Progressive Urbanism in Small Towns: The Contingencies of Governing From the Left

The progressive potential of urban politics is the subject of growing interest. However, debates have been largely focused on large cities with strong progressive constituencies of activists and Left-voting residents. We know little about the opportunities and challenges for progressive politics in smaller urban areas. This article addresses these shortcomings through a discussion of “progressive urbanism” in relation to small towns. In doing so, it makes three main contributions. First, it provides a definition of progressive urbanism as political projects of social justice, citizenship and democracy exploring the contingent potential of “localism”, “urban movements” and “municipal government”. Second, the article provides empirical insights on small towns in the German state of Brandenburg governed by mayors of the Left Party. Third, the article outlines challenges and opportunities of progressive urbanism in small towns, providing points of reflection for future research.

Commodifying Tragedy

By focusing on the representation of violence against Native American women in Craig Johnson’s "The Cold Dish" and the television show "Longmire," this article demonstrates how these cultural productions perpetuate settler-colonial power relations. Although Longmire is one of the more progressive shows thanks to its development of Native American characters and storylines, the settler-colonial status quo is affirmed in four main ways. Not only do the novel and TV show redeploy the racist stock characters of the Magical Indian and the White Savior, but the TV show especially also reiterates a version of the stereotypical Vanishing American narrative inherited from the Western genre. Furthermore, both cultural productions heavily pathologize the Cheyenne community, depriving them of agency. Finally, the novel and show both transform pain, suffering, and grief into transferable commodities. This allows them to disinvest the pain and tragedy suffered by the Native American characters in order to reinvest this tragic potential in white characters, which serves to reinforce the white characters’ heroism. The commodification of tragic potential and emphasis on its sentimentalization help obscure the settler-colonial origins and systemic perpetuation of violence against Native American women. In sum, this analysis shows that the deeply ingrained and normalized settler-colonial ideology inherent to representational strategies limit the progressive potential of even the most benevolent and well-meaning white cultural productions.

Shared projects and symbiotic collaborations: Shenzhen and London in comparative conversation

This paper presents ‘shared projects’ and the ‘symbiotic’ relations they engender to capture accounts of state and society actors collaborating to turn individual constraints into collective opportunities for pursuing urban experiments which are institutionally-shaped but also institution-shaping. The concepts are developed through a sequential and recursive comparison – that is, a ‘comparative conversation’– between a case of urban village upgrading in Shenzhen and Community Land Trust Development in London. The paper uses a pragmatist approach to capitalist transformation as a starting point for comparison between these supposedly ‘incomparable’ cases. I build both heterogeneous and generalisable accounts of the pathways and progressive potential of collaborations on shared projects by recursively composing analytical proximities across the cases and their contexts of state entrepreneurialism and austerity localism. Theoretically, this paper contributes to scholarship which focuses on the contingency and complexity inherent in urban transformation. State and society actors are seen as potential collaborators working pragmatically to solve systemic problems without necessarily targeting wholesale systemic change. Methodologically, it contributes to ongoing attempts to demonstrate the positive relationship between experimental comparisons and conceptual innovation through staging a ‘comparative conversation’.

Recalibrating Human Rights-Based Approaches to Development: Are they Progressive and Transformational?

This paper argues that notwithstanding criticisms levelled against Human Rights-Based Approaches (HRBAs) to development, such approaches are progressive and transformational because they provide a framework of standards on which development should be grounded. Further, HRBAs provide an analytic and institutional resource for articulating a wide range of justice concerns in order to challenge power relations and structural impediments in development processes. The paper is not blind to other contributions which have focused on the progressive potential of HRBAs and the attention that has been given to the challenges and pitfalls of implementing such approaches. Therefore, the paper builds on existing literature to advance its main thesis that HRBAs, which flow from human rights that are the subject of binding international legal obligations, are progressive and transformational because they provide a human rights language that can be vernacularised at national and local levels when development interventions are properly contextualised. The paper concludes with the position that despite concerns raised against HRBAs, such approaches offer a principled approach to development that puts a human person at the centre. Thus, concerns against HRBAs do not necessarily erode or invalidate the legitimacy of the transformative and progressive nature of such approaches in development practice.

The Myth of Science as a Source of Progress

In the philosophy of science and technology, scientific progress has been usually considered in a logical-methodological way, namely, from the point of view of the capacity to solve problems, the theoretical and empirical success of a certain theory or scientific research program. These are the concepts of K. Popper, I. Lakatos, and L. Laudan. They are opposed by historical and sociological ap­proaches to the development of science by T. Kuhn, S. Toulmin, and P. Feyer­abend. The article proposes a variant of the second approach – socio-epistemo­logical and, in particular, value interpretation of scientific progress shifting the focus of the discourse on scientific progress to the world-view and ideological circumstances of the development of science not only as knowledge, but as a form of culture and social institution. There is a polemic with the thesis by A.L. Nikiforov about the dominant pragmatic need for science and the primacy of its applied results, as ifthe modern achievement of which science has al­legedly fulfilled as well as the purpose prescribed to it by F. Bacon, and even ex­hausted its progressive potential. Criticism of the position by A.L. Nikiforov is based on an alternative view on science, which follows from a different interpre­tation of the New Times scientific revolution and the purpose of science in gen­eral. Scientific progress is seen in the creation by science of a new image of the world, new ways of communication, new moral guidelines, the design of new ways of social order. Such a science does not fit into the narrow, logical-method­ological criteria of scientific rationality. However, it is precisely this culture-forming, socio-cultural function of science that allows us to talk about science as an enterprise that contributes to social progress and, if progressive, it is precisely because of this circumstance.

African Personhood, Humanism, and Critical Sankofaism: The Case of Male Suicide in Ghana

Suicide in Ghana is criminalised and those who survive suicide attempts are subject to significant social condemnation. Paradoxically, studies show that male suicide is often driven by individuals’ strong sense of responsibility to meet social norms and expectations around gender as well as the internalisation of societal views that death would be preferable to shame and disgrace. This contradiction prompts a critical re-examination of the communitarian tradition of African personhood which posits an intimate link between the individual attainment of socially affirmed roles and the status of personhood. Through an analysis of the Akan concept of critical sankofaism I suggest that African approaches to suicide may draw upon important adaptive, critical resources internal to African cultural values, thus highlighting the progressive potential of the African tradition. I show specifically how male gender norms and societal responses to suicide attempts distort core humanistic values at the heart of African communitarian personhood.

‘We’re not delivering government’s agenda’: The Community Organisers Programme in England

Community organising is expanding globally. One example is the Community Organisers Programme in England, initiated by the Cameron coalition government from 2011 to 2015. This qualitative study of the Community Organisers Programme juxtaposes critical theory regarding neoliberalism and state devolution with the experiences of fifteen subjects interviewed in 2014 and 2015. The three cohorts included (i) five recruited, salaried and trained community organisers, (ii) five administrative staff from key social service organisations and government and (iii) five external professionals including leading full-time community organisers and/or academic activists recognised in the overall field. The case study confirms expected outcomes regarding the existing theory on neoliberalism and state incorporation. Nevertheless, the interviews revealed both more nuance in relation to the existing theory and literature as well as some surprises in the Community Organisers Programme, which are potentially instructive for future community organising within and outside of social work. Two were (i) the relative absence of bureaucratic burden from the government and sense of autonomy felt by the community organisers and staff and (ii) the progressive potential of adding public funding of community organising to diversify and expand the funding mix in response to our extraordinarily challenging contemporary context.