The failure of the Patarine movement

Although the authors of recent literature on the Patarine movement in Milan (1057-75) have very different intellectual backgrounds, they all try to study and interpret the movement in its complete historical context, and they point to the circumstances or special combination of circumstances which caused the movement to fail. Its failure was due in part to its relationship to the social structure. In this article we first show why this relationship needs to be re-examined and then go on to investigate how the place of the movement in the social structure contributed to its failure and dramatic collapse.     

Communitas and the commons: The open access movement and the dynamics of restructuration in scholarly publishing

In this article, the author reflects on the open access movement as a social and political phenomenon via the lens of Turner’s work on liminality and communitas. Moving beyond the neo-liberalization frame, which is the primary way that the transformations in open access have been conceptualized to date, she argues that they are better understood as a product of the hybridizing relationship between structure and anti-structure. This perspective allows us to make sense of the open access movement’s seemingly paradoxical qualities, which, the author suggests, point to cultural processes still very much in the subjunctive mood.     

URBAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT: AN ANALYSIS OF HOUSING PROVISION IN NORTH AUSTRALIA*

This paper examines the role of urban social movements in shaping the built environment. It is based on empirical work undertaken in two relatively small towns, Darwin and Alice Springs, located in the Northern Territory of Australia. This approach has furnished the opportunity to undertake a true comparative study of the role of social movements in what ostensibly appear to be relatively simple urban locations situated in similar local, national and global circumstances, across the same time-period. In particular, the investigation sets out to examine the contrasting success/failure of social movements to coalesce around the problem of housing provision. The early sections of the paper review various conceptual issues related to the empirical investigation and try to arrive at a usable definition of ‘urban social movement’.     

Waves,Floods, Currents: The Politics and Poetics of Water in Social Movement Analysis

The task of conceptualising social movements draws on a wealth of watery images, from protest waves and political currents, to imagining mobilisations as tides, ripples, cascades or high-pressure hydraulics. Called upon to analyse complex processes, these waters have a life of their own, carrying analytical implications while extending a relationship to water that is never only symbolic and is material, embodied and historical. This article explores the ways water is “enrolled” to understand movements, to advance three arguments: first, these use familiar water morphologies to naturalise particular, located understandings of political change and social form; second, they imply normative claims and ideological affinities regarding political struggle; third, this has implications for our relationship to water, echoing the abstract and alienating “modern water” of capitalist world-ecology. The article considers how critical water knowledges and subjectivities, often sustained by social movement spaces, indicate possibilities of a being-otherwise with water and its meanings.     

Defence,the Family and the Battler: The Democratic Labor Party and its Legacy∗

The split in the Australian Labor Party (ALP) of the mid-1950s had a lasting impact on both the political and industrial wings of the labour movement. In electoral terms the creation of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), and the DLP's second-preference strategy, in particular, had adverse consequences for the ALP. This article re-examines the DLP in terms as a political party, a promotional pressure group and as part of a social movement. The article argues that as a party, the DLP was a failure largely due to its narrow focus on anti-communist defence and foreign policies. But as part of a social movement, it was far more successful and its legacy was still evident in 2007, and was found in the non-labourist social conservatism of the Howard government.     

Gendered mobilities in the making: moving from a pedestrian to vehicular mobility landscape in Shimshal,Pakistan

Although feminist geographers understand gender and mobility as mutually constitutive social processes, few studies explain how gender relations are constituted in particular mobility contexts, and how and why they shape mobility patterns in specific socio-spatial circumstances. We address these questions in an analysis of gendered mobilities in Shimshal, Pakistan, which until recently have taken shape in the context of a pedestrian mobility regime. The gender and mobility relationship has transformed as vehicular mobilities have replaced pedestrian mobilities with the construction of the Shimshal road. To demonstrate empirically the co-constitution of gender and mobility, we analyze aspects of socio-spatial context that have shaped gendered pedestrian mobilities, followed by those associated with the new vehicular mobility regime that are modifying gender relations in Shimshal. Shifting gender relations reshape corporeal mobility patterns. Road infrastructure has enhanced men’s and youth’s outbound travel as wage earners and students, respectively. These mobilities have reshaped women’s capacity to move, constraining their mobility beyond the village. As prosperity becomes contingent on outbound movement, men’s and youths’ social horizons and mobilities are expanding, while women’s compromised access to mobility as a social resource produces new mobility hierarchies and gendered exclusions.     

"The Civil Rights Movement of the 1990s?": The anti-abortion movement and the struggle for racial justice

In 1964, Claude and Jeanne Nolen, who were white, joined an interracial NAACP team intent on desegregating local restaurants in Austin, Texas as a test of the recently passed Civil Rights ACt. Twenty-five years later, the Nolens pleaded "no contest" in a courtroom for their continued social activism. This time the issue was not racial segregation, but rather criminal trespassing for blockading abortion clinics with Operation Rescue. The Nolens served prison sentences for direct action protests that they believe stemmed from the same commitment to Christianity and social justice as the civil rights movements.Despite its relationship to political and cultural conservatism, the anti-abortion movement since Roe v. Wade (1973) was also a product of the progressive social movements of the turbulent sixties. Utilizing oral history interviews and organizational literature, the article explores the historical context of the anti-abortion movement, specifically how the lengthy struggle for racial justice shaped the rhetoric, tactics, and ideology of the anti-abortion activists. Even after political conservatives dominated the movement in the 1980s, the successes and failures of the sixties provided a cultural lens through which grassroots anti-abortion activists forged what was arguably the largest movement of civil disobedience in American history.     

社区分化-整合运动一般规律探讨

社区是社会的子系统,其运动发展极其复杂。本文借助系统理论中描述系统运动发展的一对概念-分化与整合建立起社区分化和社区整合概念,并通过从社会层面、区域层面、空间连续分布的相邻社区层面分析影响社区分化一整合的外部因素和社区分化一整合的基本内容及其相互关系,探讨社区运动发展的一般规律,最后结合我国社区发展的实际概况论述了社区分化一整合运动规律在我国的特殊表现。     

Understanding large-scale institutional change

A remarkable reform in modern Swedish political history was the transformation of the local government structure between 1952 and 1974. In a mere 22 years, the number of municipalities was reduced from 2,498 to 277. This study aims to answer how such large-scale reforms could come about politically, particularly since much of the literature on institutions and political reform asserts that carrying out large-scale political change should be a difficult task. Two opposing stories of institutional change are presented: evolutionary accounts, which see the amalgamations as rational adaptations to changing circumstances, are contrasted with a social conflict perspective, which explains amalgamations in terms of their distributional consequences. By investigating the processes leading up to this vast restructuring of Swedish local political geography, we demonstrate that an understanding of these reforms as rational adaptations to changing circumstances, made on the basis of consensus among leading political actors, is not accurate. The reforms were not as uncontroversial and non-conflictual as they often have been portrayed. Our results weaken the evolutionary approach to institutional change, whilst supporting the social conflict perspective.     

‘A Fanatical Reverence for Gandhi’: Nationalism and Police Militancy in Bengal during the Non-cooperation Movement

Police militancy and strike actions featured prominently throughout the British Empire in the years after the First World War. While the demands of police for greater pay and better conditions of service were rooted in economic circumstances, police in diverse locales also forged tentative alliances with labour and trade union movements, sparking government fears of police ‘Bolshevism’. In the Indian province of Bengal, Indian police officers took a more radical stance and expressed widespread sympathy with the non-cooperation campaign of Mohandas Gandhi and its goal of swaraj or independence. Police discussed Gandhian teachings, threatened strike actions and formed the first association of non-European policemen in India, the Bengal Police Association. While ultimately the police remained loyal to the British Raj, the events in Bengal demonstrate the continuing links of colonial policemen to social, economic and political currents within the societies in which they operated, the force of nationalism in Bengal during the noncooperation movement and the strategies used by the colonial state to maintain police loyalty. An interrogation of Bengal police support for Gandhi not only complicates our portrait of the policemen who upheld the raj, but also sheds light on a significant moment in the ‘modernisation’ and professionalisation of colonial police forces and the tensions between their role in upholding colonial authority and their relationship to emerging labour and nationalist movements.     

美国进步运动研究评述

从研究方法的角度看,国外主要是美国学界关于进步运动的研究大体可分为专题研究、综合研究与比较研究。特别是在20世纪70年代以来,进步运动研究超越民族国家范畴,在跨国比较研究方面取得了重大进展。从构成进步运动的主体看,19世纪末20世纪初的美国进步运动是由复杂多样的改革运动组成的,得到不同的变革力量的倡导与支持。作为改革的进步派不能简单地以阶级或阶层划线,他们因不同的问题忽而协同作战,转而又互为敌寇或各自为战。尽管进步运动具有多样性,但并不排斥其一致性或共性的存在。从进步运动的目标与内容看,它是一场新的历史条件下重建民主与资本主义的社会政治运动,而作为支持进步运动的意识形态,即进步主义,究其实质,是属于自由主义范畴的。作为全国范围内的首次变革运动,进步运动奠定了现代美国政治、经济与文化的基础。     

中国近代工业道路的历史反思

中国近代工业道路形成于19世纪后半期的半殖民地半封建社会,其形成的前提条件、产生方式、组成结构、行业发展和资本积累等方面,都具有与一般资本主义国家所不同的独特性,给我们今天的工业现代化建设留下了深刻的教训。     

Reframing the “Irish Question”: the role of the Irish co-operative movement in the formation of Irish nationalism, 1900–22

This article examines the role of the Irish co-operative movement in the early twentieth century and argues that it played a crucial role in shaping a popular understanding of the “Irish Question”. This mass-membership movement impacted upon the development of the Irish state and population. By taking this rural, social movement as a lens to analyse Irish society in the early twentieth century, social and economic issues re-emerge as central components to a contemporary understanding of Ireland's increasingly contested position within the Union. As the expectation of some kind of political resolution to demands for political independence grew during the First World War, radical nationalism absorbed a social and economic discourse that originated within the co-operative movement in its critique of the British state as it operated in Ireland. Irish co-operation represented a sophisticated form of political economy that provided an influential ideological platform for Irish nationalists as they anticipated some form of political independence.     

Seismologies of emotion: fear and activism during domestic violence

This paper explores the relation of fear to activism in private and constrained circumstances of chronic risk and anxiety. Asking how people contest domestic violence, given the intensity of the fear that it generates, the paper reframes their responses as practices of activism. It draws on qualitative research that charts the nature, experience and effects of fear over time. Using seismology as a metaphor for this process, the analysis describes complex and often hidden shifts in emotions over periods of years, as interviewees describe being simultaneously constrained by fear and actively using fear to manage and contest violence. Their practices of resistance are small scale, largely invisible to others, and have a messy and non-linear relationship with the process of leaving that some eventually undertake. Such action is only necessary in a social and political climate which continues to place more emphasis on individual than social responsibility for domestic violence. I examine what this resistance adds to recent accounts of activism, concluding that isolated actions constitute activism when they anticipate or engender collective social and political change at other scales.     

Placing social interaction: An integrative approach to analyzing past built environments

A growing recognition of the vital role that built space plays in social reproduction has created a need for analytical methods and interpretive frameworks with which to investigate this relationship in archaeological datasets. I address this by developing an integrative approach that emphasizes the role of the built environment as the context for interactions through which social structures are created, transformed and reproduced. This approach uses access analysis to examine how buildings structure patterns of movement and encounter that allow social actors to engage in or avoid particular forms of interaction. With its focus on the topological properties of built space, however, access analysis does not take adequate account of a building’s symbolic aspects, especially architectural characteristics and furnishings that social actors mobilize in the creation of meaningful contexts for interaction. I therefore integrate access analysis with an examination of how built environments encode meanings and nonverbally communicate them to inhabitants and visitors, potentially influencing their actions and interactions. The integrative approach allows determination of probable contexts for various types of social interactions during which social identities could be displayed, negotiated and reified. I conclude by demonstrating the potential of this approach with an analysis of the monumental Ashlar Building from the Late Bronze Age (c. 1650–1100 BC) site of Enkomi, Cyprus.     

Social protest and its policing in the “heart of the European crisis regime”: The case of Blockupy in Frankfurt,Germany

Under the name of ‘Blockupy’ the city of Frankfurt am Main witnessed major social protests between 2012 and 2015 against the European crisis management and its devastating impacts on the livelihoods of people all over Europe. By assuming a Gramscian perspective, with a special focus on struggles over hegemony in the realm of coercion itself, this paper, analyzes the early Blockupy movement from 2012 to 2013, and argues that these protests were able to successfully challenge the neoliberal hegemonic story of EU austerity politics in Germany for two main reasons. First, Blockupy at that time was able to avoid criminalization by practicing a professionalized politics of hegemony that actively sought to intervene in public debates and by establishing a code of conduct shared by all participating groups. Second, Blockupy's geography and its place-based, multi-scalar and networked character were crucial, in that they drew on spatial strategies derived from the traditions and experiences of different social movements. Blockupy was multi-scalar and networked in that it brought together national, local and European movements by networking across scales, and it was placebased in two respects: it used and reignited the urban social movement infrastructure that was in place in Frankfurt after decades of social struggles within and against global city formation; and it strategically used Frankfurt's material and symbolic status as a global city.     

Law,ethnicity and taxes in Ostrogothic Italy: a case for continuity,adaptation and departure

This article considers the relationship between the social status of Goths and Romans in Italy and the legal and administrative regime of the Ostrogothic state. It is argued that the distinctions made between Goths and Romans by the Ostrogothic state were based primarily upon economic conditions and circumstances of land tenure in Italy, rather than upon ‘ethnicity’. It is furthermore argued that the social and economic conditions that produced the status landscape of late fifth‐ and early sixth‐century Italy were not innovations of the Amal rulers at Ravenna, but rather they represent adaptation to the previous imperial administration ongoing since the early fifth century. In examining this topic, the article touches upon issues of the legal difference between Goths and Romans, the manner of accommodating and administrating soldiers in Italy, and the fiscal resources available to the Ostrogothic court.     

‘You just have to be smart’: spatial practices and subjectivity among women in sex work in London,Ontario

Social science research on the relationship between space and sex work, specifically among women in street-based settings, demonstrates the spatialized nature of risk and how different forms of civic and legal governance contribute to their socio-economic marginalization. However, these studies rarely consider the women’s spatial practices and gendered subjectivities beyond the sex trade, which is problematic because sex work is not their singular life activity or the only impetus for their spatial movements through the urban landscape. Using social mapping and interview data from 33 women in sex work in London, Ontario, this article explores how our participants navigate the spaces where they work and live alongside those regarding health care, social services, violence and places they avoid. Findings reveal that the women traverse diverse spaces as they access health services, especially for crisis issues that necessitate travel to hospitals located beyond the inner city. The spaces used to access social services and those they avoid (i.e. to not be emotionally triggered or under police surveillance) overlap significantly, which presents unique challenges for our participants who depend upon these services for their socio-economic survival. The theoretical contributions these data make to the feminist geography literature on gender and space are discussed, particularly with respect to the issues of nomadic subjectivity and the relationality between city spaces and marginalized bodies.     

Geographical notes

An earlier reference to the term ‘social geography’ than those described by Dunbar (Scot. Geog. Mag., 93 (1977) 15–20) has been identified in a MS. by H. Gougeon dated 1873. The broader circumstances of the movement to reform geography teaching and the secondary school curriculum at the beginning of the IIIrd Republic are described as a necessary context for evaluating the Gougeon MS. An English translation of Gougeon's views of ‘social geography’ is provided, and although his outline provides no more than a sketch of the possible content of social geography several of the traditional topics of this sub‐field are readily recognizable.     

Political dynamics in North Africa

North Africa is notable for the remarkable stability of its political systems despite the increasingly hostile social and economic environment in which they operate. In part this results from their current security engagement with Europe but more important, perhaps, is the shared political culture that informs them despite the great differences between them and their failure to fulfill the principles upon which they were, for the most part, founded. This is, in part, typified by the very similar mechanisms they have each developed to ensure political continuity, based either on monarchical succession or dynastic republicanism. It is less clear, however, that they will be able to resist the most recent challenges arising from Islamist social movements, although the new political dispensations that might emerge may not be so very different from their predecessors.