Pub Date : 2023-10-19DOI: 10.1177/23996544231206822
Clara Egger
The past decade has seen a growing engagement of tech companies in conflict settings to develop multifaceted technological innovations, including digital biometric identification to register refugees, commercial drones to deliver cargo, and big data-fuelled algorithms to predict the spread of crises. Humanitarian technology has been largely acclaimed as a way of making aid more effective and of triggering a paradigm shift in humanitarian governance by putting crisis-affected communities in what is claimed to be the driving seat of aid programmes. Critics are however wary about the negative impacts these innovations have on humanitarian practices and crisis-affected population. This paper contributes to this debate by assessing whether technological innovations fundamentally alter the politics and spaces of humanitarian governance. To do so, it analyses the way public private partnerships (PPPs) mediate between the interests of the various stakeholders of tech experiments and distribute power among them. Drawing upon the exploratory analysis of 22 tech projects in crisis settings, a typology of PPPs is formalised based on the way they distribute power and resources among their stakeholders. The results show that only one type of PPPs - community-based digital humanitarianism – has the potential of increasing the ownership of crisis-affected communities over aid programmes and localising projects in so-called Global South societies. The two other types – technologising the humanitarian business and externalising the lab to crisis settings – appear as a continuation of neo-colonial practices with a digital touch.
{"title":"The politics and spaces of public-private partnerships in humanitarian tech innovations","authors":"Clara Egger","doi":"10.1177/23996544231206822","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231206822","url":null,"abstract":"The past decade has seen a growing engagement of tech companies in conflict settings to develop multifaceted technological innovations, including digital biometric identification to register refugees, commercial drones to deliver cargo, and big data-fuelled algorithms to predict the spread of crises. Humanitarian technology has been largely acclaimed as a way of making aid more effective and of triggering a paradigm shift in humanitarian governance by putting crisis-affected communities in what is claimed to be the driving seat of aid programmes. Critics are however wary about the negative impacts these innovations have on humanitarian practices and crisis-affected population. This paper contributes to this debate by assessing whether technological innovations fundamentally alter the politics and spaces of humanitarian governance. To do so, it analyses the way public private partnerships (PPPs) mediate between the interests of the various stakeholders of tech experiments and distribute power among them. Drawing upon the exploratory analysis of 22 tech projects in crisis settings, a typology of PPPs is formalised based on the way they distribute power and resources among their stakeholders. The results show that only one type of PPPs - community-based digital humanitarianism – has the potential of increasing the ownership of crisis-affected communities over aid programmes and localising projects in so-called Global South societies. The two other types – technologising the humanitarian business and externalising the lab to crisis settings – appear as a continuation of neo-colonial practices with a digital touch.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135778547","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-17DOI: 10.1177/23996544231208195
Purushottam Kesar, Peter M Ache
The paper analyses the visioning of the Greater Mumbai-2034 Development Plan (DP-2034) and its content. Our results suggest that visioning practice is essentially a discursive intervention embedded in interpretive struggles. The paper outlines the role of two key planning instruments, Floor Space Index-FSI and No Development Zone-NDZ, which materialised as discursive elements while Mumbai’s urban vision along a de-regulated and market-determined rationale is formulated. Also, to uphold its core view, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (civic body) exercised its discursive agency through various strategic practices that revolve around framing, rationalisation, scientification efforts and re-designating territorial boundaries. Simultaneously, visioning created a strategic impulse amongst citizens and civil society actors to realise their agency for change, alter their discursive power and emerge as a stronger discursive agent through forming alliances, engaging in independent surveys, imparting planning literacy, peer learning, shadow visioning and canvassing with media. As a result, MCGM was forced to alter its proposals partially. The empirical case argues that visioning exercises present novel openings for actors to negotiate their pre-given subject position, demand participatory forms of urban governance and acquire discursive agency to exercise the right to change.
{"title":"Notes on urban visions, the newer sites for discursive struggles: Mumbai 2034","authors":"Purushottam Kesar, Peter M Ache","doi":"10.1177/23996544231208195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231208195","url":null,"abstract":"The paper analyses the visioning of the Greater Mumbai-2034 Development Plan (DP-2034) and its content. Our results suggest that visioning practice is essentially a discursive intervention embedded in interpretive struggles. The paper outlines the role of two key planning instruments, Floor Space Index-FSI and No Development Zone-NDZ, which materialised as discursive elements while Mumbai’s urban vision along a de-regulated and market-determined rationale is formulated. Also, to uphold its core view, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (civic body) exercised its discursive agency through various strategic practices that revolve around framing, rationalisation, scientification efforts and re-designating territorial boundaries. Simultaneously, visioning created a strategic impulse amongst citizens and civil society actors to realise their agency for change, alter their discursive power and emerge as a stronger discursive agent through forming alliances, engaging in independent surveys, imparting planning literacy, peer learning, shadow visioning and canvassing with media. As a result, MCGM was forced to alter its proposals partially. The empirical case argues that visioning exercises present novel openings for actors to negotiate their pre-given subject position, demand participatory forms of urban governance and acquire discursive agency to exercise the right to change.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135992886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-13DOI: 10.1177/23996544231207261
Adam Peacock, Simon Pemberton
Over the last twenty years considerable attention has focused on the territorial restructuring and rescaling of the state. In particular, there has been an emphasis on city-regionalism to enhance the capacity of formal and more informal structures of governance to secure greater spatial equity and economic competitiveness. However, the spaces which sit outside of these spaces – the ‘In-between Spaces of City-Regionalism’ (ISCR) – have received relatively little attention. This paper addresses this gap in knowledge by focusing on the Northwest of England (UK) and an in-between space flanked by the Manchester and Liverpool city-regions. It highlights that despite the significant privileging of city-regions and their respective governance structures by the state, actors of relevance to ISCR spaces have also worked in highly entrepreneurial ways - both territorially and relationally - to embed economic development activities conducive to economic growth. Consequently, we offer important insights into the methods key actors in ISCR spaces can use to bypass presumed (and widely ineffective) assumptions of economic trickle down fuelled by city-regional agglomerative policy.
{"title":"The neglected spaces of economic rescaling: Insights into the in-between spaces of city-regionalism","authors":"Adam Peacock, Simon Pemberton","doi":"10.1177/23996544231207261","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231207261","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last twenty years considerable attention has focused on the territorial restructuring and rescaling of the state. In particular, there has been an emphasis on city-regionalism to enhance the capacity of formal and more informal structures of governance to secure greater spatial equity and economic competitiveness. However, the spaces which sit outside of these spaces – the ‘In-between Spaces of City-Regionalism’ (ISCR) – have received relatively little attention. This paper addresses this gap in knowledge by focusing on the Northwest of England (UK) and an in-between space flanked by the Manchester and Liverpool city-regions. It highlights that despite the significant privileging of city-regions and their respective governance structures by the state, actors of relevance to ISCR spaces have also worked in highly entrepreneurial ways - both territorially and relationally - to embed economic development activities conducive to economic growth. Consequently, we offer important insights into the methods key actors in ISCR spaces can use to bypass presumed (and widely ineffective) assumptions of economic trickle down fuelled by city-regional agglomerative policy.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135858926","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-06DOI: 10.1177/23996544231207731
Byeongsun Ahn
While much has been said about the structural and spatial dimensions of living-with-difference in the city’s diverse places, existing research has seldom addressed its situatedness within a wider institutional context of place-making that shapes the everyday conditions of our encounters and experiences with ‘others’. As a result, little attention has been paid to the political dynamics of the governance process that engender a context-specific definition and meaning of urban diversity at the local scale. In this light, this article delves into the contextual embeddedness of urban diversity in regenerating a multiethnic neighbourhood, around which residents build their new social relations and belonging. It uses Vienna’s urban renewal model as a research window, through which to explore the political dimension of state-led urban renewal, including institutional and stakeholder arrangements, and its social implications for both old and new residents in everyday spaces. Building on the empirical evidence obtained through field observation and interviewing, it demonstrates how a ‘bottom-linked’ renewal process and its resultant outcome shape a place-specific mode of living-with-difference in the daily life. It concludes highlighting the need for greater attention to the enabling role of the city’s institutional arrangements and policy designs in current research on urban diversity and coexistence.
{"title":"The politics of living-with-difference: Local perception of diversity and coexistence around participatory place-making in a multiethnic neighbourhood","authors":"Byeongsun Ahn","doi":"10.1177/23996544231207731","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231207731","url":null,"abstract":"While much has been said about the structural and spatial dimensions of living-with-difference in the city’s diverse places, existing research has seldom addressed its situatedness within a wider institutional context of place-making that shapes the everyday conditions of our encounters and experiences with ‘others’. As a result, little attention has been paid to the political dynamics of the governance process that engender a context-specific definition and meaning of urban diversity at the local scale. In this light, this article delves into the contextual embeddedness of urban diversity in regenerating a multiethnic neighbourhood, around which residents build their new social relations and belonging. It uses Vienna’s urban renewal model as a research window, through which to explore the political dimension of state-led urban renewal, including institutional and stakeholder arrangements, and its social implications for both old and new residents in everyday spaces. Building on the empirical evidence obtained through field observation and interviewing, it demonstrates how a ‘bottom-linked’ renewal process and its resultant outcome shape a place-specific mode of living-with-difference in the daily life. It concludes highlighting the need for greater attention to the enabling role of the city’s institutional arrangements and policy designs in current research on urban diversity and coexistence.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135352124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-04DOI: 10.1177/23996544231205256
Darren Sierhuis, Luca Bertolini, Willem Van Winden
In many European cities, urban experimentation is increasingly preferred as a method for testing and disseminating innovations that might ignite a transformation toward more sustainable cities. By both academics and practitioners, these experiments tend to be approached as relatively neutral initiatives through which plural urban stakeholders willfully collaborate, while their success is seen as above all dependent on effective management. For this reason, the political nature of urban experiments, in the sense that they entangle different and often contending stakeholders in their innovation processes, remains relatively unarticulated in both practice and the academic literature. Building on the urban experimentation literature and political theory, this conceptual paper argues that the depoliticization of experimental initiatives is especially problematic for unleashing their transformative potential, which requires revealing the existing power-relations and biases keeping the status quo in place and negotiability of radical alternatives. From this perspective, the paper sketches out four ideal-typical trajectories for experiments as related to their (de)politicization; optimization, blind leap, antagonistic conflict and transformation. Bringing insights from political theory to bear on the urban experimentation literature, we proceed to hypothesize the implications of our ideal-types for urban experiments’ transformative capacities. The paper closes by presenting a future research and policy agenda.
{"title":"“Recovering” the political: Unpacking the implications of (de)politicization for the transformative capacities of urban experiments","authors":"Darren Sierhuis, Luca Bertolini, Willem Van Winden","doi":"10.1177/23996544231205256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231205256","url":null,"abstract":"In many European cities, urban experimentation is increasingly preferred as a method for testing and disseminating innovations that might ignite a transformation toward more sustainable cities. By both academics and practitioners, these experiments tend to be approached as relatively neutral initiatives through which plural urban stakeholders willfully collaborate, while their success is seen as above all dependent on effective management. For this reason, the political nature of urban experiments, in the sense that they entangle different and often contending stakeholders in their innovation processes, remains relatively unarticulated in both practice and the academic literature. Building on the urban experimentation literature and political theory, this conceptual paper argues that the depoliticization of experimental initiatives is especially problematic for unleashing their transformative potential, which requires revealing the existing power-relations and biases keeping the status quo in place and negotiability of radical alternatives. From this perspective, the paper sketches out four ideal-typical trajectories for experiments as related to their (de)politicization; optimization, blind leap, antagonistic conflict and transformation. Bringing insights from political theory to bear on the urban experimentation literature, we proceed to hypothesize the implications of our ideal-types for urban experiments’ transformative capacities. The paper closes by presenting a future research and policy agenda.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135590498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-04DOI: 10.1177/23996544231204826
Juan Pablo Vera Lugo
This article argues that contemporary humanitarian bureaucracies in Colombia have gradually produced and reproduced specific socio-spatial and epistemological hierarchies through a conceptual device commonly referred to as the nation-territory ( nación-territorio) divide. The nation-territory divide is a way in which public servants, experts, international cooperation officers, and scholars refer to practices and strategies to “territorialize public policy” or to “bring the state down to the territories.” Through an ethnographic study of the mechanisms involved in the implementation of victims’ reparation and land restitution policy in Colombia, I describe the everyday spatial state building practices of national bureaucrats and experts tasked with “territorializing” transitional justice and development paradigms. I discuss how expert knowledge created to implement transitional justice policies fail in that they produce and reproduce the very spatial hierarchies they attempt to mitigate. I argue that in order to strengthen democracy, transitional justice paradigms and practices must challenge the hegemonic configuration of spatial state building and bureaucratic approaches to spatial representation and local governance. By exploring these bureaucratic practices, as well as spatial representations within humanitarian and transitional justice institutions in Colombia, this article contributes to a larger discussion of the implementation of territorial approaches to transitional justice and development.
{"title":"Widening the nation-territory gap: Transitional justice, development and spatial state-building in Colombia","authors":"Juan Pablo Vera Lugo","doi":"10.1177/23996544231204826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231204826","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that contemporary humanitarian bureaucracies in Colombia have gradually produced and reproduced specific socio-spatial and epistemological hierarchies through a conceptual device commonly referred to as the nation-territory ( nación-territorio) divide. The nation-territory divide is a way in which public servants, experts, international cooperation officers, and scholars refer to practices and strategies to “territorialize public policy” or to “bring the state down to the territories.” Through an ethnographic study of the mechanisms involved in the implementation of victims’ reparation and land restitution policy in Colombia, I describe the everyday spatial state building practices of national bureaucrats and experts tasked with “territorializing” transitional justice and development paradigms. I discuss how expert knowledge created to implement transitional justice policies fail in that they produce and reproduce the very spatial hierarchies they attempt to mitigate. I argue that in order to strengthen democracy, transitional justice paradigms and practices must challenge the hegemonic configuration of spatial state building and bureaucratic approaches to spatial representation and local governance. By exploring these bureaucratic practices, as well as spatial representations within humanitarian and transitional justice institutions in Colombia, this article contributes to a larger discussion of the implementation of territorial approaches to transitional justice and development.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135590111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-30DOI: 10.1177/23996544231203896
Alex Farrington
In this paper, I contribute to the literature on self-organized houseless encampments in the United States in two ways. First, I draw on Roy’s concept of racial banishment to examine the relationship between encampments and American racial capitalism. Second, I extend Caldeira’s theory of peripheral urbanization – originally developed to describe urban informality in the Global South – to encampments in the United States. Doing so highlights how encampment residents and local government interact with one another through transversal logics. I show how both these frameworks – racial banishment and peripheral urbanization – can help us understand the creation of two self-organized houseless encampments: Dignity Village in Portland and Umoja Village in Miami. In each city, I describe how these encampments not only encountered, but also countered various forms of banishment through creative means.
{"title":"Racial capitalism and self-organized houseless encampments: (En)countering banishment in Portland and Miami","authors":"Alex Farrington","doi":"10.1177/23996544231203896","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231203896","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, I contribute to the literature on self-organized houseless encampments in the United States in two ways. First, I draw on Roy’s concept of racial banishment to examine the relationship between encampments and American racial capitalism. Second, I extend Caldeira’s theory of peripheral urbanization – originally developed to describe urban informality in the Global South – to encampments in the United States. Doing so highlights how encampment residents and local government interact with one another through transversal logics. I show how both these frameworks – racial banishment and peripheral urbanization – can help us understand the creation of two self-organized houseless encampments: Dignity Village in Portland and Umoja Village in Miami. In each city, I describe how these encampments not only encountered, but also countered various forms of banishment through creative means.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"160 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136279858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-30DOI: 10.1177/23996544231200002
Christine Gibb
Natural hazards don’t care who you worship. However, the evacuation camps, transitional housing sites and relocation sites aimed at helping disaster survivors do. Empirically, this paper explains a puzzle in which Muslim survivors of Typhoon Sendong in the Philippines were all but absent in official post-disaster spaces of this Catholic-majority country. Based on qualitative interviews, focus groups and site visits, I identify two exclusionary mechanisms: (1) prejudices, preferences and practicalities, and (2) socio-spatial design of official post-disaster spaces. This paper argues that by studying Muslim survivors’ post-disaster mobilities, we see that discrimination along the lines of religion, as it plays out in everyday gendered religious socio-spatial practices, repels survivors from accessing evacuation camps and other post-disaster spaces. This is important for two related reasons. One, these humanitarian spaces claim to be inclusive yet, in practice, deter would-be migrants on the basis of religion. Two, religiously-informed gender relations shape the politics of disaster recovery processes, which further exacerbate inequities post-disaster.
{"title":"Post-disaster mobilities of Muslim typhoon survivors: How gendered religious preferences and discrimination shape socio-spatial exclusions in Catholic-majority Cagayan de Oro, Philippines","authors":"Christine Gibb","doi":"10.1177/23996544231200002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231200002","url":null,"abstract":"Natural hazards don’t care who you worship. However, the evacuation camps, transitional housing sites and relocation sites aimed at helping disaster survivors do. Empirically, this paper explains a puzzle in which Muslim survivors of Typhoon Sendong in the Philippines were all but absent in official post-disaster spaces of this Catholic-majority country. Based on qualitative interviews, focus groups and site visits, I identify two exclusionary mechanisms: (1) prejudices, preferences and practicalities, and (2) socio-spatial design of official post-disaster spaces. This paper argues that by studying Muslim survivors’ post-disaster mobilities, we see that discrimination along the lines of religion, as it plays out in everyday gendered religious socio-spatial practices, repels survivors from accessing evacuation camps and other post-disaster spaces. This is important for two related reasons. One, these humanitarian spaces claim to be inclusive yet, in practice, deter would-be migrants on the basis of religion. Two, religiously-informed gender relations shape the politics of disaster recovery processes, which further exacerbate inequities post-disaster.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"129 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136280333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-21DOI: 10.1177/23996544231199333
Kanchana N Ruwanpura
Sri Lankan garment workers have navigated a terrain where their initial status as stigmatized labour were re-casted as empowered workers through various industry-led initiatives in the recent past. Rearticulation from disposable to empowered workers, however, did not rest upon living wages or a hike in wage packets; instead, various management interpellations were attempted onsite and offsite factories. Without a material basis for these initiatives in the pre-CoVID-19 period, the vacuity of these tropes became particularly evident during the pandemic. Workers had to come to terms with shabby social support and stigma that worsened their economic lives, with tattered social safety systems compelling labour rights organizations and kin to step up. Using worker testimonies, I speak to the politics of empowerment to underline how the recasting of workers as stigmatized resulted in the cost of social reproduction to borne by kin networks and labour activists too. These frayed social safety nets and public support continue to echo against the country’s worst economic crisis.
{"title":"Frayed social safety: Social networks, stigma, and COVID-19 – The case of Sri Lankan garment workers","authors":"Kanchana N Ruwanpura","doi":"10.1177/23996544231199333","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231199333","url":null,"abstract":"Sri Lankan garment workers have navigated a terrain where their initial status as stigmatized labour were re-casted as empowered workers through various industry-led initiatives in the recent past. Rearticulation from disposable to empowered workers, however, did not rest upon living wages or a hike in wage packets; instead, various management interpellations were attempted onsite and offsite factories. Without a material basis for these initiatives in the pre-CoVID-19 period, the vacuity of these tropes became particularly evident during the pandemic. Workers had to come to terms with shabby social support and stigma that worsened their economic lives, with tattered social safety systems compelling labour rights organizations and kin to step up. Using worker testimonies, I speak to the politics of empowerment to underline how the recasting of workers as stigmatized resulted in the cost of social reproduction to borne by kin networks and labour activists too. These frayed social safety nets and public support continue to echo against the country’s worst economic crisis.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136152937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-20DOI: 10.1177/23996544231201632
Liam O’Farrell, Katrín Oddsdóttir
In 2008, Iceland experienced one of the largest banking crashes in history. Protests against the government emerged, and as a response the country set in motion a process to rewrite its constitution. In 2011 the world’s first ‘crowdsourced constitution’ was presented to Parliament, following which two-thirds of voters in a national referendum said “yes” to the document being the basis for the Constitution of Iceland. Despite this, successive governments have repeatedly failed to implement constitutional reform. In this context, grassroots activists have campaigned to keep the issue of the new constitution alive, including through an artistic campaign. This article is the first study of this art and consideration of how Iceland’s political struggles have played out in space. Applying Duncombe’s methodology of affective effect, we present an evidence-based case of art achieving quantifiable goals, suggesting broader social change. Given that policies pursued by the government have changed the nature and use of space in the country, activist art is shown to have a significant capacity to reinvigorate the democratic functions of space, with effects that can be observed both within and without political institutions.
{"title":"‘Where is the new constitution?’ Activist art and the politics of space in Iceland","authors":"Liam O’Farrell, Katrín Oddsdóttir","doi":"10.1177/23996544231201632","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231201632","url":null,"abstract":"In 2008, Iceland experienced one of the largest banking crashes in history. Protests against the government emerged, and as a response the country set in motion a process to rewrite its constitution. In 2011 the world’s first ‘crowdsourced constitution’ was presented to Parliament, following which two-thirds of voters in a national referendum said “yes” to the document being the basis for the Constitution of Iceland. Despite this, successive governments have repeatedly failed to implement constitutional reform. In this context, grassroots activists have campaigned to keep the issue of the new constitution alive, including through an artistic campaign. This article is the first study of this art and consideration of how Iceland’s political struggles have played out in space. Applying Duncombe’s methodology of affective effect, we present an evidence-based case of art achieving quantifiable goals, suggesting broader social change. Given that policies pursued by the government have changed the nature and use of space in the country, activist art is shown to have a significant capacity to reinvigorate the democratic functions of space, with effects that can be observed both within and without political institutions.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136264294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：