‘Fundermediaries’ in Nairobi,Kenya: Development Partnerships in the Aid Chain

By representing the voice of communities, community-based organizations (CBOs) are increasingly joining development partnerships. This article explores the inherently contradictory relationship between ‘voice raising’ and the politics of listening. While academia has mostly focused on the inclusion of CBOs, few studies have approached this subject from the perspective of the listening practices of ‘fundermediaries’ (a portmanteau term combining ‘funder’ and ‘intermediary’). This ethnographic research on a CBO led by male sex workers in Nairobi, Kenya, illustrates that the listening ability of fundermediaries hinges on their position in the aid chain, and specifically on the dynamics of their own accountability. The analysis distinguishes between two partnership types. The first uses a pragmatic approach, which ultimately limits the channels for CBOs to be included and heard, resulting in them having to ‘make noise’ to ensure they are heard. The second creates more possibilities to listen, engages in constructive dialogues with partner CBOs, and includes the ideas and expertise of CBOs in development strategies; hence, CBOs feel heard and are positive about these partnerships. Improved listening practices facilitate opportunities to reconfigure the position of the different actors in development partnerships and can benefit both the positions of CBOs in the aid chain and the programmatic outcomes of fundermediaries.     

Gaming the System: Tactical Workarounds and the Production of Antagonistic Subjectivities among Migrant Platform Workers in Italy

Our article explores how migrant food delivery couriers work around platform algorithmic control to argue that gaming the system is a form of everyday resistance. Drawing on data collected in Turin, Italy, between August 2020 and June 2021, we examine how, on the one hand, through gamification, food delivery platforms construct the couriers as entrepreneurial and productive subjects; on the other hand, we show that the disarticulation and repurposing of these management mechanisms both address survival needs and signal a still fledgling, but potentially vibrant, space of labour activism. By conceptualising gamification as another weapon in capital's arsenal to control labour, we acknowledge the entanglement of workers’ agency and subjectivity. We thus bring a two-fold contribution to radical geography: we link gamification to the “production of subjectivity”, drawing on the Italian Operaista intellectual tradition; and we posit the subversive and generative potential of migrant couriers’ everyday geographies.     

Unmasking the Essential Realities of COVID-19: The Pasifika Community in the Salt Lake Valley

Pacific Islanders in diaspora are disproportionately contracting COVID-19, experience hospitalization and develop complications. In Utah, Pacific Islanders have the highest contraction rate in the state. Pacific Islanders constitute only 2% of the state's population, but represent 4% of the those infected with COVID-19, begging the question how we might explain the high rates of contraction? As community engaged scholars and practitioners, we offer discussion, insight, and commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic affecting Pacific Islanders in Utah. Grounding this discussion is a history of the Pacific Islander community as an essential workforce that dates back to the 1850s, before statehood. We argue that historical discrimination against these early Pacific Islanders shaped the way this group is racialized as essential laborers today. The authors offer this assertion along with practices and protocols that honour cultural norms of socialization, which we see is the pathway to provide safe measures that are relevant to the Utah Pasifika community.     

Picking up The Pieces: Reconstructing Lithic Production Strategies at a Late Holocene Obsidian Quarry in Southern Kenya

Use of particular lithic quarries by different cultural groups is a prominent feature of the Pastoral Neolithic period in southern Kenya (ca. 3200–1400 b.p.), when lifeways based on herding domesticated livestock spread through eastern Africa. Here, I present lithic attributes from the recently excavated Elmenteitan Obsidian Quarry assemblage to examine the site’s role in an obsidian distribution network spanning southwestern Kenya. Evidence from the quarry reflects intensive preparation of blade cores and blade reduction. Changes in platform size, flake scar orientation, curvature, and cortical rates through the reduction sequence permit a preliminary reconstruction of Elmenteitan core production strategies that can serve as a basis for regional comparative studies. Uniformity in blade core design and reduction strategy suggests highly organized use of the quarry and supports its role as a production center for regional exchange. Results inform regional debates and contribute to a growing literature on the potential of quarry archaeology.     

Confronting the settler legacy: Indigenisation and transformation in South Africa and Zimbabwe

This article examines attempts to negotiate a perceived residual dominance of settler populations in South Africa and Zimbabwe by means of developmental and cultural policies deemed necessary to restore sovereignty to Africans. Indigenisation has become a preferred strategy for reconstructing post-colonial states in Africa: indigenisation of the economy as part of a Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe and Black Economic Empowerment in the socio-cultural context of Ubuntu in South Africa. These are issues arising from the regional legacy of contested and uneven transitions to majority rule. Identifying how governments frame the ‘settler problem’, and politicise space in doing so, is crucial for understanding post-colonial politics. Indigenisation in Zimbabwe allows the government to maintain a network of patronage and official rhetoric is highly divisive and exclusivist although couched in terms of reclaiming African values and sovereignty. Revival of Ubuntu as a cultural value system in South Africa facilitates a more positive approach to indigenisation, although Black Economic Empowerment displays elitist tendencies and cultural transformation remains controversial and elusive. The perceived need to anchor policy in socially acceptable (i.e., ostensibly indigenous/traditional) contexts has become a prominent feature of post-colonial politics and is indicative of an indigenous turn in Southern African politics.     

Talk Back: Sex Workers in the Maritimes

Gayle MacDonald (a sociologist) and Leslie-Ann Jeffrey (associateprofessor of history and politics) interviewed sixty sex workersin three cities in the Maritimes region of Canada: Halifax,Saint John, and Moncton, as well as some police, health, andcommunity workers and politicians. This book presents in-depthextracts of those interviews, with a commentary drawing on criticalpolitical analysis. It is not an oral history book per se. Butit skillfully blends these oral sources with a thorough critiqueof a range of good sex work literature. In common with mostother sex work oral history, the authors take an explicit andacknowledged stance that draws on the insights of sex radicalismand pro-rights feminism,     

对新疆建设兵团农牧团场职工代表大会的思考

职工代表大会是国有企业实行民主管理的基本形式,是职工行使民主管理权力的机构。新疆建设兵团作为＂党政军企＂合一的特殊组织,既具有企业性质,又具有政府性质,在这个大背景下,其职工代表大会必然具有特殊职能。文章立足团场这一体现兵团性质、履行兵团职能的基层组织,对其职工代表大会的组织保障、选举功能以及与人民代表大会职权的比较等方面作了梳理,指出了加强兵团团场职工代表大会权力的必要性。     

Contentious Realities: Politics of Creating an Image Archive with the Negev Bedouin in Southern Israel

This paper discusses the politics of creating an image archive amidst local Bedouin historicity in Southern Israel. To do so, it summarizes an archival initiative conducted during my fieldwork in Rāha?, Israel between 2011 and 2013, which broadly examined the presence and values of images in their society. I suggest that members compete over historical resources in attempts to augment limited cultural capital in the Negev, making efforts to collect and exhibit ‘shared’ histories contentious. This is particularly the case when local societies consider archival images rare artefacts and thus objects to be owned and protected. This paper concludes that control over archives and image objects, and the past, present, and future ideals to which they are used, is far from uniform amongst peripheral peoples in the Middle East. Visual evidence and the histories and presents it serves are indelibly localized within the prevailing status negotiations and current spatial divisions between Bedouin members in the Negev.     

The Democratization Process and Popular Participation in Africa: Emerging Realities and the Challenges Ahead

Many observers have judged the recent wave of democratization in Africa as an unstoppable process and have overemphasized the role of external factors in inducing this change. This article argues that the quality of change has been fragile and defective in many respects, and draws attention to the susceptibility of the process of democratic transition to reversals. It goes on to underscore the importance of internal forces in bringing about change and in ensuring the sustainability of democracy in Africa. The tasks that lie ahead for civil society in Africa and the role of the international community and political conditionality of aid in this context are then debated.     

Confronting Political Religion with Divine Religion: Christian Strategies of Re-Evangelization in the 1930s

Abstract

Western Christianity is currently engaged in a debate on religious pluralism, postmodernity and re-evangelization. This paper argues that the contours of this debate were already visible between the two world wars when Nazism (the ‘new Mohammedism’ as some Christian observers termed it) tried to take over the place Christianity was vacating. The defeat of this ‘political religion’ does not mean the victory of Christianity.     

京西村落里的花会--庄户、千军、台古幡会

对于北京民间花会的研究,总的来说是集中在对以碧霞元君信仰为背景的妙峰山香会的研究上,而其中又以北京城的香会组织与活动为研究重点。民国时期的北京香会的研究主要有：1925年顾颉刚、孙伏园等5位学者对妙峰山庙会的实地考察,在《京报副刊》先后6期发表“妙峰山进香专号”,后于1928年9月收录另外几篇相关文章,以《妙峰山》为名结集出版。同年,李景汉根据自己的亲自考察,在《社会学杂志》上发表《妙峰山“朝顶进香”的调查》一文。1929年,顾颉刚和魏建功、白涤洲等人一起再次对妙峰山进香活动进行田野调查,后以调查专号形式在《民俗》第六九、七十合刊上发表文章9篇、附录3篇和田野照片近40幅。此外还有与妙峰山香会有关的专著两部,一是奉宽的《妙峰山琐记》,