The production of emancipatory feminist spaces in a post-socialist context: organization of Ladyfest in Romania

Ladyfest – a Riot Grrrl feminist do-it-yourself festival – has been organized independently in cities around the world since the year 2000. The emancipatory spaces that activists at Ladyfest seek to cultivate through workshops, music, and art provide seeds of inspiration for transformative social change. The main strength of the festival is the capacity to strengthen networks. This article discusses how the idea for this festival arose in Olympia, Washington, expanded to other locations, and was later organized by young feminists in Romania. In 2005, young women in Timisoara organized the first such festival in their city with a community of women from both inside and outside of Romania, and held another festival in Bucharest in 2007. Retrospective interviews are used to unpack the meaning of such organizing in a post-socialist context with reflections on how feminism has changed in Romania over the past decade. Specifically, the analysis of this event offers insight on how the production of space can be used to catalyze interconnections between emancipatory feminist spaces, the mode of production, and flows of feminist knowledge and concepts.     

Memoir as Iranian exile cultural production: A case study of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis series

In this essay, Iranian exile cultural production is examined via a cultural studies approach, applying Hamid Naficy's work on the concept of liminality and its productive potential to analyze the Iranian women's memoir phenomenon of the past eleven years. Focus is placed primarily upon Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis, which is analyzed as part of this larger memoir phenomenon. I will argue that Persepolis is a prime example of exile cultural production—as a site for experimentation within various genres (here, that of the memoir and graphic novel), and also for identity negotiation, self-reflection, and cultural translation—thanks to the liminality and hybridity of an artist and author who feels she is “in-between.”     

TOWARD A POST-POSITIVIST POLICY ANALYSIS

Book reviewed in this article
Paul Diesing, Science and Ideology in the Policy Sciences
Daniel Callahan and Bruce Jennings, Ethics, The Social Sciences, and Policy Analysis
Frank Fischer, Polities, Values, and Public Policy: The Problem of Methodology     

Australia–Indonesia cooperation on asylum-seekers: a case of ‘incentivised policy transfer’

Australia and Indonesia have engaged in cooperation on asylum policy since the late 1990s, bilaterally on immigration detention and people-smuggling agreements, and multilaterally through the Bali Process. Seen from a global perspective, this form of cooperation is one of many such bilateral and multilateral agreements that stymie the ability of asylum-seekers to gain effective and durable protection. This article argues that policy transfer theory can explain how these agreements are achieved, their political implications, and their outcome for the refugee regime and the asylum-seekers reliant on the regime for protection. In the case study of Australia and Indonesia, the authors argue that the cooperation is best understood as a form of ‘incentivised policy transfer’, whereby Australia has provided substantial financial and diplomatic incentives to Indonesia to adopt policies consistent with Australia's own. The implications for asylum-seekers in the Asia-Pacific region are substantial, and include an increase in the use of immigration detention in Indonesia and the introduction of border security measures that restrict the ability of asylum-seekers to reach territory where they may claim protection under the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.