scholarly journals Cities and the political imagination

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (6) ◽  
pp. 1097-1110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rivke Jaffe
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
Expressive Culture ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Social

How can we recognize the political in the city? How might urban scholars engage with forms of urban politics outside of established sites of research such as those associated with representative democracy or collective mobilizations? This article suggests that new perspectives on urban politics might be enabled through reinvigorated connections between the social sciences and humanities, and by combining long-term urban ethnography and cultural analysis. Reading forms of creative expression in relation to power struggles in and over urban space can direct our attention towards negotiations of authority and political belonging that are often overlooked within urban studies. The article explores the possibilities of such an approach by focusing on the idea of the political imagination as socially and materially embedded in urban landscapes. Expressive culture generates both analytical and normative frames, guiding everyday understandings of how urban power works, where and in whose hands it is concentrated, and whether we see this as just or unjust. Such frames can legitimize or delegitimize specific distributions of urban resources and risks, and can normalize or denaturalize specific structures of decision-making. Through a discussion of popular music and visual culture, the article considers how everyday practices both feed into, and are informed by, imaginations of urban rule and political belonging.

The Urban Problematic II

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 121-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Bishop ◽  
John W.P. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
Selection Of

This article provides a framework by way of introduction to the special section, ‘The Urban Problematic II’. It introduces a new selection of papers contributing to the continuing project of interrogating concepts, processes and practices associated with contemporary forms of urban life. The article focuses in particular on the problem of infrastructure in relation to questions of urban politics and especially remarks on the emergence of a kind of thinking in which the separation of notions of material infrastructure from those of the social or cultural sphere can no longer be usefully maintained. The essays in the section cumulatively address the issue of an emergent hybridity of urban elements: the virtual and the material, the social and the technical, the political and the instrumental, the vertical and the horizontal. The spectacle of contemporary political activism and dissent emerges in the transformation of social and urban space.

The Distribution of Emotions: Affective Politics of Emancipation

Hypatia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 580-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Bargetz
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social

Currently, affect and emotions are a widely discussed political topic. At least since the early 1990s, different disciplines—from the social sciences and humanities to science and technoscience—have increasingly engaged in studying and conceptualizing affect, emotion, feeling, and sensation, evoking yet another turn that is frequently framed as the “affective turn.” Within queer feminist affect theory, two positions have emerged: following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's well‐known critique, there are either more “paranoid” or more “reparative” approaches toward affect. Whereas the latter emphasize the potentialities of affect, the former argue that one should question the mere idea of affect as liberation and promise. Here, I suggest moving beyond a critique or celebration of affect by embracing the political ambivalence of affect. For this queer feminist theorizing of affective politics, I adapt Jacques Rancière's theory of the political and particularly his understanding of emancipation. Rancière takes emancipation into account without, however, uncritically endorsing or celebrating a politics of liberation. I draw on his famous idea of the “distribution of the sensible” and reframe it as the “distribution of emotions,” by which I develop a multilayered approach toward a nonidentitarian, nondichotomous, and emancipatory queer feminist theory of affective politics.

Events as Templates of Possibility: An Analytic Typology of Political Facts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mabel Berezin
Keyword(s):  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Emile Durkheim ◽  
Thick Description ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Spatial Axis

This article extends the concept of events to bring cultural analysis to bear on political explanation and privileges “thick description” and narrative as methodological tools. Drawing on the views of Emile Durkheim, it argues that events constitute “social facts”—phenomena with sufficient identity and coherence that the social collectivity recognizes them as discrete and important. The article first considers the tension between the political and the cultural using a metaphor from sports and biology that unites agency and nature. It then discusses the intersection of events and experience as an analytic category that incorporates the “counterfactual” turn in historical analysis by drawing on William Sewell’s sociological theory of events. It also argues for the existence of “political facts” and concludes by proposing an analytic typology of political facts based on the classification of events along a temporal or spatial axis.

Sociology’s encounter with the decolonial: The problematique of indigenous vs that of coloniality, extraversion and colonial modernity

2020 ◽  
pp. 001139212093114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sujata Patel
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Politics Of Difference ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Everyday Knowledge

How did the process of decolonization reframe the social sciences? This article maps the interventions made by theorists of and from the ex-colonial countries in reconceptualizing sociology both as practice and as an episteme. It argues that there are geographically varied and intellectually diverse decolonial approaches being formulated using sociological theory to critique the universals propounded by the traditions of western sociology/social sciences; that these diverse knowledges are connected through colonial and global circuits and that these create knowledge geographies; that collectively these diverse intellectual positions argue that sociology/social sciences are constituted in and within the politics of ‘difference’ organized within colonial, nationalist and global geopolitics; that this ‘difference’ is being reproduced in everyday knowledge practices and is being structured through the political economy of knowledge; and that the destabilization of this power structure and democratization of this knowledge is possible only when there is a fulsome interrogation of this political economy, and its everyday practices of knowledge production within universities and research institutes. It argues that this critique needs to be buffered by the constitution of alternate networks of circulation of this knowledge.

Gender, Class, and Space

1988 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
G Pratt ◽  
S Hanson
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Social Geography ◽  
Metropolitan Statistical Area ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Social Area

The social area analyses and factorial ecologies of the 1950s and 1960s have constrained the way in which scholars conceptualize urban space; in particular, one can trace contemporary arguments regarding the social reproduction of class to the notion of homogeneous neighborhoods that emerges from social area analyses and factorial ecology. It is argued that the growth in female labor-force participation, the fact of occupational sex segregation, and other recent demographic trends have important implications for the social geography of the North American city. With 1980 Census data from the Worcester, MA Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, the impact of the gender division of labor on urban social space is described; in particular it is shown that occupational segregation is an important source of intraneighborhood class heterogeneity. The final section of the paper is an exploration of the implications of the findings for theories of social reproduction and for class-based urban politics.

scholarly journals The Islamic Fundamentalist's Politics of Dissents and the Emergence of Urban Citizenship in Yogyakarta

PCD Journal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Dana Hasibuan ◽  
Rizky Alif Alvian
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Local Identities ◽  
Political Myth ◽  
Global Terrorism

This study seeks to add to the ongoing debate regarding the state of multiculturalism within Indonesia political landscape. Using Yogyakarta as an exemplary case, this study suggests that the so called radical groups’ political practices should be situated within the spatial formation of urban politics. This will shed new horizon on the political myth which has been redressing violence as values or belief-driven reproduced by certain groups and gradually expanding it as mode of political engagement. Representing space as a political register which is discursively constituted by three dominant discourses; local identities, multiculturalism, and lastly global terrorism. This study argues that Yogyakarta citizens are subjected to the interplay between these three forces which composed the urban space of Yogyakarta as a local, national and global entity. Within this context, the expression of radical groups should be viewed as politics of dissent which target to alter and appropriate the three spatial conjunctures which characterized Yogyakarta. This shows that the articulation of dissent and discontent are effective political forms to engage with the notion of urban citizenship.

Squatters and migrants in Madrid: Interactions, contexts and cycles

Urban Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (11) ◽  
pp. 2472-2489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Angel Martínez López
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mutual Relationship ◽  
Police Harassment ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
City Space ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
The City

Squatters and migrants use the city space in a peculiar and anomalous manner. Their contributions to the social and political production of urban space are not usually considered crucial. Furthermore, their mutual relationship is under-researched. In this paper I investigate the participation of migrants in the squatting of abandoned buildings. This may entail autonomous forms of occupation but also various kinds of interactions with native squatters. By looking historically at the city of Madrid I distinguish four major forms of interactions. I collect evidence in order to show that deprivation-based squatting is not necessarily the prevailing type. The forms of ‘empowerment’ and ‘engagement’ were increasingly developed while ‘autonomy’ and ‘solidarity’ were continuously present. These variations occurred because of specific drivers within the cycles of movements’ protests and other social and political contexts which facilitated the cooperation between squatters and migrants, although language barriers, discrimination in the housing market and police harassment constrained them too. Therefore, I argue first that two key social organisations triggered the interactions in different protest cycles. Second, I show how, in spite of the over-representation of Latin American migrants, the political squatting movement in Madrid has consistently incorporated groups of migrants and their struggles in accordance with anti-fascist, anti-racist and anti-xenophobic claims and practices. The analysis also provides a nuanced understanding about the ‘political’ implications of squatting when migrants are involved.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael N. Barnett
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Communities

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book immerses itself in the history of American Jews and traces how the American experience shaped the identity of American Jews; how this identity is intertwined with the political theology of Prophetic Judaism; how the political theology accounts for an outward orientation that is more cosmopolitan than tribal; and how this foreign policy orientation shaped American Jews' responses to the Jewish Problem and the Jewish Question. As a work of history, this book is deeply informed by the historical record and draws from memoirs, archives, secondary research, and interviews. As a work of interpretation it is informed by what the social sciences and humanities tell us about the relationships between various kinds of political communities and their relations with others.

Ruins in Pre-Columbian Maya Urban Landscapes

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina T. Halperin
Keyword(s):  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Common People ◽  
Structural Pattern ◽  
North Central ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Terminal Classic ◽  
The North ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Social

There is a growing recognition that ancient cultures actively reworked their own pasts (and thus their futures) by reusing and modifying relics and ruined buildings. In the Maya area, architectural ruins of the Pre-Columbian past are often considered as isolated from major centres or as subsumed by new architectural constructions. In contrast, this article examines recent survey and excavations from the North-central sector of Tayasal, Guatemala, where I document the ways in which common peoples from a Terminal Classic (c. ad 800–900/950) neighbourhood lived amongst the ruins of a Late Preclassic monumental past (c. 300 bc–ad 300). Conceptions of such ruins are explored through both (1) a long-term, structural pattern of temple-pyramids seen as metaphors of mountains, and (2) the lens of everyday practices, in which the social lives of common people and ruins become entangled through quotidian activities. Taken together, the article highlights the dynamism of enduring structural patterns. These patterns both challenge dualistic divides of wilderness and urban settings and reveal ancient Maya urban landscapes as places of mixed temporalities.

scholarly journals No Safe Space: Zombie Film Tropes during the COVID-19 Pandemic

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-258
Author(s):  
Lúcio Reis Filho
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Safe Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Government ◽  
Mainstream Culture

As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, reports on the crisis evoke many tropes of horror cinema, reinforcing the role of pandemics in apocalyptic imagination. More tied to the zombie film subgenre, horror tropes re-emerge daily in the news and mainstream culture: the unexplainable disease, the silence or denial of the authorities, the political disarticulation, the buzz of the media, the government conspiracy, the collapse of the social order, and the big cities as vast, ruined spaces. Considering the profound changes in urban landscapes, the analogy I intend to establish with a specific horror subgenre highlights the stigma of the infected, the quarantine as a social and cultural experience, and the segregation inherent in it.

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