Creating Space for Protest and Possibility

Contention ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Rob Garbutt
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
40Th Anniversary ◽  
Sustainable Living ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Environmental Protest ◽  
Matters Of Concern ◽  
Productive Engagement

This article brings together the ideas of protest and counterculture in a productive engagement. If protest is understood as publicly bearing witness in opposition to something, then countercultures often do this as rejections of dominant cultures that are folded into everyday life in order to create spaces for possible futures. The countercultural experiments undertaken in the region around Nimbin, Australia, are an example of such space creation. Using interviews, presentations, and archival materials collected at a 2013 community conference marking the 40th anniversary of the 1973 Nimbin Aquarius Festival, I will explore these experiments in the context of countercultural protest. The Festival not only gathered together people under the banner of the counterculture, but provided a unique space for gathering around common matters of concern to create an ongoing countercultural community. This community continues to develop practical knowledge regarding sustainable living and innovations in grassroots environmental protest.

scholarly journals A pragmatic critique of the conception of everyday praxis within Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural sociology

2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 423-443
Author(s):  
Srdjan Prodanovic
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Computer Technology ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
Comparative Advantages

This paper tries to critically analyse Jeffrey Alexander?s cultural sociology. In the first part of the paper I will examine Alexander?s conception of hermeneutical structuralism which argues that conventional systemic sociology and richness of experience found in everyday praxis can be reconciled. In the next section I will provide a critique of this kind of approach to social theory and maintain that Alexander?s sociology is, in principle, reductionist regarding everyday life. In addition, I will also point out some of the comparative advantages that pragmatically oriented theory has in the attempt of integrating theoretical and practical knowledge. In the final section of the paper, I will try to illustrate some of the major shortcomings of Alexander?s sociology on the concrete example of advances in computer technology.

scholarly journals REVIEW: Bearing witness in 40 years of Greenpeace chronicles

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 232
Author(s):  
David Robie
Keyword(s):  
Marshall Islands ◽  
40Th Anniversary ◽  
Bearing Witness

Reviews of: Rainbow Warrior Mon Amour: Trente ans de photos aux côtés de Greenpeace, by Pierre Gleizes. Paris: Glenart, 2011, 379 pp. ISBN 978-2723484558; Warriors of the Rainbow: A chronicle of the Greenpeace movement from 1971 to 1979, by Robert Hunter [40th anniversary edition]. Perth: Greenpeace and Freemantle Press, 2011, 451pp. ISBN 978-1921888809.My dog-eared yellow-covered copy of the late Robert Hunter’s Warriors of the Rainbow still has pride of place among my bookshelves. It was inspirational in many respects before I embarked on Rainbow Warrior I’s journey to the Marshall Islands in May 1985 which led to the bombing in Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour two months later and my own book Eyes of Fire about that ill-fated humanitarian voyage, so very different from most Greenpeace campaigns.

scholarly journals Blue-Green Solutions and Everyday Ethicalities: Affordances and Matters of Concern in Augustenborg, Malmö

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 132-142
Author(s):  
Misagh Mottaghi ◽  
Mattias Kärrholm ◽  
Catharina Sternudd
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Green Infrastructure ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Free Text ◽  
Green Technologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Matters Of Concern ◽  
The Impact

This article aims to understand how the introduction of blue-green solutions affects ethical concerns and expectations of an urban environment. Blue-green solutions are complementary technical solutions, introduced into urban water management, in order to deal with the impact of urbanisation and climate change. These kinds of solutions establish new affordances that have an impact on everyday life in the urban environment. This article describes how blue-green solutions become part of urban settings and how they influence the inhabitant’s perceptions, desires and matters of care concerning these settings. The article examines the interplay between blue-green technologies and the social, material and cultural context in the Augustenborg district in Malmö, Sweden. The study is based on the analysis of free-text answers to a questionnaire aimed to collect information about the interaction between blue-green solutions and everyday life in public spaces. By exploring the inhabitants’ point of view, the article then seeks to recognise the meanings and thoughts entangled with place concerning different types of blue-green solutions. We summarise the main concerns raised by the inhabitants and discuss how the implementation of blue-green solutions relates to the transformation of everyday ethicalities and matters of concern relating to the neighbourhood. We conclude that blue-green infrastructure seems to come with a new kind of sensitivity, as well as with an intensification of concerns, in an existing urban environment. This has important social repercussions, which also makes it important to study the social role and implications of blue-green technologies further.

Motivating Healthcare Students in Using ICTs

2011 ◽  
pp. 99-104
Author(s):  
Boštjan Zvanut
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Practical Work ◽  
Work Efficiency ◽  
Healthcare Students ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Successful Integration

Motivating and teaching healthcare students to use information and communication technologies represent a challenge. For the successful integration of healthcare and technology, there must be an investment in the organization, but particularly in its people. Motivation and a lot of practical work are mandatory for teaching informatics in healthcare. A practical knowledge of informatics is an investment for healthcare students that can improve their quality of study, work efficiency, and everyday life. In this article, four examples of connecting healthcare jobs with informatics are presented. Connecting healthcare students’ work and everyday lives is an efficient way of motivating them to use information and communication technologies.

scholarly journals Sustainability through surveillance: ICT discourses in design documents

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 177-189
Author(s):  
Baki Cakici
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Development Projects ◽  
Wide Spread ◽  
Design And Development ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Sustainable Living ◽  
Design Documents

In this paper, I examine design documents from three different ICT design and development projects. I argue that they present intersecting visions of sustainability entailing the wide-spread use of ICT, describe the properties of users compatible with such ICT, and provide ways of judging the users. In the design documents, the inhabitants are made individually responsible for living sustainably, and surveillance is positioned as integral to this future with the help of ICT. Underlying the visions, I identify a translation process that captures the traces of the inhabitants' lives, classifies them according to different criteria of sustainable living, and returns them to the tapestry of everyday life to convince the users to behave differently. In the discourses of these documents, surveillance translates the traces, and the translations exert new pressures on existing power relations.

scholarly journals Sustainable Living in Finland: Combating Climate Change in Everyday Life

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arto Salonen ◽  
Jani Siirilä ◽  
Mikko Valtonen
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Sustainable Living

scholarly journals Risky Eating: Shanghai Families’ Strategies to Acquire Safe Food in Everyday Life

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 262-280
Author(s):  
Ingrid Fihl
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Health Risks ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Urban China ◽  
Moral Issue ◽  
Peace Of Mind ◽  
The Family ◽  
Food Market ◽  
Safe Food ◽  
Individual Strategies

Resourceful parents and grandparents in Shanghai go a long way in search of safe and healthy food for the children of their families. From an ethnographical perspective, this article delves into the risk of eating in everyday family life in urban China, and it investigates the complexity of navigating the urban food market and trusting advice from Internet sources, mommy groups, friends, and family members in order to avoid often incomprehensible health risks posed by polluted or chemically treated foods. It describes how family caregivers feel a moral obligation of doing their best to handle food risks in everyday life, and how they exchange practical knowledge in private networks. It argues that food risks are tackled with individual strategies aiming towards a feeling of peace of mind ( fangxin), and that buying, preparing, and eating safe food is a moral issue within the family.

Thriving in Academia: Understanding and Managing the Complexities of Faculty Work

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ketevan Mamiseishvili
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Education Research ◽  
Community Engagement ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Work Setting ◽  
Higher Education Research ◽  
Faculty Work ◽  
College And University ◽  
Teaching Research ◽  
University Settings

In this paper, I will illustrate the changing nature and complexity of faculty employment in college and university settings. I will use existing higher education research to describe changes in faculty demographics, the escalating demands placed on faculty in the work setting, and challenges that confront professors seeking tenure or administrative advancement. Boyer’s (1990) framework for bringing traditionally marginalized and neglected functions of teaching, service, and community engagement into scholarship is examined as a model for balancing not only teaching, research, and service, but also work with everyday life.

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