Space,Social Relations,and Contestation: Transformative Peacebuilding and World Social Forum Climate Spaces

The 2013 and 2015 World Social Forums in Tunis, Tunisia hosted thematic “climate spaces” for the first time. This article examines the extent to which these spaces are constitutive of a form of “transformative peacebuilding” aiming to transform social relations and eliminate the structural violence of the world capitalist economy. Both the theoretical and practical activities of civil society at the climate spaces are shown to be transformative but only to the extent that they contest broad processes of trasformismo which transcend differences and obscure the lived realities of governance and resistance. In this sense, civil society groups and movements at the climate spaces are shown to engage with global capitalism to potentially produce new global understanding and action. This generates new understandings of civil society as constitutive of directly resistant modes of social relation that push for radically different visions of climate justice and governance.     

On Language, Culture, and Social Action

This article outlines the theoretical developments experienced in historical studies over the last two decades. As a consequence of the growing critical reconsideration of some of the main theoretical assumptions underlying historical explanation of individuals' meaningful actions, a new theory of society has taken shape among historians during this time. By emphasizing the empirical and analytical distinction between language as a pattern of meanings and language as a means of communication, a significant group of historians has thoroughly recast the conventional notions of society, experience, interests, culture, and identity, and has developed a new concept of social action. Thus, historiographical debate seems to have started to transcend, for the first time, the longstanding and increasingly futile contest or dilemma between objectivism and subjectivism, between materialism and culturalism, between social and intentional explanation, or between social constraints and human agency. The groundwork has now been laid for an alternative to the declining paradigm of social history that does not entail a revisionist return (be it partial or complete) to idealist history but opens a quite different path.     

Frontiers of Individuality: Embodiment and Relationships in Cultural Context

Book reviewed in this article:
Margaret S. Archer, Being Human: The Problem of Agency     

The Role of the Development Industry in Shaping Urban Social Space: a Conceptual Model

Socio‐spatial differentiation or the spatial arrangement of social groups in cities has long been the subject of scholarly attention in urban studies from a variety of perspectives. In many contemporary societies, the development industry plays an important and growing role in socio‐spatial differentiation. This paper presents a conceptual model for the empirical analysis of the role of this industry in shaping urban social space.     

文化遗产 文化自觉 文化建设——追寻中国文化遗产事业的发展历程

文物古迹是过去文化的载体,文化既是不同人们共同体在特定时空中适应环境与社会的结晶,也是人类曾经的生存可能性的记录,因此,文化遗产是发展的智慧资源而非包袱。改革开放以来我们对文物与文化遗产及其价值的认识有一个不断拓展和提高的过程,经历了由古玩、文物到全民性的文化遗产自觉的演变。正确认识和处理不同文化及历史文化遗产,既是作为文明古国的中国发展过程中无法避开的选择,也是全球化、信息化时代古今中外文化大会面时代人类和谐共处、共同繁荣的前提性要求。     

Policy Knowledge, Policy Formulation, and Change: Revisiting a Foundational Question

Understanding the influence of policy knowledge (analysis, evaluation) on policy change represents a long-standing quest in the policy sciences. Despite attempts of Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) scholars, the first to embark systematically on this quest, utilization and policy process literatures still run parallel. Through a critique of ACF and utilization studies, we argue that the inability of policy theory to include how and which information decision makers use is the foundational issue hindering efforts to link process and substance in policy theory. Situating utilization studies in the policy design approach offers an improvement in conceptualizing relationships between policy knowledge, process, and change.     

A Space and Time for a Generation to React: The Gattjirrk Cultural Festival in Milingimbi

This article deals with the annually held Gattjirrk Cultural Festival organised in Milingimbi, a Yolngu community in Northeast Arnhem Land, and has the objective of analysing its socio‐cultural and political meaning. Although this event is considered an amusement (wakal), it nevertheless constitutes an arena to negotiate postcolonial realities in which Yolngu people are forced to live. Focusing on the organisers' overall frame of ‘sharing culture’ and youths' interpretations of hip‐hop dances as ‘performative tactics’, I suggest that the Milingimbi Festival creates a space in which generational perspectives within the community as well as the tension between Yolngu people and the non‐indigenous (balanda) world may be displayed and mediated. While the Festival has been mainly conceived as a space for encountering and ‘sharing culture’ with other groups and people both within the community and with the balanda world, it is also seized as an opportunity by young people to generate new ways to engage with and challenge others. By weaving together elements of Yolngu heritage and pop culture, I argue that fun or burlesque dances (wakal bunngul) are ‘tactics of cultural remix’ that through laughter and irony demand a witnessing: a mutual recognition, engagement, and responsibility to participate and to respond. It is thus in their own ways that these performances produce new connections and relationships bringing together old and young, Yolngu and balanda in an effective although fleeting encounter.     

类士群体与新加坡早期文化空间的初创

论文从早期中国驻新加坡领事左秉隆、黄遵宪对新加坡文教事业的贡献,流寓文人邱菽园主导的文学活动以及卫铸生、丘逢甲、康有为等过境文人的积极参与三个方面,论证了一批华人"类士群体"是19世纪末20世纪初建构新加坡本地文化空间、提高新加坡华人社群文化素养的中坚力量。这个类士群体的形成离不开两任驻新领事官所创办的文学社团的辛勤培育,离不开寓居星洲的文化名人邱菽园的强力推动,也离不开过境文人的积极参与。这三方面的力量各有优势,缺一不可。     

Gender, Public Space and Social Segregation in Cairo: Of Taxi Drivers, Prostitutes and Professional Women

Abstract:  Cairo's cityscape has transformed rapidly as a result of the neoliberal policies that Egypt adopted in the early 1990s. This article examines the spatial negotiations of class in liberalizing Cairo. While much scholarly attention has been devoted to the impact of neoliberal policies on global cities of the South, few studies have adopted an ethnographic focus to examine the everyday negotiations of such transformations. I examine the ways young female upper-middle-class professionals navigate Cairo's public spaces, both the safe spaces of the upscale coffee shops and the open spaces of the streets. Their urban trajectories can be read as the footsteps of the social segregation that has increasingly come to mark Cairo's cityscape. I conclude that the bodies of upper-middle-class women have become a battleground for new class configurations and contestations, literally embodying both power and fragility of Cairo's upper-middle class in Egypt's new liberal age.     

Class in a Glass: Capital,Neoliberalism and Social Space in the Global Wine Industry

Abstract: This paper explores the evolving relationship between class and capital in the neoliberalised global wine industry. Wine is a unique sector that is possessed of intricate and underexplored aspects of class formation. Having investigated the recent restructuring of the industry under neoliberalism the paper goes on to analyse class formations in the production and consumption spheres. In this discussion we note not only the concrete economic and social dynamics of change, in terms of the differing fortunes of consumers, investors, landowners and workers, but also the physical and symbolic expressions of class in and through the countryside, as manifested in changing landscapes, discourses and idylls. In conclusion we analyse relationship between capital, class formation and accumulation across and within different scales in the context of a rapidly globalising sector that is so rooted in place.     

Prehispanic Social and Cultural Changes at Tibes,Puerto Rico

Abstract

we present here the initial results of the Proyecto Arqueológico del Centro Ceremonial de Tibes. The aim of the project is to study changes in the social, political, and economic systems at Tibes, the earliest civic and ceremonial center in the Caribbean. Tibes was founded as a village around A.D. 1, and sometime between A.D. 600 and A.D. 900 experienced major changes that eventually resulted in the development of a center with multiple ball courts and plazas. The ceramic, faunal, and radiometric evidence suggest that multiple factors were operating at different times during the transformation process. While some of these factors are found in other regions of Puerto Rico, others are evidently unique to Tibes. Traditional regional definitions of cultural periods and areas were not adequate units of analysis to study many of the local and short-term social and political processes that occurred.     

After Gentrification: Social Mix,Settler Colonialism,and Cruel Optimism in the Transformation of Neighbourhood Space

Social mix policies have emerged as a prominent mechanism to legitimate neighbourhood redevelopment efforts across the US. Despite integrationist rhetoric, results often disabuse marginalised communities of their claims to the city. This paper employs a hybrid spatio‐temporal analysis at the intersection of political‐economic theories of gentrification and post‐colonial and Black geographies literatures to examine underlying cultural logics and affective experiences animating such processes of neighbourhood transformation, contestation, and succession. Reflecting on 15 years of experience researching Over‐the‐Rhine (OTR), Cincinnati, we contribute a stylised distinction between the foundational, mature, and ongoing legacies of urban settler colonial relations. Our account discloses the power geometries shaping neighbourhood space by illustrating the impact of the discourses, tactics, and strategies employed by pro‐development actors and neighbourhood activists as OTR's socio‐political landscape shifted over time. In conclusion, we engage the thorny questions these dynamics raise surrounding how inner‐city neighbourhoods are theorised and struggled over after gentrification.