scholarly journals Policing January 25: Protest, Tactics, and Territorial Control in Egypt’s 2011 Uprising

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitris Soudias
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Security Forces ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Territorial Control ◽  
Spaces Of Resistance ◽  
Space Production

On January 25th, 2011 thousands of protesters took to the streets of major cities in Egypt—referred to as the “day of wrath”—to express their grievances and frustration with the ruling regime, ultimately leading to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak after three decades in power. The street, as a socially constructed space of discontent, had become the central locus of political change. In this paper, I will tackle the question of how and why policing strategies in Cairo failed to contain protesters, eventually leading to the withdrawal of security forces on January 28th. I will analyze the interactions between security forces and protesters in protest events during the uprising, focusing on policing strategies, tactical repertoires, and spaces of resistance. Through this, I hope to offer a way of looking at the politics of territorialization and space production in protest, and by extension, the negotiation of power relations between authority and resistance actors.

scholarly journals Language and Revolution

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 5-37
Author(s):  
Ana Iriarte Díez
Keyword(s):  
Social Behavior ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Political Change ◽  
October Revolution ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Public Sphere

Speakers’ individual and collective identities are socially constructed through their linguistic and social behavior, and inevitably shaped by the socio-political and cultural situation of a region and its observers. It stands to reason, therefore, that significant changes in a community’s linguistic practices are often catalyzed by noteworthy socio-political developments within the same community. In this light, the present study aims to explore recent linguistic developments regarding speakers’ use of Arabic and their perception of its status in Lebanon in the midst of a time of profound social and political change: The October Revolution. The present study opens with an introduction that reviews Lebanon’s linguistic panorama before October 17th, 2019, and provides a brief synopsis of the succession of events now widely known as ‘The October Revolution’. The second section explains the study’s theoretical approach and the nature of the data. The third and last section focuses on how the events of the October Revolution have, at least temporarily, affected the use and status of Arabic in Lebanon and reshaped this language’s place in the public sphere.

Framing Nature: First Steps into the Wilderness for a Sociology of the Landscape

1993 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond Bell
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Landscape ◽  
The Media

We give a sociological reading of the landscape as a formation not primarily of the natural world but of the social. Landscape is best seen as a terrain on which socially constructed and historically determined significatory practices are at work shaping our perception of nature. Accordingly we must attend to the media forms and practices through which landscape has been represented if we are to understand the inter-textual nature of our experience of nature. We explore in particular sociological attempts to understand tourist representations of the landscape. We engage with Urry's postmodern analysis of picturesque tourism and argue that a more historically informed analysis is needed that links representations of landscape to power relations in colonised societies.

Letter-Writing as a Decolonial Feminist Praxis for Philosophical Writing

Hypatia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 410-423
Author(s):  
Diana María Acevedo-Zapata
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Philosophical Writing ◽  
Spaces Of Resistance ◽  
Writing Practice

AbstractAccording to Chandra Mohanty, there is no apolitical academy; academic and scholarly practices are in themselves political, insofar as they are inscribed in power and validation relations, which answer to and have effects upon the patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist structures to which they belong. In the case of philosophical writing, this means that the forms that regulate writing, that is, what determines how one must write in different contexts, are expressive of the power structures within philosophical academia. These power structures are upheld through time because of, among many other factors, the rendering invisible of the diversity of places of enunciation belonging to those who write and think in philosophy, and of the universalization of the privileges associated with said places of enunciation. In this article, I propose a way of writing letters that appeals to grammatical persons and their relation to the authors of the texts. Through this writing practice it is possible to make explicit the places of enunciation from which we write philosophy. This enables, first, making visible the privileges and oppressions of those writing philosophy; and second, generating small spaces of resistance and transformation of the oppressive power relations within the philosophical academy.

Legitimacy and Legitimization in Low Turnout Ballots

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Kirkland ◽  
Matthew Wood
Keyword(s):  
Current Literature ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Uk ◽  
New Research ◽  
Western Democracies

Declining voter turnout has been highlighted as problematic for a number of western democracies. However, in this article we argue that whether an election is seen as ‘legitimate’ or not depends crucially upon interpretations of the levels of turnout by elite actors. Through comparing two recent democratic ballots in the UK we demonstrate how elections with lower turnouts can come to be seen as holding more legitimacy than those with higher turnouts. The cases demonstrate, we argue, a distinction between actual legitimacy, defined as a binary concept, and the process of legitimization – a process through which the authority of an institution is discursively constructed and conferred. This suggests a new research agenda which extends beyond the current literature to focus upon how the legitimacy of a ballot is socially constructed in a broader context of unequal socioeconomic power relations.

The Russian Siloviki & Political Change

Daedalus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 146 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian D. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Political Change ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
Security Forces ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Will ◽  
Russian Military ◽  
The Stability

The siloviki – Russian security and military personnel – are a key part of Team Putin. They are not, however, a coherent group, and there are important organizational and factional cleavages among the siloviki. Compared with some security and military forces around the world, Russian military and security forces generally lack the attributes that would make them a proactive and cohesive actor in bringing about fundamental political change in Russia. In the face of potential revolutionary change, most Russian military and security bodies do not have the cohesion or the will to defend the regime with significant violence. Russian siloviki are a conservativeforce supportive of the status quo. Future efforts by the siloviki to maintain the stability of the existing political order are most likely to be reactive, divided, and behind the scenes.

scholarly journals Bakhtin’s Dialogism as a Discursive Means of Resistance against Manipulated Gendered Spaces in Margaret Atwood’s TheHandmaid’sTale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
SELT Djihad Afaf ◽  
Kaid fatiha BERRAHAL
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Physical Entity ◽  
Gendered Spaces ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
The Social ◽  
Oryx And Crake ◽  
Mental Space ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Space Production

At the peak of the spatial turn, space and gender have become critical notions that have a direct influence on the social construction of nations. In this vein, Lefebvre identifies space as a physical entity that has a mental representation. He affirms that the physical space is the outcome of a set of values and experiences that reproduce society. Nevertheless, the mental space results from the power relations embedded within the physical one. The manipulation of these spaces produces a gendered one in which women are considered inferiors. This paper investigates the interplay between gender and space production along with the power relations they entail. It examines how this manipulation stimulates resistance precisely through discourse in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003). The research is carried out on Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism as a theoretical frame, relying on a combination of analytical as well as descriptive methods. This article concludes that gendered spaces are being manipulated by religious doctrines as well as corrupt political structures that aim to relegate females to marginal spaces in favor of their male counterparts.

scholarly journals O “corpo-migrante” e Bourdieu: corpo e incorporação no contexto migratório / Bourdieu and the ‘migrant-body’: embodiment in the migratory context

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (19) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Alario Ennes
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
The Body ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social

O presente artigo tem como objetivo central a análise de algumas obras de Pierre Bourdieu tendo em vista sua contribuição para o desenvolvimento de uma agenda de pesquisa em torno da ideia do “corpo-migrante”. Esta agenda visa compreender como o corpo é socialmente produzido no contexto migratório e como isto resulta nas relações sociais e de poder das quais o imigrante é parte. O artigo foi elaborado com base em (re)leituras de obras de Bourdieu com foco na ideia de incorporação e corpo e a partir de um levantamento bibliográfico por meio do qual foram identificados alguns artigos que já fazem o diálogo entre conceitos bourdieusianos e a questão migratória, e outros que tratam do corpo no contexto migratório mas sem problematizá-lo teoricamente. Como resultado, sugiro que Bourdieu nos oferece elementos suficientes para apreender e compreender o “corpo-migrante” como resultado de relações de força e poder que geram a inserção, o posicionamento e o reposicionamento de imigrantes em campos específicos em que atuam. This article sets out to analyse a number of works by Pierre Bourdieu, focusing specifically on his contribution to the development of a research agenda surrounding the ‘migrant-body.’ This agenda aims to understand how the body is socially constructed in the context of migration, and how this results in the social and power relations in which the migrant becomes embedded. The article is based on (re)reading Bourdieu’s books with a focus on his ideas of embodiment and the body. Additionally, a review of the literature enabled two groups of articles to be identified, the first comprising texts that already develop a dialogue between Bourdieu’s concepts and the topic of immigration, while the second group studies the body in the migration context without problematizing the issue theoretically. In the conclusion, I suggest that Bourdieu offers us enough elements to understand the ‘migrant-body’ as an outcome of power and social relations that generate the insertion, positioning and re-positioning of migrants within the specific fields in which they act.

Political Change in the Middle East and North Africa

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
Political Change ◽  
National Level ◽  
Mena Region ◽  
Mena Countries ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
Broad Concept ◽  
The Arab Spring

The aim of the book is to closely study regime responses and the principal transformations that have occurred in the MENA countries and in the region overall as a result of the Arab Spring, with the purpose of assessing whether the nature of power and power relations has changed since 2011.Thus, this book analyses comparatively the consequences of the political changes that have taken place following the Arab Spring in MENA countries, not only at national level (within political regimes), but also at regional and international level (the MENA region and western policies towards MENA countries). The monograph opts for a horizontal comparative analysis by theme: parties and political groups, elections, constitutional frameworks, power relations, governance, civil society, rights and freedoms, regional powers, security issues and foreign policies. In order to complement this comparative analysis, this book also employs a typology to study change processes undertaken in specific countries in the MENA region: democratisation, autocratisation, political liberalisation, authoritarian progression and the breakdown of state authority. Thus, political change can and often does take different directions, not all of which necessarily have to lead to regime change. Transitions may occur from authoritarianism toward democracy, but may also give rise to a reconfiguration of authoritarianism. Authoritarian rulers can undertake political reforms without democratic motivations. Thus, the broad concept of ‘political change’ is used in this monograph not only in the sense of provoking democratic developments, but also as an element in reshaping authoritarian regimes.

scholarly journals Social Innovation in the Undergraduate Architecture Studio

Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Krstikj
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Social Innovation ◽  
Architectural Education ◽  
Public Place ◽  
Teaching Mode ◽  
Educational Method ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Space Production

Social innovation has been gaining attention as an alternative method for defining socially constructed problems and their solutions in times of failure of more conventional methods. This study focused on the potential of undergraduate architecture students for social innovation in public space production. A novel collaborative educational method was proposed based on a conceptual framework of social extrapreneurs’ platforms of exploration, experimentation and execution, and problem-based learning. The method was designed for 90 h synchronous and 90 h asynchronous work, in a remote teaching mode. The benefit of the method was foreseen in improving the social processes of public space production, especially in areas with pronounced discrimination. Social innovation in planning is crucial for the capacity of imagining better futures in the context of a system’s evolutionary resilience and has the potential for democratization of public place design. Preliminary results show that the proposed method enables critical thinking, sets the base of action on social justice, and turns students into active agents of social change; thus, it provides an important contribution to the necessary, but still uncharted, paradigm shift in architectural education from an object- to people-driven design.

scholarly journals How to do (or not to do)… gender analysis in health systems research

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (8) ◽  
pp. 1069-1078 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Morgan ◽  
Asha George ◽  
Sarah Ssali ◽  
Kate Hawkins ◽  
Sassy Molyneux ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Systems ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Health Systems Research ◽  
Gender Analysis ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Systems Research ◽  
Data Collection And Analysis ◽  
Gender Power

Abstract Gender—the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for males, females and other genders—affects how people live, work and relate to each other at all levels, including in relation to the health system. Health systems research (HSR) aims to inform more strategic, effective and equitable health systems interventions, programs and policies; and the inclusion of gender analysis into HSR is a core part of that endeavour. We outline what gender analysis is and how gender analysis can be incorporated into HSR content, process and outcomes. Starting with HSR content, i.e. the substantive focus of HSR, we recommend exploring whether and how gender power relations affect females and males in health systems through the use of sex disaggregated data, gender frameworks and questions. Sex disaggregation flags female–male differences or similarities that warrant further analysis; and further analysis is guided by gender frameworks and questions to understand how gender power relations are constituted and negotiated in health systems. Critical aspects of understanding gender power relations include examining who has what (access to resources); who does what (the division of labour and everyday practices); how values are defined (social norms) and who decides (rules and decision-making). Secondly, we examine gender in HSR process by reflecting on how the research process itself is imbued with power relations. We focus on data collection and analysis by reviewing who participates as respondents; when data is collected and where; who is present; who collects data and who analyses data. Thirdly, we consider gender and HSR outcomes by considering who is empowered and disempowered as a result of HSR, including the extent to which HSR outcomes progressively transform gender power relations in health systems, or at least do not further exacerbate them.

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