The role of museums of contemporary art in the re‐telling of historical accounts in Lithuania and Latvia

Museums of History and Art provide accounts of the past and the transition of nations into their current situation. They follow a certain line of interpretation of past events which reflect the dominant belief system in a nation. These narratives told in this process leave room for interpretation. Which particular string of the available narratives is followed while neglecting the others, and is influenced by the current self‐understanding of a nation and its political considerations. Latvia and Lithuania, two Baltic Nations, were planning to set up museums of contemporary art in 2009 and in 2011, respectively. Due to the financial crisis at this time, however, both projects have been put on hold. Based on interviews with key personnel and experts, the paper shows how the museums in both countries interpret their Soviet past and align it with the new European master narratives.     

Autistic culture online: virtual communication and cultural expression on the spectrum

In this article, I examine cultural narratives about the lives and places of women with mental illness in the commercial Hollywood film: Girl Interrupted (1999). In contrast to most of the disability studies literature concerned with cultural representation, this article explicitly examines how the spatiality of ‘mad women's’ lives is constructed through film. Drawing on post-structuralist, and feminist perspectives on disability, and on conceptual ideas from the limited social geographic literature concerned with the lives of persons with mental illness, I explore the contradictory cultural narratives about the lives and places of women with mental illness constructed through this film. This approach recognizes that representations of ‘mad women’ and their places in society and space involve contradictory, tension-laden relationships between spectator and cultural product, complex discursive negotiations of meaning, and gendered processes of meaning-making, in some ways affirming mad women's lives and in others perpetuating negative stereotypes about women with mental illness and where they belong.     

Being NGO girls: gender,subjectivities and everyday life in Kolkata

This article discusses the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a cultural and political force in shaping the gendered and classed subjectivities of young women growing up in ‘red-light areas’ in Kolkata, India. It foregrounds the flexible deployment of NGO gender narratives by ‘subjects’ of NGO development to improve their everyday lives. Drawing on debates of NGOization, post-colonial urban Indian femininities and intersectionality, it demonstrates how several young women who grew up as ‘subjects’ of NGO development mobilize, reject and improvise contested NGO-inspired femininities for their everyday gain. At the same time, it illustrates how NGO gender narratives that are useful to some young women in their renegotiation of gender norms are deemed ineffective, if not obstructive, by other young women, particularly those whose lives remain entangled in multiple marginalities.     

What to do with conspiracy theories?: Insights from contemporary Turkey

This article presents ethnographic insights into the everyday lives of people who circulate conspiratorial narratives through an ethnographic study of ultranationalist men in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on the findings of this research, the author suggests that conspiratorial discourses should be examined not solely in terms of their (anti-)truth qualities but as social practices through which masculine subjectivities and socialities are engendered. The author then explores how the circulation of conspiratorial narratives forges agency and political subjectivity for the men involved, while also inducing sociopolitical effects such as vigilantism and paramilitary violence. This article contends that through the circulation of conspiratorial narratives and everyday engagements with vigilantism and extralegal violence, the men reconfigure sovereignty and the way that the state operates in contemporary Turkey. The findings of this research suggest that the focus should be moved away from the epistemological shortcomings of conspiratorial narratives or strategies to debunk them – such as fact-checking – which presume that exposure of ‘the truth’ would lead to the dissolution of ‘untruthful’ conspiracies. Rather, the author suggests that researchers attend to the particular forms conspiracies take in concrete situations, how they mould political subjectivities and social groups and reconfigure the ways that the state operates alongside the law in other similar settings.     

MAJORITY AND MINORITY NATIONALISM IN THE DANISH POST‐WELFARE STATE

The future of the nation and the Danish welfare state is one of the most important political issues today. The transition in neoliberal governance from welfare state to security state, the ongoing securitization of global and European mobility, the restructuring of public services and the re‐scaling of political and economic power has made the debate around the welfare state central. In this article I take an approach to the welfare nation state that is based on the practices and narratives of everyday life. The argument is that narrative practices in everyday life constitute a central sphere inviting studies of the struggle over the welfare community and meaning. The empirical material draws on two recent research projects that include narratives and perspectives from minority and majority population in Denmark. By analysing different perspectives on the nation the article intends to open up for both shared narratives on the welfare state but also differences in the ongoing struggle over the right to the nation.     

Discourses of nation among migrants from Northern Ireland: Irishness,Britishness and the spaces in‐between

Narratives of nation and identity are highly contested in Northern Ireland, with allegiance usually given to an Irish nation or a British nation, or located somewhere along a continuum between the two. The negotiation of one's identity along this continuum can become particularly complex once one migrates outside Northern Ireland. Adopting a sense of belonging to or exclusion from an Irish diasporic community is part of this process of negotiation. This paper explores these negotiations of identity among both Catholic and Protestant migrants from Northern Ireland to England. It utilises an oral history archive of interviews with individuals who migrated in the latter half of the 20th century, and focuses on narratives of nation and identity among these migrants. Drawing on the notion of England as a diaspora space, in order to make sense of these narratives, the intersections between diasporic Irishness and different British identities are untangled in an attempt to draw out the spaces ‘in‐between’ two, often polarised, narratives of nation.     

‘It can be good there too’: home and continuity in refugee children's narratives of settlement

Drawing on refugee children's narratives about their experiences of settlement after prolonged stays in asylum centres, this article explores how the process of home-making is experienced in the everyday lives of children (7–12 year olds) settling with their parents in Norway. This article examines the importance of home as a material and relational space where children's expectations of an ideal home and existing standards together influence the process of home-making. Settlement is found to be a turning point in the lives of refugee families; it is a way of making oneself at home, sustaining continuity in children's world of movement, as well as linking space and time in their lives.     

Wars in refuge: Locating Syrians’ intimate knowledges of violence across time and space

This article examines the intimate entanglements of war and refuge. Situated within feminist political geography, I trace the ways in which war is at play in refugees' journeys for safety. Drawing on ethnographic research with Syrian refugees living in Denmark, my research shows the intimate contours of war in ways that disrupt conventional boundaries and definitions of war in two critical ways. First, I show how the war in Syria reverberates in Syrians' lives in refuge. Second, I unpack how Denmark -- a country that is purported to be a place of peace and protection from war -- is experienced by Syrians as a place of war. Taken together these findings call attention to how refugees themselves draw on and articulate geographical imaginations and knowledges of war, violence, and safety as they try to make new lives as refugees. I argue that the existence of war in refuge necessitates rethinking a broader set of questions about war; including where war is, what counts as war, and who decides. In doing so, this article contributes to feminist political geographers' and postcolonial scholars’ efforts to unsettle and decolonize conventional understandings of war.     

Women anti-mining activists’ narratives of everyday resistance in the Andes: staying put and carrying on in Peru and Ecuador

This article explores the ways in which activism and resistance are incorporated into the everyday lives and practices of rural women in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Andes, theorising the nature of women’s everyday resistance in long running social conflicts. Drawing on research with women anti-mining activists in Peru and Ecuador, the article emphasises that their resistance is rarely concerned with large-scale protests, transnational activism, and the spectacular, but rather depends on daily resistance and resilience in, often fractured, local communities. I explore how rural women make extraordinary circumstances, including facing lawsuits and accusations of terrorism, part of their everyday lives, and how they articulate their resistance and situate it in place through narratives of staying put and carrying on, drawing on emblematic notions of rural livelihoods to challenge large-scale mining developments in their communities.     

A New Woman and Her Warlord: Li Dequan,Feng Yuxiang,and the Politics of Intimacy in Twentieth-Century China

This article proposes a new way of viewing Republican-era warlords. Through an examination of the life of Li Dequan, the second wife of warlord Feng Yuxiang, it displaces Feng from his typical military and political context, scrutinizing instead the ways that Feng and Li interwove the private intimacies of love, marriage, and family life into their public and political lives. In the Republic, Feng and Li, like many prominent figures of the time, shared elements of their private lives with journalists and, through them, a broader reading public, posing for photographs with their children on their way to school and inviting reporters to family events. Feng and Li utilized this newfound intimacy between public and political leaders to cultivate public sympathy and support. By the early PRC, Li—following Feng’s sudden 1948 death—was named the first Minister of Health of the People’s Republic of China and her roles as wife and romantic object fell away. Instead, she focused on mothering the nation. By the late twentieth century, emphasis on the Li and Feng romance reappeared in writings about the couple, and while these narratives drew on the Republican-era stories, it was made to seem that Li’s feminism rather than Feng’s modernity had facilitated their true love. Though the warlords have often been seen as destructive, exploring Feng’s and Li’s lives demonstrates that factional militarists and their families contributed to a new political culture grounded in a gendered national narrative that intertwined family and nation.     

A political geography of walking in Jordan: Movement and politics

The past 10-15 years has seen the growth of walking groups taking walkers from Amman to rural parts of Jordan at weekends and the development of the Jordan Trail. Through the narration and analysis of everyday accounts of walking, this paper explores political geographies of identity, movement, and territory in Jordan. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I suggest that at the heart of a growth of walking for leisure in Jordan are important political questions. How is walking conditioned by situated cultural politics? How can walking unearth intimate and embodied accounts of territory in Jordan? I build upon three developments in political geography to do this. First, research on political geography and walking; second research on everyday political geographies of the Middle East; third, critical and feminist work on territory. Literature on political geography and walking is developed by centring Jordanian walkers and the (post)colonial context of Jordan to explore what walking means under different political conditions and for individual bodies. In doing so I contribute to work on identity and nationalism in Jordan and the importance of the everyday to explore political geographies of the Middle East. I develop critical and feminist work on territory by arguing that walking bodies make and contest territory and in doing so calling for greater synergies between cultural and political geography. These arguments are made in two empirical sections. The first explores how different people talk about walking, the language for walking, and assumptions about walking bodies. The second explores how walking connects different bodies to territory, and creates territorial nationalist narratives, but also how walking can highlight indigenous and embodied relations with territory. This paper concludes that walking is political because it shapes and is shaped by situated political geographies and because it enables embodied and intimate accounts of territory to emerge.     

Two bullocks,a ladder and a lamp: electoral symbols in Nehruvian India

There is a substantial body of literature on nation‐building that, from a variety of theoretical approaches, examines the role of symbolic constructs in the process of construction and consolidation of new nation‐states. Among these works, the dramatic and symbolic aspects of election and their function in the nation‐building project have been investigated by political scientists and anthropologists alike. However, analysis of electoral emblems as constitutive elements in the nation‐building process has been largely missing from most studies of nation‐building and official nationalism. A case study of postindependence India suggests how national belonging was also made to hinge upon on competent democratic participation of the masses in the political life of the country. Central to this process of identity work was the establishment of an independent Election Commission and of strict rules for the design, selection and allotment of election emblems. Conventional accounts have argued that these procedures were introduced primarily for the benefit of the uneducated masses who were suddenly invited to participate in India's democratic process. I argue against this simplistic interpretation. Far from being only tools for the simplification of electoral processes, India's election symbols were one of India's institutional mechanisms designed to nurture the development of a correct democratic conduct and therefore ultimately contributing to the Nehruvian national project.     

Erotics,love and violence: European women's travels in the northeast of Brazil

In this article I analyze the cross-border sexual and affective relationships women from diverse European countries form with local men in two coastal touristic villages of the state of Ceará, in the northeast of Brazil. Drawing on ethnographic research I consider how, in the frame of ambiguous sexual, economic, and affective exchanges, violence intertwines with erotics and with notions of love. I take the women's narratives as the central reference. My main argument is that the delight provoked by the transformation of their erotic subjectivities and the idea of rehearsing new forms of heterosexual relatedness, which involve what they consider unusual forms of love, feed the ambiguities pervading their relationships with local men, making these women unaware of the economic aspects involved in their relationships and of occasional hostility and subalternization to which they are subjected. Only in the frame of the acute increase in the tensions provoked by the change in these women's status from tourists to foreign residents, they label their partner's economic demands as exploitative and their actions as violence.     

Using cultural trauma: Gandhi's assassination,partition and secular nationalism in post‐independence India

Nationalism theorists have noted the link between traumatic events and national identity, and cultural trauma theory presents a framework for understanding how these events become trauma narratives. I argue for greater consideration of how these narratives are strategically linked to ideological frames of national identity. A case study of post‐Independence India considering the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the Partition of India and Pakistan demonstrates how two very different events were promoted as cultural traumas by various carrier groups in order to promote a secular vision of the Indian nation. Adapting Armstrong and Crage (2006), I suggest that the success of these trauma narratives depend on several criteria: the ease of narrating the event, how it is linked to underlying cultural meanings/frames and how the event interacts with historical contingencies.     

Understanding the spatialities of sexual assault against Indian women in India

Both domestic violence (DV) and sexual assault against women (SAAW) in public spaces continue to be significant problems facing Indian society. Moreover, the link between DV and SAAW is also commonly misconstrued. Adding to this confusion is the way in which forms of violence against women (VAW) – battering, rape, molestation and sexual abuse – lacks spatial and contextual analysis. There was nationwide outrage over the Nirbhaya incident of 16 December 2012, which escalated the issue of VAW to the centre stage of political debates. Indeed, the Nirbhaya incident has intensified the need for understanding the spatialities of SAAW in India and propelled the Government of India to pass the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, 2013. Using a questionnaire survey supplemented by open-ended interviews, the research aims to understand how social and patriarchal norms allow SAAW to persist. The research narratives reveal that the contours of DV, leading to sexual exploitation of women, often spill over to the public spaces, thereby restricting women's mobility and creating fear of its (re)occurrence. Finally, I urge for reforms to tackle VAW while using Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 as an asset for reform.     

A place to transform: creating caring spaces by challenging normativity and identity

Like all spaces, concrete caring places both shape and are shaped by understandings and constructions of normativity and identity. The traditional understanding of care for older people, imagining clearly demarcated dyadic roles, is firmly embedded in heterosexual logics of relationships within families, the own (family) home and institutional support. Social and residential places for older people thus both assume particular gender and sexual identities and contribute to a (re)production of the very normativity. But how can this interlinkage between the construction of caring spaces and the normativity of identities be understood and, possibly, challenged? In this article we discuss the transformative potential of the social (and partly residential) space of La Fundación 26 de Diciembre, in Madrid, Spain, which opened up to specifically support older LGBT people. Drawing on an in-depth case study we explore a space that allows visibility of different forms of living and caring practices of people with different genders, sexual preferences, origins, classes or political backgrounds. Through the daily life narratives of the people who work, volunteer or simply use the centre we discuss the potential of challenging the restricted notions, assumptions and constructions through which particular places gain both social and political meaning. The article highlights the transformative power of the active and collective making of caring spaces through which narratives of care, collective sexual and gender recognition and practices of caring relationships can replace both traditional/informal forms of living together and institutional spaces that provide professional care.     

Epistemic Ignorance and the Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966: Righting the Wrongs of the Past and the Role of Faith Community

ABSTRACT

This study demonstrates how ignorance works in the Indonesian massacres of 1965–1966. This atrocity, which claimed roughly five hundred thousand lives, is one of the most forgotten human tragedies of the twentieth century. For many years, the massacres were hidden from public view. Ignorance was reinforced by the New Order under the presidency of Suharto. Drawing on contemporary political philosophers’ studies on the epistemology of ignorance, I contend that ignorance, like knowledge, has structures, criteria, and practices. Ignorance, thus, is not merely a “lack of knowledge” or a state of not knowing, but epistemic and political. By appropriating the epistemology of ignorance, I seek to show how the Indonesian people remember the historical wrongs and how Christian theology provides resources for right remembrance. To confront the epistemic ignorance of the Indonesian mass killings, I argue that the churches must assert their identity as the community of memory and lament.     

The stories rocks can tell: Marie Stopes' evolutionary narratives of plant sex in New Brunswick's Fern Ledges

This article discusses British pioneer in birth control and palaeobotanist Marie Stopes' visit to Saint John New Brunswick's ‘Fern Ledges’ as an important historical episode for feminist geography. By considering the relationship between Stopes' inquiries into plant sex and human sex, this article explores feminist and queer studies' constructions of ‘natural’ bodies alongside environmental constructions of ‘natural’ environments. Stopes' work is useful in showing how early twentieth century plant-breeding and human sexual politics intersected through understanding sex as a perfectible technique for producing better bodies across plant, animal and human boundaries. This argument is developed along three significant sites that show how dynamic relationships between bodies and places are mutually constituted. The first site focuses on early twentieth century evolutionary thought which made it possible to conceive of linkages between plants and humans in their sexual lives. The second site is Stopes' experience of place in the ‘Fern Ledges’ through a palaeobotanical investigation of plants, which were read ‘backwards’ through human social categories of kinship, family, race and nation. The final site is an examination of Stopes' popular sex manuals as ecological texts that give specific attention to plant agency in shaping narratives of human sexual politics.     

International solidarity and ethnic boundaries: using the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to strengthen ethno‐national claims in Northern Ireland

While scholars have described vertical nation‐building narratives that genealogically anchor a specific group to a specific territory (Smith 1981; Eriksen 2002), I argue that, in addition to vertical strategies, expressions of international solidarity constitute horizontal nation‐building strategies. Expressions of international solidarity can be used to maintain local ethnic boundaries and reinforce local divisions. By adopting an ally, expressions of international solidarity also designate an adversary, making the boundary between the two a possible incentive for solidarity. In Northern Ireland, some Unionist and Nationalist political entrepreneurs rely on expressions of international solidarity with Israelis or Palestinians, respectively, to make adversarial ethno‐national claims to the nation‐state. This study examines flags, graffiti, murals and political speech on display in Northern Ireland that advocate for either Israelis or Palestinians. Through the concept of ‘borrowed legitimacy’, I acknowledge the strategic use of the ethnic boundary in expressions of international solidarity.     

Micro Aggressions and Connections in the Context of National Multiculturalism: Everyday Geographies of Racialisation and Resistance in Contemporary Scotland

This paper is organised around geographies of encounter, power and living together. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews and focus groups in the West and North of Glasgow, I explore the micro connections and aggressions shaping everyday encounters for some (ethnic and cultural) minorities, contributing to debates on the potentials and challenges of multicultural living. The research contributes to this work by offering a detailed embodied/felt account of belonging and racism in contemporary Glasgow, challenging dominant narratives that construct Scottishness as having “no problem with racism”. As worrying shifts around immigration and multiculturalism continue on a broader political level, including in Scotland, I use the conceptual frame of micro connection, to detail how people actively resist being racialised and othered, and attempt to transform public spaces in Glasgow by “quietly” carving out and inhabiting alternative spaces of belonging.