The political economy of fanzines on the threshold of state socialism and post-socialism: The story of Czech(o)slovak fanzines

In this article, I analyse Czech and Slovak fanzine-making during the transition from state socialism to post-socialism. The regime change ushered in new dominant forms of cultural production, and thus a situation emerged in which cultural hierarchies were being negotiated and new ways of collective action being formed. Fanzines played a crucial role in building up alternative communities in the new neoliberal system, when there was strong demand for Western subcultural styles and the need of safe space of domestic scenes. Independent publishing depends heavily upon that which it opposes, and when major social changes occur, fanzine-making provided a space for negotiating cultural hierarchies, resulting in specific ways in which fanzines help build and maintain alternative scenes.

Sustainable way of life and environmental chaos: a textual analysis of an expert panel held at Brazilian meeting of alternative communities

This study of the views of Brazilian experts on Sustainable Way of Life corroborates the idea that a capitalist model – based on consumption, linear production systems and disconnected with nature – has made the city way of life unsustainable. It also suggests that these struggles point to a move from urban environmental chaos to a new reality, as well as the difficulties in making it happen. As a confrontation with chaos, a new order represents a different way of reorganizing oneself and the group, in search of a new social and environment ideal reconnected and inspired by virtuous cycles as seen in nature.

Helen Southworth. Fresca. A Life in the Making. A Biographer’s Quest for a Forgotten Bloomsbury Polymath

The subject of Southworth’s book is Francesca (Fresca) Allinson (1902–1945), a puppeteer, choral conductor, writer and creator of folksongs, whose life was cut short by drowning. She grew up in a gifted and thoroughly non-conformist family. Her brother Adrian, a painter, studied at the Slade school. Her father worked as a doctor at his practice in London, obtaining and practising his own unorthodox convictions about hygiene and diet. As a radical pacifist Fresca helped provide alternative communities for conscientious objectors (COs). Her fictional autobiography A Childhood was published in 1937, by the Hogarth Press, the publishing house of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

“Pure Means” and the Possibilities of the Past

In his essay “Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin argued that only certain types of strikes can be considered revolutionary, while others—i.e., most bread and butter, or “political” strikes—tacitly rely on the violent logics of the state. This paper suggests, however, that by reading Benjamin against himself and applying his discussion of “pure means” to those “political” strikes, the extent to which even these basic collective actions represent effective “strategies of resistance” becomes evident. This framework requires an interdisciplinary approach to radical labor studies, combining political theory with history in order to identify and analyze past instances of joyful community-building during strikes. Relying also on a historical case study—the 1926 miners’ lockout in South Wales—and Benjamin’s own writings on the discipline of history, this paper contends that strikes, and the “alternative communities” they encourage workers and their families to build, present enormous revolutionary potential. When theory and history are studied together, and when we pay close attention to the actual tactics of solidarity that make up strike actions, this potential is uncovered.

Thinking with Deconstruction: Book-Adult-Child Events in Children's Literature Research

As Nathalie op de Beeck (2018) has recently pointed out, children's literature scholars need to forge more meaningful connexions between ecoliteracy and environmental action to create possibilities for achieving environmental justice. I propose that we achieve this goal by (auto-)deconstructing our research practices and subjectivities through promoting the participation of children as active contributors to all elements of the research process. Such approaches enable young decision-makers to engage with one another, with books and with the world through ethics of interconnectivity. I see such praxis as exemplifying deconstructive events and discuss their emergence in Shaping a Preferable Future: Children Reading, Thinking and Talking about Alternative Communities and Times (ChildAct), a project I co-conducted with children in Cambridgeshire, UK, in the school year 2017–2018. The project centered on child-adult collaboration towards a better understanding of how utopian literature shapes ideas for preferred futures, how these ideas evolve in readers’ encounters with their localities and how they call readers into action. As I show, ChildAct testifies to the possibility of de-centering children's literature research towards a field promoting a shared sense of belonging to and responsibility for our world.

Building alternative communities within the state: the Kurdish Movement, local municipalities and democratic autonomy

This chapter discusses the different forms of community development that the Kurdish Movement creatively makes use of and how funding is sourced in support of these practices. Since the mid-2000s, the Kurdish Movement has put increased focus on the development of alternative communities in the Kurdistan region in Turkey as part of an effort to establish ‘democratic autonomy’. The chapter is structured in three parts. The first section explains the historical and theoretical background of the paradigmatic shift within the Kurdish Movement from armed struggle for independence towards a movement for democratic autonomy. This is followed by a discussion of the central role of the municipalities in this model and an analysis of three exemplary forms of funding.