Out of the cauldron: lessons from Cedric Robinson

This is an abbreviated account of the UK webinar launch in October 2021 of the biography, Cedric Robinson: the time of the Black Radical Tradition, written by Joshua Myers. Moderated by James Pope, panellists, including Myers, Colin Prescod, John Narayan, Avery Gordon and Elizabeth Robinson present their takes on Robinson in relation to the UK and especially his relationship with the Institute of Race Relations and the journal Race & Class. They discuss key aspects of Robinson’s work, including the meaning of racial capitalism, his understanding of time, and how for him historical materialism was grounded, not in the mode of production but in the primacy of social struggle and in a dialectic of power and resistance to its abuses.

Power, Resistance, and Place in Appalachia

This essay is an analysis of the power and resistance dynamics at work in West Virginia. Because identity constructs are often place-based, place and the meaning of place in Appalachia inform identity construction and are a powerful tool to harness for resistance. With extensive outmigration pulling Appalachians from home and local communities, the facets of identity tied to place become even more complex. Loss impacts the salience of the “idea” of home for many Appalachians. Identity that is place-based can offer a framework for building a deeper understanding of a region. At the same time, to comprehend resistance, it must have a specific context and location. Places are made up of many different identities that make creating solidarity extremely difficult. Resistance must be place-based but in order for movements to be effective, it must not rely solely on place. Appalachia has a strong history of resistance and resilience. The role of power in resistance provides context to explore West Virginia’s rich history of protest.

Negotiating power from the margins: Encountering everyday experiences and contestations to REDD + in Southern Tanzania

This paper provides an account of everyday discursive and material practises deployed by marginalised forest-dependent groups in the course of resisting the implementation of Reduced Emission from Deforestation and forest degradation (REDD + ) and conservation regulations. Available literature have documented extensively that REDD + market-based models across the Global South, and Tanzania in particular, have led to increasing inequality, injustices, and exclusions. Nevertheless, there is little attention to exploring how different social actors that are unequally positioned resist exclusions. The paper explores selected case studies of marginalised forest-dependent groups in Lindi, Southern Tanzania, who creatively work to negotiate unequal power relations through a range of encounters around REDD+. Our analysis shows unequal social, spatial, and environmental ramifications of market-based conservation policies and strategies that have led to different kinds of material and discursive resistance to challenge exclusions. In doing so, it provides critical context-specific realities from the Global South and, specifically, Tanzanian scholarship to focus on both the dynamics of power and resistance in socially differentiated forest-dependent groups affected by envisioned market-based and development model-led conservation regimes.

Introduction

Sport as a global phenomenon is gaining a cultural and social centrality within countries in different ways and varying pace. Allen Guttmann (1978) defines modern sports as reflecting secularism, equality of opportunity, bureaucratic organization, specialization of roles, rationalization, quantification, and a quest for records. Sports may also be defined in more invested terms of what it does to a society, culture, politics, and economy and how it impacts social relations and economic landscape. Sports has an emancipatory potential that is realized in various ways. A multidimensional perspective on sports allows us to understand in microcosm the operation of embedded forces of patriarchy and capitalism, and of power and resistance in society....

Decolonial Possibilities of Reintroducing the Devil in the Public Space of Afro‐Ecuadorian Territories

The article discusses the decolonial possibilities of the collective design of a sound artwork in reimagining the role of two Afro‐Ecuadorian music and dance‐based events in the Afro‐Ecuadorian ancestral territories of North Esmeraldas and Chota‐Mira. The two events, Bomba del Chota and Marimba Esmeraldeña, emerged in the context of slavery and colonialism as a response of Afro‐Ecuadorians to the oppression and violence they endured. These two music and dance‐based events sustain a counter‐narrative of power and resistance for Afrodescendant peoples in Ecuador, weaving meaningful connections among them and other entities populating their territories, such as the “devil,” whose cohabitation with Afro‐Ecuadorians will be at the spotlight of our analysis. Based on the audio‐recorded testimonies of these connections that strongly existed until the 1970s, and of a sonic composition that was created from them, we propose a collaborative design of a sound artwork in the public spaces of the jungle in Esmeraldas and the mountain in Chota‐Mira. We discuss how a decolonial approach to the design of the artwork can serve as a dialogical space to engage inhabitants in their re‐connection to the possibilities of resistance that their ancestors nurtured in their territories through the practice of the two music and dance‐based events. Through a political reading of soundscapes, an argument is developed to show how sound constructs the public spaces that root people in their territories, connecting them with meaningful stories and practices that keep being forgotten due to the on‐going consequences of slavery and colonialism. The article contributes to the discussion about political ecologies and the collective production of public spaces as a joyful response to exclusion and oppression.

Power and Resistance: Digital-Free Tourism in a Connected World

Although digital-free tourism is growing in popularity, research in this area has not unpacked the complex power relations between humans and technology through a critical perspective. Building on Foucault’s analysis of power and resistance, we theorized technology as disciplinary power and conducted a collaborative autoethnography to explore how individuals resist the dominant discourse. Through a reflexive account, we theorize digital-free travel as a process of negotiating and rejecting the dominant discourse of technology, particularly through effective personal strategies of engaging in full disconnection, redefining punishments and rewards, recalling nostalgic memories, and constantly reflecting on embodied feelings and self-transformations in the power relations. Theoretically, this study contributes to understanding digital-free tourism through the lens of power and resistance; it also contributes to critical studies in technology and tourism. Methodologically, we emphasize the potential of applying collaborative autoethnography in analyzing embodied self-transformations. Practically, this study offers suggestions for digital-free tourism providers.

COMPARATIVE CONCEPTOLOGY OF POWER AND RESISTANCE USING GOOGLE NGRAM BOOKS

The article discusses the evolution of key concepts referring to governmentality in comparative perspective. The Russian discourse on government and power is compared with the Western discourse. The Google Books Ngram Viewer databank covering the period from 1800 to 2019 is used as a source of information. This databank contains more than 5% of all published books. The proposed discourse analysis suggests that the Russian and Western discourses have some elective affinity: in both cases there is little room for truth telling and whistle-blowers face significant risk.