The ’68 Movements around the World and in Turkey: One Movement or Many?

The student movement of ’68 was both a major source of inspiration and subject of research for the social movement scholars. One persistent disagreement about studying ’68 lies between the world-system theory—Wallerstein views the movement as “a single revolution”—and the contentious politics approach—McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly refuse to consider ’68 “one grand movement.” Expanding this theoretical debate, this article overviews Turkey’s ’68 movement and discusses its divergence from the global movement. Wallerstein summarizes “the single revolution” of ’68 with five points: challenging US hegemony, working-class solidarity, demanding education reform, counter-culture, and challenging the old left. This article revisits these points and cross-reads them with insights of the contentious politics approach to evaluate Turkey’s ’68 movement. It then focuses on mobilizing structures, framing processes, and repertoires of contention that have shaped student activism.

Carnivalesque, Liminality and Social Drama: Characterising the Anti-Structural Potential of Theyyam

The cultural and ritual performance of Theyyam in Northern Kerala, considered as a reflection of the war cry against the caste system and oppression, conducts subversion of the social hierarchy. The chosen deity by the performer for a transitory symbolisation expresses the collective outrage of the oppressed and exploited people. This research paper enquires about the anti-structural characteristics exhibited by the performance of Theyyam. In the context of Richard Schechner’s performance theory, it attempts to trace the characterisation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, Victor Turner’s liminality and social drama in the transitional performance of Theyyam that mostly relies on interim separation and reintegration. The expression of antipathy to the hierarchy in Bakhtinian carnival, the anti-structural emphasis in Turnarian liminality, and the deconstructive-reconstructive stages in social drama elucidate the symbolic delineation of the performance of Theyyam. The analytical findings of the paper derived from the discussion of the three concepts reveal that the performance of Theyyam is rooted in its anti-structural characteristics. The performer is subject to continuous alteration in the identity that intermediates the idiosyncrasy between the deity and the human being. It symbolises the temporal transition from the oppressed to the equivalent status of the dominator that occurs as part of counter-culture, through status reversal and inversion.

Counter-Narrative Tradition

The term “counter narrative” refers to a narrative that takes on meaning through its relation with one or more other narratives. While this relation is not necessarily oppositional, it involves a stance toward some other narrative(s), and it is this aspect of stance, or position, that distinguishes counter narrative from other forms of intertextuality. The article explained, “counter‐narratives only make sense in relation to something else, that which they are countering counter narratives has been seen as a means of opposing or resisting socially and culturally informed master narratives (about, for example, skin colour, ethnicity, and food culture), which are often normative or oppressive, or exclude perspectives or experiences that diverge from those conveyed through master narratives. In this sense, counter narratives play a role in storytellers positioning themselves against, or critiquing, the themes and ideologies of master narratives. Used in this way, “counter narratives” refer to “the stories which people tell and live which offer resistance, either implicitly or explicitly, to dominant cultural narratives” This articles explains the counter narratives on perception of black skin colour and food culture. Both the concepts of counter-culture and counter-narrative tradition are new in the folklore field of Tamil traction.

Educating youth ministers in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney; John Kidson and the Youthworkers Course

This study is a historical analysis of the education of youth ministers in the Anglican diocese of Sydney in the 1970s and 1980s. John Kidson ran the Youthworkers Course with the goal of educating professional, specialised youth ministers that could evangelise young people who were influenced by the counter-culture and increasingly disengaged from the church. Kidson used a distinctive educational model that emphasised relational outreach, transformative community, praxis, and the importance of the Bible. His goal was only partially met. He trained youth ministers that were able to communicate with and evangelise non-churched youth, but there were small numbers being trained, and few remained in youth ministry in the long-term. The Youthworkers Course and its strengths and weaknesses can be used as a case study for churches and colleges today as they consider the best way to educate youth ministers.

The Post-Structuralist Repositioning of Allen Ginsberg’s Controversial Poem “Howl”: A Deconstructive Approach

Allen Ginsberg’s poems with their paradoxical language and syntax are a literary commentary on anger, hopelessness and frustration of the American society in the 1950s. His poems work on the binary concept of this culture versus counter-culture and try to portray a suitable diatribe on the cultural issues which were disgusting in Ginsberg’s mind. The present study looks for potentially malfunctioning sections of the language of his masterpiece “Howl” in order to argue that although attempted by the poet, there might be no organic unified without showing susceptibility to breakage and rupture. The study concludes that Ginsberg’s poetry strives hard to express a vehement lamentation in breath-length stanzas which often times decenters its own text and might raise multiple interpretations and provoke multiple lingual disorganizations. KEYWORDS: Allen Ginsberg, Deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, poem, binary opposition, rupture, analysis

“It’s being a part of a grand tradition, a grand counter-culture which involves communities”: A qualitative investigation of autistic community connectedness

Autistic people report experiencing greater comfort socialising and easier communication with other autistic people compared to with non-autistic people. Despite autism being stereotypically associated with a lack of social motivation or community, an autistic community has been described briefly in the literature but is not yet well understood. Autistic community connectedness (ACC) may play an important role in promoting and protecting wellbeing for autistic people. This qualitative study involved interviewing autistic individuals (N = 20) in-person, via a video-based platform, over a text-based platform, or over email (according to the needs of the participants) to investigate ACC. Critical grounded theory tools were used to collect and analyse the data. Three elements of ACC were apparent in the data: belongingness, social connectedness, and political connectedness. Belongingness referred to the general sense of similarity that autistic people experienced with other autistic people, which they often did not with non-autistic people. Social connectedness referred to specific friendship participants formed with other autistic people. Political connectedness referred to a connectedness to the political or social equality goals of the autistic community. Participants described the benefits of ACC as being increased self-esteem, a sense of direction, and access to a sense of community that they did not typically experience with non-autistic people. Lack of connectedness involved ambivalence with an autism diagnosis and/or feelings of internalised stigma. These experiences of ACC may have implications for autistic people’s health and wellbeing, as well as how they deal with exposure to discrimination and stigma.

Exploring the Virulent Jazz Counterculture in Mumbo Jumbo

This article will be focusing on Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), a vibrant postmodernist text, which offers a fresh perspective on the rise of black popular culture in the form of Jes Grew, which is largely informed by jazz and neo-hoodoo aesthetics. Jes Grew, the phenomenon which binds the multifaceted text in cohesion and brings together elements from History, Jazz and Afrofuturism, is communicated by using the metaphor of a virulent disease- the Jes Grew pandemic. The article is a work in cultural studies, attempting to map the evolution of the counter culture that Jes Grew represents and its effect on identity. This mapping is achieved by viewing the equation of the Jazz counter-culture with the Jes Grew pandemic. Jes Grew decodes the cultural and racial politics Mumbo Jumbo is invested in by destabilising the meaning and perspective attached to ‘disease’ and adapting it to an entirely new climate of cultural reclamation and celebration by deconstructing the dominant culture defined illness (Jes Grew in the text) and reinterpreting it as potentially healing and liberating. The discussion of the politics and aesthetics of this counter-culture mainly hinges on the central metaphor of the Jes Grew pandemic operating throughout the narrative. Raymond Williams’ work on culture studies and Stuart Hall’s theory on the formation and representation of cultural identities are particularly helpful in discussing the issues of culture and identity that are in dialogue with the narrative.