Entanglements of art and memory activism in Hungary’s illiberal democracy

This paper explores how art contributes to the articulation of memories that counter the official historical narrative of Hungary’s self-proclaimed political and ideological system, illiberal democracy. Amid deepening polarization between Europe’s post-colonialist and post-socialist countries, the Hungarian government promotes a Christian conservative national identity against the “liberal” values of Western Europe. Systematic appropriation of historical traumas is at the core of such efforts, which largely manifests in removing, erecting and reinstating memorials, as well as in the re-signification of trauma sites. Insufficient civic involvement in rewriting histories generates new ways of resistance, which I demonstrate through the case study of a protest-performance organized by the Living Memorial activist group as a response to the government’s decision to displace the memorial of Imre Nagy in 2018. I seek to understand the dynamics between top-down memory politics, civil resistance and art within the conceptual apparatus of the “memory activism nexus” (Rigney 2018, 2020) and “multidirectional memories” (Rothberg 2009). I argue that artistic memory activism has limited potential to transform the dynamics of memory in a context where a national conservative political force has gradually taken control over historical narratives, triggering inevitably polarizing responses in the society. Although profoundly embedded in local histories, the case-study may offer new ways of negotiating traumatic heritages through the entanglement of art and memory activism.

The Radical Arm of the Welfare Lobby: A History of the Victorian Coalition Against Poverty and Unemployment, 1980-91

Australia has had high levels of unemployment since the mid-1970s, particularly from approximately 1976-94, yet to date there has been no significant study of political activism by the unemployed in the modern era. This article fills some of this knowledge gap by examining the activities of the Victorian Coalition against Poverty and Unemployment (CAPU), an activist group based on an alliance of trade unions, churches, community groups and the unemployed. Whilst CAPU was influenced by conventional Marxist critiques of the welfare state and highly critical of both the professional social welfare sector and the Australian Labor Party, it also worked co-operatively with key community welfare groups such as the Victorian Council of Social Service and the Brotherhood of St Laurence on specific campaigns. Consequently, it is argued that CAPU was not an anti-welfare organisation per se, but rather acted as the radical arm of the welfare lobby seeking to shame governments into operationalising in practice their declared social justice principles.

Clowning around a polarized issue: Rhetorical strategies and communicative outcomes of a political parody performance by Loldiers of Odin

For decades, political activist groups have used humor for ridiculing their opponents and attracting media attention. This study analyzed the online presence of the Loldiers of Odin, a clown-disguised activist group created as a parody of the anti-immigration group Soldiers of Odin. By analyzing the rhetorical strategies of Loldiers’ performance, we show how absurd and naïve parody stunts were used to criticize anti-immigration street patrolling, distort radical right-wing discourses, and mobilize like-minded progressives. Furthermore, by analyzing Facebook commentary of the performance, we trace its communicative outcomes: support and legitimization, but also problematization and delegitimization. Our results highlight the unpredictable and ambivalent nature of humor in facilitating a political protest. We argue that while humor offers a compelling way for citizens to discursively engage with political issues such as the immigration question, the polysemic nature of parody paradoxically works to amplify and support existing polarized positions in online discussions.

Troubling Dialogue and Digital Media: A Subaltern Critique

Over the past several decades, scholars have explored dialogue and digital media. While this scholarship has advanced strategic communication theory, it lacks a critical focus on how marginalized groups have been written out of these theories and practices. We bring a critical lens to dialogue, employing a subaltern critique to elevate the experiences and voices of members of an activist group working on behalf of low-income, minority women. Advancing theoretical and empirical work on dialogue and social media, our study approaches activist communication and dialogue through a co-optation orientation, to consider how advocacy groups are co-opted or erased through dialogic methods entailed in dominant discourses and how these groups exert agency and resistance. While social media may not always help activists penetrate the walls upheld by powerful social actors, they offer connective and transformative possibilities.

Negotiating Care

This article explores the creation of the Over 60 Health Clinic in Berkeley, California, during the mid-1970s. Developed by a local network of the activist group Gray Panthers, the clinic offered screening and preventive care to elderly clients and was intended to serve as a catalyst for broader health reform. Drawing on the proposals, contracts, and reports that structured the clinic’s early operations, the article traces the clinic’s efforts to imagine new modes of care, even within the constraints of collaboration with bureaucratic public agencies. In so doing, the East Bay Gray Panthers articulated a distinct understanding of “healthy aging” as relational and contingent on the maintenance of existing intergenerational communities.

An Analysis of Sisters in Islam’s (SIS) Misinterpretation of the Gender Equality in the Quran

The main agenda of feminism movements is to fight for gender equality between women and men. This agenda is advocated both by the Western as well as by some Muslim feminists. In Malaysia, a Muslim activist group who aggressively fight for gender equality is known as Sisters in Islam (SIS). This group has challenged and questioned the validity and reliability of the interpretation of some Quranic verses related to women, as it is felt that some of the verses were misinterpreted. To the group, the misinterpretation of the verses has led to misunderstanding regarding the positions and rights of women, which resulted into gender inequality. This paper aims to discuss the standpoint of SIS concerning gender equality by focusing on several issues; the superiority of men (qawwamah), the credibility of women as witness and the rights of women to be an imam. An analytical technique is used to analyse the SIS group’s viewpoint on the issues by referring several printed sources and articles published. These views will be compared with prominent Muslim scholars’ interpretation on related verses that has been used to find any contradiction or misinterpretation. The study concluded that SIS holds a misleading understanding on the interpretation of certain Quranic verses led by misrepresented claims on the unfounded contradiction between the verses of the Quran.

The Early Bloomer

This chapter examines developments in digital campaigning in Australia from 1994 to 2013. It does so by reviewing the findings from the secondary literature, and conducting original analysis of web content and national survey data. These data sources build a picture of key changes in the supply and demand for digital campaigning in Australia and particularly whether they fit the four-phase model of development. The results show that digital campaigning has broadly followed the anticipated cycle with parties making a strong early start. However, efforts slowed considerably following a highly publicized failure by prominent right-wing state politician and web campaigner Jeff Kennett. Much of the subsequent innovation appears to have been driven by the mainstream left and also the non-party online activist group GetUp!

Agency and Paternalism: Balancing Acts Between a Domestic Violence Survivors’ Task Force and a State Coalition

This research explores the dissonance between feminist ideology and practice as it manifests in an activist group of intimate partner violence/aggression (IPV/A) survivors under a state coalition on domestic violence serving multiple stakeholders. A gendered organizations framework reveals the activist group resisting paternalism and colonization in their efforts to achieve their goals and maintain their identity. Two-and-a-half years of observational field work reveals a complex dynamic, simultaneously feminist and patriarchal, with the activist group experiencing growing pains and internal conflict, emotion regulation, as well as empowerment. We offer suggestions for further exploration of the ways survivor–activist groups and coalitions can pursue collaborative partnerships.

Radiance in Reclamation

In the sharp frosty winds of the morning of January 9th, 2019, Indigenous activist group Idle no More and their allies shut down the Bloor Viaduct, a well-used truss arch bridge in Tkaronto, Ontario, Kanata (Three Fire Territories) that connects the city’s east-side to its downtown core. The action took place during rush hour in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en First Nation. The Canadian government was once again violating unceded land by mobilizing armed federal law enforcement to forcibly remove the nation from their land in order to build a gas pipeline. In response to this violence, allies throughout the city, myself among them, decided to show Tkaronto that it was not business as usual by bringing traffic on the Viaduct to a halt. Importantly, the bridge looms over the Don River. Reclamation of this space was therefore a reminder of the sanctity of water, gesturing to the fact that it is a privilege to be able to access clean water, while also reminding us of the threat of contamination posed by the pipelines’ development. As the day came to an end and the sun retreated, cycling through its farewell hues of yellow and orange, the elders began to sing. We round danced, our bodies flowing as one like the river beneath us. Our melodic voices of hope and mourning, joining the gusts of wind that whistled between the bridge supports. After the protest, we continued to chant as we walked back, fists raised with the awareness that, although this action was over, our spirits had been rekindled for the next one. This photo essay seeks to echo the calls of resistance of that day. I capture the warm hopeful tones of the sunset in an otherwise frigid colour scheme, while using wide angles to capture the scope of attendance, and a low depth of field to center the role of femme-identifying water protectors in the movement.

Minority positioning in physical and online spaces

The study examines how a Sweden Finnish minority language activist group positions themselves by inserting graffiti-like stickers into the Swedish Linguistic Landscape, and how the majority populations in Sweden and Finland react to these revitalisation efforts. Protesting by placing stickers in physical environments is classified as an act of linguistic citizenship (Isin 2009) and, from the majority’s point of view, these acts are a threat to the shared cultural moral order. The data consists of pictures posted on Instagram that depict actual physical environments where activists have placed stickers that encourage the minority to “speak their own language”. The activists utilise temporal, spatial, textual, and multimodal elements in their discursive construction. As a theoretical framework, I apply Harré and Langehove’s (1991) positioning theory. The results show how minorities position themselves in relation to the Swedish majority population with the aim of justifying their status and their right to exist.