Beyond Obstruction: Blockades as Productive Reorientations

This paper examines blockades not as disruptions in logistical circulations, but as entities which aim to reorient and produce different political and social processes. Inspired by Deleuzean conceptualisations of assemblage, this paper emphasises the ways blockades and occupations arise from globe-spanning networks of social relations which then attempt to produce alternative regimes of governance through reorienting places and their topologies of interconnection. To make these points, this paper engages with three case studies which highlight different kinds of blockades. One example focuses on the regional scale where US military interests have expressed concern over potential blockades of Sea Lines of Communication due to the rising geopolitical and economic influence of China in the island Pacific. The second example focuses on blockades at the construction site of a US military base on the coast of Henoko, Okinawa. The third example examines blockade protests by Kanaka Maoli kia‘i (protectors) on Maunakea in Hawai‘i.     

Infrastructural Activism: Google Bus Blockades,Affective Politics,and Environmental Gentrification in San Francisco

Between 2013 and 2018, the San Francisco Bay Area saw the rise of “Google bus blockades”—a form of protest against gentrification, growing inequality and a housing crisis linked to the economic impacts of the technology sector on the region. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with housing activists in the San Francisco Bay Area, this article argues that the disruptive tactic of “the Google Bus blockade” can be understood as a form of infrastructural activism—a flexible political form that uses the interruption of infrastructure for political ends. The blockades politicised the “Google buses” and transformed them into symbols of gentrification and sites of resistance. Protestors constructed a political analysis that drew connections between struggles for housing, racial and environmental justice and brought together material, affective and political critiques of infrastructure.     

Why the Homeless Rebel: Housing Struggles in post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Post-apartheid housing struggles urgently need to be addressed in order to consolidate the inclusivist democracy in South Africa. Former white minority governments restricted housing in order to control the movement of Africans and their labour. This paper analyses aspects of post-apartheid housing protest. The argument is that such protests are rooted in a problematic rights discourse of the anti-apartheid struggle, and in the new constitution's recognition of the right of access to adequate housing, which is nonetheless, subjected to fiscal constraints. The article's second focus is on a legacy of land dispossession, which also hinders housing delivery. Failure to realise the right to housing fuels some of the most important conflict that will shape future organisation of state institutions and relations between the state and society.     

Seizing the Means of Circulation: Choke Points and Logistical Resistance in Coco Solo,Panama

Recent studies of logistics have embraced the “choke point” thesis: the notion that a strategically positioned group of workers or insurgents can exercise outsize power by disrupting the circulation of goods through the supply chain. This article examines this proposition through the case of Coco Solo, Panama, an informal community situated at the epicentre of Panama’s transit economy but persistently excluded from its benefits. Between 2001 and 2014, as part of a protracted struggle over housing, Coco Solo residents repeatedly blockaded key ports and logistics facilities. Despite their location at a critical node in global capitalist commodity circuits, the community’s actions met with limited success. I draw on the case to refine existing theorisations of logistical resistance, emphasising the contingent factors that influence the effectiveness of such tactics, the diverse contexts in which they are mobilised, and the value of going beyond workerist and insurrectionist accounts of supply chain disruption.     

Infrastructural Discontent in the Sanitary City: Waste,Revolt, and Repression in Cairo

In this article, I examine the relationship between waste, revolt, and repression in Cairo's sanitation system from the early 20^th century to the present. I coin the term infrastructural discontent in the sanitary city to describe how discontent slowly accretes around Cairo's sanitation system and becomes a powerful force in the city's politics—a force that can be mobilised for popular revolt and state repression. I detail three expressions of infrastructural discontent in Cairo's sanitation system, paying careful attention to the deeply related mundane and spectacular productions of these expressions. Tracing the formation of infrastructural discontent in the sanitary city, I show how resistance and repression are produced and contested in material infrastructural relations which contain the accretions of long‐standing struggles over colonialism, development, and uneven urbanisation.     

I Quindici Giorni di Scanzano: identity and social protest in the New South

Abstract

This paper examines the dramatic events of ‘I Quindici Giorni di Scanzano’, the vast popular uprising in Basilicata in November 2003 that thwarted a government decree to create a consolidated national nuclear waste dump at Scanzano Jonico. The struggle cut across lines of locality, age, social class and political affiliation, mobilizing the populace with various symbols, including references to brigandage, postwar struggles for land, and the Madonna of Loreto. Solidarity for the protest came from all quarters of the South, especially the neighboring regions of Apulia and Calabria. Although government representatives and some of the media portrayed the Lucanians in recognizably anti-Southern tropes of ‘uncivicness’, this paper argues that this remarkable moment in Basilicata's history created a new sense of public identity and action that in many ways reflected recent intellectual discourses on the South.     

Re-thinking Solidarity as a Principle of Catholic Social Teaching: Going Beyond Gaudium et spes and the Social Encyclicals of John Paul II

Abstract

The tradition of official Catholic Social Teaching, which emerged within the context of the European social question, has since expanded to incorporate developmental issues of the Two-Thirds World. This is shown in the social encyclicals of Pope John XXIII, but more significantly in the Vatican II Pastoral Constitution, Gaudium et spes, and the social documents of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II. In these writings, the principle of solidarity is a significant feature—both for discussions of the European social question, and in engaging with the problems of poverty and underdevelopment in the Two-Thirds World. This paper accepts that the principle of solidarity occupies a central position in Catholic social thought. It argues, however, that the ever-increasing poverty, exploitation and despair in the Two-Thirds World challenges our ethical and theological conceptualizations of solidarity. This paper intends to examine the use of the solidarity principle both in Gaudium et spes and in the social encyclicals of John Paul II. It will also raise the question whether their formulations and insights are adequate in confronting the ever-expanding challenges of international poverty and underdevelopment.     

Shutting Down the Machines of Destruction: Possibilities for Agrarian Life on the Protest Blockade

The protest blockade is one tool for seeking liberation from the state while living within it. I offer a critical analysis of the protest blockade in agrarian struggles for land and life in Indonesia and beyond. I specify my discussion with a retelling of a Sumatran land-back movement of smallholders and landless workers who twice turned to the blockade to reclaim their land from a plantation company. I consider how these blockades and others in Sumatra and Borneo created direct-action power, thereby expanding people's possibilities for livelihood and autonomy in landscapes of extraction and exploitation. Blockading action is a process that unfolds from within as activists challenge the legitimacy of their rulers and set out to create more emancipatory spaces and territories. When protestors blockade the bulldozers, logging trucks, and other machines of capitalist exploitation of workers and ecologies, they seek to disrupt the infrastructures and commodity flows of the dominant political-economic order as well as open up new agrarian possibilities. These protest blockades are central to the anarchist, Indigenous, and decolonial politics that motivate direct-action protests across the globe.     

Ripping the Heart out of Ancoats: Collective Action to Defend Infrastructures of Social Reproduction against Gentrification

The article exposes attacks on infrastructures of social reproduction as a prime gentrification strategy, but also as an effective focal point for community resistance. We exemplify this through the conflict over Ancoats Dispensary, a Victorian hospital at the heart of one of the UK's most deprived communities in East Manchester, which faced demolition following the 2000 New Islington Regeneration Plan. Using ethnographic and archival data we show how 200 years of community struggles for healthcare became catalytic for establishing Ancoats’ working class identity and how Ancoats Dispensary became the spatial/material and symbolic infrastructure for community continuity. The building's socially embedded history became key for articulating anti‐gentrification struggles as its planned demolition was seen as a symbolic demolition of the community itself. Local citizens formed the Ancoats Dispensary Trust and utilised tactics from historical struggles and entrepreneurial strategies to envision an alternative future in the defence of social reproduction infrastructures.     

A Picture and a Protest: Kjartan Slettemark and the Vietnam War

In given circumstances, art can play a crucial role in motivating people to participate in altruistic acts of protest and in initiating the formation of social movements. The story of the most controversial work of art in Norwegian cultural history, the so-called Vietnam Picture from 1965, provides an illuminating illustration of how and why artists and their work can have and have had a significant impact on peace and solidarity movements. The article discusses the qualities of artistic production and its reception that can stimulate and sustain protest. Picasso’s Guernica provides an interesting parallel to the Vietnam Picture, and the two pictures are briefly compared.     

Prosperity and its discontents: Contextualizing social protest in the late Qianlong reign

Studies of the Qing history have tended to overstate the prosperity of the Qianlong period (1736–95), while taking the ensuing Jiaqing period (1796–1820) as the crisis-ridden beginning of dynastic decline. To challenge such a simplistic and somewhat misleading interpretation, this article reappraises the late Qianlong era by examining the dramatic combination of social protest which largely defined this period. It focuses on the structural and conjunctural origins of these upheavals and uses them as a prism to investigate the changing state-society relationship. This study conceptualizes the late Qianlong upheavals as a profound crisis of an overextended empire whose political development had become unsustainable. In addition to facing the formidable challenges of an expanding society, the late Qianlong state was crippled by the emperor himself and his aggressive efforts to concentrate power in his own hands.     

Engendering the New Enclosures: Development,Involuntary Resettlement and the Struggles for Social Reproduction in Coastal Tanzania

This article engages with the feminist concept of ‘social reproduction’ to arrive at a richer understanding of the gendered processes and outcomes of contemporary large‐scale land acquisitions, or the ‘new enclosures’. It focuses on the case of a recent land deal for industrial sugarcane production in the Coast Region of Tanzania and the resultant process of involuntary resettlement. It critically analyses people's struggles for land in the face of imminent displacement, and the gendered ways they experience the erosion of their pre‐existing modes of social reproduction. It argues that enclosure of rural landscapes does more than immediately strip peasants and pastoralists of their means of production and turn them into wage labourers. It gradually uproots them from their socio‐ecological knowledges, cultural practices and historical memories, which are rooted on the land and articulated through gender. The highly uncertain processes of enclosure and displacement also force rural women and men to renegotiate their livelihood strategies and intra‐household gender relations.     

Beyond the Coastalscapes: Preindustrial Social and Political Networks in East Africa

The archaeological community worldwide now readily recognizes the role and significance of interregional interaction in the development and sustenance of urban societies (e.g., Marcus and Sabloff 2008; Sinclair et al. 2010; Trigger 2003). Over the past two decades, we have carried out a systematic, problem-oriented research program on the Kenyan coast and its hinterland in an effort to understand the ecological and cultural milieu that enabled towns and city-states to develop along the East African coast beginning in the late first millennium CE. Archaeological research complemented with historical sources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows that different scales of analysis can be used to understand the long-term history of the development of urbanism along this Swahili coast: local, regional, and trans-continental frames of reference each show that Swahili communities were part of numerous networks of interactions. An emerging picture of preindustrial urbanism shows that local, regional, and trans-continental interaction spheres tied coastal towns to the hinterland and to wider Indian Ocean commercial and social networks. Not all of the theorized links between the coastal towns and their local and regional trade and interaction partners will be visible archaeologically. We address the still poorly known elements of preindustrial regional networks of alliance and interaction spheres between urban and rural polities and argue that an integrative approach is necessary to understand the context of coastal urban society.     

"近五百年来中国社会结构变迁"国际学术讨论会综述

近500年特别是19世纪以来,中国社会结构处于急遽的历史变动进程之中,探寻转型与变动中的中国社会结构及其内在奥秘自然成为社会史学研究的重要课题与方向。由南开大学中国社会史研究中心暨历史学院共同主办的“近五百年来中国社会结构变迁”国际学术讨论会即围绕近500年来中国社会结构的历史变动主题,在社会结构的特征及其变迁、经济发展与社会结构变动、社会阶级阶层结构、社会流动与社会分层、城市社会结构、国家与社会结构变动等方面进行了深入研讨,力图再现500年来中国社会结构变迁的历史图景,并为当代中国社会结构转型提供历史借鉴。     

20世纪90年代社会学视野下我国社会政策和社会问题研究中的社会性别分析述评

妇女解放和男女平等的追求一直是人类社会一个永恒主题。文章通过对 2 0世纪 90年代这 1 0年里我国社会学界在社会政策和社会问题研究中所反映出来的社会性别意识和观念进行概括 ,总结出他们在研究中所表现出来的一些特点 ,并详细地分析了这些研究中存在的三种情况 ,即对社会性别的忽略或笼统化、一定的社会性别歧视、合理的社会性别分析描述和以抨击偏见维护两性平等。通过综合述评 ,旨在引起我国政界和学界在今后社会政策制定和社会问题研究中对性别问题的高度注意 ,最终促进人类社会的良性协调发展     

Historical Documents vs. the Archaeology: Lunette Blockades at Fort Bridger,Wyoming

Historical Archaeology - A comparison of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data and available historical records on U.S. military fortifications at Fort Bridger, Wyoming, provides an opportunity to...     

REVIEW ESSAY Beyond Social Construction: Toward New Histories of Psychiatry

Focusing on symptom classification and on the outcome of somatic interventions, Berrios and Shorter challenge the social constructionist and anti-psychiatry tendencies that have framed the writing of the history of psychiatry for the past quarter-century. Contextualizing clinical interventions, these studies point out the value of examining the proposition that practitioners were motivated as much about curing distress as they were about eliminating nonconformity. Such examinations require an understanding of the strengths and limits of medical science that often have been trivialized or ignored by some social constructionists. Together the studies under review open the possibility that recent biological interventions may have transformed psychiatry in such fundamental ways that they call into question the assumptions that have underlay in an almost two-century-old classification system. Ironically, adherence to the scientific method (falsification) reveals that the biological revolution in psychiatry fits post-modern claims about the tentative nature of knowledge claims, while it simultaneously undercuts the particular historical interpretations of post-modern scholarship.     

From Urban Social Space to Social and Environmental Justice: Observations on Laurence Ma's Essay

A senior American specialist on China and noted geographer evaluates the merits of an essay by an equally prominent specialist who advocates reflexive activism as a method designed to generate more relevant studies of the country. The author of the evaluation stresses the value of empirically based work, noting a number of contributions by geographers to the study of China's transition from doctrinaire communism to "socialism with Chinese characteristics." While not denying the need for geographical research focused on deficiencies in social and environmental justice, he is not in favor of excessive activism that may overlook advances in economic development and related accomplishments of China's governing regime. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: P30. 24 references.