Chinese environmental activism and the environmental politics of rumors

Rumors are an important yet poorly understood dynamic in environmental politics, particularly regarding their role in environmental activism. Drawing on theories of rumors, environmental information governance, and environmental activism, we analyzed the eco-politics of rumors in a Chinese village that experienced rumor-fueled protests against the construction and operation of a limestone quarry. We make three arguments regarding the condition, control, and content of rumors. First, poor environmental information governance, driven by a development-first and prejudice-rich official narrative and the strategic behaviors of blame and accountability avoidance, provides an important condition for rumor formulation and circulation. Second, the generation and circulation of rumors can be understood as a collective sense-making process driven by the informal communication between external and internal sources of information. The ephemeral nature of communication and group sanctions on government supporters make it difficult for authorities to control rumors. Third, by conceptualizing rumors as information warfare against official narratives, we show that rumors can foster a sense of collective urgency, reframe a land-right protest into an environmental protest that is politically more likely to succeed, and undermine public trust in local authorities. The findings suggest that rumors are an important part of environmental politics in China because of their role in environmental activism.     

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.     

Relics of Empire Underground: The Making of Dark Heritage in Contemporary Japan

This paper examines civil activities to protect and conserve the underground war-related sites in contemporary Japan. Conservation movements rooted in local communities and centred on the Japanese Network to Protect War-Related Sites are making efforts to transform the dark heritage of war-related sites into cultural property in an attempt to integrate diverse wartime experiences. In delving into the heritage-making practices, I introduce local movements in Okinawa and Okayama. Okinawa hosts the first underground war-related site to become a cultural property, the Haebaru Army Hospital Bunkers, while Okayama struggles to create another one by making the Kamejima Mountain Underground Plant a dark heritage site. I argue that these conservation movements are challenging the homogenising national war memory by attaching ethnically diversified vernacular memories to the underground sites. In doing so, these underground war-related sites have become public spaces where new forms of social engagement are negotiated and contested.     

Human rights politics and scaled performances of memory: conflicts among the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina

This paper builds on the geographies of commemoration literature extending the scope of inquiry to consider the scaled performances through which the politics of memory unfold. I focus on an analysis of conflicts over the creation of memorial landscapes that emerge from the intricate ways in which representations of the past and the everyday politics of social movements intersect. The paper analyses the competing politics of memory of two groups of Madres de Plaza de Mayo (mothers of people who ‘disappeared’ during Argentina's Dirty War). Their strategies underscore geographic dimensions of the politics of memory as the Madres clash over how to appropriately place memory in the landscape. While one group emphasizes making visible the events of the past to promote transmission of memory and to remember those who disappeared, the other group focuses on re‐interpreting symbols about the past in an attempt to encourage future activism. Such conflicting strategies manifest spatially in a variety of ways, ranging from the creation of physical markers in the built environment to the performance of collective rituals that centre on activists' bodies as sites for either commemoration of the past or future activism. The Madres' conflicts highlight how different spatialities contribute to validate or condemn competing politics of commemoration.     

Experimental Publics: Activist Culture and Political Intelligibility of Climate Change Action in the Hunter Valley,Southeast Australia

The ethnographic study of Western environmental activism opens up the prospect of studying subjectivities formed in opposition to dominant Western ideas and values, and yet encapsulated within Western societies and democratic polities. One of the directions in which it points the anthropologist, which is pursued in this article, is towards the study of the political lifeworlds of activists, their self‐identity as citizens and their embeddedness in the wider society. Environmental politics can be an emergent activity in citizens' lives, as expressed in John Dewey's concept of ‘the public’ as citizens who organise themselves to address the adverse consequences of situations that they experience in common (Dewey 1991[1927]). This paper focuses on a middle ground of social action between habitual daily practice, and the domain of institutional politics: groups of people in small voluntary organisations in the heavily coal‐mined Hunter Valley, Southeast Australia, who are moved to collective action to address the threatening aspects of anthropogenic climate change. Action group members variously articulate their reflexive understandings of the structural contradictions of environmentalism in corporate capitalist societies where values of consumerism and processes of individualization corrode collective concerns of citizenship‐based politics. These understandings inform activists' personal motivations, values and ideals for a ‘climate movement’, diverse modes of political action and striving for wider political intelligibility.     

Schools of resistance – a brief history of student activism in Kashmir

This article traces the unique stance and nature of student politics in Kashmir. Drawing from an historical overview, it will argue that student activism in Kashmir is largely different from activism in India as it does not restrict itself to advocacy of student issues. Rather, it places itself squarely in the people’s struggle for self-determination and counter-colonial sentiment in the Kashmir Valley. Setting out from the pre-colonial era, the article first traces the evolution of Muslim political consciousness and the key role of education in this process. These changes will be drawn against the historical evolution of the Kashmir conflict to highlight the context in which the specificities of student activism in the Valley can be drawn out. The second section, which forms the bulk of the article, traces the history and nature of activism in Kashmir, drawing on major historical events, interviews with erstwhile and contemporary student leaders, and local memoirs. In doing so, the article aims to present the conjoining of student politics and a larger politics of self-determination in Kashmir post-independence, which is an important aspect of the emergence of Muslim identity in conflict with the occupying state.     

Mediating anti-political peace in Abidjan: Radio,place and power

After a decade of conflict (1999–2011), peace-building in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, focused on the local as a primary site of reconciliation. In addition to being local, peace was anti-political, seeking to separate place from politics as autonomous realms of public life. Through the example of local radio peace programmes, this article offers a critical, ethnographic account of anti-political peace as a spatial process. It links local peace and its justifications to the operations of governmental power, emphasising continuities of anti-political mediation and political domination. Such a historicised perspective challenges the framing of anti-political peace as the opposite of politics-as-conflict: they have long been two sides of the same coin in Abidjan and, as a binary “choice,” prevent the search for more democratic alternatives. Simultaneously, I argue that anti-political peace it is best approached as a field of contest. An ethnographic approach acknowledges the widespread rejection of politics in the Ivoirian metropolis, while resisting the collapse of institutional and everyday perspectives into a self-reinforcing consensus. I show that radio producers and Abidjanais residents could not quite pin down the meaning of politics, as that which ought to be shunned. Rather than bypass these hesitations through normative or ontological reasoning, I suggest (following others) that we might treat politics' irreducible polysemy as a source of continued struggle.     

Towards a political geography of hotels: Southern Rhodesia, 1958–1962

This article sets out the case for taking account of hotels in political geography. It argues that hotels, as key spaces of welcome, association, and entertainment between public and private, are important political sites. They provide space for the performance of political ideologies and identities, where political campaigns can be made visible, where political relations can be illuminated and translated for international audiences, and where the ‘little things’ (Thrift, 2000, Thrift, 2004) that construct political geographies can be examined. Drawing on theoretical discussions of hospitality, as well as work in political geography, it explores the politics of multi-racial hospitality in the hotels of Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, between 1958 and 1962 in order to understand late colonial politics in Southern Africa. Considering three individual hotels, the paper elaborates their role as keys spaces in the landscape of exclusive ‘European’ sociability; as crucial sites in the enactment of and resistance to the colour bar; and as vantage points on Southern Rhodesian racial politics for international guests. The papers shows that far from being peripheral to the ‘real’ politics of diplomacy and government, hotels and the hospitable practises within them can be seen as crucial elements in the construction of local, national and international politics.     

Vernacular museum: communal bonding and ritual memory transfer among displaced communities

Eclectically curated and largely ignored by the mainstream museum sector, vernacular museums sit at the interstices between the nostalgic and the future-oriented, the private and the public, the personal and the communal. Eluding the danger of becoming trivialised or commercialised, they serve as powerful conduits of memory, which strengthen communal bonds in the face of the ‘flattening’ effects of globalisation. The museum this paper deals with, a vernacular museum in Vanjärvi in southern Finland, differs from the dominant type of the house museum, which celebrates masculinity and social elites. Rather, it aligns itself with the small amateur museums of everyday life called by Angela Jannelli Wild Museums (2012), by analogy with Lévi-Strauss’ concept of ‘pensée sauvage’. The paper argues that, despite the present-day flurry of technologies of remembering and lavishly funded memory institutions, there is no doubt that the seemingly ‘ephemeral’ institutions such as the vernacular museum, dependent so much on performance, oral storytelling, living bodies and intimate interaction, nevertheless play an important role in maintaining and invigorating memory communities.     

Cultural Imperialism and Heritage Politics in the Event of Armed Conflict: Prospects for an ‘Activist Archaeology’

The production of archaeological knowledge is embedded in a long-standing tradition of colonial encounters. This paper asks how political-economic interests impinge on archaeological work, specifically in the event of armed conflict. To answer this question I discuss commodification of cultural heritage and analyze it as a form of structural violence. I argue that the attitude that allows treatment of archaeological artifacts as saleable items with international owners is part of a strategy of global cultural imperialism. Exemplified by the case of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, this paper shows how the clash of global ‘heritage’ politics with local practices of memorializing the past results in a tension: because capitalist governments consider the locales whose glorious pasts are studied by archaeologists to be culturally inferior, the nexus between (trans-)national actors and local communities is an asymmetrical one. In order to overcome the hegemonic role of archaeology within these dynamics, I propose an ‘activist archaeology’ that enables a political activism grounded in recursivity.     

Paying for water and the geography of commodities

Across the globe there is an ongoing debate about whether water ought to be treated as a commodity. This paper argues that recent geographical work on commodities can usefully inform these debates amongst environmental and development policymakers. First, the paper uses a case study from Cameroon to show that the commodification of public water supplies is not new, permanent or inevitable. Second, it uses the case study and insights from the psychoanalytic literature to examine the relationship between the willingness-to-pay for water and knowledge amongst water users about the costs of production. It is argued that the commodity fetish remains a useful concept, but that it requires reinterpretation. It concludes that demystifying the commodity includes not only unveiling the politics of production but also understanding the politics of the practice of exchange by considering the socio-synthetic effects of treating things as commodities.     

Food,conviviality and the work of mourning. The asado scandal at Argentina’s ex-ESMA

This article addresses a controversial debate raised by an asado-party, which was celebrated by the end of 2012 at the former Navy Mechanics School (ESMA), the main clandestine detention centre where almost 5,000 people were held captive and tortured during Argentina’s last dictatorship (1976-1983). In 2004, the former school was transformed into a “space of memory”. Drawing upon the asado episode, I consider which kind of practices of re-occupation former landscapes of death may allow.

I first provide an overview of the interventions that took place at ESMA within the Kirchnerist period (2003-2015). Second, I bring into play some cultural productions of the new generations, as well as performances and philosophical ruminations regarding the asado as a main theme in the local culture. Finally, I put these materials in the larger context of memory politics to explore how food-reunions – and expanded tables might work as a public pathway for a collective digestion of grief. The question that is ultimately at stake is how to kindle alternative hospitalities and dialogues in landscapes marked by loss. Might the spectrum of activities that took place at the former ESMA during the Kirchnerist years suggest a new conviviality for the aftermath of violence?     

Tourism and Tragedy: The Memorial at Belzec,Poland

In 1942, within in a period of 10 months, 500,000 people were systematically murdered in a specially built death camp at Belzec, Poland. When it had served its purpose the Nazis demolished it, and to hide its existence, grassed the site over, allowing the atrocities performed there to remain virtually hidden from public view for over 60 years. In 2004 an important new Holocaust memorial, covering the whole death camp area, was opened. Visually striking, this conceptual art/architectural artwork affectively elicits strong visitor responses. I explore ways in which the materiality of the reconfigured site makes the invisibility of such horror and collective loss paramount. My interpretation and visual analysis shows how ‘memory work’ can operate through viewer experience. This paper locates Belzec within its historical context and includes a related discussion about Polish–Jewish relationships up to the present. As a significant heritage site, Belzec’s new role in Polish Holocaust tourism is examined.     

LGBT Advocacy and Transnational Funding in Singapore and Malaysia

LGBT advocacy is an emergent site attracting transnational funding from an expanded set of donor types that now include private corporations, national governments, NGOs, intergovernmental organizations and public–private partnerships. This article discusses LGBT advocacy as involving an expanded range of issues that go beyond a traditional focus on HIV/AIDS prevention. The geographical focus is on Singapore and Malaysia, two Southeast Asian countries where homosexuality is officially illegal. Alongside the global politics of LGBT rights, previous critiques about external funding and North/South asymmetries in transnational aid raise questions about its effectiveness for transformative socio‐political change, and its political and theoretical implications. Three case studies are examined: Pink Dot Singapore, and the PT Foundation and Kuala Lumpur activist workshops in Malaysia. The data demonstrate the capacity for transnational support to contribute to grassroots activism and coalitional politics. However, significant observable outcomes are currently limited, partly because most of the grants are modest, and Singapore and Malaysia's high‐ and middle‐income status excludes them from various funding bodies. Furthermore, domestic resistance to transnational funding has emerged, constituting more widespread discourses in which anti‐LGBT sentiment is framed in terms of opposing Western encroachments and the dominance of the global North.     

Indifferent but Mobilized: Rural Politics during the Interwar Period in Eastern and Western Europe

What did peasants discuss at party meetings? Were they mobilized by ethnic politics or indifferent to them altogether? The end of the First World War brought about universal male suffrage in much of Europe, and with it the process of mass politics began. The concept of national indifference is important in understanding interwar politics, because this period is often studied teleologically with attention focused on extremism and nationalism as the primary mobilizing issue

Agrarian movements have been under-researched, and when Agrarians have been studied, it has been through the prism of elite politics. This comparative paper seeks to redress this omission by looking at grassroots rural politics. The interwar countryside was marked by profound political, economic and social transformation but also in terms of what Robert Paxton has described as the ‘triple crisis of the countryside’ – worsening economic conditions, the declining status of the countryside and inadequate political representation. The paper will explore how reform and crisis impacted how agrarian politics functioned at a local level by asymmetrically comparing cases from Romania, Poland and Ireland, with the final case helping to contextualize Eastern Europe within the wider European experience This paper argues that the rural population was mobilized, but primarily in the context of local issues rather than national ethno-political questions. Local party organization was, to paraphrase James C Scott, the site ‘of an exchange of small arms fire’ in rural class conflict, as questions regarding the control of public space, generational conflict and power within the village mobilized peasants. Thus, I argue that it was the underlying socio-economic issues that mobilized the rural population, not nationalism. The dynamics of these conflicts were shaped by local economic, political and social power dynamics, and by using indifference as a concept, we can look more deeply at interwar politics from a grassroots perspective and develop a more nuanced understanding of local, national and European politics.     

Governmentalities of Urban Crises in Inner‐city Athens,Greece

Through the notion of “conjuncture” this paper explores the interplay of urban crises that have been unfolding in the city of Athens during the past 7 years (2008–2014). By focusing on specific “critical moments” that have significantly influenced the narratives, discourses and subsequent policies concerning “Athens in crisis”, it examines a number of intertwined approaches and tactics that shaped the governmentality of such crisis. These approaches and tactics, that work in tandem, include emergency‐driven policies and politics; politics of fear that occasionally transform into geographies of fear; processes of defining the “public” and “public enemies”; and redefinitions of (il)legalities. Yet, they have repercussions on people, places and politics. In this context, certain issues are deemed critical or urgent while others do not or are even obscured.     

‘Save our NHS’: activism,information-based expertise and the ‘new times’ of the 1980s

This article examines activism in defence of the National Health Service (NHS), which emerges in the 1960s to defend local hospitals from closure. From the mid-1980s, a new form of campaigning developed, which sought to protect the Service nationally. Tracing this campaigning illuminates, first, that small groups played a significant role in negotiating political change, and in contributing to cultural change which, in turn, has become politically powerful. Second, this demonstrates that the 1980s were ‘new times’ in welfare politics, as Thatcher’s changes fostered voluntary interest in information-led expertise, and a new vision of the NHS as a significant, much valued, national institution.     

Unearthing Women's Anti‐Mining Activism in the Andes: Pachamama and the “Mad Old Women”

Women play an important role in social activism challenging the expansion of extractive industries across Latin America. In arguing that this involvement has been largely unrecognised, this paper explores Andean Peruvian and Ecuadorian women's accounts of their activism and the particular gendered narratives that the women deploy in explaining and legitimising this activism. These discussions contribute to understanding the patterning of grassroots activism and making visible the gendered micro‐politics of resistance and struggle around natural resource use, as well as to understanding the gendered and strategic ways in which women contest dominant discourses of development.     

Heritage conservation and advocacy coalitions: the state-society conflict in the case of the Enning Road redevelopment project in Guangzhou

The Enning Road redevelopment project has been controversial in Guangzhou as the site possesses many vernacular buildings that are not officially recognised by the authorities as significant but are nevertheless highly regarded by non-state stakeholders as important entities that embody the unique essence and culture of local neighbourhoods. This paper examines the positive role led by the press media, the New Express, in bringing about changes in the government-sanctioned Enning Road redevelopment project plan through the lens of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). The significance of this paper lies in detailing how the news group has helped shift the project priority from being property-led to conservation-led. Its reports have gained a wide audience in appreciating and recognising the conservation value of non-designated vernacular architecture in inner city areas. Nonetheless, this paper raises question about the sustainability of civil mobilisation in subsequent conservation efforts, due to a general lack of enthusiasm. Neither urban redevelopment strategies nor conservation agenda have been subject to a major overhaul due to the impact of this individual redevelopment project. Therefore, the promise of change is at best a tactical compromise adopted by the municipal authorities to nullify opposing public voices in Guangzhou.     

Geoffrey Holmes and the Public Sphere: Augustan Historiography from Post-Namierite to the Post-Habermasian

This article attributes the relative lack of attention to the 'public sphere' in Geoffrey Holmes's work to the pervasive influence of Lewis Namier and the Namierite conception of political history. Holmes's British Politics can be understood as a product of what might be called the revisionist's dilemma. Because the main thrust of the argument of this work was to challenge the Namierite interpretation of the structure of politics in Anne's reign, Holmes could not fail but to replicate the structures of the original Namierite paradigm. Nevertheless, Holmes's demolition of the Namierite view of Augustan politics also opened up new possibilities for further research; it ultimately widened our understanding of the 'political' and it prepared the ground for the remarkable interdisciplinary dialogue between literary historians, intellectual historians, and political historians. The article concludes with a discussion of how Holmes's successors began to build on his work in ways that can help explain why the Habermasian public sphere paradigm emerged to the foreground of current scholarship in a field where it had been ignored for three decades. Historians are now beginning to build a detailed post-Habermasian understanding of the ways in which the public sphere affected the structures of politics in later Stuart Britain. Work along these lines may well finally help explain the transformation of British politics from an age of Stuart revolutions to the age of Hanoverian oligarchy.