The heritage ‘NGO’: a case study on the role of grass roots heritage societies in Iran and their perception of cultural heritage

This paper examines the activities of a group of heritage enthusiasts in Iran. Grass roots heritage activism is a relatively recent phenomenon that appeared in Iran since the late 1990s. They are increasingly operating collectively as cultural or heritage NGOs. They have diverse socio-economic origins and political views. However, as this paper argues, they share a common ground in their activities; one that maintains an ambivalent and critical relationship with the state and official definitions of heritage and identity. Referring to interview and other data collected during fieldwork in Iran, this paper traces and analyses the contours of that common ground and argues that there is a nascent heritage movement in the country. The impact and contribution of these emerging and self-reflective heritage movements to Iranian identity, which is reflected in their embracing of diversity and the notion of historical continuity, reveal the dynamism and complexity of the cultural and political landscape of contemporary Iranian society. They also reveal the importance of generating further scholarship in the field of Iranian cultural heritage. In conceptualising the characteristics of a nascent heritage movement in Iran, the paper makes a new contribution to the approach of existing scholarship in the broader field of heritage studies.     

Rethinking grassroots campaigners in the digital media: The ‘grassroots orchestra’ in Italy

The diffusion of digital media allows the emergence of new types of relations between grassroots campaigners and organisers. This article presents the results of a comparative qualitative study of two Italian cases of grassroots online participation: a local electoral campaign and a single-issue social movement. The first case is ‘Tell your Milano’, a project that took place during the electoral campaign for Mayor of Milan in the spring of 2011. The second case is the ‘Purple People’ (Popolo Viola), an Italian social movement started in 2009 to demand the resignation of the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The article introduces the concept of a ‘grassroots orchestra’: a grassroots campaign aimed at a short-term objective, coordinated by a non-grassroots political actor and performed by a community sharing a uniform and coherent context.

数字媒体的扩散导致了草根运动家与组织者之间新型关系的出现。本文对两个意大利草根在线参与案例——一为地方选举运动,一为独立议题社会运动——做了对比定性研究。前一个案例是所谓“告诉你一个马力诺”,是2011年春米兰市长选举中的一项活动。另一个“紫色人民”始于2009年,是一个要求贝卢斯科尼总理辞职的社会运动。本文引进了“草根乐队”的概念,意即短期目标的草根运动,由非草根政治主体协调,并由处在同一语境中的一个社群来完成。     

Communal Performativity—A Seed for Change? The Solidarity of Thessaloniki's Social Movements in the Diverse Fights Against Neoliberalism

The debate on the financial crisis is at an impasse. Neoliberal austerity discourse is often positioned as an almost insurmountable barrier, its disciplinary power affecting even the most change‐oriented citizen‐initiatives existing today. Countering this, this paper highlights the transformative capacity of social movements in Thessaloniki. Drawing from Butler, Laclau and Mouffe, and Gibson‐Graham we develop the notion of “communal performativity” both as an academic and as a practical concept to understand and build trajectories of socio‐economic change. “Communal” denotes the drive of the movements’ participants to interconnect and (re)negotiate with a multiplicity of Others, curbing identity politics to articulate internal differences and Otherness. We see some hopeful signs of bridges being built towards shared trajectories of change that can be understood as different but concrete variations on the abstract counter‐narrative of “breaking with neoliberalism”. Some of these variations challenge, others diversify neoliberal discourses and practices.     

Contingent Coalitions in Environmental Policymaking: How Civil Society Organizations Influenced the Chilean Renewable Energy Boom

This article analyzes the role of social movements and environmental organizations in crafting contingent coalitions to advance renewable energies in Chile. Until recently, Chile presented several conditions predicting the continuation of an arm’s-length energy policy and a deregulated energy market heavily concentrated on environmentally and socially unfriendly sources. However, gradual but transformative policy change in the last decade has made the country a world leader in renewable energy development. Studying two key moments in energy policy reform, we argue that the contingency of the coalitions that social movements and environmental organizations forged was crucial to the advancement of renewable energy policy and the transformation of the energy sector in the country. The paper advances our understanding of policy change in contexts of high path dependency and status quo bias, and builds the concept of “contingent coalitions,” unifying similar but scattered and under-theorized notions that capture the fluid dynamics of coalition formation and policy change in environmental policymaking.     

‘Memory is the strength of our resistance’: an ‘other politics’ through embodied and material commemoration in the San José Peace Community,Colombia

Scholars have shown how memory is an embodied and spatial practice that potentially generates more just possible futures, and that peace is a politicized and contextually specific process, but how does place-based memory performance actually contribute to social movements’ construction of peace? This article explores massacre commemoration pilgrimages and stones painted with victims’ names in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, a group of small-scale farmers living in the war-torn region of Urabá, Colombia. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in Colombia from 2011 to 2014, including participant observation and 49 interviews, I explore the relationship between these spatially embodied practices and the community’s resistance to forced displacement and peace-building project. I argue that these forms of memorialization cultivate key elements for an autonomist ‘other politics’, including solidarity with allies; mobilizing bodies across space to defend life and land; and ongoing reflection, education and strategic planning that strengthen community cohesion and organization. Integrating scholarship on memory performance, peace geographies, and social movements, I illustrate how the San José de Apartadó Peace Community’s massacre commemorations and stones reject vindictive violence and instead build an alternative, transformative and emancipatory politics through internal and external solidarity.     

Indigenous Youth and Decolonial Futures: Energy and Environmentalism among the Diné in the Navajo Nation and the Lepchas of Sikkim,India

In India and the United States, Lepcha and Diné youth are articulating decolonial futures that diverge from past aspirations. Rather than demanding big infrastructure such as dams or power plants, Indigenous youth forward decolonial visions that reimagine the landscape and energy technologies. In this article, we suggest that Lepcha and Diné activists are articulating a youthful decolonial futurity—a vision for the future where their generation and the ones to follow can flourish in their own territories and on their own terms. We propose youthful decolonial futurity as a prefigurative politics specific to Indigenous youth, who view their activism as integral to creating a future where their communities have more control over decision-making processes and their ancestral territories. What emerges is a consideration of the role of Indigenous youth in building a language and politics of decolonisation against the roles of power brokers, elites, and naysayers.     

Can't I be seen? Can't I be heard? Black women queering politics in Newark

What does it mean for a black female to negotiate urban space? How is her body read, her politics enacted, and her agency understood and interpreted? How do black women use their bodies and identities to challenge structural intersectionality in US cities? To answer these questions, I explore how black women embraced a set of oppositional spatial practices to resist the intersectional effects of misogyny, homo/transphobia, racism, and poverty in Newark, New Jersey. I reconstruct the creation of the Newark Pride Alliance, a local lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer coalition that mobilized in 2003 and 2004, after the death of Sakia Gunn. Exploring migrations between ‘black women,’ ‘black queer’ and ‘black feminist,’ I examine how black women respatialized social capital and enacted resistance. Through semi-structured interviews and frame analysis, I explore how black women forged new relationships between queer youth and black vernacular institutions, and created political spaces in which honest engagement of issues of gender violence, poverty, and power could take place.     

Creating an intentionally dialogic space: Student activism and the Newcastle Occupation 2010

Dominant discourses tend to represent young people as politically apathetic, disengaged and inert. Yet, in late 2010, tens of thousands of young people across the UK protested against government proposals to change the ways in which higher education is funded. In numerous universities across the country, students occupied buildings, facilitated protests and challenged university leaders to speak out against the proposed changes. At Newcastle University, a group of highly organised students occupied the Fine Art lecture theatre for seventeen days in late 2010 in resistance to these changes. In this paper, we draw upon a detailed analysis of twenty-seven interviews with young people who participated in the Newcastle Occupation, supplemented by participant observation of Occupation meetings. We argue that the students created an intentionally dialogic space in the Occupation in a number of ways, including how they organised it, how they used social media and the internet, the actions they participated in and the ways in which they engaged with the elite. These insights offer an important contribution to debates and young people and politics and exemplify the ways in which the student activists involved in the Newcastle Occupation were sophisticated political agents who strategically and tactfully engaged with politics matters.