Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in the Age of Resurgent Imperialism

Critical ethnographies and methods of relational comparison provide tools for reconfiguring area studies to challenge imperial visions of the world; for illuminating power‐laden processes of constitution, connection, and disconnection; and for identifying slippages, openings, contradictions, and possibilities for alliances. Crucial to this project are Lefebvrian conceptions of the production of space. In developing these arguments, this essay also intervenes in recent discussions of so‐called “primitive accumulation” as an ongoing process. It does so by drawing on research into connections between South Africa and East Asia, and using these relational comparisons to highlight the significance of specifically racialized forms of dispossession and their salience to struggles currently underway in South Africa. These examples underscore how critical ethnography and relational comparison provide a crucial means for “advancing to the concrete”—in the sense of concrete concepts that are adequate to the complexity with which they are seeking to grapple.     

The Resurgent Conflict Between Offshore Wind Farms and Tourism: Underlying Storylines

Abstract

Efforts to put offshore wind farms in place have demonstrated that these are far from being conflict-free, evoking confrontations with a number of stakeholders' interests. One of the most persistent conflict lines refers to the feared adverse externalities on coastal tourism, although tourist surveys and initial empirical evidence seem to reflect the opposite. This paper explicitly addresses this gap and explores how and why certain stakeholders rationalise potential impacts on the tourism economy of coastal communities and, thus constitute the conflict between offshore wind farms and tourism. Based on two cases studies in Scotland and Germany, five storylines are identified that are invoked by local opponents to substantiate impacts on tourism. The paper will show that a particular meaningful construction of the coastal landscape is inherent in tourism and pervades all storylines. It is concluded that arguments of both opponents and decision-makers are embedded in epistemic uncertainty which necessitates a thorough consideration of oppositional arguments in the planning process for offshore wind farms.     

The Dark Sides of Social Policy: From Neoliberalism to Resurgent Right-wing Populism

This Forum Debate explores the confluence of neoliberal, populist, conservative and reactionary influences on contemporary ideologies and practices of social policy, with a focus on the poorer peripheries of global capitalism. Several fundamental tensions are highlighted, which are largely overlooked by the social policy and development literatures. First, many recent social policy innovations have been discredited by their association with neoliberalism. The rising political Right has been much more successful than the Left at exploiting this discontent, despite simultaneously deepening many aspects of neoliberalism once in power. At the same time, right-wing movements have proactively used social policy as a political tool to fashion the social order along lines deemed amenable for their interests and ideologies, expressed along nationalist, racialized, ethnicized, nativist, religious, patriarchal or other lines, and to innovate practices of segregation, exclusion and subordination. While these synergies of neoliberal and right-wing populism are observed globally, they need to be carefully and differentially interpreted from the perspective of late industrializing (or late welfare state) peripheral countries. Nonetheless, common themes occurring across both centres and peripheries, as identified by the invited contributions to this Debate section, include exclusionary identity politics, hierarchical and subordinating inclusions, and patriarchal familialism. In this context, segregationism is an ominous possibility of post-neoliberal social policy.     

Didactic translation: The first Scandinavian translation of the Eclogues: Peder Jensen Roskilde,Bucolica (1639)

The very first translation of the Eclogues into a Scandinavian language, Peder Jensen Roskilde's Bucolica (1639), is concerned with interpretative closure. Following the tradition of reading Virgil's poetry allegorically the translation supplies names and circumstances where the text is unspecific. More than that, however, the translation also includes glosses, thus making the translation a hybrid between a commentary and a translation, a didactic translation. This article offers an analysis of this translation with a special focus on the relationship between the historically oriented allegorical interpretation and this unusual format.