Uncovering the low-profile #MeToo movement: Towards a discursive politics of empowerment on Chinese social media

In China, a few posts related to #MeToo movement survived and remained online well after its peak and the state’s response in July 2018. This article proposes a theoretical framework that pays attention to discursive meaning-making and employs a broad notion of empowerment, referred to as ‘empowerment through discourse’, in order to offer a more nuanced understanding of the low-profile #MeToo movement in the Chinese context. This framework is used to analyse a corpus of uncensored #MeToo material, which appeared on Chinese social media. This article combines a discourse analysis of these posts and interviews with feminists from activist collectives to critically examine feminist empowerment by reflecting on survivor/victim narration and storytelling practices, digital media’s capacity to facilitate critical dialogue between witnesses and survivors/victims and activist collectives’ organising role in opening up a dialogic space for collective reading, listening and healing. These reflections lead to broader considerations on how notions of empowerment can spur collective action and structural change. In short, this article demonstrates the potential possibility of discursive change and reflects on this mode of feminist politics as a way to speak to empowerment in the Chinese context.

The Development of Peasants’ Reading Habits in Courland and Livonia in the 18th Century*

The article explores the development of peasants’ reading habits over the 18th century in the Latvian-inhabited Lutheran regions of Russia’s Baltic provinces Courland/Kurzeme and Latvian Livonia/Vidzeme. By analysing the transition from intensive to extensive reading patterns, as well as from loud and ceremonial to silent and private reading, insight into the available statistical sources and information from subscription lists is provided and the observations of contemporaries are scrutinized. The views on Latvian peasants’ reading habits expressed by Baltic-German Lutheran parsons Friedrich Bernhard Blaufuß, Joachim Baumann, Christian David Lenz, Johann Friedrich Casimir Rosenberger, Alexander Johann Stender, as well as those published by Johann Friedrich Steffenhagen, are discussed within the context of urban and middle-class reading patterns. While the number of literate peasants in the 18th century was high, reaching one third in Courland and two thirds in Livonia by the turn of the 19th century, the motivation for reading and everyday habits differed, and while extensive reading increased, before the 1840s, the Baltic rural so­ciety did not see a phenomenon similar to the European middle-class rea­ding revolution. The article focuses on differentiating among various types of readers, divided according to their confessional lines (Herrnhutian Brethren or Lutheran Orthodox Church), social stan­ding (reading patterns were different depending on rural professions) or genera­tion (the older generation tended to prefer loud and ceremonial religious reading while the younger generation more often adopted silent, private and secular reading). The collective reading of books has been explored by demonstrating how it allowed combining the reading of books with other activities and also performed a socializing function. The avai­lable sources demonstrate that quiet reading did not replace reading aloud, in the same way that extensive reading did not replace intensive, but all reading practices continued to co-exist alongside each other, creating an increasingly diverse and saturated reading experience.

Conclusion

This book’s ethnographic narrative ends with a description of the last months of the Moscovici cabinet, which dissolves as he and his collaborators look for new opportunities, while the incoming Commission headed by Ursula von der Leyen is engulfed in political controversy and Brexit negotiations. Exiting fieldwork through a collective reading of the book manuscript, I discuss the methodological challenges of embedded observation, while the Moscos take stock of their collective experience. What did the political commissioner and his staff achieve? What were the limits of political work? The conclusion is an opportunity to reflect on Juncker’s “Political Commission” experiment and on what it means to do politics in the European Union.

Community Bonding for Developing Life-Affirming Skills of Children: A Qualitative Case Study of Tole Reading Group in Kaski, Nepal

Based on a qualitative case study of a community reading group in a village of Kaski district, this paper explores how community bonding facilitates children's life-affirming skills. It argues that the networks based on communal values of reciprocal benefits are assets that promote sensitisation among themselves and the children’s learning. A local teacher and a School Management Committee member from the community facilitate as mediators for bridging school and the community meaningfully. It highlights that community members' informal and autonomous engagement in the collective reading and learning of children is more sustainable than the rigid, structured, and controlled mechanisms. Further, the paper claims that the school as an isolated institution with imported global values may not fit in a particular community. Thus, it is essential to respect and value the community bonding with contextual values to bridge the school and community and enhance meaningful reading and learning activities and quality education.

The "artistic biography" with displaced youth in camps in Iraq: Presence as an indicator of entry into resilience

The current armed conflicts in the world, and in particular those linked to the Islamic State System (ISIS) in Iraq, constitute a major obstacle to stable benchmarks, to a collective reading of a common culture, and to a society free from the symptoms of war. Inclusive artistic interventions are often deployed with children affected by conflict as a source of resilience and empowerment. The objective of this article is to propose entry into resilience identified during the implementation of a device of an "artistic biography" activities with coaches of an NGO and young people in a camp in Iraq. The device built was a project to "paint our caravans" as a first project with the young people in a camp. Through our experience as an artist, trainer and researcher, we observe the indicators of entry into "presence" during the artistic activities. Involvement in a collective work, self-recognition by the coaches and self-recognition in the final artistic work are the three indicators of presence that we note. Individual and collective resilience processes are complex and long and subject to many obstacles. Our article invites further investigation to build evidence to develop artistic response in humanitarian emergencies.

Bridging the Gap: Understanding the Trends in Indian Legal Education from Recent Developments

The constitutional mandate of legal aid provides Indian law schools a unique opportunity to achieve the social justice mission of legal education. Taking cue from such holistic vision, Indian legal education aims to provide a fair, effective and accessible legal system to its citizens. Having said this, the euphoria of ideal legal education remains a distant dream with continuous declining standards in legal education impartation. There appear efforts to correct such decline, which led to the introduction of clinical legal education (CLE) as a mandatory component in the law school curriculum by way of mandatory practical papers. Also, the modern approach to legal education demands adoption of local circumstances while implementing ‘broadly shared aspirations’ and ‘goals of global level’. In this regard, this article covers three recent activities, which if clubbed together present wider scenes pertaining to the state of legal education and reforms in India. On a collective reading of all three events, this article argues for introducing continuing legal education (CLE) in India.

Individual and Collective Action: Reply to Blomberg

Olle Blomberg challenges three claims in my book From Individual to Plural Agency (Ludwig, Kirk (2016): From Individual to Plural Agency: Collective Action 1. Vols. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press.). The first is that there are no collective actions in the sense in which there are individual actions. The second is that singular action sentences entail that there is no more than one agent of the event expressed by the action verb in the way required by that verb (the sole agency requirement). The third, is that an individual intention, e.g. to build a boat, is not satisfied if you don’t do it yourself. On the first point, I grant that Blomberg identifies an important distinction between simple and composite actions the book did not take into account, but argue it doesn’t show that there are collective actions in the same sense there are individual actions. On the second point, I argue from examples that the collective reading of plural action sentences doesn’t entail the distributive reading, which requires the sole agency requirement on singular action sentences. This settles the third point, since it entails that if you intend to build a boat, you are successful only if you are the only agent of it in the sense required by the verb.