Pub Date : 2024-02-28DOI: 10.1177/19427786241234546
Matthew B. Anderson, Graham Zickefoose, Tate Andrie, Tony Newton
Housing costs have soared in the United States and beyond in recent years, leading to growing calls for rent control among tenant rights advocates and legislators. This push to enact rent control has been met with substantial opposition by landlord associations, an opposition which is mobilized by long-standing arguments by economists rooted in neo-classical economic principles. The article extends existing criticism of one particular facet of this opposition: the argument that rent control will only worsen any housing crisis as rents increase due to landlords actively reducing supply. We argue that this argument amounts to the pursuit of something that mainstream economists have long ignored or disavowed to counter-act the intended purpose of rent control: class monopoly rent. By drawing on evidence from the statewide rent control legislation passed in Oregon in 2019, we engage with scholarship on the sociology of housing markets and Marxian rent theory to reveal that landlords acting as a collective voice through landlord associations to advance this argument effectively constitutes the discursive deployment of class monopoly power as a political strategy to lobby against tenant rights proponents. As such, we argue that landlords effectively engage in a “politics of class monopoly rent” which functions as a discursive weapon against tenant rights activists and low-income renters otherwise held captive in unaffordable housing markets. We offer this article as a resource for tenant rights activists and legislators who must inevitably confront this opposition in the process of mobilizing rent control legislation.
{"title":"Landlord opposition to rent control and the politics of class monopoly rent","authors":"Matthew B. Anderson, Graham Zickefoose, Tate Andrie, Tony Newton","doi":"10.1177/19427786241234546","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786241234546","url":null,"abstract":"Housing costs have soared in the United States and beyond in recent years, leading to growing calls for rent control among tenant rights advocates and legislators. This push to enact rent control has been met with substantial opposition by landlord associations, an opposition which is mobilized by long-standing arguments by economists rooted in neo-classical economic principles. The article extends existing criticism of one particular facet of this opposition: the argument that rent control will only worsen any housing crisis as rents increase due to landlords actively reducing supply. We argue that this argument amounts to the pursuit of something that mainstream economists have long ignored or disavowed to counter-act the intended purpose of rent control: class monopoly rent. By drawing on evidence from the statewide rent control legislation passed in Oregon in 2019, we engage with scholarship on the sociology of housing markets and Marxian rent theory to reveal that landlords acting as a collective voice through landlord associations to advance this argument effectively constitutes the discursive deployment of class monopoly power as a political strategy to lobby against tenant rights proponents. As such, we argue that landlords effectively engage in a “politics of class monopoly rent” which functions as a discursive weapon against tenant rights activists and low-income renters otherwise held captive in unaffordable housing markets. We offer this article as a resource for tenant rights activists and legislators who must inevitably confront this opposition in the process of mobilizing rent control legislation.","PeriodicalId":507268,"journal":{"name":"Human Geography","volume":"41 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140421938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-22DOI: 10.1177/19427786241227235
James Lawson, Feng Xu
In urban China, institutional eldercare interacts with local land markets in ways that present special analytical problems in critical political economy. It is a new sector: home-based eldercare and childcare have formed complementary parts of intergenerational household strategies that are coming under system-wide pressure for the first time. Growth in Chinese institutional eldercare has increasingly contributed to the repurposing of a wide range of disused buildings, with noteworthy state encouragement. We read this post-reform feature of urban transformation to deploy David Harvey’s concept of ‘capital switching’ in new ways that are emerging in studies of China's urban geography. Harvey’s framework has already been used in analysing China’s multi-decade boom in the built environment. It exposed the stabilising effects of diverting capital from overaccumulation in single turnover and realisation cycles into deferred returns in the multi-cycle built environment albeit complicated by complex and distinctive interpenetrations of consumption fund and fixed capital, for-profit and not-for-profit sectors, state and non-state interests, and so on. This certainly speaks to the origins of contemporary Chinese urbanisation booms. But repurposing for institutional eldercare now appears to be playing a role in abating mounting overaccumulation and potential devalorisation in the built environment, pairing these unprofitable buildings with for-profit eldercare services operating and yielding profits in repeated single turnover cycles. We experiment with bundled commodity theory to understand repurposing buildings for residential eldercare in this new context.
{"title":"Re-purposing the built environment of urban China: Residential eldercare and David Harvey's capital switching in a new era","authors":"James Lawson, Feng Xu","doi":"10.1177/19427786241227235","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786241227235","url":null,"abstract":"In urban China, institutional eldercare interacts with local land markets in ways that present special analytical problems in critical political economy. It is a new sector: home-based eldercare and childcare have formed complementary parts of intergenerational household strategies that are coming under system-wide pressure for the first time. Growth in Chinese institutional eldercare has increasingly contributed to the repurposing of a wide range of disused buildings, with noteworthy state encouragement. We read this post-reform feature of urban transformation to deploy David Harvey’s concept of ‘capital switching’ in new ways that are emerging in studies of China's urban geography. Harvey’s framework has already been used in analysing China’s multi-decade boom in the built environment. It exposed the stabilising effects of diverting capital from overaccumulation in single turnover and realisation cycles into deferred returns in the multi-cycle built environment albeit complicated by complex and distinctive interpenetrations of consumption fund and fixed capital, for-profit and not-for-profit sectors, state and non-state interests, and so on. This certainly speaks to the origins of contemporary Chinese urbanisation booms. But repurposing for institutional eldercare now appears to be playing a role in abating mounting overaccumulation and potential devalorisation in the built environment, pairing these unprofitable buildings with for-profit eldercare services operating and yielding profits in repeated single turnover cycles. We experiment with bundled commodity theory to understand repurposing buildings for residential eldercare in this new context.","PeriodicalId":507268,"journal":{"name":"Human Geography","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140439467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-19DOI: 10.1177/19427786241228496
Asif Mehmood, S. Hasnain
In this visual intervention, we show how a traditional community ( Gujjars) associated with livestock and dairy business enables and sustains milk commons as an articulation of their devotion to Lahore's city saint Data Ganj Bakhsh. We argue that the flows of milk at the shrine (monthly/annually) operate not only as a special purpose vehicle of piety for centuries but also as a device for Gujjar identity formation. The commoning practices reveal that identity, spirituality, and rituals are key cultural drivers of the urban commons and associated metabolic circulations, therefore, establishing themselves as important markers and analytical categories within the broader urban-nature-society debates. We seek to foreground constituent elements of the local commoning and the socio-nature at the shrine—milk, community, identity, and rituals of piety. We call their interplay the “ lactosocial” and show that it goes beyond the shrine, and its monthly/annual assemblies, and manifests itself throughout the year in other places, representations, and portrayals vis-à-vis Gujjar community. Through this work, we suggest that the lactosocial may be taken as a broader theoretical trope. It essentially moves our focus towards more-than-humans and the forms of power and social differentiation that cut across, inter alia, animal lifeworlds, traditional ecological knowledge, and neoliberal food policy domain.
在这一视觉干预中，我们展示了一个与畜牧业和奶制品业相关的传统社区（古贾尔人）如何促成和维持牛奶公社，以此表达他们对拉合尔城市圣人 Data Ganj Bakhsh 的虔诚。我们认为，几个世纪以来，圣地的牛奶流（每月一次/每年一次）不仅是虔诚的特殊载体，也是古贾尔人身份形成的一种手段。共同化实践揭示了身份认同、精神信仰和仪式是城市公共空间和相关新陈代谢循环的主要文化驱动力，因此，在更广泛的城市-自然-社会辩论中，它们被确立为重要的标记和分析类别。我们试图突出当地公地和圣地社会自然的组成要素--牛奶、社区、身份认同和虔诚仪式。我们将它们之间的相互作用称为 "乳社会"，并表明它超越了圣地及其每月/每年的集会，全年都在其他地方、表现形式和对古贾尔社区的描述中体现出来。通过这项工作，我们认为可以将哺乳社会作为一个更广泛的理论特例。从根本上说，它将我们的关注点转移到了 "超人类 "以及跨越动物生活世界、传统生态知识和新自由主义粮食政策等领域的权力和社会分化形式。
{"title":"The lactosocial at Data Saheb’s Shrine (Lahore-Pakistan): Piety, flows, commons, and the community","authors":"Asif Mehmood, S. Hasnain","doi":"10.1177/19427786241228496","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786241228496","url":null,"abstract":"In this visual intervention, we show how a traditional community ( Gujjars) associated with livestock and dairy business enables and sustains milk commons as an articulation of their devotion to Lahore's city saint Data Ganj Bakhsh. We argue that the flows of milk at the shrine (monthly/annually) operate not only as a special purpose vehicle of piety for centuries but also as a device for Gujjar identity formation. The commoning practices reveal that identity, spirituality, and rituals are key cultural drivers of the urban commons and associated metabolic circulations, therefore, establishing themselves as important markers and analytical categories within the broader urban-nature-society debates. We seek to foreground constituent elements of the local commoning and the socio-nature at the shrine—milk, community, identity, and rituals of piety. We call their interplay the “ lactosocial” and show that it goes beyond the shrine, and its monthly/annual assemblies, and manifests itself throughout the year in other places, representations, and portrayals vis-à-vis Gujjar community. Through this work, we suggest that the lactosocial may be taken as a broader theoretical trope. It essentially moves our focus towards more-than-humans and the forms of power and social differentiation that cut across, inter alia, animal lifeworlds, traditional ecological knowledge, and neoliberal food policy domain.","PeriodicalId":507268,"journal":{"name":"Human Geography","volume":"115 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140451951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In Venice, Italy, peculiar forms of alpha territorialisation are triggered mainly by touristification and ‘tourism-led gentrification’ processes. Such dynamics, increasingly supported by real estate financialisation, are currently spreading from the old town towards the minor islands of the Venetian lagoon, as well as towards the mainland. These processes change the traditional relationship between the old town and its islands. At the same time, such drifts are somehow counteracted by social movements and grassroots cultural practices that often implement forms of actions towards the realisation of an alternative idea of the city. This paper argues that such processes can be interpreted as phenomena of alpha territorialisation and that this interpretation helps us understand the spatial and environmental consequences of urban socio-economic restructuring processes.
{"title":"Luxury Venice: The spread of touristification processes as alpha territorialisation","authors":"Carla Tedesco, Matteo Basso, Chiara Mazzoleni, Valeria Morea","doi":"10.1177/19427786241227405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786241227405","url":null,"abstract":"In Venice, Italy, peculiar forms of alpha territorialisation are triggered mainly by touristification and ‘tourism-led gentrification’ processes. Such dynamics, increasingly supported by real estate financialisation, are currently spreading from the old town towards the minor islands of the Venetian lagoon, as well as towards the mainland. These processes change the traditional relationship between the old town and its islands. At the same time, such drifts are somehow counteracted by social movements and grassroots cultural practices that often implement forms of actions towards the realisation of an alternative idea of the city. This paper argues that such processes can be interpreted as phenomena of alpha territorialisation and that this interpretation helps us understand the spatial and environmental consequences of urban socio-economic restructuring processes.","PeriodicalId":507268,"journal":{"name":"Human Geography","volume":"1 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139867031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In Venice, Italy, peculiar forms of alpha territorialisation are triggered mainly by touristification and ‘tourism-led gentrification’ processes. Such dynamics, increasingly supported by real estate financialisation, are currently spreading from the old town towards the minor islands of the Venetian lagoon, as well as towards the mainland. These processes change the traditional relationship between the old town and its islands. At the same time, such drifts are somehow counteracted by social movements and grassroots cultural practices that often implement forms of actions towards the realisation of an alternative idea of the city. This paper argues that such processes can be interpreted as phenomena of alpha territorialisation and that this interpretation helps us understand the spatial and environmental consequences of urban socio-economic restructuring processes.
{"title":"Luxury Venice: The spread of touristification processes as alpha territorialisation","authors":"Carla Tedesco, Matteo Basso, Chiara Mazzoleni, Valeria Morea","doi":"10.1177/19427786241227405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786241227405","url":null,"abstract":"In Venice, Italy, peculiar forms of alpha territorialisation are triggered mainly by touristification and ‘tourism-led gentrification’ processes. Such dynamics, increasingly supported by real estate financialisation, are currently spreading from the old town towards the minor islands of the Venetian lagoon, as well as towards the mainland. These processes change the traditional relationship between the old town and its islands. At the same time, such drifts are somehow counteracted by social movements and grassroots cultural practices that often implement forms of actions towards the realisation of an alternative idea of the city. This paper argues that such processes can be interpreted as phenomena of alpha territorialisation and that this interpretation helps us understand the spatial and environmental consequences of urban socio-economic restructuring processes.","PeriodicalId":507268,"journal":{"name":"Human Geography","volume":"2009 20","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139807269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-01-31DOI: 10.1177/19427786241227234
M. Dudley, Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, Michelle Tynan, Anna Zoodsma
Both farmers and workers utilize guest worker programs to gain access to the transnational food labor economy. Yet such programs reinforce both employees’ and farm owners’ relative lack of power in the global food system. This paper discusses the approaches farmers and workers utilizing the H-2A guest worker program in the United States employ to cope with such inequalities. We assess findings from qualitative interviews in New York state with current and former workers and farmers participating in the program. We find that farmers draw on regional agrarian communities with historically established networks to collectively manage labor acquisition, seasonality, and affordability. In contrast, the temporary nature of workers’ time in the United States limits their ability to establish deep social networks, and workers cope either by increasing their hours and commitment or by leaving the program to work in agriculture without work authorization. These temporal and spatial constraints further diminish worker power within the food system by limiting their ability to effectively organize for better conditions, with consequences for global food system equity.
{"title":"Thinking across agrarian class hierarchies in guest worker programs: Limitations to worker and farmer collective strategies","authors":"M. Dudley, Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, Michelle Tynan, Anna Zoodsma","doi":"10.1177/19427786241227234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786241227234","url":null,"abstract":"Both farmers and workers utilize guest worker programs to gain access to the transnational food labor economy. Yet such programs reinforce both employees’ and farm owners’ relative lack of power in the global food system. This paper discusses the approaches farmers and workers utilizing the H-2A guest worker program in the United States employ to cope with such inequalities. We assess findings from qualitative interviews in New York state with current and former workers and farmers participating in the program. We find that farmers draw on regional agrarian communities with historically established networks to collectively manage labor acquisition, seasonality, and affordability. In contrast, the temporary nature of workers’ time in the United States limits their ability to establish deep social networks, and workers cope either by increasing their hours and commitment or by leaving the program to work in agriculture without work authorization. These temporal and spatial constraints further diminish worker power within the food system by limiting their ability to effectively organize for better conditions, with consequences for global food system equity.","PeriodicalId":507268,"journal":{"name":"Human Geography","volume":"219 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140477645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-01-23DOI: 10.1177/19427786231214447
Rae Baker, Dylan M. Harris
Student debt burdens are second only to mortgages in the United States’ debt portfolio. With nearly 43 million people repaying trillions of dollars of student debt, it is no surprise that calls for student debt cancellation have grown amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which has only exacerbated already existing economic crises in the US. And yet, meaningful action to address student debt has largely been absent from recent legislation meant to help Americans overcome the residual impacts, including the financial burdens, of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we argue the absence of student debt relief is consonant with what we articulate as the topologies of student debt in the US, which we use to contextualize the student debt crisis. We provide two case studies—on the relationship between environmental legislation and student debt, and on the uneven ruralities of student debt—that give insight into the socioecological dimensions of student debt's topologies. We end this article by inviting others to join us as we develop more geographical evidence to support ongoing activism for student debt cancellation.
{"title":"Socioecological topologies of student debt in the United States","authors":"Rae Baker, Dylan M. Harris","doi":"10.1177/19427786231214447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786231214447","url":null,"abstract":"Student debt burdens are second only to mortgages in the United States’ debt portfolio. With nearly 43 million people repaying trillions of dollars of student debt, it is no surprise that calls for student debt cancellation have grown amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which has only exacerbated already existing economic crises in the US. And yet, meaningful action to address student debt has largely been absent from recent legislation meant to help Americans overcome the residual impacts, including the financial burdens, of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we argue the absence of student debt relief is consonant with what we articulate as the topologies of student debt in the US, which we use to contextualize the student debt crisis. We provide two case studies—on the relationship between environmental legislation and student debt, and on the uneven ruralities of student debt—that give insight into the socioecological dimensions of student debt's topologies. We end this article by inviting others to join us as we develop more geographical evidence to support ongoing activism for student debt cancellation.","PeriodicalId":507268,"journal":{"name":"Human Geography","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139602921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-01-22DOI: 10.1177/19427786241227171
Tod Rutherford
This article examines the ongoing 2023 US strike wave while setting it within the institutional and historical context of the post-war American industrial relations paradigm. This paradigm was often challenged by workers, and after 1970, its decline also reflected deindustrialization, increasing employer attacks and state and legal shifts toward neoliberalism which contributed to the decline of unionization, strikes, and increasingly deteriorating work conditions. However, especially after the 2008–2009 crisis, these factors also laid the basis for increasing worker resistance. The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath have shifted labor market conditions in the workers’ favor and contributed to the current strike wave, and some strikes such as those by the United Auto Workers have been framed within a wider political and class narrative. Nonetheless, the trajectory of these strikes is in question. Whether they can lead to a sustained increase in American workers’ power depends on their ability to scale up both through organizing and politically via the state.
{"title":"The labor of strikes: Unions, workers, and the 2023 US strike wave","authors":"Tod Rutherford","doi":"10.1177/19427786241227171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786241227171","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the ongoing 2023 US strike wave while setting it within the institutional and historical context of the post-war American industrial relations paradigm. This paradigm was often challenged by workers, and after 1970, its decline also reflected deindustrialization, increasing employer attacks and state and legal shifts toward neoliberalism which contributed to the decline of unionization, strikes, and increasingly deteriorating work conditions. However, especially after the 2008–2009 crisis, these factors also laid the basis for increasing worker resistance. The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath have shifted labor market conditions in the workers’ favor and contributed to the current strike wave, and some strikes such as those by the United Auto Workers have been framed within a wider political and class narrative. Nonetheless, the trajectory of these strikes is in question. Whether they can lead to a sustained increase in American workers’ power depends on their ability to scale up both through organizing and politically via the state.","PeriodicalId":507268,"journal":{"name":"Human Geography","volume":"1 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139607253","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-15DOI: 10.1177/19427786231220336
Raouf Ahmad Peerzada, Amrita Sharma, Samyuktha Kannan
Resistance movements in India have often found support and sustenance within universities that have offered profound association, critical engagement, expertise, camaraderie, and, in some cases, even leadership. Working within the structural confines of statism, nationalism and global capitalism, universities have managed to advance critical instruction, pedagogical innovations, and political resistance. This dialectical relationship between the university and society emphasizes the position of educators as inextricably linked to the social production of labor power. With the power to equip students, teachers not only become conduits of emancipatory knowledge but also have the power to politicize students and transform the classroom into spaces of resistance against capitalism, that has consistently emphasized education as a commodity. As a result, universities have offered and preserved crucial spaces of radical (re)thinking and a critical platform for waging a war for democracy. A new form of protracted and collective political resistance is necessary if democracy is to be restored from the ruins of unrestrained capitalism. Being the meeting points of decades of collective struggles of students–teachers–workers, universities may yet again offer that if they survive the assaults of neoliberalism and evolve to preserve its progressive social character.
{"title":"University and resistance: New state and new struggles","authors":"Raouf Ahmad Peerzada, Amrita Sharma, Samyuktha Kannan","doi":"10.1177/19427786231220336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786231220336","url":null,"abstract":"Resistance movements in India have often found support and sustenance within universities that have offered profound association, critical engagement, expertise, camaraderie, and, in some cases, even leadership. Working within the structural confines of statism, nationalism and global capitalism, universities have managed to advance critical instruction, pedagogical innovations, and political resistance. This dialectical relationship between the university and society emphasizes the position of educators as inextricably linked to the social production of labor power. With the power to equip students, teachers not only become conduits of emancipatory knowledge but also have the power to politicize students and transform the classroom into spaces of resistance against capitalism, that has consistently emphasized education as a commodity. As a result, universities have offered and preserved crucial spaces of radical (re)thinking and a critical platform for waging a war for democracy. A new form of protracted and collective political resistance is necessary if democracy is to be restored from the ruins of unrestrained capitalism. Being the meeting points of decades of collective struggles of students–teachers–workers, universities may yet again offer that if they survive the assaults of neoliberalism and evolve to preserve its progressive social character.","PeriodicalId":507268,"journal":{"name":"Human Geography","volume":"236 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139177342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-15DOI: 10.1177/19427786231220046
John Agnew
The 2023 Gaza War quickly became a war of words. In the war over public opinion, support for the lot of the Palestinians or criticism of Israeli government actions alike were put down to an anti-Zionism inspired by anti-Semitism. My purpose is to question this conflation and to suggest that in fact historically and today it has been pro-Zionism that has been inspired more by popular anti-Semitism, a conspiratorial view of the world in which Jewish people figure exclusively as “enemies” of the nations in which they live, rather than the opposite. Zionism, as its early proponents all said, was a solution to anti-Semitism. In creating a Jewish nation state, Jews could be shielded from the animus and consequences of anti-Semitism. In doing so, of course, any Palestinian collective political future would necessarily be compromised. The competing claims to the same territory this entails cannot be resolved by simply adopting “better language.” The language war confuses the real issue at hand: Israelis and Palestinians alike are inheritors of the logic of the territorialized (ethno) nation state imported from nineteenth-century Europe. The historical irony is that Israel is now a “role model” for the populist-nationalists whose political ancestors demonized their Jewish populations as “other” and “disloyal.” This points to the tragedy of the nation state that the Gaza War represents. Shared political space is impossible to comprehend while locked into this logic.
{"title":"The language of intractability and the Gaza War: Conflating anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is historically problematic and misses how much contemporary Israel has become a role model for ethno-nationalists worldwide","authors":"John Agnew","doi":"10.1177/19427786231220046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786231220046","url":null,"abstract":"The 2023 Gaza War quickly became a war of words. In the war over public opinion, support for the lot of the Palestinians or criticism of Israeli government actions alike were put down to an anti-Zionism inspired by anti-Semitism. My purpose is to question this conflation and to suggest that in fact historically and today it has been pro-Zionism that has been inspired more by popular anti-Semitism, a conspiratorial view of the world in which Jewish people figure exclusively as “enemies” of the nations in which they live, rather than the opposite. Zionism, as its early proponents all said, was a solution to anti-Semitism. In creating a Jewish nation state, Jews could be shielded from the animus and consequences of anti-Semitism. In doing so, of course, any Palestinian collective political future would necessarily be compromised. The competing claims to the same territory this entails cannot be resolved by simply adopting “better language.” The language war confuses the real issue at hand: Israelis and Palestinians alike are inheritors of the logic of the territorialized (ethno) nation state imported from nineteenth-century Europe. The historical irony is that Israel is now a “role model” for the populist-nationalists whose political ancestors demonized their Jewish populations as “other” and “disloyal.” This points to the tragedy of the nation state that the Gaza War represents. Shared political space is impossible to comprehend while locked into this logic.","PeriodicalId":507268,"journal":{"name":"Human Geography","volume":"641 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139178310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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