Reflections on an academic life

David Harvey traces his intellectual journey reflecting on what he calls “the central animating theme of his thinking” starting from his days as a positivist geographer and the publication of Explanation. Harvey clarifies that his transition from Explanations to Social Justice, which has often been touted as a radical-epistemological break in his work should actually be seen as a complimentary productive tension. In making this transition, Harvey decided to reject the scientific orthodoxy of positivist science and instead, use dialectics derived from Marx as alternative mode of scientific inquiry. Harvey narrates his Baltimore experience of combatting local racial discrimination as formative in his understandings of the motions of capital and dynamics of uneven development thus imbricating personal politics and Marx's theory of capitalism in his work ever after. Harvey also recalls how teaching of Capital furthered his exploration of the urban condition and accumulation of capital, ultimately leading to the concept of “spatial fix.” Conditions of Postmodernity contends Harvey, taught him the importance of gender and feminist perspective and Justice, Nature written under extreme physical, professional, intellectual duress was intended to bring the “metabolic relation to nature” at the forefront. Economic liberalism propelled Harvey to introspect on his many volumes on the global neoliberal conditions, which he argues is now imbricated with issues of identity and intersectionality involving Black Lives and Me too. Harvey concludes that his intellectual journey has been a preoccupation to understand “contradictory unity between social relations in constant transformation” through Marx's power of abstraction to imagine an “anti-capitalist” future.

What Made Milton?

This introductory chapter opens with a material reading of the John Milton that emerges from a publication produced early in his career, Humphrey Moseley’s 1645 Poems, arguing that Milton projected his authorial identity into the world alongside an ambitious stationer who likewise sought to fashion himself through the book trade. The authors consider the volume, its contents, author portrait and inscription, and relationship to Moseley’s contemporaneous publications as a case study that attests to ways in which Milton worked both with and against stationers in order to promote both his authorial status and his personal politics. The essays of Making Milton are then summarized as the editors set out the collection’s three main threads of argument: for the importance of the book trade and the ways in which Milton’s books were made available, read, and sold; Milton’s exceptionalism as an author who participated in the construction of his own profile as a writer; and the ways in which readers and other writers have contributed to shape Milton’s afterlives.

Antifascist Athletes? A Reappraisal of the 1936 Berlin Olympics

In Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl offered representations of idealized Aryan athletes and their democratic counterparts, including Jesse Owens. Her evocative images shaped historical memory and the historiography of the Berlin Games as either a German propaganda victory or a moment of athletic antifascist resistance. The notion of the Berlin Games populated with ‘democratic’ and ‘fascist’ athletes is largely ahistorical. Riefenstahl’s fascist/antifascist dyad prompted scholars to ask questions about appropriate athletic behaviors, but it also required them to elide contrary histories, including Owens’ own experiences of racial segregation in the United States. A more holistic view of the Games, that encompasses both the antifascist resistance to it and the ultimate decision of most athletes to attend, confounds any analysis that slips sportsmen and women into neat heuristic categories of fascist and antifascist and opens the door to the possibility of personal politics outside of the dyad of fascism/antifascism.

2019 Labour History Review Essay Prize Winner: Navigating Deindustrialization in 1970s Britain: The Closure of Bilston Steel Works and the Politics of Work, Place, and Belonging1

This article examines the impact of industrial decline on popular constructions of selfhood and place during the 1970s through a case study of the Bilston Steel Works in the West Midlands, which closed in May 1979. Following recent work exploring deindustrialization as a process of transformation, rather than simply a discreet event that is reacted to after the moment of closure, the article makes use of the contemporary accounts of local television and print media to uncover the immediacy of deindustrialization as a disruptive force. While studies of deindustrialization have long identified nostalgia as a characteristic, identity-defining trope of retrospective testimonies, the approach taken in this article suggests that the nostalgic reworking of identity was already a prominent feature of everyday language in late 1970s Bilston. Long-term processes of regional economic restructuring had already begun to recast the personal politics of place. The Bilston Steel Works was the last bastion of the once dominant steel industry in the West Midlands, a feature that Bilston’s steelworkers celebrated as a mark of uniqueness and pride at both an individual and community level. A consequence of the closure of the steelworks was its far-reaching social and cultural impact, with the implications for self and place complexly intertwined. The article argues that notions of community and belonging did not necessarily wane but were rather reconstructed and adapted to make sense of, and begin the process of navigating through, industrial decline.

Editorial and Critical Reflections on the future of identity moments and social media in China and beyond

This Special Issue of Global Media and China responds in part to Stuart Hall’s famous 1996 invocation, ‘Who needs identity?’ – to study ‘specific enunciative strategies’ utilized within ‘specific modalities of power’ so as to consider identity discourses of the present and of the future. This issue draws upon empirical observations presented and debated at the 2019 Chinese Internet Research Conference held in Singapore in May 2019, as well as theoretical contributions in identity politics and social media, the chosen site or ‘modality of power’. This editorial and critical essay reflects upon, complemented and supported by the papers in this issue, the critical and conceptual frameworks that are emerging to critique the global and local complexities, diversity and dynamics resulting from the deeper integration of social media into the everyday lives of Chinese Internet users. It presents an overview of the 2019 Chinese Internet Research Conference proceedings in terms of how social media is used to wrap personal politics into a widening range of identity groupings around gender, class, citizens, pop culture and religion in ways that signal the future of newer forms of identity politics among Internet users in China. Since social media posts and exchanges, while geographically sourced and situated, often transcend their boundaries, the arguments presented here goes beyond China and are global. The shareability of identity mediated by individual, state and public discourses on social and ‘anti-social’ media during the COVID-19 pandemic within China, Singapore and Australia leads to novel ways of understanding identity politics in globalizing China and strategic uses of Chinese identity.

Trace publics as a qualitative critical network tool: Exploring the dark matter in the #MeToo movement

The relationship between the daily practice of personal politics and digitally networked publics amplify a familiar shaping and reshaping of the social. This article expands on nascent critiques of nodocentrism as a contemporary representation of the social in new media research to begin to advance a digital methods multidisciplinary project. Trace publics as a qualitative critical network (QCN) approach considers how representations developed by big social data analysis are shaped by everyday practices. Using the #MeToo phenomenon as an analogous frame, I show how trace publics can be used as a theoretical and methodological device for deconstructing, co-constructing, and reconstructing representations in social media research. The goal of such a proposal is to encourage future critical network and data research to consider the ethical ramifications of nodocentric representations of the social and the methodological possibilities of trace publics.

Het persoonlijke in Thorbeckes Tweede Kamer

Remarks about the person in Thorbecke’s Second ChamberThere is always a risk in parliamentary politics that objective debate will change into personal debate and conflict. On the one hand, orators can choose to launch a personal verbal attack to their opponents. On the other hand, opponents can interpret verbal arguments as a personal attack, even if these words were not meant that way. In the most extreme cases personal honour is damaged and needs to be repaired through other means, including a physical duel. Compared to other young parliaments, the nineteenth century Dutch ‘Second Chamber’ (Tweede Kamer) had a quiet and calm reputation. How did Dutch Members of Parliament handle their emotions in confrontations that risked to become personal? How did the most influential politician, J.R. Thorbecke, deal with these confrontations? Which rules and rituals were at the disposal of MPs to protect themselves against personal politics? And what could contemporary parliamentary debate learn from these Dutch nineteenth-century examples? To find asnwers to these questions, this article explores personal politics in Thorbecke’s Second Chamber.