Disability Consciousness on the Frontlines of Urban Struggle

Drug wars, austerity and gentrification are interwoven social relations in many North American urban centres and are typically met with organising of varying degrees of militancy. Loïc Wacquant characterises many of these sites as highly stigmatised, associated with violence and pathology. In Toronto's downtown east end (DEE), one such stigmatised urban space, disabled activists are far from unfortunate casualties. They tend to refer to the DEE as an “urban battleground”, where disabled people politicise and challenge the DEE's pathology and stigma by linking into emerging radical disability politics across the global North and by developing localised revolutionary disability consciousness. Drawing on oral stories, zines and blogs of disabled activists and workers in Toronto's DEE, this article uses Rachel Gorman's dialectic of disability/disablement to analyse the emergence of revolutionary disability consciousness and the centrality of disabled people on the frontlines of anti‐gentrification and harm reduction organising in Toronto's DEE.     

OBJECTS OF HISTORY: THE PAST MATERIALIZED1

What is the role of material culture in understanding the past? This review essay explores two principal approaches—the history of museums and antiquities and environmental history—to reflect on their shared investment in historical materialism. It reviews Timothy LeCain's The Matter of History and Peter Miller's History and Its Objects, discussing their perspectives on objects and the writing of history. One important part of this history concerns the relationship of academic historians to the idea of a history museum, curatorial practices, and public history. What kinds of history can we do in a museum, with things, that might not occur without the presence of objects? Why were nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to encourage a close relationship between historical research and the history museum largely abandoned in favor of a document-driven approach? The second dimension of current interest in historical materialism concerns new approaches to environmental history. It draws inspiration from Deep History as well as recent work in archaeology and STS (Science and Technology Studies) to argue for a more integrated history of humans and nature that demonstrates how things have made us. The history of successive efforts to remake the environment in different parts of the world and their consequences offers crucial object lessons in how humans have responded to nature's own creativity. Both approaches to historical materialism highlight the virtues of a more interdisciplinary approach to historical scholarship, in the museum or in the field, but most important, in our own sensibilities about what it means to think historically with artifacts and to treat them as compelling evidence of a shared history of humanity and nature.     

论新时代中国世界历史学话语体系的构建

世界历史学的话语体系蕴含在世界史的研究、编撰和教学之中,其实质是中国学者如何认识中国与世界的关系,如何界定人类历史的性质,如何阐明对人类社会发展演变的基本观点和判断,体现的是中国学者将世界历史理论化的途径,目的则在于实现自身的学术话语权。新的时代必然要求不断发展的话语体系,这就需要在唯物史观基本原理和新时代中国特色社会主义思想的指导下,梳理世界史话语体系建设的发展历程,进一步提炼世界史研究的核心概念、表述框架和阐述方式,彰显中国世界史研究和编撰的当代理论视角。从生产和交往两个基本概念进一步分析世界历史演化的内在动力,显然是其中一种可行的研究思路。通过生产和交往两种基本动力构建的分析框架,可以清楚地看到,中国特色社会主义建设事业不仅是中国历史连续性的自然体现,而且也是人类社会发展规律的具体表现。     

The Work‐Life Balance: Geographical Perspectives on Lifestyle,Leisure, Stuff and the FuturePresidential Address to the Institute of Australian Geographers’ Conference,Hobart, July 20081

The work‐life balance is a pressing social issue in Australia but one on which geographers have been relatively silent. Predictions of ‘a leisure society’ have not been fulfilled. Instead, work has come to dominate life in Australia and in many other advanced western societies. The reasons for this are explored. Materialism is at the heart of the work‐life imbalance. There is, however, evidence of a changing work ethic and the emergence of leisure‐orientated lifestyles, albeit with ‘leisure’ interpreted as ‘freedom to’ undertake gratifying activity rather than simply ‘freedom from’ obligatory commitments. Despite the supposed homogenising influence of globalisation and the internet, place will become increasingly important in a leisure‐orientated lifestyle‐led future.     

Contemporary Social Change as the Context for Geographical Enquiry: Towards a Reinvigoration of the Concept of Place

The nature of contemporary social change is explored by posing questions about the implications of neoliberalism, the character of leisure, the perils of materialism, and the shift from consumption to consumerism. Momentum is a powerful force in human affairs. Investigating its nature illustrates how the concept of equilibrium has been given undue emphasis in models of human behaviour. Momentum encourages ‘more of the same’ and is implicated in the way people fail to use leisure fully or effectively and in the way they subscribe to an emphasis on materialism and consumption as a path to happiness. Geography needs to engage with popular social scientific writing if it is to have a place in public intellectual debate. In many ways contemporary social change promises a reinvigoration of the concept of place and therefore challenges to both the substance and nature of geographical inquiry.     

正视·总结·继承·发展——2007年高教版《中国近现代史纲要》的理论特色

2007年高等教育出版社出版的《中国近现代史纲要》具有鲜明的文化发展意识、民族发展意识、史学批评意识、历史总结意识和自觉的会通意识等特点。该书的面世不仅有助于推动高校学生思想政治教育的深入和历史教育的进一步发展,而且还在一定意义上体现出当代中国马克思主义史学的理论意义和发展趋势,可以看作是中国马克思主义史学工作者进入21世纪后对中国近现代史的最新研究和解读。     

Potemkin Revolution: Utopian Jungle Cities of 21st Century Socialism

This paper explores the entanglement of ideology and materiality in the production of the spaces of 21^st century socialism. “Millennium Cities” are currently being constructed for indigenous communities throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon, with revenues derived from petroleum extracted within their territories. As iconic spatial symbols of the “Citizens’ Revolution”, the Millennium Cities would appear to embody “the original accumulation of 21^st century socialism”—a utopian state ideology promising the collective appropriation of natural resources without the dispossession of the peasantry. Drawing on extensive field research, we argue that they are better understood as a simulation of urban modernity that is symptomatic of the predominance of ground rent in South American capitalism, and which conceals the violent repression of an autonomous indigenous project of petroleum‐based modernization. The original accumulation of 21^st century socialism can therefore be interpreted as a “fantasy of origins”, which functions to reproduce the primitive accumulation of capital.     

Reception and use of intersectionality. A reading from French perspective

This text seeks to provide an overview of the concept of intersectionality as it was introduced and disseminated in French social and cultural geography. To understand this reception and use, I will recall the place occupied by each matrix of domination that constitutes intersectionality – gender, race and class. First it is important to remember that the notion of intersectionality has been introduced in a French academic context in which research on gender is still disputed. Second, it is worse in the case of race because it is a blind spot in French republican ideology (one nation, one people). Third, class has always had a central dimension in the analysis because of the weight of the Marxian heritage in the social sciences. The introduction of the notion of intersectionality thus marked a return of the class and materialist perspective in analysis. After this review of the context, I highlight to the work accomplished as intersectinalists outside the category of intersectionality and explain why the notion of intersectionality may be easier and better accepted in this light. I conclude with two examples of work on intersectionality.     

谈谈史学工作者的责任和素养

史学工作者应该有正确的立场、观点和良好的学术素养。首先,要尽到自己的历史责任,要关注现实提出的重大课题,服务于国家的长治久安,潜心研究,传承文明;其次,要坚持以马克思主义唯物史观为指导,实事求是,严谨务实,揭示历史的真相,正确地总结历史的经验和教训;再次是要“博学于文,行己有耻”,把做人、做学问、做事情结合起来。     

Bringing Metaphysics Back In?

Summary

Ian Hunter has made a name for himself as a critic of German university metaphysics, finding its progeny at work in places where many of us would not even think of looking, for example in the late twentieth-century celebration of theory in the humanities. Some of his recent work has focused on a rather different issue: the methodological task of making intellectual history empirical. Here he builds on Quentin Skinner's rationale for the Cambridge School's efforts to make the history of political thought more properly historical. Skinner's argument draws on the work of R. G. Collingwood, at least in its earlier versions, and on neo-Kantian tendencies in mid-twentieth century Oxford philosophy. Thus, in aligning his methodological programme with Skinner's argument, Hunter may risk bringing elements of university metaphysics back in another form.