Waves,Floods, Currents: The Politics and Poetics of Water in Social Movement Analysis

The task of conceptualising social movements draws on a wealth of watery images, from protest waves and political currents, to imagining mobilisations as tides, ripples, cascades or high-pressure hydraulics. Called upon to analyse complex processes, these waters have a life of their own, carrying analytical implications while extending a relationship to water that is never only symbolic and is material, embodied and historical. This article explores the ways water is “enrolled” to understand movements, to advance three arguments: first, these use familiar water morphologies to naturalise particular, located understandings of political change and social form; second, they imply normative claims and ideological affinities regarding political struggle; third, this has implications for our relationship to water, echoing the abstract and alienating “modern water” of capitalist world-ecology. The article considers how critical water knowledges and subjectivities, often sustained by social movement spaces, indicate possibilities of a being-otherwise with water and its meanings.     

Bringing Back the (B)order: Post‐9/11 Politics of Immigration,Borders, and Belonging in the Contemporary US South

Abstract: Post 9/11, debates about borders, immigration, and belonging have reached a new intensity in the US South. The temporal overlap of growing immigration to the South since the late 1990s and growing nativist sentiment across the US since 9/11 has led southern communities to fuse new regional racial demographics to new national border anxieties. This convergence enables southern political elites to address the changing contours of local communities through recourse to national imperatives of border security, all the while avoiding an explicit language of race in a thoroughly racialized debate. In an analysis of recent political maneuvers in the South, this article examines what happens when debates about nation, community, and borders are relocated to southern spaces heretofore absent in discussions of immigration. It argues that legislative actions against immigrant populations in southern states are virulent and multi‐scalar border policings in which concerns about the social and cultural boundaries of southern communities, new racial projects across the South, and post‐9/11 immigrant anxieties across the US become inseparable. To conclude, it discusses the theoretical insight that this critical assessment of the South's new border projects offers vis‐à‐vis understandings of, and struggles against, exclusion, racism, and social injustice.     

'Minorities with a Message': The Beveridge Report on Broadcasting (1949-1951) and Wales

This article explores the significance of the report of theBeveridge Committee on Broadcasting (1949–1951)—whichwas charged with considering all aspects of post-war broadcastingin Britain at a time of political, social, economic and culturalchange—in relation to Wales. It argues that the interactionbetween the committee and the Welsh political and cultural andgroups that submitted evidence to the committee allows for aninsight into the cultural politics of Wales during the earlypost-war period. It also argues that a study of the report throwslight onto issues of broadcasting and nationhood, the significanceof the Welsh language in defining nationhood and a nationalconsciousness and the relationship between a minority languageand the state, at a time of political and cultural change. Astudy of the Welsh dimension of the committee's report alsoprovides a framework for an understanding of the broadcastingpolitics of Wales in the 1950s and 1960s. Finally, the articleexemplifies the tensions that existed between what media historianJames Curran calls the ‘newness and modernity’ ofthe broadcast media and a political and cultural elite whichsought to preserve a ‘traditional’ way of life inthe face of the perceived impact of those media.     

Labor, zapped/growth, restored? Three moments of neoliberal restructuring in the American labor market

The paper revisits the works of Barry Bluestone and BennettHarrison in order to develop a critical commentary on the post-1970srestructuring path of the US economy. It is argued that Bluestoneand Harrison's three major books (The Deindustrialization ofAmerica, The Great U-Turn, and Growing Prosperity) not onlyprovide compelling, real-time analyses of three significantmoments of neoliberal labor-market restructuring – theadvent of deindustrialization, the emergence of systemic inequality,and the effective ‘normalization’ of unequal economicgrowth – but also, taken as an historically situated bodyof work, draw attention to a series of long-run trends and institutionalshifts in economic regulation which are of particular significancein the present conjuncture. Most pertinently, perhaps, theyraise the question of the political and theoretical significanceof neoliberalism as a mode of economic regulation and the natureof its relationship – substantially causal or merely coincidental?– with the celebrated American boom of the 1990s. Presentinga sympathetic critique of left-institutional analyses of spatial-economicrestructuring and associated reform proposals, the paper concludesby arguing that both the institutional durability and the politicaltenacity of neoliberalism may have been underestimated.     

THE CO-PRODUCTION OF NARRATIVE IN AN ENTREPRENEURIAL CITY: AN ANALYSIS OF CINCINNATI, OHIO, IN TURMOIL

In April 2001 Cincinnati, Ohio, erupted into violence and protracted unrest after the police shooting of an unarmed African‐American named Timothy Thomas. African‐American interest groups in the city subsequently organized an economic boycott of downtown businesses. In response to the demonstration and the boycott, the Cincinnati government issued a marketing campaign entitled ‘We're On the Move!’, intending to give nod to past failures and launch forward movement on their part. In this article I investigate the entirety of these events as narrative moments under the auspices of urban entrepreneurialism to answer the question: How does the local population inform, rather than simply mediate, the narrative administration of an urban entrepreneurial form of governance? I then turn to a response to the campaign by an African‐American newspaper columnist in Cincinnati to underscore a dialogic relationship between an entrepreneurial city and its citizens as it forms the presentation of entrepreneurialism. In turn, this conception allows for a more nuanced version of entrepreneurial governance more generally.     

The Only Girl in Amoy: Gender and American Patriotism in a Nineteenth-Century Treaty Port

In 1861, twenty-year-old Ruth Bradford accompanied her father to the Chinese treaty port of Amoy where he was to serve as American consul. Bradford recorded this trip in a diary kept from her departure from New York until her 1863 return. Drawing upon her diary, this paper explores how Bradford, as the only American woman in Amoy, refined her sense-of-self through interracial and cross-cultural encounters with the settlement's Chinese and British inhabitants. The paper argues that through critical comparison with these communities, Bradford, like other nineteenth-century American women in China, consolidated and articulated her gendered, racial and burgeoning patriotic national identity.     

Recognizing synesthesia on the international stage: The first scientific symposium on synesthesia (at The International Conference of Physiological Psychology,Paris, 1889)

ABSTRACT

At the first ever worldwide international conference of psychology in Paris, 1889, one symposium included a round-table event devoted entirely to the neurodevelopmental condition of synesthesia. Details of this seminal gathering on synesthesia and its international reception have been lost to historical obscurity. A synesthesia study committee emerged from this meeting, as well as a new research tool. Moreover, the scientific findings discussed during this symposium would be echoed over a hundred years later, when a new wave of synesthesia research in the late-twentieth century arose. This article sheds new light on this seminal gathering and aims to answer the following historical questions: Why was synesthesia included in this conference? What science was discussed? Who were the members of the committee and how did they come to be involved? What were their contributions to synesthesia research before, during, and after the conference? What has history shown us about the impact of this symposium on the science of synesthesia?