Women anti-mining activists’ narratives of everyday resistance in the Andes: staying put and carrying on in Peru and Ecuador

This article explores the ways in which activism and resistance are incorporated into the everyday lives and practices of rural women in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Andes, theorising the nature of women’s everyday resistance in long running social conflicts. Drawing on research with women anti-mining activists in Peru and Ecuador, the article emphasises that their resistance is rarely concerned with large-scale protests, transnational activism, and the spectacular, but rather depends on daily resistance and resilience in, often fractured, local communities. I explore how rural women make extraordinary circumstances, including facing lawsuits and accusations of terrorism, part of their everyday lives, and how they articulate their resistance and situate it in place through narratives of staying put and carrying on, drawing on emblematic notions of rural livelihoods to challenge large-scale mining developments in their communities.     

Sex in the digital city: location-based dating apps and queer urban life

It is well established that digital technology and code mediate bodies in space. The collapse of any supposed physical/digital divide has been amply documented to the extent that everyday life is now widely theorised in terms of hybridisation. What is less clear is what comes next for those participating in this hybridisation. This article examines what Kitchin and Dodge term the ‘social contour of software’ via queer male locative media users who collectively negotiate digital hybridisation in their everyday lives. Using qualitative interviews with 36 non-heterosexual men using apps such as Grindr and Tinder in London, UK, I explore how locative media refigures conceptualisations of community, technological efficiency and boundaries between private and public space. The study finds that users express ambivalence about their membership of queer ‘communities’, and are also unconvinced by online sociality. Apps expedite searches for new partners but prove deceptively time-consuming. Public and private space are being hybridised by locative technology, but common codes of conduct are slower to develop, leaving users unsure of how to navigate physical encounter. This article concludes that schema for queer men’s lives are increasingly promulgated digitally but may be uneasily embodied in everyday practice.     

Minangkabau Migration: Developing an Ethnic Identity in a Multicultural Society

The ambiguity which often surrounds the definition of ethnic identity stems from its wide ranging utility in humanistic studies. The breadth and flexibility of meaning attached to ethnic identity assists in uncovering the diversity of issues which relate to migrants' everyday experiences, expectations and aspirations. This paper seeks to establish how a relatively recent group of migrants to Australia, the Minangkabau from West Sumatra, Indonesia, develop and maintain their sense of ethnic identity during the migration process and in their everyday lives. A framework is developed which places the development of ethnic identity into a wider social context by examining links with the country of origin, involvement in the host community and the home environment.     

Breaking silence: exploring motherhood and social transformation in a participatory action research with Alteñan mothers

In November 2012, a researcher, two social workers and five mothers embarked on a participatory action research (PAR) journey with the aim to develop new ideas for interventions for children and young people in street situations of the city of El Alto in Bolivia. In this article, we attend to the topic of personal and social transformation in PAR. We explore how the mothers of young people in street situations perform and negotiate their subjectivities as mothers in their everyday life; how they create (new) subjectivities in exchange and in interaction with each other during the mother project; and how the performance of their (new) subjectivities can bring social change. The mothers in our group shared stories of being silenced by social services in their everyday lives, as their motherhood is declared not good enough or as they are perceived too guilty to claim for help. It was the first time the mothers shared their stories with other mothers of their lives with their children in street situations. By noticing that they all experienced or heard of similar events that their children were subjected to in the streets, the mothers grew confident enough to talk back. Mothers talked back by denouncing injustice and by transforming doubts into questions, providing them with more knowledge. Finally, as the mothers reached out to social services, mothers’ presence, questions and stories confronted aid workers with their own flaws, and their comfortable discourse of blaming families, creating new paths towards social transformation.     

Children’s participation: moving from the performative to the social

The body of work on children’s participation has been valuable in asserting its importance. Nonetheless, participation is a contested concept and key challenges arise relating to its emphasis on age and voice, its focus on socialising the participative responsible citizen, and its failure to sufficiently recognise the range of participatory activities of children in their everyday lives. This article presents findings of a study on children’s experiences of participation in their homes, schools, and communities including the importance of the relational context, how everyday interactions rather than ‘performative’ formal structures for participation are valued by children and how their participation is limited by adult processes based on notions of competence and voice. It concludes with an argument for recognising and facilitating children’s informal and social participation as well as new forms of democratic processes being developed by children to address the possibility of governance and over-responsibilisation of children.     

Being NGO girls: gender,subjectivities and everyday life in Kolkata

This article discusses the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a cultural and political force in shaping the gendered and classed subjectivities of young women growing up in ‘red-light areas’ in Kolkata, India. It foregrounds the flexible deployment of NGO gender narratives by ‘subjects’ of NGO development to improve their everyday lives. Drawing on debates of NGOization, post-colonial urban Indian femininities and intersectionality, it demonstrates how several young women who grew up as ‘subjects’ of NGO development mobilize, reject and improvise contested NGO-inspired femininities for their everyday gain. At the same time, it illustrates how NGO gender narratives that are useful to some young women in their renegotiation of gender norms are deemed ineffective, if not obstructive, by other young women, particularly those whose lives remain entangled in multiple marginalities.     

Everyday articulations of prostitution: how some Filipina migrants in rural Japan describe sexual–economic relationships

This article draws attention to ‘everyday articulations of prostitution’: the diverse, performative ways that people reproduce and rework meanings of ‘prostitution’ as they mobilize the term in their day-to-day lives. The article offers an ethnographic illustration of this process by exploring why and to what ends a group of Filipina wives of rural Japanese men referred to the behavior of another Filipina woman in their community as ‘prostitution.’ It demonstrates that when mobilizing this term, these Filipina women were not categorizing sexual–economic relationships (like ‘prostitution’) in terms of payment systems, as other scholars have assumed. Rather, geographical and cultural factors, such as the stigma associated with these women's migration histories and their long-term residence as wives and mothers in the small rural communities where they had worked in bars, led Filipina women in Central Kiso to describe such relationships according to the sentiments motivating them, the ways one utilized gifts or money from a sexual partner, and whether or not one demonstrated appreciation of this financial support. The article maintains that attention to everyday articulations of prostitution such as these expands our understandings of the situated meanings people can invest in this term. It illustrates how culture and geography shape the ways discourses of prostitution are mobilized to stigmatize some intimate-economic behaviors and, thereby, legitimize others.     

Spaces of protest: gendered migration,social networks,and labor activism in West Java,Indonesia

This article examines the gender geography of labor activism through a comparative investigation of two communities in West Java, Indonesia. Based on in-depth interviews and a survey of workers carried out in 1995, 1998, and 2000 in the two sites, it explores the place-specific meanings attached to migrants’ social networks and gender relations, and their roles in mediating the gendered patterns of labor protest in the two villages. Previous analyses of labor protest in Indonesia have occluded scales and processes that are critical to understanding how gender dynamics are linked to the geography of protest. By contrast, attention to the gender- and place-based contexts of women’s activism illustrates the complex interactions between migrants’ local interpretations of gender norms, social network relations, household roles, state gender ideology, and global neo-liberal restructuring. Through examining these interactions, gender is conceptualized as ontologically inseparable from the production of specific activist spaces, rethinking the uni-directional spatial logic and deterministic views of gender and place put forth in theories of the New International Division of Labor.     

What to do with conspiracy theories?: Insights from contemporary Turkey

This article presents ethnographic insights into the everyday lives of people who circulate conspiratorial narratives through an ethnographic study of ultranationalist men in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on the findings of this research, the author suggests that conspiratorial discourses should be examined not solely in terms of their (anti-)truth qualities but as social practices through which masculine subjectivities and socialities are engendered. The author then explores how the circulation of conspiratorial narratives forges agency and political subjectivity for the men involved, while also inducing sociopolitical effects such as vigilantism and paramilitary violence. This article contends that through the circulation of conspiratorial narratives and everyday engagements with vigilantism and extralegal violence, the men reconfigure sovereignty and the way that the state operates in contemporary Turkey. The findings of this research suggest that the focus should be moved away from the epistemological shortcomings of conspiratorial narratives or strategies to debunk them – such as fact-checking – which presume that exposure of ‘the truth’ would lead to the dissolution of ‘untruthful’ conspiracies. Rather, the author suggests that researchers attend to the particular forms conspiracies take in concrete situations, how they mould political subjectivities and social groups and reconfigure the ways that the state operates alongside the law in other similar settings.     

Global policy paradigms,gender equality and everyday lives in Beijing,Hong Kong,Seoul and Taipei

Focusing on the interface between gender equality, the labour market, and everyday lives in four East Asian societies – China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan – this article seeks to articulate the spatial expression and multi-scalarity of global governance and policy paradigms. It will demonstrate that whilst regions, places and people are influenced by global processes and paradigms, these move and embed in different ways across spaces, time and scales. In this context, the article seeks to develop a more nuanced appreciation of ‘the social lives’ of global policy models, engaging with the role of ideas and institutions and the interactions of transnational, national and local dynamics in the shaping of gender equality policies and everyday experiences. Drawing on qualitative data collected in Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul and Taipei the article draws out the perceptions of individuals from different policy, sectoral, social and cultural settings of gender equality. It highlights the tensions and disjunctures between general principles and particular situations, and in embedding gender equality policies into the social imaginaries and everyday lives of women and men. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing the role of place and power relations in shaping localized responses to and experiences of gender justice.     

CHOOSING RESIDENCE,COMMUNITY AND NEIGHBOURS ‐THEORIZING FAMILIES’ MOTIVES FOR MOVING1

This article takes its point of departure from an ongoing research project that examines the connection between everyday life and choice of residence. The first component of this empirical study is an investigation of reasons given by families for moving out of Copenhagen to a commune ‐ Absalons Have in Trekroner – in a new suburban area close to the city of Roskilde (located approximately 25 km west of Copenhagen). The research examines the connection between this choice of residence and the everyday lives of the families, including why this form of residence ‐ the commune ‐ is attractive to them. What kinds of needs do the families have and how can the new residence fulfil these needs? This article examines these questions, first, by outlining a theoretical discussion of how to capture the connection between everyday life and residence. Here concepts such as “sense of place”, “the social construction and use of place”, “meaningful places”, and how place experiences play a central role are examined. Second, the article presents findings from an empirical study examining families’ choice of Trekroner and the commune Absalons Have.     

Striated agency and smooth regulation: kindergarten mealtime as an ambiguous space for the construction of child and adult relations

Deploying an everyday life approach, this article focuses on the kindergarten meal, defined as a space in which humans, materials and discursive elements interact. The article identifies and discusses two co-existing perspectives on the everyday meals that emphasise children as future beings and here-and-now beings. Through the concepts of smoothing and striation the paper discusses how these perspectives produce different mechanisms of regulation and agency, and position the eaters differently. The paper emphasises kindergarten mealtime as an ambiguous space that does not offer simple discussions about good and bad meal situations. The paper thereby adds to the existing literature within children’s geographies which emphasise interactional, relational and material aspects of children’s lives. It does so by revisiting some concepts, striation and smoothing, that has been used to explore children’s spaces and child–adult relations, but argue that these concepts describe ambivalent and complex processes in children’s and adult’s everyday lives.     

Gender,race, militarism and remembrance: the everyday geopolitics of the poppy

This article offers a feminist analysis of how British military violence and war are, in part, made possible through everyday embodied and emotional practices of remembrance and forgetting. Focusing on recent iterations of the Royal British Legion’s Annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the emotionality, and gendered and racial politics of collective mourning provide opportunities for the emergence of ‘communities of feeling’, through which differently gendered and racialised individuals can find their ‘place’ in the national story. I aim to show that in relying on such gendered and racial logics of emotion, the Poppy Appeal invites communities of feeling to remember military sacrifice, whilst forgetting the violence and bloodiness of actual warfare. In so doing, the poppy serves to reinstitute war as an activity in which masculinised, muscular ‘protectors’ necessarily make sacrifices for the feminised ‘protected’. The poppy is thus not only a site for examining the everyday politics of contemporary collective mourning, but its emotional, gendered and racialised foundations and how these work together to animate the geopolitics of war.     

The Right to a Nice Home: housing inspection in 1930s Stockholm

This article deals with how the authorities taught the Swedes to live and how Swedish citizens came to accept such an intimate encroachment in their private lives. Why did people accept these social experts of everyday life? The answer tells us something about modern society and modernity itself.

Around the turn of the 20th century, Stockholm had one of Europe's worst housing conditions, according to Swedish experts of the time. One-room apartments were the norm, even for large families. Not all buildings had running water and often several families shared one outhouse. At the same time, the idea that the home was the place in which the conscientious citizens of the future would be raised was introduced – in Sweden as elsewhere. Dwellings became part of the social question. Many people believed that a well-functioning home would improve other aspects of life as well: men would stay at home in the evening instead of going to pubs; women would do a better job of raising the children; and public health would improve. A neglected home was seen as a sign of the exact opposite; the right to a nice home turned into a duty to live well. As an extension of this idea, housing inspections became important processes in the effort to improve the lives of citizens. The inspections were carried out by municipal employees, who were expected to monitor people's everyday lives. They functioned as housing experts, but what did these social engineers actually do? How did they become housing experts? And was their encroachment into people's daily lives accepted by ordinary citizens?     

Block politics

This paper explores how young people have experienced everyday life on ‘the block’ in a racially diverse lower to working class community in New York City over time, a concept that I refer to as block politics. Broadly defined, block politics refers to the process in which young people's territories are socially conceived, performed, maintained and challenged in everyday life. Gendered and racialized norms and practices play an important role in determining how young people construct their identities and that of their block. Block politics represents one of the many ways in which young people express and articulate their sense of social and spatial inclusion/exclusion, something that has transcended both time and space in urban communities in the United States.     

IDENTITIES AND URBAN SOCIAL SPACES IN LITTLE TOKYO,LOS ANGELES: JAPANESE AMERICANS IN TWO ETHNO‐SPIRITUAL COMMUNITIES

Ethnic identities are expressed and articulated in particular places. These mutable identities are crucial sources of meaning in the lives of social actors. This article seeks to elucidate just how the contexts of specific institutions in an urban enclave will impact upon patterns of conflict and cooperation among different subgroups practising two religious traditions. Historical discourses of ethnic community and ‘race’, shifts in migration patterns and the changing nature of the Little Tokyo enclave provide the formative patterns of social spaces, in which ethnic actors seek to create lives of spiritual and material meaning and security. Barth's concept of the social organization of cultural difference encourages analysis of ethnic identities as a dynamic and mutable enterprise. Because the maintenance of boundaries is crucial to identities, the manner in which a group seeks to maintain difference is intermeshed with the social terrain of particular places. Through qualitative methods of semi‐structured and informal interviews and participant observations, this project engages Japanese American identities within the context of two religious communities in an urban enclave. Fieldwork was conducted in two institutions, a Protestant church and a Buddhist temple, with the aim of exploring how Japanese American identities are expressed and (re)negotiated within different ethno‐spiritual communities. Such communities are fundamental to the expression of ethnic identities, and to the emotional lives of worshippers, particularly seniors and new immigrants.     

Collapsing contexts: social networking technologies in young people’s nightlife

In the latest discussions of children and young people’s new geographies of leisure and pleasure, one controversial issue has been how digital technologies co-produce and reconfigure young people’s everyday worlds. This article draws on semi-structured interviews with 40 young people who regularly use social networking technologies in their nightlife experiences in Zurich and Lausanne, two nightlife hubs in Switzerland. Informed by Danah Boyd’s concepts of ‘collapsing contexts’ and ‘imagined audiences’, this article enables a critical engagement with young people’s emerging understanding of their nightlife contexts, which are increasingly permeated by networking technologies. I show how social networking spaces facilitate the coming together, or collapse, of various social contexts which induce young people to imagine multiple audiences, including authority figures, in their nightlife practices. These collapsing contexts and imagined audiences, I argue, present new perspectives on debates about control and surveillance in young people’s contemporary urban nightlife.     

Councils,consultations and community: rethinking the spaces for children and young people's participation1

The participation of children and young people in decisions that affect them is now mainstream in social and public policy in the UK. Yet for many young people formal participation opportunities are abstracted from everyday lives and concerns. Children may not feel empowered despite the existence of formal structures for participation. This raises questions about how ‘spaces’ for participation are constructed. This paper critiques prevailing models of participation in formal structures and instead, argues for the need to rethink children's participation as a more diverse set of social processes rooted in everyday environments and interactions.     

‘Walking … just walking’: how children and young people's everyday pedestrian practices matter

This paper considers the importance of walking for many children and young people's everyday lives, experiences and friendships. Drawing upon research with 175 9- to 16-year-olds living in new urban developments in south-east England, we highlight key characteristics of (daily, taken-for-granted, ostensibly aimless) walking practices, which were of constitutive importance in children and young people's friendships, communities and geographies. These practices were characteristically bounded, yet intense and circuitous. They were vivid, vital, loved, playful, social experiences yet also dismissed, with a shrug, as ‘just walking’. We argue that ‘everyday pedestrian practices’ (after Middleton 2010, 2011) like these require critical reflection upon chief social scientific theorisations of walking, particularly the large body of literature on children's independent mobility and the rich, multi-disciplinary line of work known as ‘new walking studies’. In arguing that these lines of work could be productively interrelated, we propound ‘just walking’—particularly the often-unremarked way it matters—as a kind of phenomenon which is sometimes done a disservice by chief lines of theory and practice in social and cultural geography.