The art of nationalism: Artists' perspectives on the Latvian Centenary film programme

In the aftermath of several decades of neoliberalism in Eastern Europe, the social fabric of post-socialist societies is frayed. In this context, nationalist cultural policies and everyday displays of national belonging have emerged as key instruments of social solidarity. There has recently been a drive of state initiatives in Latvia in the field of cultural policy aimed at strengthening national identity. In this paper, we focus our attention on one particular cultural policy initiative, Latvian Films for Latvian Centenary. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 16 film directors who participated in the Centenary film programme, the paper explores how artists and cultural operators involved in this programme are mobilised as national(ist) subjects and how they see their work within such a framework. We argue that nationalist cultural policy can be successfully implemented because the artists, themselves formed as responsible political and moral subjects in the tradition of Latvian cultural nationalism, share a regard for culture and the arts as a resource for sustaining the political statehood and the national community. However, the artists also recognise the limitations of their work as a source of social cohesion and solidarity in a society that is ethnically divided.     

A Postcolonial Critique of Community Energy: Searching for Community as Solidarity in India and Scotland

Community renewable energy (CRE) represents a growing empirical and academic turn towards community‐based sustainability and climate change interventions. This paper brings together postcolonial theory and CRE for the first time to outline fundamental tensions in the conceptualisation and application of the idea of community. The understanding of community within the CRE discourse is largely: (1) location‐based; and/or (2) a community of choice that is consciously opted into. Driven by postcolonial theory, this paper counterpoises both as a form of community as contract against an idea of community as solidarity. Its central thesis is that actually existing community, contrary to how the bulk of CRE literature commonly understands it, is a combination of bonds of solidarity and emergent purposes. The paper conceptualises community as fluid bonds of solidarity that align and realign differently around different purposes.     

Navigating the Fault Lines: Race and Class in Philadelphia's Solidarity Economy

In debates over post‐capitalist politics, growing attention has been paid to the solidarity economy (SE), a framework that draws together diverse practices ranging from co‐ops to community gardens. Despite proponents’ commitment to inclusion, racial and class divides suffuse the SE movement. Using qualitative fieldwork and an original SE dataset, this article examines the geospatial composition of the SE within the segregated geography of Philadelphia. We find that though the SE as a whole is widely distributed across the city, it is, with the exception of community gardens, largely absent from poor neighborhoods of color. We also identify SE clusters in racially and economically diverse border areas rather than in predominantly affluent White neighborhoods. Such findings complicate claims about the SE's emancipatory potential and underscore the need for its realignment towards people of color and the poor. We conclude with examples of how the SE might more fully address racial injustice.     

Building More Inclusive Solidarities for Socio‐Environmental Change: Lessons in Resistance from Southern Appalachia

It is increasingly recognized that socio‐environmental justice will not be achieved through liberal and cosmopolitical forms of activism alone. Instead, more diverse and inclusive solidarities must be achieved across political ideologies for transformative change. By engaging with one constituency often overlooked by mainstream environmentalists—rural, conservative Americans—we argue for a situated solidarity that can be forged among people whose views of nature, community, and politics differ significantly. This framework rejects totalizing expressions of global ambition that erase important place‐based differences. To explore this ethic, we examine a localized anti‐fracking campaign in western North Carolina to determine how place‐based forms of environmental resistance can be brought in closer connection with the cosmopolitical movement for climate and energy justice. This requires that cosmopolitical movements make room for more customary forms of cultural politics, while conservative movements look beyond their own place‐based struggles to resist mutually experienced forms of oppression.     

“It was amazing to see our projects come to life!” Developing affective learning during geography fieldwork through tropophilia

This research, conducted with groups of undergraduate students before and after a European fieldwork exercise, critically examines the pedagogic value of fieldwork and its ability to provide students with transferable skills. This is achieved using Anderson and Erskine’s lens of tropophilia – the aesthetic connection between people and place – to explore the influence of “being” in the field upon affective learning. In doing so, this research suggests (1) that encouraging students to recognize how their own affective skills may influence the types of knowledge(s) that are produced on fieldtrips and (2) that people-place connections have the ability to inspire students to become more self-reflexive about their position(s) as learners.     

Labour Relations and the Transfer of Knowledge in Industrial Clusters: Why do Skilled Workers Share Knowledge with Colleagues in Other Firms?

Industrial clusters are held to offer competitive advantages to firms that accrue from the transfer of tacit knowledge between skilled workers co-located in spatially bound regions. This paper argues that informal knowledge transfers between skilled employees working in spatially bounded industrial clusters might have an association with the labour relationship between employers and employees. In the literature on industrial clusters general knowledge is readily traded through codified texts and collegial networks but high value, tacit knowledge transfers occur less frequently but are critical to the success of firms located in clusters. Tacit knowledge transfers are held to occur when workers move to other firms because of firm death or poaching but less frequently through contacts between colleagues from other firms. Industrial clusters are said to offer labour market advantages for skilled workers in the form of ample job opportunities and rising wages, which engender firm loyalty and discourage the transfer of tacit knowledge of competitive value to other firms. However, the limited empirical evidence available on actual working conditions for skilled workers in regional industrial clusters indicates that this argument is contestable. Some evidence suggests that there are limited wage premiums accruing to the industrial districts, a limited role for geographic proximity, and weak localised returns on seniority and education. We argue that in such circumstances high value knowledge between workers in different firms might be traded as an act of epistemic solidarity or sociability that disregards the interests of employer organisations. Such actions might vary by region and country in relation to the prevailing system of labour relations. Australian labour relations are offered as a case in point.     

Globalization in Solidarity

Abstract

Globalization is an economic, social, cultural, and political phenomenon. Considering globalization as evil in itself or as a panacea for all the problems is not realistic. In general, globalization is welcomed by the elite and the corporate sector in India, whereas the poor are generally against it. Considering the impact of globalization on economic life, culture, and the environment in India, this article tries to see why globalization needs to integrate the values of justice and solidarity if it really wants to facilitate true human development.

In spite of the advancement in technology, communication and trade, inequalities, exploitation, and corruption have increased in a globalized world. Economy needs ethics to function correctly. Globalization has an inherent tendency to bring homogeneity in socio-cultural and religious life. Consequently, the indigenous cultures feel threatened. Only by respecting the uniqueness of cultures, globalization can strengthen cultures through healthy dialogue rooted in solidarity. Another important aspect of solidarity is solidarity with nature. To enhance real human development, globalization should safeguard ecology, discerning the needs of the present generation, as well as future generations.

Globalization is not first all about money, market, or competition, but about people and their interconnectedness. Economic prosperity, if it does not ensure justice to all, will not lead to long-lasting peace and development. Justice is rooted in love and solidarity with all.     

“And You Welcomed Me”

Abstract

In this article, I assess rival liberal and communitarian ethical perspectives underlying contemporary debates regarding migration policy in the US. I then propose a critical via media in a rights-based ethics of solidarity with migrants. I conclude by addressing the distinctive role played by citizens of faith in a religiously pluralist polity like our own, noting, in particular, the place (locus) of Christian belief in immigration policy.     

Affective atmospheres,urban geopolitics and conflict (de)escalation in Beirut

The article joins literature on urban geopolitics and on affective atmospheres to trace the intensities of feeling that propagate during escalation and de-escalation of urban conflict in Beirut. Based on two months of fieldwork in 2010 in the Lebanese capital, it considers the deadly clashes of May 2008 between government- and opposition-affiliated militias. Political decisions and deliberate interventions involving the urban built environment before and after the clashes, contributed to propagating affective atmospheres of (de)escalation, which in turn impacted on the residents’ practical and emotional responses to violence. The paper proposes an atmospheric urban geopolitics that moves away from techno-centric, disembodied approaches to urban conflict, and that instead takes seriously the lived experiences of urban (de)escalation.     

Mapping coexistence in Italy: Reshaping the cartographic feelings of the plural nation

Rarely considered from the perspective of ordinary citizens as opposed to institutional actors, national maps have been primarily deconstructed as abstract tools of power that express nationalist agendas. This paper offers an alternative examination of the map as a performative tool of national pluralism. In tune with the most recent conceptualizations of everyday forms of nationhood, I explore multiple creative auto-cartographies of Italy as experiential images for investigating the coexistence of several senses of nationhood and cultural diversity. To this end, I combine an inductive visual content analysis of nearly three hundred remappings of Italy, uploaded online by readers of a popular national newspaper, La Repubblica, with a visual semiotic reading of six samples. Here, the playful idea of remapping the nation becomes a catalyst to produce or resist a sense of belonging to the nation, while eliciting a wider spectrum of feelings with regard to internal and external perceived meaningful others. This paper concludes that the different ways in which ordinary people map the nation have to be taken seriously, as they show evidence that these readers absorb and decode, but also resist or challenge, different mainstream discourses regarding the idea of nationality, coexistence, and cultural diversity.