scholarly journals Moving Spaces: Mapping the Drama Room as Heterotopia

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Elsa Szatek

This article is aimed at exploring the political characteristics of the drama space, which reflects, juxtaposes, and opposes particular sites in a participant’s everyday life, such as the school. By putting spatial theories to work, this article investigates the drama space belonging to an all-girls community group in Sweden, participation in which is voluntary and where the artistic work produced relies on a democratic process, with the girls’ input being vital. I conceptualise the drama room as a heterotopia that functions as an exclusive and excluding space as a well as a space of resistance. Based on interviews with the girls, this ethnographic study challenges the conventional notion that applied drama is only an interrelational matter between the drama participants. By examining the drama room’s role as the ‘other place’ in the girls’ everyday lives while being connected to ‘everyday’ places, this article demonstrates the drama room as an important space for the girls to have agency, there and elsewhere. When placing space and place in the foreground, a ‘dramaspaceknowledge’ emerges, the influence of which stretches beyond the drama room. This article argues that the girls’ dramaspaceknowledge is utilised when creating a performance and while challenging structures and norms elsewhere, such as in their schools and communities.

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
Sarbani Sharma

While much has been said about the historicity of the Kashmir conflict or about how individuals and communities have resisted occupation and demanded the right to self-determination, much less has been said about nature of everyday life under these conditions. This article offers a glimpse of life in the working-class neighbourhood of Maisuma, located in the central area of the city of Srinagar, and its engagement with the political movement for azadi (freedom). I argue that the predicament of ‘double interminability’ characterises life in Maisuma—the interminable violence by the state on the one hand and simultaneously the constant call of labouring for azadi by the movement on the other, since the terms of peace are unacceptable.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Rastas

In the vast area of studies of racism children’s experiences have been overlooked. Questions of racism are often related to immigrants and their children, but in many European countries increasing numbers of children of mixed parentage, as well as children adopted from other continents, confront racism. My ethnographic study of racism in the everyday lives of Finnish children with “transnational roots” focuses on the experiences of transnational adoptees and those young Finnish citizens who have one Finnish-born parent, but whose Finnishness and right to belong is often questioned by others because of their parental ties to other countries and nations. This article explores the different manifestations of racism in their daily lives and concludes with a discussion of the importance of identifying those social and culturalfactors which make it especially difficult for children to talk about and deal with their experiences of racism.


2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-457
Author(s):  
Martina Böse ◽  
Brigitta Busch

This article explores the multi-accentuality of the sign ‘gastarbajteri’, used as title word in an exhibition on labour migration that took place in Vienna, Austria, in 2004. Based on an ethnographic study of the exhibition, it addresses a variety of readings of this word, both at the level of production and reception. The analysis of texts shows, firstly, the divergent rationales of the two agents who cooperated as exhibition producers, the minority NGO who wished to signal self-empowerment of migrants on the hand and the city museum who aimed at selling the exhibition to a mainstream audience on the other hand. Secondly, it juxtaposes them with the plurality of readings by its recipients, which range from the recognition of an appeal to migrants via the mis-reading as ‘guestworker’ and its upvaluation through to an insider-perspective based on the knowledge of the word’s connotations in the former Yugoslavia.


2021 ◽  
Vol 70 (4/2020) ◽  
pp. 205-225
Author(s):  
Sanja Lazarevic Radak

The literature that explores the representations of the Balkans is based on the assumption that the Balkans were constructed, imagined or invented. This claim is usually accompanied by the attempts to highlight the discrepancy between physical and imaginary geography and to point out the gap in semantics between the Balkan Peninsula and the Balkans. While the first one functions as physical geography, the other one refers to a place populated by representations, rather than people. Following the trend of linguistic and spatial turn, they hold the binary logic that insists upon the duality of the spatial. Some of the most important studies in this field can be read and interpreted as another in a series of texts about the Balkans. Thus, the aim of this paper is to: 1. Point out the places and passages where academic discourse on the Balkans separate physical and symbolic geography; 2. Highlight the political implications of this approach; 3. Suggest a geocritical aim that provides a sort of ballance between the material geography („real“) and imaginary spaces.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine Damir-Geilsdorf ◽  
Mira Menzfeld ◽  
Yasmina Hedider

Salafis’ everyday lives, social relations, and attitudes towards both Muslims and non-Muslims are often shaped implicitly or explicitly by the theological concept of al-wala’ wa-l-bara’ (“loyalty and disavowal”). It indicates whom to be loyal to on the one hand, and whom to disavow on the other hand—or from which persons, deeds, and practices one should distance oneself. However, within the highly heterogeneous spectrum of Salafi orientations, beliefs, and religious practices, interpretations of al-wala’ and al-bara’ differ as well as its actual relevance and its implications for concrete life situations. This article explores how Muslims in Germany who identify themselves with non-violent, so-called ‘purist Salafism’ perceive and practice social relations, social closeness, or separation in their everyday lives by drawing implicitly or explicitly on principles of loyalty and disavowal. Based on qualitative interviews and participant observations (data gathered between 2014 and 2018), we shed light on how individuals’ ideas of loyalty and disavowal intersect with issues of identity, belonging, inclusion, and exclusion. The article thus shows how local interpretations and implementations of a Salafi core concept are strongly interwoven with realities of everyday life.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136787792110554
Author(s):  
Afroditi-Maria Koulaxi

The article interrogates whether citizens’ (embodied) encounters with migrant populations (newcomers and settled) enable or hinder convivial reflexivity in a multicultural city of compounded crises. Convivial reflexivity refers to the embodied process of identity-making that is rooted in the context of everyday life and emerges at the juncture of embodied encounters with the Other and the intense mediation of migration that shapes citizens’ perceptions and practices. The article draws on a four-month intense ethnographic study in an Athenian neighbourhood and reveals how, even in a very tense environment of crises and intensified racism, everyday encounters in the city could mediate class solidarities and support the emergence of networked commons against national and racial hierarchies. The article aims to move beyond claims of conviviality as a natural outcome of urban encounters, and instead to reveal a convivial reflexivity that understands urban encounters as an assemblage of cognition, affect and embodiment.


2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 138-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Oettingen ◽  
Doris Mayer ◽  
Babette Brinkmann

Mental contrasting of a desired future with present reality leads to expectancy-dependent goal commitments, whereas focusing on the desired future only makes people commit to goals regardless of their high or low expectations for success. In the present brief intervention we randomly assigned middle-level managers (N = 52) to two conditions. Participants in one condition were taught to use mental contrasting regarding their everyday concerns, while participants in the other condition were taught to indulge. Two weeks later, participants in the mental-contrasting condition reported to have fared better in managing their time and decision making during everyday life than those in the indulging condition. By helping people to set expectancy-dependent goals, teaching the metacognitive strategy of mental contrasting can be a cost- and time-effective tool to help people manage the demands of their everyday life.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen

This article considers the politics and aesthetics of the colonial Bildungsroman by reading George Moore's often-overlooked novel A Drama in Muslin (1886). It argues that the colonial Bildungsroman does not simply register difference from the metropolitan novel of development or express tension between the core and periphery, as Jed Esty suggests, but rather can imagine a heterogeneous historical time that does not find its end in the nation-state. A Drama in Muslin combines naturalist and realist modes, and moves between Ireland and England to construct a form of untimely development that emphasises political processes (dissent, negotiation) rather than political forms (the state, the nation). Ultimately, the messy, discordant history represented in the novel shows the political potential of anachronism as it celebrates the untimeliness of everyday life.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ida Susilowati ◽  
Zahrotunnimah Zahrotunnimah ◽  
Nur Rohim Yunus

AbstractPresidential Election in 2019 has become the most interesting executive election throughout Indonesia's political history. People likely separated, either Jokowi’s or Prabowo’s stronghold. Then it can be assumed, when someone, not a Jokowi’s stronghold he or she certainly within Prabowo’s stronghold. The issue that was brought up in the presidential election campaign, sensitively related to religion, communist ideology, China’s employer, and any other issues. On the other side, politics identity also enlivened the presidential election’s campaign in 2019. Normative Yuridis method used in this research, which was supported by primary and secondary data sourced from either literature and social phenomenon sources as well. The research analysis concluded that political identity has become a part of the political campaign in Indonesia as well as in other countries. The differences came as the inevitability that should not be avoided but should be faced wisely. Finally, it must be distinguished between political identity with the politicization of identity clearly.Keywords. Identity Politics, 2019 Presidential Election


Author(s):  
Avi Max Spiegel

This chapter seeks to understand how Islamist movements have evolved over time, and, in the process, provide important background on the political and religious contexts of the movements in question. In particular, it shows that Islamist movements coevolve. Focusing on the histories of Morocco's two main Islamist movements—the Justice and Spirituality Organization, or Al Adl wal Ihsan (Al Adl) and the Party of Justice and Development (PJD)—it suggests that their evolutions can only be fully appreciated if they are relayed in unison. These movements mirror one another depending on the competitive context, sometimes reflecting, sometimes refracting, sometimes borrowing, sometimes adapting or even reorganizing in order to keep up with the other.


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