Leaving Home, Claiming the Street: Exploring Women’s Challenges in Turkey’s ’68 Movement

Despite worldwide interest in the history of the sixties—particularly in 1968—gender as a category of analysis has received little attention in the majority of academic research about them. Most national historiographies of ’68 have disregarded women’s political actions and their struggles with the gendered political culture. Like its counterparts, Turkey’s ’68 experience was also strongly gendered male. Given the underrepresentation of female historical agency and political subjectivity in the scholarship on 1968, this article aims to explore women’s accounts of Turkey’s ’68 experience with a particular focus on their struggles in leaving home and getting involved in political life.

Concepciones de docentes en formación suecos y españoles sobre la desigualdad de género en perspectiva temporal

Este trabajo se centra en la visión particular que futuros y futuras docentes tienen sobre la desigualdad de género y cómo ha evolucionado ésta a lo largo de la historia. Para el desarrollo de esta investigación se han analizado 131 narraciones de docentes en formación de España (n=55) y Suecia (n=76) que cursan programas universitarios de educación en Primaria y Secundaria. El diseño de la investigación ha supuesto el análisis del contenido de las narraciones con un proceso de codificación y posterior identificación de co-ocurrencias, análisis de conglomerados de códigos, densidad de codificación y red de códigos con el programa Nvivo 12 Pro. A pesar de algunas diferencias significativas en cuanto al sentido del tiempo en la historia entre las narraciones analizadas suecas y españolas, en ambos casos predomina una falta de identificación de la capacidad de acción de las personas (especialmente resistencia de las mujeres a las asimetrías de poder operadas en el pasado), y un débil análisis del pasado desde la perspectiva de género que ayude a comprender el problema presente. The research is concerned with pre-service teachers’ assumptions about gender inequality and its development across time. In conducting the research 131 narrations of Spanish (n = 55) and Swedish (n = 76) students, enrolled in Primary and Secondary education programs, were analyzed. The research design has been the content analysis of the narratives through a coding process and subsequently identification of co-occurrences, cluster analysis, density of codes and nets of codes with software Nvivo 12 Pro. Although some differences come up regarding the orientantion over time among Swedish and Spanish narratives, in both cases prevail a lack of intentional historical agency (specially of women against the power asymmetries in societies), and a weak analysis of the past from gender perspective that could help to understand current situations.

REHABILITATING BECÁN

Research in 1970 vaulted Becán to prominence on the landscape of great Maya centers. Mapping, excavation, and ceramic stratigraphy revealed that its enigmatic earthwork, first recorded archaeologically in 1934, was a fortification built at the end of the Preclassic period. Large-scale warfare thus unexpectedly turned out to have very deep roots in the Maya lowlands. The site's wider implications remained obscure, however, in the absence of dates and other inscriptions. The ever-increasing dependence on historical and iconographic information in our narratives, along with the invisibility of its Preclassic buildings and plazas, unfortunately marginalized Becán. Some colleagues even claimed that we have misinterpreted both the nature of the earthworks (not fortifications) and their dating (not Preclassic). We rehabilitate Becán by dispelling these claims and by showing that standard archaeological evidence, contextualized in what we know today, has much to say about Becán's role in lowland culture history. We identify intervals of crisis when the earthwork remained useful long after it was originally built, especially during the great hegemonic struggles of the Snake and Tikal dynasties, and introduce new ceramic and lithic data about Becán's settlement history and political entanglements. Our most important message is that inscriptions and iconography, for all their dramatic chronological detail and historical agency, must always be complemented by standard fieldwork.

Mediating Capitalism’s ‘Rules of Reproduction’ with Historical Agency

This article responds to Samuel Knafo and Benno Teschke’s recent critique of Political Marxism and their proposal for an alternative, ‘radical agency-centred’ historicism. While sympathetic to the critiques raised by the authors, I am less convinced by the conclusions they reach. Rather than abandon Political Marxism altogether, I argue that there remains much of value in the tradition. Through an analysis of the differential path of capitalist development in settler-colonial Canada, I suggest that bringing the methodological insights of Uneven and Combined Development to bear on the theoretical material of Political Marxism can alleviate the problems identified by the authors.

GEOPOLITICS IN THE INFRASTRUCTURAL IDEOLOGIES OF 5G

This paper explores how infrastructural ideologies function as tools in geopolitical struggles for dependence and independence of world powers. Meese Frith and Wilken (2020) suggest that controversies around 5G stem from infrastructural anxieties best examined in the framework of geopolitics. We build on this work by analyzing the emerging infrastructural imaginary of 5G in light of the changing global division of labor. Sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) refer to the vision of technologies themselves, while ideologies refer to the totality of social relations, translating the objective reality of material conditions to subjective lived experience (Bory 2020). The Western imaginaries around 5G infrastructures reflect, deflect, translate and sublimate the infrastructural anxieties tied to the development and deployment of new network paradigms. Their controversial nature, contradictory content, and fragmented presentation is a necessary part of living through the trauma of lost historical agency on the part of Western superpowers. We engaged in code ethnography (Rosa 2019) of GSM, internet, and 5G technologies, as well as participant observation in the main standard-development organizations of the internet and 5G, and semi-structured interviews with equipment vendors and network operators. Our methodological assumption, taken from World Systems Theory (Wallerstein and Wallerstein 2004), is that the character and content of imaginaries and their underpinning ideologies creatively reflect the position of actors in the global division of labor. This paper contributes to the understanding of the role of infrastructures in geopolitical power tussles and straddles the fields of science and technology studies and international relations.

Peasant Oaths, Furious Icons and the Quest for Agency: Tracing Subaltern Politics in Tsarist Georgia on the Eve of the 1905 Revolution. Part II: Agents and Items of (Counter)Insurgent Political Theology on the Imperial Borderland

This two-part transdisciplinary article elaborates on the autobiographical account of the Georgian Social-Democrat Grigol Uratadze regarding the oath pledged by protesting peasants from Guria in 1902. The oath inaugurated their mobilization in Tsarist Georgia in 1902, culminating in full peasant self-rule in the “Gurian Republic” by 1905. The study aims at a historical-anthropological assessment of the asymmetries in the alliance formed by peasants and the revolutionary intelligentsia in the wake of the oath as well as the tensions that crystallized around the oath between the peasants and Tsarist officials. In trying to recover the traces of peasant politics in relation to multiple hegemonic forces in a modernizing imperial borderland, the article invites the reader to reconsider the existing assumptions about historical agency, linguistic conditions of subjectivity, and the relationship between politics and the material and customary dimensions of religion. The ultimate aim is to set the foundations for a future subaltern reading of the practices specific to the peasant politics in the later “Gurian Republic”. The second part of the article delves into Uratadze’s account of the aftermath of the inaugural oath and the conflicts it triggered between peasants, intelligentsia and the Tsarist administration.

Subversive Concepts: Empires and Beyond

“The worst thing one can do with words,” George Orwell once wrote, “is to surrender to them.” One must “let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way,” to use language for “expressing and not forconcealing or preventing thought,” he continued (1953, 169). For centuries, social movements “let the meaning to choose the words” and actively sought new categories to grasp the world. They also expressedthe desire for a new world but often surrendered to words when imagining it. Medieval heretics, French revolutionaries, and various socialist movements on the fringes of the Russian Empire one hundred yearslater, as well as groups like nationalist urban reformers, Muslim modernizers, and democratic antisuffragists–all had to face fossilized concepts that they attempted to question and modify, actively reappropriating them to forge new configurations. They also inherited the existing language and other sign systems, which cannot be modified at will without the risk of losing the capacity to communicate. To paraphrase Karl Marx’s nutshell definition of historical agency, people make use of their concepts but they do not do so as they please; they do not do so under self-selected circumstances but, rather, under the already-existing circumstances given and transmitted in language and social relations.