Pan‐Islamic ideals and national loyalties: Competing attachments amongst early Muslim activists in France

Islamist movements are often considered the epitomes of transnational movements; however, little is known about the concrete workings of their transnational ambitions. In investigating the evolution of Muslim activists in France from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, this article shows that their embrace of pan‐Islamic ideals initially conflicted with strong investment in (Arab) homeland politics. Later on, their engagement with a French Islam signalled less the emergence of a de‐territorialised, de‐culturalised Islamic identity than it did the assertion of new nationally bounded (French) attachments. Overall, the analysis sheds light on a stimulating puzzle regarding cosmopolitanism: the persistence of national forms of identification in movements that aspire to bypass national affiliations.     

Indigenous Youth and Decolonial Futures: Energy and Environmentalism among the Diné in the Navajo Nation and the Lepchas of Sikkim,India

In India and the United States, Lepcha and Diné youth are articulating decolonial futures that diverge from past aspirations. Rather than demanding big infrastructure such as dams or power plants, Indigenous youth forward decolonial visions that reimagine the landscape and energy technologies. In this article, we suggest that Lepcha and Diné activists are articulating a youthful decolonial futurity—a vision for the future where their generation and the ones to follow can flourish in their own territories and on their own terms. We propose youthful decolonial futurity as a prefigurative politics specific to Indigenous youth, who view their activism as integral to creating a future where their communities have more control over decision-making processes and their ancestral territories. What emerges is a consideration of the role of Indigenous youth in building a language and politics of decolonisation against the roles of power brokers, elites, and naysayers.     

When open data and data activism meet: An analysis of civic participation in Cape Town,South Africa

Municipal open data projects are motivated by a desire to democratize data access and knowledge production, strengthen transparency, and advance cities socially and economically. However, their effects and implications are insufficiently analyzed. This paper examines civic engagement in open data in Cape Town, South Africa, the continent's first municipal-level open data initiative. Findings reveal how local civil society organizations have been driving engagement with municipal open data as part of their recent turn towards technology and data-driven forms of public engagement and activism. This analysis highlights the important role of the “smart civil society organization”—occupying a position between the smart city and smart citizen—that is developing significant capacity to produce and share data about the city's informal settlements with stakeholders in government, the private sector, and wider society. Minimal engagement with or recognition of civil society efforts illustrates the limits to the city's philosophy of data openness, which is largely restricted to releasing selected government datasets to the public. The notion of “bi-directional open data” is developed here to characterize emerging possibilities for data openness between governments and the public. This may be particularly relevant for cities like Cape Town with a highly active, capable, and data-literate civil society.     

Environment and Cultural Heritage in China: Introduction

The transformation of the natural and built environment over the past three decades has left China with a legacy of environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity. The loss of cultural heritage, including cultural forms associated with the natural ecology, has been just as dramatic. The three studies in this special focus section of Asian Studies Review explore significant issues in environmental conservation, cultural heritage, and grassroots activism in urban and rural China, with an emphasis on the relationship between the natural environment, the transmission of traditional cultural forms, and localised forms of agency or activism. As discussed here, while China's discourse on these issues is strongly influenced by global norms, different regions of China are developing their own individual responses to environmental conservation, the protection of biodiversity, and the ongoing transmission of endangered cultural forms.     

Gay-riatrics: spatial politics and activism of gay seniors in Tel-Aviv’s gay community centre

This paper discusses aspects of spatial politics and activism at the municipal Gay Community Centre in Tel Aviv. It focuses on one marginal group within the LGBT community that is active in the centre – gay seniors. Drawing on theories of queer geography, queer gerontology and geographies of activism and social movements, the qualitative research reported here uses in-depth interviews and participant observations to demonstrate how these men construct the space for their activity both inside and outside the centre. On the one hand, this spatial politics shifts along a delicate axis between proximity to the municipality and community hegemony, looking ‘inside’ the community on the one hand. On the other, it subverts and challenges the existing communal order, looking ‘outside’ to the surrounding society. However, these two directions are not necessarily binary; rather, as the paper shows, they stand in a dialectic that holds them in tension. This tension is evident in the ways in which the group operates from within the core of the hegemony, creating a complex non-dichotomous reality that enables politics that acts within – and despite – the mainstream.     

‘Save our NHS’: activism,information-based expertise and the ‘new times’ of the 1980s

This article examines activism in defence of the National Health Service (NHS), which emerges in the 1960s to defend local hospitals from closure. From the mid-1980s, a new form of campaigning developed, which sought to protect the Service nationally. Tracing this campaigning illuminates, first, that small groups played a significant role in negotiating political change, and in contributing to cultural change which, in turn, has become politically powerful. Second, this demonstrates that the 1980s were ‘new times’ in welfare politics, as Thatcher’s changes fostered voluntary interest in information-led expertise, and a new vision of the NHS as a significant, much valued, national institution.     

Fast Activism: Resisting Mobile Policies

“Fast” urban policy is increasingly common as city leaders draw on globally mobile policy models to accelerate the policymaking process. Critics have responded with new types of “fast activism” strategies. Fast activists plan temporary and strategically timed campaigns, use relationally local messaging that jumps between global and local political critiques, and organise ideologically diverse coalitions to mobilise quickly against policy proposals. This was observed in protest campaigns against Olympic bids in Boston (USA) and Hamburg (Germany). Protesters successfully opposed mega‐event planning in both cities by combining all three tactics within a short period of time. The paper presents a comparative study of the Boston and Hamburg protests, drawing from qualitative fieldwork on the campaigns in both cities. The paper contributes by conceptualising an emerging mode of urban opposition, and by evaluating how this type of resistance changes local receptions of fast and mobile urban policy.     

Digital heritage research re-theorised: ontologies and epistemologies in a world of big data

ABSTRACT

This article provides the first theoretical treatment of the ontologies and epistemologies of digital heritage research at the time of the interconnected and social web, based on extensive empirical and analytical investigation. We draw on observations and concepts developed while conducting the first study of public experiences of the past that utilised big data – over 1.4 million Facebook posts, comments and replies – to revisit or generate new theory from the ground up. We expect that this will help scholars from a range of fields in the humanities, social and computing sciences who are interested in undertaking digital heritage research to understand the deeper implications of their work, the complexities and limitations of the knowledge they create, and its value in exposing the processes via which heritage is made and assessed.     

Second world war as a trigger for transcultural changes among Sámi people in Finland

One of the characteristics of the cultural landscape of Svalbard is the abundance of remnants of Russian hunting stations, in the form of house ruins, graves, and large erected crosses. These are traces from Russian Pomors from the areas along the White Sea, who were hunting here over a long period of time - a period which the author will make an attempt to delimit in this article. It is known that the last Russian hunting expeditions to Svalbard were equipped from Archangel in 1851-1852. Far more controversial is the issue of the actual start of hunting by Pomors in Svalbard. This issue has been hotly debated among historians and archaeologists ever since the end of the nineteenth century.     

Anthropology at the End of the World

At this critical juncture in human history, when technological, political, demographic, and climatological forces promise to reshape the world in fundamental ways, anthropology stands in a uniquely privileged position to understand and perhaps cope with these forces and the resulting changes. By virtue of three key features—holism, scalability, and a tradition of political engagement—anthropology has an important role to play in the 21st century.