Neotoponymy, Appropriation of Space and Youth Political Expression in Tokombéré, Northern Cameroon (1970–2011)

2021 ◽  
pp. 002190962110638
Author(s):  
Baskouda S.K. Shelley

Using the example of neotoponyms proliferation in Tokombéré (Northern Cameroon) between 1970 and 2011, this paper questions the banal tactics of naming places as a site of public patriarchy contestation. In fact, young people play a crucial role in reinventing local political power forms of interpellation, which enables them to symbolically reappropriate the space. This helps to establish their presence in the public sphere from which they have been side-lined by social elders. Even though it reflects a political expression, the fact remains that the attribution of toponyms does not really help to reverse their domination into social field.

2021 ◽  
pp. 0044118X2110408
Author(s):  
Ilaria Pitti ◽  
Yagmur Mengilli ◽  
Andreas Walther

Existing understandings of youth participation often imply clear distinctions from non-participation and thus boundaries between “recognized” and “non-recognized” practices of engagement. This article aims at questioning these boundaries. It analyzes young people’s practices in the public sphere that are characterized by both recognition as participation and misrecognition or stigmatization as deviant and it is suggested to conceptualize such practices as “liminal participation.” The concept of liminality has been developed to describe transitory situations “in-between”—between defined and recognized status positions—and seems helpful for better understanding the blurring boundaries of youth participation. Drawing on qualitative case studies conducted within a European research project, the analysis focuses on how young people whose practices evolve at the margins of the respective societies position themselves with regard to the challenges of liminality and on the potential of this for democratic innovation and change.


Noir Affect ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 197-221
Author(s):  
Pamela Thoma

This chapter explores a surprising shift that has occurred in postfeminist popular culture and more specifically “chick culture” in the wake of the global economic crisis. Chick noir forms itself in opposition to those two standbys of twenty-first-century U.S culture, chick lit and the chick flick. If these latter genres perform a humorous remodelling of romance as the “happy object” around which young women should orient self-making or self-improvement projects for the promise of a good life and future feelings of happiness, chick noir has emerged across popular culture to chronicle widespread economic hardship and social decline under neoliberalism. Chick noir narratives are driven by negative affect and deal in the dark side of relationships, domesticity, and the public sphere for women. The chapter takes Gone Girl as its focus. This chapter pays particular attention to ways in which both texts shine a light on modern surveillance culture to explore the textual production of empathy and coercion and the ways in which these texts imagine femininity as a site of surveillance. What emerges is a form of noir affect that dramatizes the absolute lack of a stable or noncontradictory space for the contemporary female subject.


2002 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 33-40
Author(s):  
Judith Bessant

Children and young people have too easily been subjected to state-sponsored mistreatment and neglect. One primary reason for the discriminatory and often hostile conduct directed at them by agencies ostensibly established to promote their welfare is that they have been ‘constructed’ as dangerous and ‘antisocial’, or as dependent, incompetent and naïve. A key aim of this article is to promote discussion about the significance of children's and young people's status as a key determinant of policies which routinely override their basic rights. The article argues that attention needs to be given to how child and youth policies can be developed more securely within a justice framework.I argue that, if we are serious about developing both just policies and ethical relationships with young people, we need to recognise the role played by dominant narratives about young people in shaping policies. Once this is achieved, attention can then be directed towards how those identities might be contested and reconstructed. I offer a number of suggestions for securing ethical treatment of young people which includes respecting them as fully-fledged human beings and citizens. I argue that challenging common-sense understandings of young people as dependent, not fully intellectually or morally competent, etc, can inform policies in ways that secure young people's entitlements as full citizens. In particular one way of challenging popular views about young people is to increase their involvement in the public sphere. The fact that most young people cannot currently claim rights for themselves directly is no reason for denying them. Indeed it is a good reason for securing mechanisms for monitoring those who have children in their care and to intervene to put those rights into effect. I also make a case for embedding young people's rights into an account of obligations that can be used to secure respectful and just conduct on the part of older people who have young people in their care.


PhaenEx ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 197
Author(s):  
Mark Kingwell

Political-theoretic discussions of the public sphere, common at least since Habermas as a site of both crisis and justification, are rarely if ever animated by a sense of public spaces as what phenomenology calls 'real places.' Indeed, the space/place distinction is an important lever of critique for the transcendental rationalism operative in many political theories, even when unavowed. At the same time, architectural theory, even when itself informed by a laudable marriage of concrete and abstract, often seems uninterested in pursuing the political consequences of the built environment. This paper outlines the beginning steps in a large research project that might be labelled 'the political phenomenology of the city.'


Author(s):  
Takiyah Nur Amin

This article argues that performance acts as a site where the power to extend, reaffirm, and complicate political ideas is enacted through embodied expression. The argument is supported by examining the ways in which the enduring legacy of negative stereotypes about black women’s femininity and sexuality circulate in the public sphere and how black women’s historical marginalization and dehumanization gave rise to a “politics of respectability” that continue to constrain and police black women’s bodies and voices, using both Michelle Obama (The First Lady) and Beyoncé as examples. In this chapter, contemporary performance is engaged at the location of popular dance on video.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 123-150
Author(s):  
Satoko Fujiwara

Abstract This article suggests a way for scholars of Japanese religion to contribute to the international discussion on “nones” or the “non-religious,” who have been characterized as “believing without belonging,” “belonging without believing,” “believing in belonging,” etc. by integrating three different discursive arenas: one on multiple secularities as a context-conscious reexamination of functional differentiation; one on Japanese modernization centered on the idea of ie (household)-mura (village community); and one on a recent Japanese obsession with tsunagari (relationships, connection) and shōnin (recognition). The article argues that Japanese non-religiousness in the 2010s is an updated, self-conscious version of “religion as human relationships,” which can be paraphrased as “practicing belonging.” Moreover, while the current “religion as human relationships” practiced among young people tends to be confined to the intimate sphere, its traditional version regulated the public sphere as well. It was this public sphere of “religion as human relationships” that came to appear secular, as opposed to World Religions as matters of personal choice, in the process of modernization, which included the adoption of the Western concepts of “religion” and “secular.” The article also suggests that a “relationships turn” has been taking place not only in nonreligious rituals and festivals but also in spiritual culture and institutionalized religion.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Awol Allo

AbstractNormative theories of law conceive the courtroom as a geometrically delineated, politically neutral, and linguistically transparent space designed for a fair and orderly administration of justice. The trial, the most legalistic of all legal acts, is widely regarded as a site of truth and justice elevated above and beyond the expediency of ideology and politics. These conceptions are further underpinned by certain normative understandings of sovereignty, the subject, and politics where sovereignty is conceived as self-instituting and self-limiting; the subject is understood as an autonomous and rational being capable of self-consciousness and self-representation; and politics is posited as the exercise of reason in the public sphere. In this article, I argue that such a normative conceptualization of the criminal trial and the courtroom not only ignores structures of power and privilege that produce inequalities but also forecloses possibilities for transformative judicial praxis. Drawing on the 1969–1970 trial of eight radical activists accused of conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the article argues for a performative re-conceptualization of sovereignty, the subject, and the law as indeterminate, unpredictable, and open-ended discursive formations. The article demonstrates how the accused, working with and against legal doctrines, norms, and discourses, rethought normative conceptions of sovereignty, law, and subjectivity as contingent power-knowledge constellations that are open, unpredictable, and un-closable.


Comunicar ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (55) ◽  
pp. 49-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Clua ◽  
Núria Ferran-Ferrer ◽  
Ludovic Terren

This paper aims to contribute to the study of the difficulties that young people face in accessing the public sphere as political actors. It looks at the Press coverage and the Twitter activity surrounding the restructuring process and the subsequent dissolution of the Spanish Youth Council (Consejo de la Juventud de España - CJE). A content analysis was carried out on the news published in 22 newspapers between 2012 and 2014, as well as on the use of Twitter within the framework of the “Salvemos el CJE” campaign during the same period of time. The main objective of the analysis has been to see the prominence of this issue on both the media and citizens’ agendas. In most newspapers, the measures taken by the government vis-á-vis the CJE were treated as punctual news of peripheral importance. The online campaign, mainly orchestrated by youth grassroots movements, raised the controversy on the biased nature and the political consequences of this plan. The core of the campaign addressed the representation of young people in public institutions. The results of the study suggest that the increased potential for visibility offered by social media is not always maximized and does not necessarily alter the prominence of an issue in the public sphere. Este artículo pretende contribuir al estudio de las dificultades que encuentran los jóvenes a la hora de acceder a la esfera pública como actores políticos. Concretamente, se centra la atención en la cobertura en prensa y la repercusión en Twitter de la información relativa al proceso de disolución del Consejo de la Juventud de España (CJE). El texto da cuenta del análisis de contenido realizado sobre las noticias aparecidas en 22 periódicos españoles entre los años 2012 y 2014, así como del análisis del posicionamiento en Twitter de la campaña «Salvemos el CJE» durante el mismo período de tiempo. El principal objetivo es ver cómo la cuestión de la disolución del CJE es planteada desde la agenda mediática y desde la agenda ciudadana. En la mayoría de periódicos analizados, las medidas tomadas por el gobierno respecto al CJE son tratadas como un hecho noticioso puntual y de baja repercusión. La campaña online ofrece un discurso gestado desde los movimientos juveniles de base y plantea abiertamente la controversia acerca del sesgo y las consecuencias políticas de esta medida. La campaña gira entorno a la representación de la juventud en las instituciones públicas. Los resultados del estudio muestran cómo las crecientes oportunidades de visibilización que ofrecen las redes sociales no siempre comportan un mejor posicionamiento de un tema en la esfera pública.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Rahmi Nur Fitri ◽  
Indah Rama Jayanti

Religious behavior nowadays has became a sector which has a lot of change. Modernity and globalization formed a society that was worried on their religious identity. This problem deliver to a new trend amongst young people and Indonesian celebrities. Campaigns of movement extensively spread on media social, self convertion to religious individuals also known as “seleb hijrah”. The massive movement of hijrah lead by various groups that caused alteration the meaning of it and increased activities of religion commodification. Society today has liberation to select literature of hijrah concept that are available in the media. Media extention facilitate spreading of the existence of seleb hijrah which eventually form new communities such as “Kajian MuSaWaRah”. Data obtain through social media, various video and articles discussing the same topic. This paper aims to scientifically explore and critically examine the phenomenon of seleb hijrah that have occurred among artists in recent years. Examine further the emergence of tendency of exclusivism in modern social circle. In addition, the article also explain the tendency of religious commodification in artists circle, in which called them selves with preacher. Nadirsyah Hosen said that hijrah activity amongst celebrities should not only be a popular trend to moving stage in seek of audiences. The majority of artists who are members of the group, innovate to maintain their existence in the public sphere. Keywords: hijrah, artist, exclusivism, identity  Abstrak Perilaku keagamaan masa kini telah menjadi bidang yang banyak mengalami perubahan. Modernitas dan globalisasi kemudian membentuk masyarakat yang terguncang akan identitas keagamaannya. Kekhawatiran ini kemudian menghasilkan tren baru di kalangan anak muda dan selebriti Indonesia. Kampanye gerakan untuk menjadi pribadi religius yang dilakoni para artis kemudian marak ditemukan di media sosial atau yang juga dikenal dengan seleb hijrah. Gerakan massif hijrah yang dilakukan oleh berbagai kalangan, menyebabkan terjadinya pergeseran makna hijrah serta meningkatnya aktivitas komodifikasi yang menjadikan agama sebagai obyeknya. Masyarakat dewasa ini bebas untuk memilih referensi hijrah dari sekian banyak sumber yang telah tersedia di media. Ekstensi media mempermudah penyebaran eksistensi artis hijrah yang akhirnya membentuk sebuah komunitas baru seperti Kajian MuSaWaRah. Data didapatkan melalui media sosial, berbagai video kajian serta artikel-artikel yang membahas topik yang sama. Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk menelusuri dan mengkritisi secara ilmiah fenomena seleb hijrah yang terjadi di kalangan artis beberapa tahun terakhir. Menelaah lebih jauh munculnya kecenderungan ekslusivisme kelompok sosial modern. Selain itu, artikel juga memaparkan terjadinya kecenderungan komodifikasi agama di dalam kelompok artis yang mulai mengidentifikasikan diri sebagai kelompok pendakwah. Mengutip tulisan Nadirsyah Hosen, aktivitas hijrah di kalangan artis seharusnya tidak hanya menjadi tren populer perpindahan panggung dalam mencari audiensi. Mayoritas artis yang tergabung ke dalam kelompok ini kemudian berinovasi untuk tetap mempertahankan eksistensi mereka di ranah publik. Kata kunci: hijrah, artis, eksklusivisme, identitas  


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