Participation and Passive Revolution: The Reproduction of Neoliberal Water Governance Mechanisms in Durban,South Africa

Abstract: This article demonstrates that Gramsci's concept of passive revolution can be utilised to help unearth some of the contradictions of participatory development within neoliberal governance systems in the global South. I argue that some approaches to “participation” within neoliberal governance systems can, in part, be understood as moments within a protracted process of passive revolution. The argument is traced through eThekwini municipality's Community Participation Programme and the related extension of Free Basic Water (FBW). This article contributes to existing scholarship by demonstrating how a Gramscian analysis is indispensable to understanding the way in which state–civil society relations are conceived in participatory development strategies and the implications this might have for radical social change. I argue that a Gramscian approach compels us to reconsider current understandings of state–civil society relations so that we might overcome the impasse of passive revolution and move towards a more progressive form of politics.     

How old are Australia's pictographs? A review of rock art dating

Australia contains some of the world's richest and apparently longest traditions of rock pictographs. Dating this art, however, has been problematic, with few ‘direct’ and reliable dates of Pleistocene or early Holocene age having been obtained from visible, representational imagery. This paper critically reviews the evidence for the antiquity of pigment rock art in Australia by examining the various dating techniques employed. The accurate and reliable dating of rock art worldwide is crucial to understanding the evolution of modern human symbolism and whether cognitive modernism came about after, rather than with, the first signs of full biological modernism; understanding the pitfalls and devising proper methods are crucial prerequisites. Towards these ends, this paper reviews the results and techniques that have been employed to date the apparently earliest known pictographs in Australia.     

‘The dearest sacrifice’: Catharine Maria Sedgwick and the Celibate Life

Catharine Maria Sedgwick, America’s most respected and popular female novelist of the early nineteenth century, never married. Yet while she chose a life of celibacy, most scholars have argued that her life represented ‘a deviation’ from the more conventional women’s roles she prescribed in her fiction. This article places Sedgwick’s marital decision within the context of several converging influences – her family history, her Federalist upbringing, and most important, her conversion to Unitarianism. Read through the lens of the complementary religious and social principles of Unitarianism and Federalism, Sedgwick’s novels reveal a persistent exploration of several themes – the ability to realize and advance truth, the centrality of character and moral cultivation, and the obligation to serve one’s community. Sedgwick’s exploration of these themes illuminates her choice of celibacy, and her conclusions contain a radical commentary on the appropriateness of marriage for women.     

The interaction of methodology with an impegno del dopo in Nuto Revelli's collections of oral testimonies

Among his varied publications, Nuto Revelli (1919–2004) produced three collections of oral testimonies gathered from the contadini (peasants) of Piedmont: La strada del davai, Il mondo dei vinti and L’anello forte. This article argues that these collections were the product of the same specific impegno del dopo (‘obligation of afterwards’) as his initial autobiographical writings, which had arisen from his experiences as an officer on the Russian Front during the Second World War. From this premise, the article then examines the interaction of Revelli's sense of impegno del dopo with the methodology he developed. The article concludes with an assessment of Revelli's stated aims and his actual achievements.     

Contesting land,creating community,in the Highlands and Islands,Scotland

This paper draws on research in four communities in the Highlands and Islands, Scotland, to explore how the notion of community and community identity are re‐worked in the political spaces created as communities claim collective rights to land. In the cases of the Assynt Crofters’ Trust, the Bhaltos Community Trust, and Laid, this has concerned land under crofting tenure; in the case of the claim of the North Sutherland Community Forestry Trust, the land on which the Naver Forests stand is the responsibility of the Scottish Ministers and is managed by Forest Enterprise. The four case studies differ with respect to membership and institutional practices and thus provide fertile ground on which to examine, comparatively, collective struggles for the land and the search for sustainable futures.     

Enlivened Geographies of Volunteering: Situated,Embodied and Emotional Practices of Voluntary Action

Abstract

Examining the everyday practices and feelings of volunteering, in particular their situated, emotional and embodied nature, serves to place the experiences of volunteers centrally in accounts of what matters in the doing of volunteering and goes beyond service provision or active citizenship. Using qualitative evidence from three collaborative research projects, we present enlivened geographies of volunteering which focus on: the situatedness of formal volunteering in place and the negotiation of local ‘moral economies’ of norms and expectations surrounding access to volunteering opportunities and the practices of volunteering; complex positionings of informal volunteering in biographies of social participation; and intersections of embodiment and emotions in experiences among environmental volunteers. We contribute to the development of social geographies which are ‘more-than-representational’ and argue that connecting insights on everyday practices of volunteering with wider policy and practice agendas requires a focus on the enduring, but also emergent and excessive nature of the spaces of doing volunteering, on the relational nature of volunteering, and on opening up debates in the networks of research-policy-practice which understand spaces of volunteering as entailing more than volunteering.     

Reimagining sustainable cultures: constitutions, land and art

Globalisation is about the interconnection of peoples and places in accelerated ways, but it is also about resistance and adaptation in the face of change. Discussions of sustainability now incorporate both dynamic understandings of culture and the recognition that place matters because the practices that are in need of sustaining, as well as those that pose threats, happen in particular communities and in specific geographic contexts. Culture is codified not only in property rights and legislation, but also in the public artistic expressions of peoples and places. Case studies from Nunavut and Scotland show the interrelationships of sovereignty and claims to identity and community. Art, as a result of creative action in the case of Cape Dorset Inuit printmakers and carvers on Baffin Island, and a millennium tapestry telling the stories of the Isle of Harris, complement matters of property rights. Both discussions show that identity is about material culture and property relations in respect of land. Serious discussions of sustainability, in contrast to the technical practices frequently invoked using the term sustainable development, require considerations of the dynamics of complex cultural arrangements in particular places, rather than assumptions of stability of either peoples or their ecological contexts.