Disobedient objects: material readings of enclosure protest in sixteenth-century England

ABSTRACT

Responding to calls for scholars to address ‘material worlds’ in our analyses of protests past, the paper examines the more-than-human historical geographies of enclosure and enclosure protest in sixteenth-century England. It argues that negotiating enclosure – in the sense of both promoting and resisting private property rights – was dependent on particular assemblages of people, animals and things and their convergence within specific spaces and temporalities. Particular attention is paid to mundane and everyday objects entangled in enclosure protest and the ways these assemblages might transform objects’ meanings, rendering them threatening or disobedient. Moreover, repurposing these things offered opportunities to re-make space, concretising or resisting particular claims to access or possession at the local level. It contributed too to the ongoing debate out of which new concepts of property eventually emerged, so that interrogating the materialities of enclosure protest offers vital space in which to rethink the makings of our modern world.     

Problematizing silences in intangible heritage: unsettling historical records of women in protests

Abstract

This paper addresses questions of women’s visibility in constructed histories, as well as levels of recognition concerning their participation in politics through historical narratives. In particular, historical narratives representing women in protest in the context of waterfront heritage zones associated with the shipbuilding industry are examined, based on examples of two public art projects: Strong Women of the Clydeside: Protests and Suffragettes from Govan’s Hidden Histories led by the artist t s Beall in the Govan area of Glasgow, Scotland and Shipyard is a Woman by Arteria Association and Metropolitanka in Gdansk, Poland.     

‘Women—Keep Australia Free!’: Women Voters and Activists in the 1951 Referendum Campaign

Abstract

This article considers three aspects of the women's vote and activism during the 1951 referendum campaign. First, it is argued that the appeal to women was conducted in terms of the democratic right to freedom of expression and protest especially as it connected to domestic issues. Second, women's engagement in this campaign has been overlooked, but was influential, diverse and prominent, as evidenced by the involvement of activists such as Millicent Preston Stanley and Margot Mahood. Finally, the campaign directed at the woman voter points to the increasing appeal by the major parties to women as independent voters.     

From Blind Spot to Media Spotlight: Propaganda Policy,Media Activism and the Emergence of Protest Events in the Chinese Public Sphere

Abstract

In recent years, popular protest in China has emerged from a state of near-invisibility. Drawing on a diachronic analysis of news media coverage, this paper traces how a number of major protest events gradually entered the Chinese media’s spotlight and came to be portrayed in an increasingly protester-sympathising fashion over the course of the Hu-Wen administration. It argues that these changes were triggered by structural transformations of the Chinese public sphere, but underlines that deliberate policy choices by the political leadership served as a crucial agent of change. Facing proliferating unrest and an increasingly unimpeded flow of information, the central authorities have gradually shifted propaganda policy from a suppressive to a more proactive approach. They have thereby created critical opportunities for Internet users and investigative journalists to push the envelope further towards protester-sympathising accounts. The development is significant as there are good reasons to surmise that increased media coverage has exacerbated the dynamics of popular contention. Theoretically, it deserves to be noted that non-inevitable choices by an authoritarian leadership have led to an outcome in which media coverage of citizens who challenge the state on the streets has become substantially more frequent and positive than before.     

Democratisation and the British Empire

ABSTRACT

This article responds to the statistically established finding in democratisation studies that British rule seems to have been good for the survival of democracy in its former empire, and that the longer a nation spent under British rule, the likelier it is to have sustained democracy since independence. This is a finding which puzzles political scientists because they think of democracy and empire as opposites. The article considers the uses made of democratic innovation by the British and the responses anti-colonial nationalists made to the offer to ‘lead them to democracy’. It places democracy and empire in a different, more complex relationship. It also considers the contribution of anti-colonial protest to the working of democracy.     

Rethinking ‘safe spaces’ in children’s geographies

ABSTRACT

In this editorial, we provide a preliminary definition of ‘safe spaces’ before exploring how the collected authors have taken a fresh approach to understanding ‘safe spaces’ though a geographical lens. Until now, the material ‘location’ of safe spaces have remained under theorised, but by turning attention to how children and young people co-produce and bring safe spaces into being through their situated practices, this Special Issue provides rich ground for re-evaluating why places ‘matter’ in children’s lives. This editorial maps out those common threads that are uncovered across a diverse collection that spans playful protest in Johannesburg, family food struggles in Warsaw, to the theatrical parodies of second generation Somali youth in London.     

Italy: A new language for a new politics?

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the language used by the major actors in contemporary Italian politics. After a brief introduction, which lists the general questions posed by such an analysis, we examine the language of the pre‐1992 regime, which has been rather too hastily condemned as obscure and solipsistic. We then pass to the self‐consciously simple language of Bossi, who constructs a discourse of protest, and of Berlusconi, who offers a discourse of government. These lead to the very different, albeit sometimes complementary, languages of Prodi and D'Alema, which go beyond populism and open new political perspectives. Through these and other examples we examine the role of political language in a changing Italy.     

An anatomy of race and immigration politics in California

At the US–Mexico border specific community organizations have played an important role in reinforcing and challenging dominant ideas about race and immigration through a series of protest and media campaigns. In this paper I explore the ways in which key community organizations have relied upon specific and specified constructions of race and ethnicity to redefine notions of borders and identities. I argue that an examination of debates around immigration reveals the centrality (and marginalization) of the images and spaces of the racialized immigrant body. An exploration of the ways in which policy, media, national and individual identities are mapped on to particular spaces provides an opportunity to interrogate and challenge the 'naturalness' of representations of race and immigration and the ways in which power is strategically located yet hidden in discussions of the border(s).     

Sunflowers,youthful protestors and political achievements: lessons from Taiwan

ABSTRACT

In 2014, an interesting youth movement collective started small p political and big P Political action and resistance in Taiwan. Their protest was against the way a major trade agreement proposed between China and Taiwan was being non-democratically pushed through the Taiwanese legislature. In this article, we provide an analysis of the activities of the Sunflower Student Movement (SSM) as a means to record a relatively little-known youthful and youth-centric successful uprising. It serves to place the SSM, and other East Asian-based protests, on the map of young people’s political geographies, and explores the paradoxical political and spatial practices pursued by young Taiwanese. This case study makes visible the interconnectedness of big P/small p politics of everyday youth geographies within an Asian context.     

Why the Homeless Rebel: Housing Struggles in post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Post-apartheid housing struggles urgently need to be addressed in order to consolidate the inclusivist democracy in South Africa. Former white minority governments restricted housing in order to control the movement of Africans and their labour. This paper analyses aspects of post-apartheid housing protest. The argument is that such protests are rooted in a problematic rights discourse of the anti-apartheid struggle, and in the new constitution's recognition of the right of access to adequate housing, which is nonetheless, subjected to fiscal constraints. The article's second focus is on a legacy of land dispossession, which also hinders housing delivery. Failure to realise the right to housing fuels some of the most important conflict that will shape future organisation of state institutions and relations between the state and society.     

Permeability and Protest in Lane 49: Entangling Materialities of Place with Housing Activism in Shanghai

Since China’s implementation of a neo‐liberal housing regime, housing activism has boomed. Whilst activism is ultimately in place, as increasingly recognised within protest work, there is limited reflection upon how permeable material histories are entangled with the throwntogetherness of place as a site for protest. Employing ethnography over three months, this article follows the emergence, organisation and implementation of housing activism in Lane 49, a public housing community in downtown Shanghai. Utilising feminist geography and feminist political theorisations of material permeability this article contributes to Chinese geographies of protest, providing a local epistemology of housing activism which demonstrates the importance of drawing materiality into understandings of activist tactics. The article also contributes to radical geographies of protest by deconstructing the idea of public protest in a public place and thus offering opportunities to demonstrate how, through blurring public‐private binaries, protest can emerge and survive in authoritative governance regimes.     

Reversed,defaced, replaced: late medieval London and the heraldic communication of discontent and protest

ABSTRACT

Cultural history is currently rediscovering heraldry as a versatile means of communication that was widely employed throughout all parts of medieval society, not least the city. Scholars, however, primarily analyse the urban space as a stage for noble self-representation by means of heraldic communication. This paper argues for a different perspective, that townspeople and other commoners were far from primarily passive observers of heraldry displayed in the city. Four case studies from late medieval London demonstrate public expressions of discontent and protest through forms of heraldic communication which did not rely on display, but instead on the manipulation and destruction of the heraldic signs of kings, princes and other noblemen. Indeed, such heraldic practices of ‘non-nobles’ suggest that heraldry, in the later Middle Ages, was accessible to all parts of society, and constituted a ubiquitous and powerful aspect of urban visual culture.     

Affective Protest Symbols: Public Dissent in the Mass Commemoration of the Sewŏl Ferry’s Victims in Seoul

ABSTRACT

Symbols used in the Sew?l protests in downtown Seoul from 2014 onwards proved effective in soliciting public engagement for three years. After the sinking of the Sew?l ferry that took 304 lives, most of them high school students, objects such as yellow ribbons gained iconic status as signifiers of the demand to investigate the ferry’s sinking and honour the memory of the victims. New visual indexes that created and articulated this emotionally laden discourse formed a common visual language of grief and anger towards the Korean authorities. This ethnography-based article explores the development of the protest’s affective aestheticism, its main agents and semiotics, and how it produced affect, which had strong cultural, social and emotional impacts. In 2016, the Sew?l movement became the core of larger protests against the ruling elites.     

Ta‘isi O.F. Nelson and Sir Maui Pomare Samoans and Māori Reunited

ABSTRACT

This paper unearths the friendship between Samoan nationalist leader Ta‘isi Olaf Frederick Nelson and Māori politician Sir Maui Pomare during the early period of New Zealand's administration of Samoa. It examines the role this friendship played – especially as a line of communication between the Samoan protest movement or Mau, of which Nelson was a leader, and the highest echelons of the New Zealand government – in those years of fraught relations between Samoa and New Zealand. It also explores the significant historical connections that were made, or remade, through this friendship. The relationship between these two men brought Polynesian peoples together in new ways and also directly linked Parihaka, a 19th-century Māori community known for its non-violent resistance against European colonialism, with the later Samoan Mau.     

I Quindici Giorni di Scanzano: identity and social protest in the New South

Abstract

This paper examines the dramatic events of ‘I Quindici Giorni di Scanzano’, the vast popular uprising in Basilicata in November 2003 that thwarted a government decree to create a consolidated national nuclear waste dump at Scanzano Jonico. The struggle cut across lines of locality, age, social class and political affiliation, mobilizing the populace with various symbols, including references to brigandage, postwar struggles for land, and the Madonna of Loreto. Solidarity for the protest came from all quarters of the South, especially the neighboring regions of Apulia and Calabria. Although government representatives and some of the media portrayed the Lucanians in recognizably anti-Southern tropes of ‘uncivicness’, this paper argues that this remarkable moment in Basilicata's history created a new sense of public identity and action that in many ways reflected recent intellectual discourses on the South.     

Cheating the Censor: Romanian Writers under Communism

Abstract

The Romanian Communist Party enjoyed considerable success in exploiting literature for its own ends. This article asks why those writers who challenged censorship were few in number, and why, even in the final year of Nicolae Ceau?escu’s rule, the chorus of protest was weak. Most Romanian writers failed to oppose censorship, and were deeply marked by it even when they believed that they were ‘cheating’ the censor. In some ways self-censorship proved to be more damaging to creativity than overt repression. The exceptions nevertheless comprise an important category, deserving examination and recognition. The fall of Communism in Romania has allowed a discussion of these themes to be more fully informed and to this end English translations of open letters from a number of writers are appended. Some of these were passed to the author for dissemination in 1989.     

Population pressure,political institutions,and protests: A multilevel analysis of protest events in African cities

Why do some of Africa's urban areas experience higher rates of protest incidence than others? Numerous authors have highlighted the role of urbanisation and democratisation in determining cross-national variation in the rates of urban protest. Yet understanding has been hindered by failures to measure mechanisms at the appropriate spatial scale, analyse a sufficiently representative sample of urban centres, de-confound local and country-level factors, and consider what it is about specific urban centres that shapes variation in protest incidence. This paper presents new evidence on the determinants of protests in African urban centres by linking georeferenced data on urban settlements from the Urban Centres Database to the location of protest events taken from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset. Fitting a series of multilevel regression models with cross-level effects, we simultaneously estimate variation in protest incidence as a function of local- and country-level factors and the interactions between them. Our results indicate that variation in protest incidence between urban centres can be explained by a combination of local-specific and country-level contextual factors including population size and growth, regime type, civil society capacity, and whether an urban centre is politically significant. These findings advance our understanding of how political and demographic factors interact and influence protest incidence in urban Africa.     

SWING REVISITED: THE SWING PROJECT

Abstract

The Captain Swing riots were the most serious protest by agricultural labouring communities of the I9th century. Historiographically, the work of Hobsbawm and Rudé (I969) has remained the outstanding account of these riots. So much so that, since their groundbreaking study, relatively little work has been done on these events at an aggregate scale. However, local research has implied that the unrest was greater than even Hobsbawm and Rudé reported. This article reviews the findings of a project on the Swing disturbances in England, Scotland and Wales in the period I830 to I832. Our intention was to address the extent of ‘Swing’ and to revisit the frequency and type of distribution of the unrest. Our findings suggest that it was indeed more widespread than hitherto believed. Boundaries between Swing and non-Swing are also shown to be porous although many of the conclusions of Hobsbawm and Rudé were found to stand the test of time.     

Learning from L'Aquila: grassroots mobilization in post-earthquake Emilia-Romagna

In this article I analyse how a number of Italian, left-wing youth groups (centri sociali) reacted to the earthquake that struck the Emilia-Romagna region in 2012, forcing thousands of people to relocate into the tendopoli camps run by the Italian Civil Protection (Protezione Civile). The centri sociali promoted an alternative, grassroots project of emergency management which built both on a negative, collective memory of the problematic reconstruction process following the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila, and on the role model of the No Tav protest movement in Piedmont. This led the centri sociali to move away from the urban territory and from the global battles that have long marked radical left-wing political activism, engaging instead in a more locally rooted project that clashes with the die-hard image of left-wing antagonism. Why have these groups taken their battle into the country side? Are we witnessing a (re)turn to a more local protest culture?     

La resignificación de los márgenes del teatro independiente: Oratorio,del Teatro Estudio Lebrijano

Abstract

Oratorio, by Alfonso Jiménez Romero and Teatro Estudio Lebrijano, is arguably among the most representative plays of 1970s Spain’s independent theater. This play experienced many changes and adjustments before it was staged in the Festival Mondial de Théâtre de Nancy in 1971. These changes were tested in performances in Andalusia before audiences with little exposure to theater but sympathizing with the play. By studying a production that developed for three years, this article challenges the claims that support a history of theater as a catalogue of finished products. This article aims at considering the creative process that emerges from the direct contact with audiences in performing spaces. Independent theater archives have limitations, but they are made up with oral histories from troupe members. This article studies both the incorporation of theatrical devices associated with ritual participation of the audience and the use of flamenco reassessed as protest music. The latter included in the play as an artistic device since the tour in Andalusia. This play made explicit references to the Spanish Civil War, which prompted physical reactions from the audience in towns where the repression was fierce.