‘Ain’t I a feminist?’: the politics of gender violence,anti-violence,and education in Oakland,CA

This article focuses on the ways gender violence politics become reduced to liberal narratives of victimization in contemporary U.S. deployment of feminist identity politics, within academic and activist discourses. Such victimization narratives, I argue, exploit suffering and reproduce social stratification between a growing middle class in the academy and poor black people outside of it. This article draws from moments in California’s Bay area when questions of feminism, gender violence, and anti-violence in schools arose. In each case, left feminists had an opportunity to reshape these questions towards new political paradigms and new academic discourses. Instead, amidst the ‘safety’ of left discourse and practice, each moment confronted contradictory silences that called into question such ‘safety’ and made generative political movement impossible. I analyze the dynamics of this silencing as constitutive of the co-optation of feminist identity politics within a capitalist university that reproduces an oppressive race and class order. We face a problem of language to adequately explain and disrupt the incapacity for collective social change that victimhood, identity politics, and reformism have produced. Each instance I present function as moments of history making from which we may reflect and strategize forward movement against capitalist oppression and racial dehumanization.     

On the current absence and future improbability of political Catholicism in Italy

Clerical ‘non-negotiable values’ were actively promoted by right-wing governments in the 2000s, the Monti government that replaced them was strongly supported by the Vatican and the Italian bishops, and the current left-wing government is led by a former member of the Catholic popolari who attends Mass every Sunday. But this article argues that, rather than a new golden age of political Catholicism, the return of Catholicism to Italian politics has taken a ‘low intensity’ form which lacks the robust combination of ideas, leaders, organizations, and interests that informed earlier, genuinely political forms of Catholic engagement. The article demonstrates this by focusing on the ‘Todi movement’, which played a crucial role in the Monti government, and on Matteo Renzi’s current leadership of the Partito democratico and the national government. It also proposes a theoretical framework to explain the apparent contradiction between the high visibility and the low political relevance of Catholicism in Italian politics.     

Education for what? Shaping the field of climate change education with children and young people as co-researchers

ABSTRACT

Children and young people are often positioned as the next generation of leaders in whom the public imagines or expects to overcome the legacies of climate and environmental inaction. Increasingly analyses of progress in environmental education independently identify the need for researchers and teachers to ‘listen to children’s voices’. In this paper we argue that climate change education presents a significant platform not only for youth voices, but also for a genuine activation of children’s political agency in schools, universities, and the public domain. In so doing, we draw upon the government funded project Climate Change?+?Me, which has involved working with 135 children and young people from across Northern NSW, Australia as co-researchers investigating young people’s voices in climate change. We conclude that climate change education can open up an entirely new field of educational experience and inquiry when it is inclusive of and led by young people.     

2. THE VICTIM'S VOICE AND MELODRAMATIC AESTHETICS IN HISTORY1

Saul Friedländer's recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. He has produced an authoritative historical narrative of the Holocaust, within which he integrates the victims' authentic voices, as recorded (mostly) in their contemporary writings. This article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer's achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer's book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer's concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. I claim that in our current “era of the witness,” set within a culture addicted to the “excessive,” the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the excess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. Excess and disbelief have thus become the most commonplace cultural topos. In our current culture, I contend, the excessive voices of the victims have, to some extent, exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, the consumers of Holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimaginable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure and involves the narrative in melodramatic aesthetics. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources.     

Rights,participatory spaces and the daily fabric of children and young people’s voices in Switzerland

ABSTRACT

The past two decades have witnessed an unprecedented rise in public policies aimed at hearing children and young people’s voices, which typically entail creating supportive participatory spaces. While this political project is usually presented as a radical move towards a more inclusive society, it raises critical questions about whose voices are being represented, how, why, by whom and for whom. Drawing upon recent ethnographic research on childhood and youth policies in Switzerland, this article explores how children and young people’s voices are produced in concrete situations. It studies how the institutional and material characteristics of participatory spaces and situated interactions shape which voices will actually be heard. The research highlights that, despite their inclusive ambitions, participatory spaces paradoxically exclude young persons who fail to articulate, orally or in written, linguistically, morally or politically legitimate voices.     

The cultural politics of shit: class,gender and public space in India

In this article we seek to interrogate the cultural, political and economic conditions that generate the crisis of sanitation in India, with its severe implications for the poor and the marginalized. The key question we ask is how to interpret and explain the spectre of ‘open defecation’ in India's countryside and its booming urban centres. The discussion is divided into three parts. Part one examines the cultural interpretation of ‘shitting’ as symbolic action underpinned by ideas of purity, pollution and ‘the body politic’. Part two takes the political economic approach to gain further insights into contemporary discourse, performance and cultural politics surrounding toilets and open defecation in India. Part three examines civil society activities, state campaigns and media accounts of open defecation to explore the disruptive potency of everyday toilet activities, and how these interplay with issues of class, caste, and gender. Drawing on interviews and a review of ethnographic work, we seek to interrogate the idiom of modern sanitation, with its emphasis on cleanliness, progress and dreams of technology, as a constitutive idea and an explanatory force in Indian modernity.     

Crafted within liminal spaces: Young people's everyday politics

This paper examines how high school-aged young people from New Zealand are crafting their everyday political subjectivities within the liminal status and liminal spaces they occupy in society. With a specific focus on schooling and the citizenship education curricula in New Zealand, three vignettes are introduced which examine young people's less reflexive and ‘everyday’ forms of political action in the interstitial liminal space between Public/private, Formal/informal and Macro/micro politics. These vignettes underline how young people's everyday politics were embedded within spatial and relational processes of socialisation with adults within their schools and communities, yet, also showed both agency and resourcefulness with these spaces. Young people's liminal status and occupation of liminal spaces provided them with unique perspectives on social issues (such as bullying, racism, water conservation, and obesity) and enabled them to respond in ways that were ‘different’ to adults' Politics, yet nonetheless showed their political and tactical selves (de Certeau, 1984). A focus on young people's political practices in liminal spaces allows for new possibilities and understandings of the political.     

Reading politics through emotions: ontological ressentiment as the emotional basis of current politics in Turkey

For almost sixteen years now, politics in Turkey have been analysed with reference to the theme of victimhood. It is true that the political discourse of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi or AKP) gained its power by the mass response to its victimhood claims. Nevertheless, as this article argues, the legitimacy of the victimhood claim rests mainly on the already‐existing emotions of masses, aroused and triggered by political elites. Thus, Turkish politics during the AKP period cannot be thoroughly understood without taking into consideration the emotions of both political elites and the masses. This article shares insights into the sixteen‐year‐long AKP reign of power based on Recep Tayyip Erdo?an's appeals to such emotions as humiliation, envy, disgust, hatred, anxiety, and anger. It further argues that these emotions reveal a much deeper and stronger emotional trait which we identify as ontological ressentiment.     

A Decadence Baedeker: D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death

This article investigates how Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death brings together Nietzsche’s ideas and Wagner’s music and interweaves them with the motifs of literary Decadence and the author’s own particular sexual politics. The novel is an experimental text striving to be a Gesemtkunstswerk, an integrated work that incorporates music, painting, poetry, regional folklore, and private thoughts about personal and national power. I discuss the novel’s themes of violent sexuality and the anxiety of powerlessness and explore their implications for the fascist political aesthetics in which D’Annunzio played a pioneering role.     

Assessing China’s response to the South China Sea arbitration ruling

Many international legal experts believe that the Philippines v. China arbitration award of 12 July 2016 represents a game changer for South China Sea dispute settlements because the award has brought a breathtaking legal clarity to the complex disputes. This article argues that the sweeping nature of the award had a very paradoxical effect on Chinese policy. The arbitration ruling has led to the hardening of China’s claims, but it has also raised a new readiness among Chinese policymakers to renew negotiations. The sweepingness of the award makes it hard for the Philippines to reach a negotiated compromise with China on the basis of the award, but it also presents a surprising political opportunity in regional politics for the major actors involved to lower tensions and recalibrate policies. Although China’s new readiness to negotiate is welcome, the overall impact of the three-and-a-half-year-long arbitration is likely to create a deadlock in negotiations in the near future. Paradoxically, this may raise the importance of political and power-centred approaches to regional dispute settlements, as the legal approach embodied by arbitration continues to meet Chinese defiance.     

Mungiki,Vernacular Organization and Political Society in Kenya

This article uses the concept of ‘political society’ as unfolded by the ‘subaltern studies’ in India to shed new light on present‐day political actors and democratic transitions in Africa. It discusses the political practices and discursive terrains of organizations within ‘really existing’ civil society that are based on identities and regarded as outside legitimate civil society. It looks at politics from below, taking the example of the 2007 elections in Kenya, and the role of Mungiki, an organization characterized by the intersection of class, generation, religion and ethnicity. Mungiki builds on Kenya's history and rich archive of indigenous popular culture. It originated in the early 1990s’ turmoil of ‘ethnic clashes’ and population displacement and now operates in rural and poor urban areas, providing income opportunities, service delivery and extortion/protection. During elections, sections of Mungiki have been recruited by political leaders and functioned as violent militia; concurrently, it seeks representation in formal and parliamentary politics. The organization is distinct from ‘respectable’ segments of Kenya's civil society who participate in NGO activities and mainstream churches. The article ends by calling for an inclusive and non‐normative approach to the study of state–civil society engagement that recognizes culturally based discourses and organizations when analysing the transitions to and the broadening of democracy in post‐colonial societies.     

The sacred elephant in the room: Ganesha cults in Chiang Mai,Thailand

In recent years, Thai society has been portrayed as increasingly fractured along class, political and cultural lines. Meanwhile, a variety of religious cults have gathered devotees by promoting their practices as a means to ameliorate precarity or secure the future. Ganesha, the Hindu god of new beginnings and remover of obstacles, while long incorporated into and worshipped within Thai Buddhism, has recently increased in popularity. Through the study of two Ganesha‐focused institutions in Chiang Mai province, this article will explore how this Hindu god's meaning is constructed within the religious marketplace as well as how and why people are increasingly turning to Ganesha for certain worldly problems. As the article will show, there is a new, syncretic form of re‐enchantment taking place in Ganesha worship in Chiang Mai, which seeks to give people the tools to negotiate meaning and identity in a fractious political economy.     

Writing on Domesticity,Thinking about Politics: Women Organising during Decolonisation in Cambodia, 1948–52

By examining the intellectual renderings of previously marginalised voices in mid-twentieth-century Cambodian history, this article reconstructs notions of who is a political agent and what constitutes the ‘political’ in tumultuous moments of decolonisation. In 1948, Cambodian women founded the Samāgam Khmaer Sahajīvinī (SKS), or Association of Khmer Female Comrades/Companions, and produced the first Khmer-language magazine for women, Dassanāvaṭti Nārī (Women's Magazine). The organisation was structured around four committees representing interests in clothing, food, good manners and publishing, and organisers engaged in issues related to visions of governance, ethnic difference and modernisation. These gendered organising efforts occurred alongside political in-fighting among male politicians in the turbulent years prior to gaining independence from the French Union in 1953. Due to their lack of electoral rights prior to 1955, women were excluded from political institutions. Yet, when the organising women founded the SKS and committed to producing a magazine from 1949 to 1952, they asserted women as political agents with important perspectives on Cambodian politics and society. Centring the efforts and writings of the SKS provides new insights into how decolonisation was not just a male-dominated and top-down movement but rather a multitude of organising and intellectual contributions.     

Oppressive Rhyming: George Orwell on Poetry and Totalitarianism

In George Orwell’s 1984, the poet Ampleforth observes that “the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes.” In this article I connect Ampleforth’s observation to Orwell’s many other writings on language and political control and then show how Orwell’s discussion of poetry’s resistance to political manipulation enhances Tocqueville’s and Burke’s accounts of totalitarianism. Specifically, Orwell illustrates how an easily “rhyming” polity is particularly vulnerable to totalitarian politics, while a society containing considerable disorder in its language and politics can be strongly resistant to such tyranny.     

Liquid passions: bodies,publics and city waters

This article explores water’s capacities as a vibrant matter with specific properties that generates passions, attachments and a sense of belonging, and which enrols bodies in new connections, socialities, alliances and politics in unpredictable ways. Based on research into practices and engagements with water in a large urban public space the paper builds on studies of blue space. It concludes that water has the capacity to enhance a sense of well-being in those that swim in it and to mobilise a very particular sense of embodiment which gives this form of public space its distinctiveness constituting new forms of sociality and connections amongst diverse individuals. It seeks to do this by paying attention to the experiences of things themselves and the active participation of nonhuman forces in events and the ‘vital materiality’ that runs through and across bodies both human and non-human. The article also explores water’s capacity to be constituted and defined by experts as dangerous and risky matter, and to thus engender political associations and connections amongst diverse groups who seek to oppose such expert interventions.     

From imperial revenants to Cold War victims: ‘red repatriates’ from the Soviet Union and the making of the new Japan, 1949–1952

When over half a million former Imperial Japanese Army soldiers returned home from long captivity in Soviet labour camps in the late 1940s, they brought back more than their memories of hardship and humiliation. In post-war society, the Siberian returnees were the uncomfortable remnants of the failed Japanese Empire; yet it was their brush with the communist enemy that caused suspicion and dragged them into the domestic political struggles. In this article, I use the experiences of Siberian internees as a lens to reconsider Japan’s formative post-war decade, when the onset of the Cold War eclipsed the inconvenient legacies of empire.     

The Politics of Insurgency in Collapsing States

The phenomenon of failed states might be expected to lead to the development of mass–based social movements to address the typically ensuing social problems. This article explores the general failure of reformist insurgencies to develop in failed states, using analyses of Nigeria’s Bakassi Boys and Oodua People’s Congress, and references to other armed groups. The cause of this failure is found in the legacy of patronage politics, especially the strategies of rulers who monopolized economic opportunities as a way of controlling people. As centralized patronage networks fragment, popular movements develop to challenge this control. Local political entrepreneurs, however, continue to dominate local markets, including clandestine ones, and use this social domination to buy off members of mass movements. As their new patrons give them access to weapons and protection against rivals, the organizational position of members who pursue individual economic interests is enhanced, while the people with more overt ideological agendas are marginalized.     

Why can't you change? Stories of parents and street educators about adolescent girls in street situations

For children and young people in street situations, to give up street life is easier said than done. The study reported in this article aims to contribute to the field of children and young people in street situations by introducing the voices of parents whose daughters live on the streets. In biographical narrative interviews, we asked parents together with street educators from Bolivia to share their stories of girls entering and leaving street life. Our findings showed that a child's act of running away made parents aware about their parenting, leading to new openings and possible renewed social bonds with their children. At the same time, street educators’ stories exposed the importance of the family support during the process of exiting street life. Nevertheless, even though parents no longer want to stand on the sidelines, the stories also revealed that parents are still forgotten throughout interventions with street children in Bolivia.     

Changing Values in the Art Museum: rethinking communication and learning

In changing times older art-museum values are coming under challenge and new emphasis is being placed on museum-audience relationships. The professional development of new communicative approaches in art museums can be seen as a form of action research. Older modernist models for communication based on the transmission of authoritative subject-based facts to a mass of passive receivers are being superseded by new approaches that acknowledge 'active audiences', constructivist and interpretist learning theories and the complexities of cultural politics. New roles for art museum professionals, the concept of differentiated audiences, the intervention of new voices and the exposition of new narratives offer possibilities for the reconceptualisation of art museums that are rooted in late 19th-century modernist culture.