Transnational Spaces of Resistance

This chapter lays out the theoretical foundation of the book. It conceptualizes resistance as a space in-between small-scale mundane practices with a low level of collective organizing and large-scale protest activities which often exemplify resistance in social movement studies. In line with feminist and queer conceptualization of resistance, the authors suggest to examine multi-scalarity of resistant practices. The chapter attends to three scales of feminist and LGBTI+ activism in Russia, Turkey, and Scandinavia. The first scale analyzes activism in relation to the civil society-state-market triad. The second scale problematizes the notion of solidarity in relations between feminist and LGBTI+ activists from different geopolitical regions and countries as well as between small- and large-scale activist organizations and groups. Finally, the third scale focuses on individual resistant practices and the role of individual bodies in emergence of collective political struggles.

Social Work With Criminalized Women: Governance or Resistance in the Carceral State?

Drawing on findings from a Foucauldian-inspired critical discourse analysis, this article examines the hegemonic ways in which social work engages with criminalized women. Utilizing the analytic of governmentality, I explore the construction of criminalized women in contemporary social work discourse and ask how those constructions support and shape practice with criminalized women. Results show that knowledge production in social work serves as a significant site through which the profession draws on, but also resists, carceral logics. I begin by discussing contemporary social work as a form of neoliberal governance. Specifically, I illuminate the ways in which social work is implicated in surveillance and control and how this involvement is obscured under the framework of helping. I then describe how bold counter discourses, such as those offered by abolitionist and anti-carceral thought foster spaces of resistance within the profession. I argue that social work should claim a stance of radical imagination in which we take seriously the calls to abolish the varying manifestations of the carceral state.

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

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.

Memento Mori: COVID-19 and the Political Imaginary of Death

The paper contrasts two complementary ways of conceptualising death in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, notably death-in-the-plural, which involves death as an objective and collective phenomenon that occurs on the level of whole populations, and death-in-the-singular, which involves the ways in which individuals and communities deal ‘subjectively’ with death. It reconstructs how the sudden ‘breaking in’ of death as it occurs during a pandemic affects the ‘normally’ stratified political economy of life and opens up spaces of resistance on the basis of the ‘resilient cohabitation’ of those most exposed to death.

The culture of childhood in (and) spaces of resistance

Providing spaces for children’s culture becomes an issue when it conflicts with or threatens to reverse the notion of ‘legitimate’ culture. Here, legitimate culture refers to the dominant values of the official curriculum and teachers’ cultural values. This article, which stems from an ethnographically oriented pilot study, explores the experience of children’s and adults’ diverse beliefs, ideologies and cultures in an art classroom that is situated in a university facility. It demonstrates how children seek spaces for their culture. Only high official culture, the school culture, and parents’ and teachers’ culture are deemed appropriate, true and good. In the world of adults, children’s culture is often seen as immature, as something to be fixed and refined. Kline suggests that humour and play might be an independent form of children’s culture. What children find funny and humorous may not be funny, or even appropriate, to adults. Bakhtin’s carnival theory demonstrates how a medieval culture used dangerous jokes at the expense of authority. Although the carnival was a temporary festival, it was the means through which the peasants’ marketplace culture was communicated to the officials, and by which they were able to demonstrate resistance – following their own rules, methods and culture. The author employs Bakhtin’s theory to help see the carnival in an art classroom, as children resist the presence of a legitimized culture by continuing to create spaces for their own cultures of pleasure, parody and even the grotesque.

Explicit and implied significance of contemporary public spaces. Part 2: Alternative spaces

This paper is a continuation of deliberations on meaning (sense) of public spaces. It refers to unofficial spaces for informal activities, which could be called informal alternative spaces or maybe even a bit exaggeratedly “spaces-of-resistance”. Their extremely important features include absence of control and lack of rules, which distinguish them from other spaces. The paramount advantage visitors gain from these places is the ability to give the space a meaning of their own, thus changing the users’s position from that of a mere user into the user in possession. It also changes his/her relation to the space which ceases to be only a ‘closed object’. It is brought into use, as it is created and linked only for the time of the actor-user's (own) performance. The experimental character of the game leads to a reinterpretation of the meaning (or even necessity to change it) that the space has. Such an approach breaks with the patterns embedded in a collective imaginarium, which promote safe, comfortable behaviours – an unofficial, alternative space must be created each time from scratch, such space is a process. It is not treated as a product, it becomes space of commitment – it becomes political space, but as such, it is a challenge and thus it is interesting only for few people. By meeting each other and being with others we fulfill our basic psychological need, but simultaneously we enter into different roles in a social game in which our own “win” often counts above all. Our private satisfaction can also be valued by a sense of community, collaboration, having something in common, and this obviously can bring benefits to everyone. However, without a deeper thought practices that seek and provide best possible conditions for staying in space can lead to a certain inertia, which can turn into “algorithmization” in satisfying space users, specialized only in passive satisfaction of thoughtless users.