Playing with the future: social irrealism and the politics of aesthetics

In this article we wish to explore the political possibilities of video games. Numerous scholars now take seriously the place of popular culture in the remaking of our geographies, but video games still lag behind. For us, this tendency reflects a general response to them as imaginary spaces that are separate from everyday life and ‘real’ politics. It is this disconnect between abstraction and lived experience that we complicate by defining play as an event of what Brian Massumi calls lived abstraction. We wish to short-circuit the barriers that prevent the aesthetic resonating with the political and argue that through their enactment, video games can animate fantastical futures that require the player to make, and reflect upon, profound ethical decisions that can be antagonistic to prevailing political imaginations. We refer to this as social irrealism to demonstrate that reality can be understood through the impossible and the imagined.     

Vernacular memorialization in the military: personal acts of remembrance at RAF Thorpe Abbotts

ABSTRACT

In September 2017, an archaeological excavation at RAF Thorpe Abbotts (also known as Station 139) uncovered 7 identification ‘dog’ tags belonging to airmen of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF). It is the thesis of this article that these were purposefully buried by individuals within the 100th Bomb Group (Heavy) as acts of remembrance. Alongside the dog tags were a number of other artefacts, including coins, bottles, and a canteen cup. These likely formed the material culture of self-developed grieving rituals established by the primary group responsible for the deposition of the dog tags.     

Digitisation,digital interaction and social media: embedded barriers to democratic heritage

Abstract

The democratisation of heritage through digital access is a well-documented aspiration. It has included innovative ways to manage interpretation, express heritage values, and create experiences through the ‘decoding’ of heritage. This decoding of heritage becomes democratised, more polyvocal than didactic exhibitions, and less dependent on experts. However, the decision of what ‘heritage’ is and what is commissioned for digitisation (the encoding) is not necessarily a part of this democratisation. This paper will consider how digitisation reinforces the Authorised Heritage Discourse through the lens of Stephen Lukes’ three (increasingly subtle) dimensions of power: conflict resolution, control of expression and shaping of preferences. All three dimensions have an impact on how public values are represented in heritage contexts, but the introduction of digitisation requires more resources, expertise and training within established professional discourse. Social media may have a positive impact on the first two dimensions, but can reinforce hegemony. Alternatives are subject to epistemic populism. The role of digitisation and social media in the democratisation of heritage needs to be better understood. Questions regarding the nature and process of digital interaction, in terms of whose heritage is accessible, affect the very issues of democratisation digitisation appears to promote.     

European integration and the social science of EU studies: the disciplinary politics of a subfield

This article takes the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome as an opportunity to reflect upon half a century of academic discourse about the EU and its antecedents. In particular, it illuminates the theoretical analysis of European integration that has developed within political science and international studies broadly defined. It asks whether it is appropriate to map, as might be tempting, the intellectual ‘progress’ of the field of study against the empirical evolution of its object (European integration/the EU). The argument to be presented here is that while we can, to some extent, comprehend the evolution of academic thinking about the EU as a reflex to critical shifts in the ‘real world’ of European integration (‘externalist’ drivers), it is also necessary to understand ‘internalist’ drivers of theoretical discourse on European integration/the EU. The article contemplates two such ‘internalist’ components that have shaped and continue to shape the course of EU studies: scholarly contingency (the fact that scholarship does not proceed with free agency, but is bound by various conditions) and disciplinary politics (the idea that the course of academic work is governed by power games and that there are likely significant disagreements about best practice and progress in a field). In terms of EU studies, the thrust of disciplinary politics tends towards an opposition between ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘pluralist versions’ of the political science of EU studies. The final section explores how, in the face of emerging monistic claims about propriety in the field, an effective pluralist political science of the EU might be enhanced.     

Language and politics: Investigations of language and speech by social and cultural anthropologists

Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. vii + 305 pp. including index. $44.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.

Merlan, Francesca and Alan Rumsey. Ku Waru: Language and Segmentary Politics in the Western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; xvii + 387 pp. including appendices, notes, references, and index. $59.50 cloth.     

Trans youth and social media: moving between counterpublics and the wider web

Today’s trans youth grew up with the internet and online LGBTQ resources and spaces are important to these communities. This article focuses on conceptualising the digital cultural strategies that trans and gender questioning youth adopt both as social media users and producers in order to cope and thrive. Drawing on ethnographic data detailing a group of trans youth’s engagements with LGBTQ social media counterpublics and the wider web, and their movement between these spheres, in combination with close readings of online material identified as salient by the participants, this article argues that in the face of rampant transphobia and cis coded online paradigms, trans youth respond both critically and creatively. More specifically, I highlight how they resist prescribed user protocols of mainstream social networking sites as well as employ pragmatic strategies for navigating a binary gendered online world, staking out their own methods and aesthetics for self expression and community formation. Having examined the content and style of social media examples highlighted by the participants, the article contends that trans youth’s consumption and production of types of online and social media is significantly more diverse than research to date has recognised.     

The social life of ruins: sites of memory and the politics of a Zimbabwean periphery

This article explores conflicts over a series of ruins located within Zimbabwe's flagship National Park. The relics have long been regarded as sacred places by local African communities evicted from their vicinity, and have come to be seen as their ethnic heritage. Local intellectuals' promotion of this heritage was an important aspect of a defensive mobilization of cultural difference on the part of a marginalized minority group. I explore both indigenous and colonial ideas about the ruins, the different social movements with which they have been associated and the changing social life they have given the stone relics. Although African and European ideas sometimes came into violent confrontation – as in the context of colonial era evictions – there were also mutual influences in emergent ideas about tribe, heritage and history. The article engages with Pierre Nora's notion of ‘sites of memory’, which has usefully drawn attention to the way in which ideas of the past are rooted and reproduced in representations of particular places. But it criticizes Nora's tendency to romanticize pre-modern ‘memory’, suppress narrative and depoliticize traditional connections with the past. Thus, the article highlights the historicity of traditional means of relating to the past, highlighting the often bitter and divisive politics of traditional ritual, myth, kinship, descent and ‘being first’. It also emphasizes the entanglement of modern and traditional ideas, inadequately captured by Nora's implied opposition between history and memory.     

Aristocratic marriage and the English peerage, 1350–1500: social institution and personal bond

Marriage was obviously an important institution to the late medieval aristocracy. Almost all of the peers between 1350 and 1500 married: all but seven did so at least once, and 144 of the 424 peers (or 34 percent) married two or more times. Since marriages were for political and economic reasons, as much or more than for personal ones, we find that many of them were contracted within the forbidden degrees of kinship and affinity, by dint of an ecclesiastical dispensation. Some dispensations were issued before the marriage, while others — usually carrying some sort of penance — came afterwards. Few proposed marriages were actually repressed or prevented by the Church. But there is also considerable evidence for affection and partnership within a marriage. Husbands who died first usually left considerable personal goods to their widows. They often made them executrixes and spoke of them in terms of trust and continuing responsibilities. Though there is no question that marriage at first was more business than pleasure, qualitative data show that it often became a satisfactory personal relationship and that it offered considerable scope for sentiment and cooperation.     

Sex, politics, and social change in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries: evidence from the Swiss Alps

The eighteenth-century "sexual revolution" cannot simply be explained as a consequence of economic or institutional factors -- industrialization, agricultural revolution, secularization, or legal hindrances to marriages. The example of western Valais (Switzerland) shows that we have to deal with a complex configuration of factors. The micro-historical approach reveals that in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sexuality -- and above all illicit sexuality -- was a highly subversive force that was considerably linked to political innovation and probably more generally to historical change. Nonmarital sexuality was clearly tied to political dissent and to innovative ways of behavior, both among the social elites and the common people. This behavior patterns influenced crucial evolutions in the social, cultural, and economic history of the region.     

Waging a war to save biodiversity: the rise of militarized conservation

This article examines the rise in militarized approaches towards conservation, as part of a new ‘war for biodiversity’. This is a defining moment in the international politics of conservation and needs further examination. The claims that rhinos and elephants are under threat from highly organized criminal gangs of poachers shapes and determines conservation practice on the ground. Indeed, a central focus of the 2014 London Declaration on the Illegal Wildlife Trade is the strengthening of law enforcement, and recent policy statements by the US government and the Clinton Global Initiative also draw the link between poaching, global security and the need for greater levels of enforcement. Such statements and initiatives contribute substantially to the growing sense of a war for biodiversity. This article offers a critique of that argument, essentially by asking how we define poachers, and if militarized approaches mean conservationists are becoming more willing to engage in coercive, repressive policies that are ultimately counterproductive. Further, this article examines how the new war for biodiversity is justified and promoted by referring to wider debates about intervention in a post‐Cold War era; notably that the international community has a responsibility towards wildlife, especially endangered species, and that military forms of intervention may be required to save them.     

Tweet style: campaigning,governing, and social media in Australia

When politicians use the new tools of social media to talk directly to voters, how strategic are these communications? Do lawmakers change how they present themselves in different situations, tweeting differently during campaigns and when their party is out of power, or tailoring their ‘tweet style’ to the preferences of constituents? I explore these questions by categorising 291,091 tweets by politicians in Australia, a nation that features variation in electoral systems in its two legislative houses and which held an election after widespread adoption of social media. When their party controls government, politicians tweet about their personal characteristics and events more often, avoiding clear ideological positions. When an election is called, politicians both in government and in the opposition rally their bases by tweeting toward their own sides of the ideological spectrum.