy that problematizes the dichotomies of theory and praxis, personal and professional, insider and outsider, and authentic and inauthentic (p. 27). This strategy works well, and makes for an engaging and lively book. Chapter 1 provides cultural and political context by describing history of British colonial intervention and institutionalization of Islam in national laws and policies after independence. Chapter 2 introduces reader life histories of SIS' founding members, their personal trajectories and struggles, and how their understanding of Islam informs organization's vision of equality and justice. Chapter 3 examines strategies employed by SIS by looking at specific advocacy campaigns and other activities such as study sessions and workshops, illustrating process of translating feminist interpretations of sacred texts into grounded activism. Chapter 4 examines state power and religious authorities' invalidation techniques silence alternative discourses. Chapter 5 discusses how SIS members provide an alternative model of female leadership by showing that women can be powerful knowledge producers and transmitters. Chapter 6 assesses impact of SIS' activism at international level and vice versa. Here author focuses on Musawah, a transnational initiative spearheaded by SIS, highlighting NGO's global success but also impact and repercussions it has within Malaysia. Humanizing Sacred joins a line-up of innovative studies on Muslim women's participation in faith-based movements that extend our understanding of agency and resistance, such as Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and Feminist Subject (2005), Lara Deeb's An Enchanted Modern: Politics and Piety in Shi'i Lebanon (2006) and Sherine Hafez's An Islam on Her Own: Reconsidering Islam and Secularism in Women's Islamic Movements (2011). …

Opening Interstitial Distances in the Neoliberal University and Art School

This paper examines how a new wave of student movements in Europe are rejecting the neoliberal values that increasingly shape and warp their institutions of higher education and are calling for a ‘new post-neoliberal university’, one that embraces critical enquiry as a means to serve the public good. It tracks this approach across three recent case studies—the 2015 student protests at the University of Amsterdam, Central Saint Martins (London) and the National College of Art and Design (Dublin)—arguing that the strategy that these groups adopt can be closely aligned with Simon Critchley’s radical political strategy of opening up spaces of dissent from within state territory, but at an interstitial (or internal) distance to it. When applied to the neoliberalized university, such an approach entails opening up spaces of resistance within the university that make use of its resources without being part of its top-down, bureaucratic structure. It concludes that the purpose of the creation of these ‘internal–external’ spaces is to experiment with alternative models of learning and critical pedagogies that test out what a post-neoliberal university may look like.

The Biopolitics of Thirdspace: Urban Segregation and Resistance in Puerto Rico’s Luis Lloréns Torres Public Housing Project

The public housing programme in Puerto Rico was highly influenced by a culturally engrained logic of colonialism that aimed to achieve a behavioural transformation of the residents of public housing based on white “criollo” norms and conducts. To this day, the process of Othering with which these bodies are understood and viewed has recurrently been reproduced and redeployed utilizing the island’s old racial/colonial hierarchies. Criminality and drug-related activities are the main discursive agents employed to stigmatize the communities that live inside public housing in Puerto Rico. It is constantly inferred that most of its residents break with the behavioural norms that the rest of the population abides by. This argument is constantly utilized to perpetuate the cultural lens that views these sectors as lazy, unruly and dangerous. This highly prejudiced misconception justified the police occupations and the fences that were erected in and around public housing premises during the 1990s. However, most of these communities rarely view themselves as victims, and it is this paper’s argument that they are constantly and collectively enacting political and physical spaces of dissent, resistance and encounter that – however momentarily – are able to overturn some of these powerful ideological and spatial constructs.

Health and contemporary change in the Arab world

Health and contemporary change in the Arab world

“International terrorism” in the League of Nations and the contemporary terrorism dispositif

This article recovers states’ discursive practices regarding “international terrorism” in the 1930s. It examines the internal conditions of the discourse of terrorism among states in this period with a particular focus on its conspiratorial elements and suggests external conditions for this discourse’s emergence and order. Furthermore, it points to continuities and discontinuities between the 1930s discursive series and the constituent discursive forms of the contemporary global terrorism dispositif – an assemblage of power practices which bear on individual human bodies, populations or (rogue or fragile) states and which are all strategically oriented through the concept of terrorism. The purpose of such a genealogical history is to expand the space of dissent to power practices in the dominant structures of (terrorism) knowledge by problematising their object and the ways in which these formations are productive of human subjectivity.

Translation and the Passage to Politics in Contemporary Palestinian Art

Analyzing connections between art and politics, this article proposes that contemporary Palestinian art is a space of dissent that challenges consensus and creates new visions of belonging and new forms of subjectivity. It considers the way the installations and videowork of Mona Hatoum and Till Roeskens and translation in the poetry of Suheir Hammad bring together reflections on “subjective mapping.” Both subjective mapping and translation are shown to imply a passage to politics. The crossing of languages, genres and media in these different artworks therefore establishes an intermedial dialogue—not only between the artworks themselves, but also between subjective mapping and translation, visual art and poetry.

Between a rock and a hard place: career guidance practitioner resistance and the construction of professional identity

Increased state intervention regarding the objectives and outcomes of career guidance leaves some practitioners deeply unhappy at the increased control this exerts over their work. In this article, I argue that practitioners are subject to the power and influence of the state’s economic and welfare agendas that are contrary to their preferred position of person-centred helping. Foucault argued that power cannot exist without resistance, yet those who identify with having a profession have few spaces for dissent. They express resistance through adherence to personal values. Strengthening the role of the professional body may provide them with a voice that needs to be heard.

Affinities of Dissent: Cyberspace, Performative Networks and the Iranian Green Movement

AbstractThis paper argues that the role of Internet activism in the Green Movement, a social protest movement that emerged after the contested 2009 presidential elections in Iran, lies in the creative configuration of complex networks that primarily interact through meaning-laden performances that carve out spaces of dissent. For social movements, especially under authoritarian rule like the Green Movement, cyberspace presents a kind of social space wherein imaginaries of self and other, resistance and power shape bonds of interactivity. Such bonds are described here as “social affinities” that are about contentious performances, actions that display intense emotions and narratives of protestation against power. Accordingly, the notion of “performative networks” underlines how the Iranian Green Movement, especially since the state repression that followed the elections, has compromised an interactive network organized around dramatic discourses and practices of contestation. In terms of structure, the paper is divided into three sections. (1) The first section shows how an electoral campaign was put together through loosely networked associations that (partly) operated through computer-mediated-communication that facilitated logistical resources for the actors. In the pre-election period, Internet played a prominent role in promoting and mobilizing a decentralized movement through offline and online shifting network connections, a phase of cyberactivism that is identified here as self-promoting networks. (2) The second section looks at what followed after the election results were announced, after which the regime unleashed its security forces to crackdown on the street protests. Cyberspace emerged as a set of other-offensive performative actions, contentious strategies like organization of street-demonstrations, hackactivism and website defacements that identified a more belligerent and aggressive strategy aimed at directly challenging state power, both offline and online. (3) The third and final phase compromises self-maintaining performative actions that largely revolves around memorial and mythical narratives for the maintenance of social affinities in light of state crackdowns in both physical and cyberspaces. The paper finally argues that Internet activism in the context of social movements involves dramatic performances of affective nature that form network associations and vibrant informal public spheres.

Sri Lanka inside-out: cyberspace and the mediated geographies of political engagement

This research note begins by pointing to the forms of geographical and political enclosure that have resulted from the current Sri Lankan government's effective regulation of parts of the national media, as well as its mediation of knowledge produced about Sri Lanka more generally. It argues that a rather draconian and unbreachable geography of inside and outside is instantiated by the political regime's insularizing regulation of the country's media(tion). The research note then points to new virtual spaces in the Sri Lankan context that are reconfiguring this sticky geography of inside and outside. In particular, it argues that Sri Lanka's burgeoning blogosphere and online citizen journalism provide new, participatory spaces for dissent, debate and the free flow of information that have much potential to assist in the production of a more robust and critical civil society. The emergence of these spaces points to the importance of geography and spatiality in manufacturing an effective critical politics in contemporary Sri Lanka.

Review: Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space

Review: Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space By Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht Reviewed by Pamela Flinton SUNY Oneonta, USA Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia and Ehrenfeucht, Renia. Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. 336pp. ISBN 9780262123075. US$28.00, cloth. The authors of this work have attempted to “document the evolution of municipal sidewalks as well as their competing functional, social, political, commercial, and environmental uses” (p.11) in a work that is relatively unique in its field. Sidewalks have been in existence, in one form or another, since about 2000 B.C. Throughout history sidewalks have been many things, including the place to see and be seen; a method to move foot traffic; a place to showcase vendor wares, and a quiet point of contention between public and private entities. Case studies of five major U.S. cities – Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Seattle – provide glimpses of how sidewalks have become public spaces that are constantly in conflict and being negotiated for. Sidewalks are considered spaces of economic survival when used by street vendors; as a place to establish one’s individual or group identity as in the suffragettes parades in 1920; as a place of dissent (the free-speech advocates of the early 1900s); and, in more recent years, as a place to create an urban forest of trees. The glimpses given in this book are succinct and extremely useful. The book uses themes of distinctiveness, publicness, diversity and contestation, and regulation to delve into the competing uses and claims of sidewalk users. The chapter “History and Evolution” provides overall background concerning the development and uses of the sidewalk. The chapter “Sidewalk as Space of Dissent” investigates sidewalks political spaces from the free speech riots of the early 1900s, through Vietnam protests in the 1960s and 1970s, right up to the Free Trade Area of the Americas protests in Miami, FL in 2003. Chapters 10 and 11 speak to the role of municipalities in the regulation of sidewalks. The amount of archival and statistical information in the writing attests to the thorough research completed by the authors. The number of photographic depictions is limited, yet very relevant to the topic of the section. Tables that are included are clear and easy to decipher. The list of references is quite comprehensive and very diverse. The index is extensive and an asset to the overall work. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris is Professor and Chair of UCLA's Department of Urban Planning. Her research focuses on the public environment of cities and its impact on the urban resident. Renia Ehrenfeucht is Assistant Professor in the Department of Planning and Urban Studies at the University of New Orleans. Her research is concentrated in the production and meaning of the public environment and the social production of that environment. This book is recommended for social science researchers, undergraduate libraries, and anyone interested in how public spaces are competed for and developed. Pamela Flinton, MLS. , Head of Access Services Librarian, James M. Milne Library, SUNY Oneonta, 108 Ravine Parkway, Oneonta NY 13820, USA. TEL:1-607-436-2998. Electronic Green Journal, Issue 29, Winter 2009, ISSN:1076-7975

Benevolent Patriotism: Art, Dissent and The American Effect

This article examines the role of contemporary art in a post-9/11 context through The American Effect exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2003. This exhibition displayed a range of artworks from around the world that specifically engaged with, commented upon and interrogated the USA's pre-eminent position as a global superpower. In the politically charged climate after 9/11, the exhibition offered itself as a critical voice amid the more obvious patriotic clamour: it was one of the places where Americans could ask (and answer) the question, `Why do they hate us so much?' Although The American Effect claimed to be a space of dissent, it ultimately failed to question, let alone challenge, US global hegemony. Instead, the exhibition articulated a benevolent patriotism that forced artwork from other nations into supplicating and abject positions, and it obscured the complex discursive networks that connect artists, curators, critics, audiences and art museums.