“Run and Hide When You See the Police”: Livelihood Diversification and the Politics of the Street Economy in Vietnam’s Northern Uplands

2018 ◽  
pp. 41-54
Author(s):  
Sarah Turner

This chapter explores the everyday negotiations required for ethnic minority street vendors working in Sapa, a tourist town in upland northern Vietnam, to eke out a livelihood in an especially prescribed environment. These individuals, mostly women, face a local political environment where access and institutional requirements shift on a near-daily basis due to the impulses of state officials, and where ethnicity is key to determining who gets to vend, where, and how. A focus on the micro-geographies and everyday politics of itinerant trade in this rapidly growing tourist site reveals specific relationships and negotiations regarding resource access, ethnicity, state authority, and livelihood strategies.

Author(s):  
Jon Schubert

The conclusion restates the main points of the book: Working through the emic understanding of contemporary Angolan society as a system that needs to be understood, mastered, and managed to successfully navigate daily life, this ethnography encompasses both the symbolic and material affects of power in people’s lives. By focusing on the relational, sensuous and reciprocal dimensions of power, this study seeks to understand the co-production of the political in a neo-authoritarian political environment like Angola. It argues that by paying detailed attention to the more subtle cultural processes and everyday politics of the ordinary in the system of contemporary Angola we can begin to understand how a regime like this one functions, and how political authority is re-negotiated on a daily basis.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mie Birk Haller ◽  
Randi Solhjell ◽  
Elsa Saarikkomäki ◽  
Torsten Kolind ◽  
Geoffrey Hunt ◽  
...  

As different social groups are directly and indirectly confronted with diverse forms of police practices, different sectors of the population accumulate different experiences and respond differently to the police. This study focuses on the everyday experiences of the police among ethnic minority young people in the Nordic countries. The data for the article are based on semi-structured interviews with 121 young people in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. In these interviews, many of the participants refer to experiences of “minor harassments” – police interactions characterized by low-level reciprocal intimidations and subtle provocations, exhibited in specific forms of body language, attitudes and a range of expressions to convey derogatory views. We argue that “minor harassments” can be viewed as a mode of conflictual communication which is inscribed in everyday involuntary interactions between the police and ethnic minority youth and which, over time, can develop an almost ritualized character. Consequently, minority youth are more likely to hold shared experiences that influence their perceptions of procedural justice, notions of legitimacy and the extent to which they comply with law enforcement representatives.


First Monday ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emiliano Treré

Drawing on interviews with social movements and organizations in Mexico and Spain, this paper sheds light on the dynamics of ‘backstage activism’ with a focus on WhatsApp. It illustrates how activists have integrated this app into their media ecologies to reinforce collective identity, cement internal solidarity and lower the pressure of protest. It shows that within WhatsApp groups, campaigners have countered the paranoia experienced in the frontstage of social media exchanging ironical material and intimate messages. It demonstrates that WhatsApp has been used as a robust organizational device and it is now firmly integrated into the mechanisms of organizations and movements. Its communicative affordances (speed, reliability, mobility, multimediality) in conjunction with the omnipresent smartphone are often emphasized. Nuancing characterizations that tend to either disregard its role or stress its negative side, this qualitative exploration foregrounds the banality of WhatsApp. This article unpacks the multiple roles of this app within the submerged practices of movements and organizations.


Author(s):  
Sophie Richter-Devroe

Chapter 3 deals with women’s less spectacular strategies of quotidian resistance and survival—ṣumūd, as they are often referred to in Palestine. Classic political analysis might consider the silent, ordinary acts that women practice on a daily basis uninteresting, or irrelevant for political change. But the fact that women’s everyday resistance is largely covert does not render it apolitical or without broader significance. The Israeli occupation and settler-colonial policies reach into and dominate the very fine grain of Palestinian everyday life; the everyday and the ordinary today has become a major site where politics is enacted. This chapter argues that women with their daily mundane struggles resist not only the physical occupation of their land and people, but they also the occupation of their mind.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document