scholarly journals Pedagogies of the Poor: Resisting Resilience in Eastern Europe and Beyond

2019 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 111-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Reid

This article illustrates the different ways in which the poor are being put to work, in defence of a global neoliberal order by global economic institutions concerned with constructing them as resilient subjects, as well as by opponents of neoliberalism concerned with galvanizing the revolutionary potentials of poor people. In spite of the apparent gulf between neoliberalism and its revolutionary opponents, the poor find themselves subject to remarkably similar strategies of construction by both proponents and opponents of neoliberalism today. This predicament of the poor is particularly vexed in Eastern Europe where strategies of resilience are fast developing, and critical legal theory has so far offered little resistance to this trend. Turning against this tide, this article considers how we might reimagine poverty and conceive its politics beyond and against clichéd images of the poor as resilient subjects. Through an analysis of the work of the Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, it argues for the necessity of images capable of conveying the intolerability of the conditions in which the poor continue to live, as well as the contingency of those conditions; images that serve as interventions on narratives which would reduce the poor to a life of mere resilience.

2019 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Rafał Mańko

Critical legal theory emerged in the United States in the 1970s, at a time when Central and Eastern Europe belonged to the Soviet bloc and was subject to the system of actually existing socialism. Therefore, the arrival of critical jurisprudence into the region was delayed. In Poland, the first texts on critical and postmodern legal theory began to appear at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. Lech Morawski’s monograph, characteristically entitled What Legal Scholarship Has to Gain from Postmodernism?, published in 2001, officially inaugurated a broader interest in postmodern legal theory. Adam Sulikowski has been the main representative of critical legal theory in Poland, developing a postmodern theory of constitutionalism. Other sub-fields of postmodern and critical legal theory, gradually developing in Central European jurisprudence, include such areas as law and literature, law and ideology, law and neocolonial theory, as well as feminist jurisprudence. There is a noticeably growing influence of critical sociology and critical discourse analysis which seem to be a promising paradigm for invigorating critical legal theory from an empirical perspective. The concept of “the political”, in the sense used by Chantal Mouffe, has been evoked to propose a “political theory of law” conceived as an analysis of the juridical phenomenon through the lens of the political. Recently, it has found its concrete applications in the political theory of judicial decision-making.


Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

While describing the peculiarities of cholera myths and riots from Asiatic Russia to Quebec, 1831–7, this chapter emphasizes the remarkable similarities across national and linguistic divides, oceans, and political regimes. The chapter argues first that this pan-regional mental landscape with the poor and marginal lashing out against elites and the medical profession cannot be explained by political events, regimes, or other causes particular to local settings. Secondly, these beliefs and struggles, instead of fading with successive waves of cholera, continued in places such as Russia, parts of Eastern Europe, Spain, and Italy. Moreover, their geographic scope and violence could increase, as with the total destruction of the industrial town of Hughesofka (today Donetsk) and riotous crowds reaching 10,000 in Astrakhan in 1892, murdering governors, counts, and physicians. As Fernand Braudel taught us long ago, pan-regional phenomena cannot be explained by local events.


2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Samson

The informal economy is typically understood as being outside the law. However, this article develops the concept ‘social uses of the law’ to interrogate how informal workers understand, engage and deploy the law, facilitating the development of more nuanced theorizations of both the informal economy and the law. The article explores how a legal victory over the Johannesburg Council by reclaimers of reusable and recyclable materials at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa shaped their subjectivities and became bound up in struggles between reclaimers at the dump. Engaging with critical legal theory, the author argues that in a social world where most people do not read, understand, or cite court rulings, the ‘social uses of the law’ can be of greater import than the actual judgement. This does not, however, render the state absent, as the assertion that the court sanctioned particular claims and rights is central to the reclaimers’ social uses of the law. Through the social uses of the law, these reclaimers force us to consider how and why the law, one of the cornerstones of state formation, cannot be separated from the informal ways it is understood and deployed. The article concludes by sketching a research agenda that can assist in developing a more relational understanding of the law and the informal economy.


2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 527-543
Author(s):  
Robert E. Rodes

But let the brother of low degree glory in his high estate: and the rich, in that he is made low.—James 1:9-10I am starting this paper after looking at the latest of a series of e-mails regarding people who cannot scrape up the security deposits required by the local gas company to turn their heat back on. They keep shivering in the corners of their bedrooms or burning their houses down with defective space heaters. The public agency that is supposed to relieve the poor refuses to pay security deposits, and the private charities that pay deposits are out of money. A bill that might improve matters has passed one House of the Legislature, and is about to die in a committee of the other House. I have a card on my desk from a former student I ran into the other day. She works in the field of utility regulation, and has promised to send me more e-mails on the subject. I also have a pile of student papers on whether a lawyer can encourage a client illegally in the country to marry her boyfriend in order not to be deported.What I am trying to do with all this material is exercise a preferential option for the poor. I am working at it in a large, comfortable chair in a large, comfortable office filled with large, comfortable books, and a large—but not so comfortable—collection of loose papers. At the end of the day, I will take some of the papers home with me to my large, comfortable, and well heated house.


2016 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Hunter ◽  
Robert Brill

A birth certificate is essential to exercising citizenship, yet vast numbers of poor people in developing countries have no official record of their existence. Few academic studies analyze the conditions under which governments come to document and certify births routinely, and those that do leave much to be explained, including why nontotalitarian governments at low to middle levels of economic development come to prioritize birth registration. This article draws attention to the impetus that welfare-building initiatives give to identity documentation. The empirical focus is on contemporary Latin America, where extensions in institutionalized social protection since the 1990s have increased the demand for and supply of birth registration, raising the life chances of the poor and building state infrastructure in the process. The authors' argument promises to have broader applicability as welfare states form in other developing regions.


Science ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 172 (3982) ◽  
pp. 458-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. Bazell
Keyword(s):  

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose R. Rodriguez

Formalism persists everywhere despite 100 years of critical legal theory. The reasons for that are sociological and political and include the persistence of the separation of powers idea as a central concept for the theory of law. In Brazil, this phenomenon manifests itself acutely for two supplementary reasons: (1) the lack of a real differentiation between academic research and professional lawyering and (2) the influence of neo-liberal economic thought.The persistence of formalism is a serious problem for Brazilian development since it naturalizes the existing institutions and their related power positions, creating an obstacle to any project of development that proposes something new. It blocks the development of a critical and reflexive knowledge on institutions, shortening institutional imagination to projects that could transform Brazilian reality.The main objective of this article is to develop a critique of formalism useful both as a general method to criticize formalism and as a tool to criticize its Brazilian manifestation. It will be argued here that the critique of formalism fails when it is only theoretical. An efficient critique must also grasp the ideas and the social relations responsible to reproduce formalism as a conceptual idea that informs social practices.To do that, this article will first propose a characterization of Brazilian formalism that does not fit in the Formalism X Instrumentalism dichotomy and is more adequate to grasp how law rationality works in countries from the Continental Law tradition. Afterwards, it will identify the power positions and the respective ideologies responsible to reproduce formalism in Brazil, giving criticism a sociological basis. Finally, it will show that only a positive view of what law should be will able to overcome formalism, both as a philosophical idea and as a social practice. In its final part, a sketch of such a view will be presented.


Edulib ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tine Silvana ◽  
Pawit M Yusup ◽  
Priyo Subekti

AbstractRural poverty can be understood as a social condition of a person, or a group of people who were associated with aspects of economic and non-economic aspects. Scientific aspects such as social, cultural, health, education, psychology, the environment, law, anthropology, and art, was often associated with poverty. Nevertheless, the notion of poor and rural poverty is, in general, is still viewed by researcher's perspective, rather than emic, ie see something from the perspective of the participant. This study took part of the effort to comprehensively understand the meaning of poor and poverty in the eyes of the poor, especially in rural areas, roomates point is on how to map view of rural poor people in hopes of interpreting experience of livelihood as poor in underlying survival living. By using a qualitative study approach, especially the tradition of phenomenology of Schutz, obtained a description of the results, that the meaning of poor and poverty, in phenomenology, containing context, such as: context ownership; contexts effort and trial and error; contexts powerlessness; contexts outside assistance; independence in the context of compulsion; contexts unattainable expectations; context of the struggle; context of limited access to information; contexts low curiosity; contexts simplicity needs; problems humiliation context; and context sensitivity in social communication.Keywords: Meaning poor, Poverty, Rural AbstrakKemiskinan di pedesaan dapat dipahami sebagai suatu kondisi sosial seseorang, atau sekelompok orang yang terkait dengan aspek-aspek ekonomi dan non-ekonomi. Aspek ilmiah seperti sosial, budaya, kesehatan, pendidikan, psikologi, lingkungan, hukum, antropologi, dan seni, yang sering dikaitkan dengan kemiskinan. Namun demikian, gagasan tentang kemiskinan dan pedesaan, secara umum, masih dilihat dari perspektif peneliti, bukan emik, yaitu melihat sesuatu dari perspektif partisipan. Penelitian ini mengambil bagian dari upaya untuk secara komprehensif memahami makna miskin dan kemiskinan di mata masyarakat miskin, terutama di daerah pedesaan, which titik adalah bagaimana memetakan pandangan masyarakat miskin pedesaan dengan harapan pengalaman yang menafsirkan mata pencaharian sebagai masyarakat miskin untuk bertahan hidup. Dengan menggunakan pendekatan studi kualitatif, khususnya tradisi fenomenologi Schutz, diperoleh gambaran hasil, bahwa makna miskin dan kemiskinan, dalam fenomenologi, mengandung konteks, seperti: kepemilikan konteks; Upaya konteks dan trial and error; Ketidakberdayaan konteks; konteks di luar bantuan; kemerdekaan dalam konteks paksaan; konteks harapan tercapai; konteks perjuangan; konteks terbatasnya akses terhadap informasi; konteks rasa ingin tahu yang rendah; kesederhanaan konteks kebutuhan; konteks masalah penghinaan; dan sensitivitas konteks komunikasi sosial.Kata Kunci : Makna kemiskinan, Kemiskinan, Desa


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 1316-1341
Author(s):  
Marc Tizoc Gonzalez ◽  
Saru Matambanadzo ◽  
Sheila I. Vélez Martínez

Abstract LatCrit theory is a relatively recent genre of critical “outsider jurisprudence” – a category of contemporary scholarship including critical legal studies, feminist legal theory, critical race theory, critical race feminism, Asian American legal scholarship and queer theory. This paper overviews LatCrit’s foundational propositions, key contributions, and ongoing efforts to cultivate new generations of ethical advocates who can systemically analyze the sociolegal conditions that engender injustice and intervene strategically to help create enduring sociolegal, and cultural, change. The paper organizes this conversation highlighting Latcrit’s theory, community and praxis.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 246-270
Author(s):  
Rusni Djafar ◽  
Umar Sune

This study aims to explain and analyze empowerment-based poverty alleviation programs through the activities of assistance, facilitation and promotion and determinant factors of success in empowerment-based poverty eradication in Pohuwato District. This research method using qualitative approach, descriptive type to get a complete picture of problem of resource development of apparatus. The results of the research show that the assistance activities through training, consultation and technical assistance, and similar activities have not been coordinated with other supporting programs, making it difficult for the facilitator task as a program facilitator. Empowering the poor through the provision of facilities, has not been able to improve the capacity of the community. The low capacity and quality of service of government apparatus from the local level to the rural level, so that the provision of facilities does not allow the involvement of the poor. A highly centralized bureaucratic system and a highly authoritarian political system that has been practiced for more than four decades in Indonesia, brings out the weaknesses of the bureaucratic character. Promotion activities in the context of empowering the poor as an activity aimed at developing responsive services, the reality has not been effective in helping facilitate the poor to access various development programs that are beneficial to improving the welfare of the poor by earning productive employment. Activities that require synergies of cooperation between institutions / organizations (Government, Private, NGOs), difficult to realize because the dominance of egoism interests of each stakeholders in addressing every village development program. It is recommended to optimize training, consultation and technical assistance activities, as well as similar activities coordinated with support programs. Provision of adequate supporting facilities that can empower the poor on an ongoing basis, and streamline promotion to develop responsive services that enable poor people to access programs.Need to pay attention to communication factor, resources, attitude, and bureaucracy structure,so asnot tohinder the smooth implementation of poverty eradication program based on empowerment society.


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