关于构建和完善社会矛盾协调体系的研究

构建和完善社会矛盾协调体系,使社会矛盾能及时化解,社会冲突能有效控制,社会利益能总体平衡,是社会和谐的基本条件。实践证明,现有的社会矛盾协调体系已不能满足我国在新形势下建设社会主义和谐社会的需要,迫切要求从民意反映机制、公共决策机制、矛盾调解机制、公共安全机制、危机防控机制、社会流动机制、社会保障机制等七个方面构建和完善社会矛盾协调体系。     

Reterritorilizing the Relationship between People and Place in Refugee Studies

The article discusses different conceptions of space and place in refugee studies, especially contributions from anthropology and geography. A main distinction is drawn between two understandings of space and place; an essentialist conception, stating a natural relationship between people and places and an alternative conception attempting to de-naturalize the relationship between people and places. The consequences of applying different conceptions of space and place for the development of refugee policies and representations of refugees and displaced persons are addressed. For many displaced persons, displacement is experienced as being physically present at one place, but at the same time having a feeling of belonging somewhere else. It is argued that though attempts to de-naturalize the relationship between people and places have been important for how the refugee experience is conceptualized, there has been too much focus on imagination accompanied by a neglect of the local perspective of migrants and displaced people. In the local perspective of forced migration, the present lives of displaced people are emphasized. Especially the attitudes from the host communities, the policy environment that displaced people are part of, and their livelihood opportunities are the focus of regard. 'Territoriality' and 'reterritorialization' of the relationship between people and places are discussed as tools to analyse the local perspective of forced migration in general and the strategies of internally displaced persons and their hosts in Sri Lanka in particular.     

Decolonizing cartography and ontological conflict: Counter-mapping in Colombia and “cartographies otherwise”

Discussions in decolonial literature have recently drawn on the concept of “ontological conflict” to reflect on the conflictual entanglements of diverse cosmologies. In Latin America (as elsewhere) these conflicts are frequently of a territorial nature, with indigenous and black communities making claims to communal land rights as indispensable part of their respective ways of being-in-the-world, which the post-colonial state has increasingly begun to acknowledge, often in the form of new political constitutions. In this article I examine the role of cartography in the resolution of such ontological conflicts; in particular a participatory mapping exercise in Colombia known as “social cartography,” which aims to challenge dominant cartographic representations and empowering local communities vis-à-vis the state. At the same time, I reflect on the limits of such an emancipatory vision and on the ways in which Colombia's version of counter-mapping has been coopted by dominant power. Inspired by the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality framework, I contextualize this experience within other radical mapping exercises, or “cartographies otherwise,” in places such as Australia, Palestine and the Straits of Gibraltar, to finally suggest that the art of decolonizing cartography may be seen as a tool of Hardt & Negri's project of a multitude in resistance.     

Time Ni Hota Hai: time poverty and food security in the Kumaon hills,India

This article investigates food and nutritional security (FNS) in a sub-Himalayan North India community, and argues that socio-spatial policies and practices naturalize a discourse that places women in a position where they are responsible for an inequitable share of both productive and reproductive labor. As a result, women are often unable to properly perform FNS practices. Paradoxically, insecurity increases when there is more agricultural labor and thus less time for food preparation, a notion itself that is productive of anxiety and further compounds poor FNS practices. NGO and government programs implicitly reinscribe these gendered labor burdens through exclusively targeting women, educating them to be ‘better’ housewives and mothers. While simple solutions and an educative approach were the dominant activities, these organizations also constitute the home as a delimiting social space for development and seek to empower women through livelihood diversification and employment activities. While these programs provide women new spaces with which to forge social relations and develop different sets of knowledge outside the home, without a renegotiation of household labor burdens, these novel commitments oftentimes exacerbate women’s existing workloads at home. This analysis suggests that while FNS programs and policies might sometimes lend short-term relief to FNS, the greatest threat to FNS comes from the ways that the home spaces of women and their household work are devalued through development practices. This results in a lack of gendered labor time to adequately prepare food, thereby contradicting the policies’ stated objectives of reducing food insecurity.     

Squatting Social Centres in a Sicilian City: Liberated Spaces and Urban Protest Actors

The Social Centres in Italy are simultaneously “liberated spaces”, empty and unused large buildings squatted by groups of radical left/antagonist activists to self‐manage social and countercultural activities, and “political contentious places”. They are indeed urban but not only local protest actors, denouncing the scarcity of spaces of sociability outside of commercial circuits, campaigning against market‐oriented urban renewal, property speculation, and on other anti‐capitalistic issues addressed outside the occupied spaces. The long history of Social Centres in Catania, the second largest city of Sicily, is reconstructed and explained through the choices and actions made by the squatters/activists, depending on their political‐ideological orientation, on the one hand; and by the opportunities and constraints of the specific political and socio‐spatial structure, which they had to face, on the other. The Social Centres, CPO Experia, CSOA Guernica, CSA Auro, and more recently CSO Liotru, are the main analysed empirical cases.     

Territories of Struggle: Social Centres in Northern Italy Opposing Mega‐Events

The article takes into consideration the spatialised action of self‐managed Social Centres in Northern Italy over the last 20 years. Considering Genoa, Turin and Milan, we outline the passage from the Fordist era to the post‐industrial cities reconversion, which gave the space—both physical and political—for the emergence of Social Centres. The changes that occurred in the three cities in the following years introduced new features in urban space configuration and organisation. In this frame, we focus on three case studies that serve the purpose of illustrating the role of Social Centres contesting unfair space transformations: Genoa's Expo Colombiane in 1992, Turin's Winter Olympic Games in 2006 and Milan's Expo in 2015. The opposition to these “mega‐events” allows us to analyse the changes related to the forms of conflict put into practice by urban social movements throughout time, and the learning process they underwent.     

Generating a voice among ‘media monsters’: hybrid media practices of Taiwan’s Anti-Media Monopoly Movement

This article assesses how social movement actors strategically use a hybrid mix of social and traditional media to organise political actions in an attempt to influence media and public agendas. Using the case study of the Anti-Media Monopoly Movement in Taiwan, it investigates how the activists’ use of social and mainstream media contributed towards their collective action and mediated visibility. We argue that the effectiveness of social media activism is augmented by the activists’ engagement in protest actions and tactics catering to news media logics. Through their hybrid media practices, the activists were able to mobilise local and overseas groups into forms of collective and connective action and amplify the impact of protests.     

Social class and wealth inequality in Italy over 20 years, 1993–2014

Italy is facing its worst economic crisis since the Second World War. As many studies have already shown, the crisis is affecting the country’s social class structure, thus accentuating several inequality tendencies. In this connection, the empirical purposes of this article are twofold: (1) to analyze whether accumulation and inequality in wealth are growing or declining in absolute terms; and (2) to investigate the relationship between social class and wealth inequality. To this end, we adopt a longitudinal approach – that is, we take the 1993–2014 period into account – by using data from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth. Our findings suggest that overall net worth has trended down in the years following the beginning of the crisis, and that inequality in wealth has basically been increasing during the 20-year period, with a decline from 2012. However, there has been no persistent social splitting process in wealth distribution by social class. Rather, there is a high (and increasing) level of domestic differentiation in terms of household wealth by class, mainly within the lower class and self-employed middle class, which could put further stress on social cohesion standards and allow new forms of social vulnerability to emerge.     

Demolition of Chengzhongcun and social mobility of Migrant youth: a case study in Beijing

ABSTRACT

Since the late 1980s, millions of poor and low-income rural migrant workers migrating to Chinese metropolises with their children have congregated in chengzhongcun (villages in the city) for low-cost housing. Drawing on data from a 14-month participant observation in one chengzhongcun in Beijing, we critically explore the potential impact of urban expansion on social mobility of migrant youth. We argue that the uncertainty and chaos connected with looming demolition result in substandard schooling and business closures for migrant parents, leading to the stagnant mobility of migrant youth. Expanding the social hierarchy pyramids, we argue that eliminating chengzhongcun, a space that creates the possibility of climbing the social ladder, hampers the social mobility of migrant youth in the context of the rigid class structure in the late-socialist China. This research re-examines the goals of the demolition of chengzhongcun and advances our understanding by analyzing the prospects of disadvantaged migrant youth during and after the demolition process.