Subaltern Counterpublics Research Articles

Melody of the Malady: Musicking Subaltern Counterpublics Space in J. B. Tuhure’s Selected Songs

When the Panchayat regime emerged as a new governmental system in Nepal, it brought various developmental projects to elevate the socio-economic condition of the people. However, when it was practically implemented, instead of betterment, the public confronted hardship in celebrating their liberty and autonomy. The society was stratified into different domains, constricting the space for the commoners and limiting their horizon of understanding. In this context, J.B. Tuhure’s song played an important role to narrate the precise story of the folks and make them aware of their position, blasting revolutionary thoughts inwardly in their consciousness. As the songs are suggestive in nature, they are, in fact, counter-voices against the regime and underlying structure of Nepali society, which had to be changed for the emancipation of the subalterns. In this relevance, this research paper explores Tuhure’s three specific songs: Basai Hidne ko Taanti Le, Aama Didi Baini Ho, and Chhora Haru Ho, focusing on how the musicality of these songs create subaltern counterpublics space to construct anti-dominant narrations of the Panchayat regime and how these songs pave the way for the recognition of the marginalized category of people in the stratified societies, where layers of domination persist. Taking Nancy Fraser’s concept of ‘Subaltern Counterpublics Space’ and Christopher Small’s notion of ‘Musicking’ as a theoretical perspective, the paper argues Tuhure’s songs are the spaces where a cluster of subaltern narratives simultaneously occur, challenging the regime and vocalizing the rights for the subordinated. It unravels that Tuhure’s songs are the musicking of subaltern counterpublics spaces, making the public participatory and performative.

Interrogating the incel-o-sphere: The state of the subaltern counterpublic sphere in the digital age of extremism

In critique of Habermas's public sphere, Nancy Fraser offered the ‘subaltern counterpublic’ – arenas of refuge from and counter-organizing against the wider public. But does this (re)configuration of the public sphere hold in the age of extremism on the internet? I examine the trajectory of incel as a community, interrogating whether this extremist contingent follows Fraser's subaltern counterpublic or if they exemplify a new counterpublic – the ultra altern, or ‘ultern’, counterpublic. I explore the ways that the ultern counterpublic differs from the subaltern and its relationship to the general public sphere, particularly within the critical intervention of the internet. I finally offer a brief analysis of another movement – the KKK – within my new framing, to further detail the differences between the ultern and subaltern counterpublic.

“Young people are having sex, whether we like it or not”: Youth countering politicized cultural differences in sexuality education in Addis Ababa

School-based sexuality education is a globally controversial topic. While adopted as a human rights-based international norm and part of numerous frameworks (e.g., SDGs and Maputo Protocol for African countries), one of the main controversies in the Global South is the question of norm ownership. The case of sexuality education in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is a powerful example of debates around norm spoiling and the so-called (un-)Africanness of sexuality education. In this article, I ask how a generational perspective, influences our understanding of translating sexuality education, which challenges a young generation of actors working in Addis Ababa face and how they counteract politicized cultural differences. Based on my empirical research in Addis Ababa during 2019–2020, I illustrate that resistance to sexuality education is culturized and therefore a transnational challenge for actors striving to enhance school-based sexuality education. Demands to better include youth generations in political decision-making, strengthen bottom-up translation, and to counter the politicization of cultural differences remain largely confined to subaltern counterpublics, particularly within educational settings and NGO-based projects.

Engendering migrant counterpublics: fun, care, solidarity, and resistance among Ethiopian domestic workers in Lebanon

ABSTRACT Research documenting the re-configurations of ‘public–private’ boundaries encountered by migrant domestic workers has observed how they often create a sense of ‘home’ in public spaces in destination countries. Migrant workers’ occupation of, and interactions in, public spaces such as parks, malls, restaurants, and churches in effect create ‘private spheres’ where they can relax and be themselves with friends and sometimes partners. Yet migrant women also often face a double exclusion from the public sphere as political subjects, first as women and second as migrants. Their physical presence in the public sphere may be highly regulated by gender norms, and their participation in the public sphere is limited due to their exclusion from citizenship or even labour entitlements. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s concept of subaltern counterpublics, this paper argues that migrant domestic workers’ experiences of re-configuring public and private spaces within Lebanon contribute to the creation of ‘migrant counterpublics’ that challenges the methodological-nationalist limitations of conceptualisations of citizenship and participation in the public sphere. I make these reflections through an auto-ethnographic account of my experiences while researching the working lives and conditions of Ethiopian migrant domestic workers in Lebanon. Central to these reflections on our navigation of public spaces is the consideration of our embodied experiences as racialised women, which intersected with our differential class, sexuality, and migrant status positioning.

Cathedrals in public: bridging the gap between public theology and cathedral studies

ABSTRACT This study demonstrates the value of the field of public theology for cathedral studies. Both of these fields are concerned with the continuing role of religion in public life in contemporary societies, and yet those writing within these fields often do not draw from the work of the other. Therefore, in this study I show some findings of my PhD thesis entitled ‘A critical evaluation of the public theology of Manchester Cathedral’. In this project, I conducted research in both of these fields by employing a publicness-ethnographic approach to collect and analyse data from participant observation, analysis of public data, and 14 semi-structured interviews with key actors at the cathedral. This study analyses three key findings from this research: public theologies of inclusion at the cathedral, the location of theology in the public work of the cathedral, and an understanding of cathedrals as hosts of subaltern counter-publics.

Participatory embeddedness and democratic deepening: Feminist Subaltern Counterpublics

The objective of this research is to analyze how participatory embeddedness through Feminist Subaltern Counterpublics is related to democratic deepening. To this end, two cases have been selected in the towns of Ripollet (Catalonia) and Etxebarri (Basque Country) developing a multi-method design that triangulates interviews, a direct observation and a discussion group. After applying a cross-case analysis, the findings reveal how the practical and spatial dimensions produce temporary rooting oriented towards democratic deepening from a gender perspective. Firstly, the dissolution of the public/private tension leads to inclusive practices and –therefore– to the politicization of subjects and problems previously excluded from the public sphere. Secondly, the institutionalization processes of social movements can favor spaces of hybridization where the concerns of the subalternized are mobilized in order to –thirdly– be transformed into public policies sustained over time. El objetivo de esta investigación es analizar cómo se relaciona el arraigo participativo a través de los Contrapúblicos Subalternos Feministas con la profundización democrática. Para ello, se han seleccionado dos casos en los municipios de Ripollet (Cataluña) y Etxebarri (País Vasco) desarrollando un diseño multimétodo que triangula entrevistas; una observación directa y un grupo de discusión. Tras aplicar un análisis de casos cruzados, los hallazgos revelan cómo las dimensiones prácticas y de espacios producen enraizamiento temporal orientado a la profundización democrática desde una perspectiva de género. En primer lugar, la disolución de la tensión público/privada conduce a prácticas inclusivas y –por tanto- a la politización de sujetos y problemas anteriormente excluidos de la esfera pública. En segundo lugar, los procesos de institucionalización de movimientos sociales pueden favorecer espacios de hibridación en donde las preocupaciones del tejido social subalternizado son movilizadas para –en tercer lugar- ser transformadas en políticas públicas sostenidas en el tiempo.

Repertoires of Anti-caste Sentiments in the Everyday Performance: Narratives of a Dalit Woman Singer

Understanding Dalit women through their lifeworld and life-narratives enables one to understand the caste relations that they negotiate with in their everyday life. Resistance in the everyday life of Dalit women includes how they challenge the existing public spaces, cultural norms, and practices through the creation of a ‘subaltern counterpublics’ space. This space involves collective actions like popular writing, singing, theatrics, etc., to confront the ‘normalised’ caste relationship that prevails within Indian society. The cultural performance becomes the narrative of this counterpublics space in which they intend to reassert their lost identity and dignity. The emergence of alternative public spaces is ‘significant and a necessary condition for democracy’. For Dalit women cultural performers, the everyday resistance practices are deeply embedded in the creation of an alternative worldview, a counterpublics, that both represent their ‘world of (caste) experience’ as well as becomes a space to ‘talk-back’ about their exclusion and humiliation. This article through an ethnographic account, has engaged with a Dalit woman cultural performer and her lifeworld. The article aims to explore the meanings, practices, and challenges that she faces in her anti-caste resistance.

#TheAfricaTheMediaNever ShowsYou: An Afrodiasporic Subaltern Counterpublic

Media representations of African underdevelopment are central to the communicative potential and reach of international development in the mainstream public sphere, but they are not without sustained critique and confrontation. By conceptualising the humanitarian-themed campaign – #TheAfricaTheMediaNeverShowsYou on Twitter, as an Afrodiasporic Subaltern Counterpublic, this article considers how UK African diasporic communities have utilised this digitalised environment to oppose the popular but problematic ‘face of development’. Applying Nancy Fraser’s counterpublics theorisation and drawing on social media ethnography and multiple participant interviews, it shows how oppositional counter-discourses among these online diasporic communities challenge problematic African representation within ‘white media’. This is realised in three distinct but interrelated discursive practices: (1) Afrodiasporic solidaristic orientations; (2) Diasporic solidarism as an assemblage(d) response to development’s institutionalised whiteness; and (3) Countering Africa(n) misrepresentations.

Capitalism and contested publicity. A conversation with Nancy Fraser

Following a workshop on ‘Wildening the public sphere’ with Nancy Fraser at the Berlin Centre for Social Critique in June 2022, we had the chance to continue the discussion via Zoom in November 2022. We start by illuminating the relation between ‘subaltern counterpublics’ and the public-at-large, the rise of right-wing counterpublics and the impact of so-called ‘social media’ on the public sphere. That brings us to the question how publics are situated within capitalism, and how they are able to politicize issues that are traditionally considered private in capitalist societies. This is particularly interesting in regard to the pressing political task of forming an extended and non-essentialist working class identity that is able to mediate different ‘faces of labour’, as Fraser puts it in her recent Benjamin Lecture (2022a).

Investigating ‘Moral Legitimacy’ and ‘Belonging’ within Subaltern Counterpublics vis-à-vis the Raj: A Study of Select Short Stories by Janice Pariat

When there is a stringent demand for a viable reconstruction of the traditional socio-political structure, especially amid the paucity of “reliable” historical records from the pre-colonial era, the native population’s recurrent anxieties of losing indigenous cultural heritage, and instances of its xenophobic politics, become visible in an unprecedented form. In this context, the discursive void between the dominant state-power and “excluded” subjects usually engenders counter-cultural values of endowed “subaltern counterpublics”. Though these alternative public spheres are formed to uphold neglected discourses, often, a few ‘dissident’ voices reside within them to challenge the unanimity of such groups, towards more progressive ends. These apparent “nonconforming” discourses within the subaltern groups strive to foreground humanitarian principles by giving voice to alternative ideologies, and sometimes, for these propositions, are accused of lacking moral legitimacy towards the subaltern counterpublics themselves. Accentuating this vital site within the marginal yet homogenized discourse, the present paper attempts to foreground the question of moral legitimacy and its critical linkages with participatory parity of the subaltern counterpublics in the context of the British colonial era in Meghalaya. It further seeks to unpack how subaltern politics itself is manipulated by anti-egalitarian ethos within the subaltern counterpublics, in response to the colonial rule. In order to understand the inclusive approach of the “nonconformist” subaltern within the subaltern colonial subjects, who sometimes appear to challenge and rethink the very basic tenets of subaltern counterpolitics, and their negotiations of the varied legacies of the Raj, this study endeavours to analyze select short stories by Janice Pariat, the 2013 Sahitya Akademi Award-winning writer from Meghalaya.

Subaltern Counterpublics in Global Politics

Publics have traditionally been conceived as sites of social integration. While discord, controversy, and contestation may be acknowledged, theorising publics and especially public spheres are characteristically geared toward the production of consensus and/or the conditions of the possibility of unified decision-making. On this view, publics beyond the nation-state are reduced to conceptual extensions of the nation-state—The move to a higher level of aggregation, imagined as global or international, seems to make no conceptual difference. Against this, I propose to conceptualize publics as sites of the constitution of social struggles. To this end, I introduce Nancy Fraser’s concept of “subaltern counterpublics,” previously applied exclusively to national contexts, to the study of global politics. With a view to future empirical application, I discuss three promising sites for the further study of subaltern counterpublics in global politics: colonial public spheres, transnational social activism, and the circulation of extreme right-wing conspiracy tropes. Taken together, I conclude, these three sites of inquiry provide an important corrective to a statist concept of the public in which the place, purpose, and direction of publics are always already taken for granted.

Framing a counter-city: The story of Sheffield Otherwise

Urban planning and design have often been complicit in perpetuating the systems of oppression embedded in colonial, capitalist, hetero-patriarchal, and racist spatial structures. Amid the current civilizational crisis, how can we enable possibilities for emancipatory and counter-hegemonic planning (Friedmann, 1989) and design? In order for new possibilities to emerge, we need to unmake what we know and look for radical approaches and practices that allow us to understand our responsibility to create counter-cities that nurture radical hope. This article presents the project Sheffield Otherwise, an exploration using research-design practices to shape a counter-city. Through a learning alliance, we partner with two community organisations working with diasporic and queer communities to reveal and frame their legacies and stories as part of the living heritage of Sheffield. We use counter-archiving and counter-mapping methodologies to engage with these counterpublics that have been excluded from official narratives, urban policies, and public space representations. In doing so, this project challenges hegemonic narratives about stigma and questions hegemonic planning and design practices that often lack understanding of the spatial heritage of diverse communities. Based on this experience, we argue that Counter-City constitutes a radical approach to imagining spatial justice that requires crystallising counter-hegemonic planning and design practices with subaltern counterpublics using methods such as counter-archiving and counter-mapping.

RÜZGARDA SALINAN NİLÜFER VE BAĞLILIK ASLI FİLMLERİ ÜZERİNE TOPLUMSAL CİNSİYET VE ORTA SINIFLAR BAĞLAMINDA BİR DEĞERLENDİRME

Bu çalışmada, Seren Yüce’nin Rüzgârda Salınan Nilüfer (2016) filmi ile Semih Kaplanoğlu’nun Bağlılık Aslı (2019) filmi toplumsal cinsiyet ve toplumsal sınıf tartışmaları bağlamında değerlendirilmiştir. Toplumsal cinsiyet ekseninde yapılan değerlendirme, özel alan – kamusal alan ayrımının cinsiyetçi karakteri hakkında süregelen tarihsel tartışma temelinde kurulmuştur. Toplumsal sınıf ekseninde yapılan değerlendirme ise toplumsal tabakalaşma tartışmalarındaki Marksist ve Weberci hatlar üzerinden kurulan bir izleğin üzerine kurulmuştur. Türkiye’de filmlerle ilgili sınıf çözümlemelerinde genellikle Weberci geleneği takip eden statü temelli toplumsal tabakalaşma yaklaşımlarının esas alındığı görülmüştür. Bu nedenle bu çalışmada incelenen filmler, farklı bir yaklaşımla değerlendirilmiştir. Bu değerlendirme, Erik Olin Wright’ın çelişkili sınıf konumları kavramsallaştırması esas alınarak yapılmıştır.[tr] This study examines the films The Swaying Waterlily (Seren Yüce, 2016) and Commitment Aslı (Semih Kaplanoğlu, 2019) in terms of gender and social-class discussions. The evaluation made on the axis of gender discussions is based on the ongoing historical debate over the sexist character of the distinction between the private and public spheres. In this context, it is first stated that the private sphere is generally identified with women, whereas the public sphere is identified with men; after that, Nancy Fraser’s subaltern counter-publics conceptualization, which supports the presence of women in the public sphere, is addressed. Historically, women in films have been positioned in the private sphere. This article addresses this issue in the case of the two films The Swaying Waterlily and Commitment Aslı. It argues that Commitment Aslı establishes a narrative emphasizing that women naturally belong to the private-household sphere. The film’s director, Kaplanoğlu, skillfully constructs this narration using a range of cinematographic elements. In contrast, The Swaying Waterlily welcomes the presence of women in the public sphere more positively. Although Yüce skillfully includes the complex social mechanisms that work against the presence of women in the public sphere, he does so in a way that opens a wide space for women in the public sphere. This article’s evaluation on the axis of social-class discussions is carried out through the lens of Marxist and Weberian approaches, as these are the dominant approaches to discussions about social classes and especially the position of the middle class in the literature. While class analyses of films in Türkiye are generally based on status-based social stratification approaches that follow the Weberian tradition, this article takes a different approach, one based in the Marxist tradition—specifically, Erik Olin Wright’s conceptualization of class counts. On this reading, the monotony, restlessness, and search for meaning in the lives of the characters in both films are associated with the contradictory character of their class counts. This contradictory character is mainly due to the fact that white-collar workers work for wages, while fulfilling their management and control functions over the wage earners in favor of the capitalist class. The article suggests that the unrest in their daily lives may also be related to such class counts. Nevzat Evrim Önal’s conceptualization of defense mechanisms is used to make sense of some of the attitudes and behaviors of these people. Önal categorizes the defense mechanisms that white-collar workers develop to escape from the unrest they are in as nihilistic defense, hedonistic defense, mystical defense, and infantile defense. In this study, the attitudes and behaviors of the characters in both films in daily life are evaluated by connecting them to nihilistic defense and hedonistic defense mechanisms. The article concludes that in terms of the position of women in the private or public sphere, which constitutes the first evaluation axis of this study, the film Commitment Aslı adopts a more conservative attitude and is willing to position women in the private sphere, whereas The Swaying Waterlily adopts a more positive approach to the existence of women in the public sphere. In the second evaluation axis, about middle-class lives, it concludes that both films draw attention to the unpleasantness, meaninglessness, restlessness, and lack of communication in such lives. In the movie Commitment Aslı, all these situations are presented within a main narrative line in which the woman is withdrawn to the private sphere; in The Swaying Waterlily, this is done in a more watchful style.[en]

Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul

Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul

트랜스젠더 인권의 정치적 실천 전략으로서의 공공공간

This study is an attempt to analyze the strategic position of public space in the political practices of minority parties. Inspecting public space as a strategic choice for the political practice of the subaltern counterpublics, this study examines the strategic position of the public space in the political practice of subalterns, by analyzing the case of the '2019 Transgender Remembrance Day March' in Korea.
 As a result of the study, the public space itself turned out to be a strategy in practicing the movement for the visualization of subaltern identity by the actors, and at the same time, functioning as a space for the subaltern to practice various politic strategies. Actors are also aware of the importance of these public spaces, and have obtained various effects by strategically choosing them as a method of movement and appropriating the space.
 Physical public space becomes the lens that most explicitly exposes the criteria for who the community accepts as a member of the community in the real world. Since the right to the city—particularly, access to public space—is a right granted to everyone ‘in principle’, it paradoxically reveals the boundary of the exclusive right to the membership of the community most clearly. Therefore, the intersectional study of human rights and space will be a guideline pointing to the current state of minority human rights in our society, and at the same time, it will be an effective method for subjects crossing the boundaries of human rights represented by space.

Digital Media and Discursive Contestation: The Importance of Feminist Counterpublics Online

For feminist research, digital media now enable other ways of knowing currently lacking in mainstream research. Therefore, searching for African women's lived experiences in other sites, such as digital media spaces, requires the appropriation of methodologies that empower women. This article discusses the feminist approach of centring women as subaltern counterpublics, to show how this unearths the intersection of technology, power, hegemony, and subordination in the Zimbabwean context. The overall goal is to explain how the feminist counterpublics approach enables empirical findings on the emancipatory potential of blogs for Zimbabwean women. This research approach reveals how Zimbabwean women are using digital media as spaces to circulate counterdiscourses that resist their subjugation and the legitimation of power. Utilising the feminist approach to qualitative content analysis and semi-structured interviews, the study shows that communicative spaces online enable traditionally emasculated groups in Zimbabwe, particularly women, to reaffirm their identities and to begin to question the societal norms that continue to oppress them. This approach illustrates that blogs act as sites for regrouping and contestation, developing remedies for women's oppression, taking positions, and influencing wider publics.

Who Represents the Domestic Voice? Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Citizen Diplomacy

Summary At its core, diplomacy is about representation. Including the domestic voice in diplomatic work pushes us to reflect critically on who represents our local communities to international constituents. To what extent is the diversity of local communities reflected in such diplomatic initiatives as, for example, state-supported citizen diplomacy programmes? This article argues for the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) work at the local level to the policy goals that citizen diplomacy programmes support. The article draws on the concept of ‘subaltern counterpublics’ to emphasise the importance of DEI efforts at the local level for more inclusive and authentic diplomacy globally. The article also discusses some of the current practices of intentionally incorporating DEI initiatives into citizen diplomacy work among civil society actors.

The Body in Religious Media Ecologies: The Case of Subaltern Latino Counterpublics

This paper explores the body-schematic and body-imaginative processes that underlie individuals’ participation in the public sphere via religious media ecologies. Utilising embodied cognition and social critique, the authors outline how subaltern counterpublics make use of the body to enact micro-oppositions to mainstream discourses. The paper also discloses the origins of higher objectivities (identity, sense of togetherness, justice, plausibility, opposition and openness) in embodiment. Discussing counterpublics through the prism of embodied cognition, as found in Latin religious media ecologies, constitutes a valuable alternative to the logocentric understanding of public consent. While the dominant discourse privileges abstract formal cognition, Latino subalterns use bodily, affective and enactive affordances given by religious media ecologies. The latter offer affordances and alternative strategies for enacting social imagination, bridging the personal and the public in physically choreographed joint intentions. Embodied participation suggests a constitutive process of public meaning that makes use of the body as the most fundamental medium of communication.

Towards Visibility: Subaltern Counterpublics in Paul Chirakkarode’s Pulayathara

Christianity has always been celebrated as a catalyst towards modernity for the Dalits of Kerala. Though missionary accounts and ethnographic studies confirm the progress of the community, there was rampant casteism and separatism too. This is succinctly revealed in Dalit Christian texts. Pulayathara by Paul Chirakkarode stands as a testimony to the Dalit Christian dilemma and traces the history of the Kuttanadan Pulaya community in the pre- and post-conversion scenarios. Conversions could not change the existing public sphere of Kerala, where upper castes were the dominant party. They (Dalits) continued to be marginalized and subordinated and lacked a class consciousness. The article highlights the limitations in the public sphere that emerged in Kerala as part of the missionary endeavours in accommodating the converted Dalits. The article attempts to trace the emergence of subaltern counterpublics among the Dalit Christians to oppose the continued oppression and casteism by situating Pulayathara at the centre of the analysis.

A qualitative UK study exploring counterpublic engagement of marginalized women via a Women's Health Network.

Public engagement is at the forefront of health policy and research. The need for engagement with diverse groups and particularly marginalized groups who face increased health inequalities has been recognized. Yet, there is a lack of research that focuses on marginalized women. This article presents data from semi-structured interviews with members of a Women's Health Network (WHN) in Bradford, one of the most deprived areas of England. WHN is a collective of women who aim to improve women and their families' health, with a particular focus on seldom-heard voices. This article critically explores what realistic, representative counterpublic engagement looks like. It reveals the tension between the ideal of public engagement (direct participation) and what happens in practice. Challenges for direct participation of marginalized groups in formal structures require alternative solutions. It is argued that WHN provides an alternative model of counterpublic engagement by bridging the gap between 'seldom-heard' women and healthcare providers. WHN creates and sustains a discursive space between subaltern counterpublics and official public spheres, enabling two-way communication. Furthermore, this article problematizes the terms 'seldom heard' and 'professionals' for assuming homogeneity and masking diversity. It is argued that WHN's bridging model of subaltern counterpublic engagement is successful at amplifying women's voices and promoting women's health because of the network's diverse membership and reach. This diversity enables the authentic representation of varied communities and the discursive movement of issues relating to women's health. WHN thus offers a transferable model of counterpublic engagement in the absence of direct participation.