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| 1 |
ID:
091594
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2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article provides an analysis of interdependencies between post-Soviet Erinnerungspolitik in public space and the individual perception of urban reconfigurations by ethnic Germans in Kazakhstan. Applying a qualitative social-geographic approach the author examines determinants of the process of ethnic symbolisation of real and imagined places. Individual biography and the extent of Soviet socialisation are factors shaping the personal perception of symbolic landscapes. From the perspective of the individual, space reflects the power distribution within society and hence, impacts on individual identity formation. Depending on the dominance of internal as opposed to external identification, the (perceived) changing ethnicised landscape of cities potentially fuels ethnic tension.
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| 2 |
ID:
121104
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
A new type of civil society movement led by the urban middle class has grown with increasing economic liberalization, one that aims to eliminate 'filth', including garbage, slums, and street stalls, from the city's public space and to create a 'world-class' city. These movements have been critically analyzed as a phenomenon representing a new India aspiring to progress based on consumerism and pleasure at the cost of the poor. 'Fight the Filth', organized by a Mumbai English-language tabloid, is one campaign of this type. This paper aims to provide a new perspective to understand these controversial movements by focusing on the forms and aesthetics of this campaign. It illustrates the demands on the middle class in public culture, both to catch up with global India's new consumer aesthetics and to be proper citizens responsible for the society at large, and considers how the middle class is coping with this.
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| 3 |
ID:
171300
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Can fun be a serious politics in feminist struggles? That is the question that animates this paper. While claims for the economic and political participation of women have gained increasing legitimacy, the demand for fun may often be seen not just as frivolous, but also as undermining the seriousness of the feminist project itself. The paper engages with three feminist campaigns, two in India and one in Pakistan, that assert women’s rights to occupy the public for fun. The paper refutes critiques that suggest that feminist campaigns to claim public space in the city are illustrative of neo-liberal subjecthood and reflect the birth of new entrepreneurial selves. It also reflects on contemporary feminist debates in India around what counts as feminist, arguing that claims for fun might in fact be central to a feminist politics in the twenty-first century.
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| 4 |
ID:
192182
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This study investigates how discourses on panhandling intertwine with the governance of beggars on China's urban streets. It focuses on local policy implementation in Guangzhou city, led by the bureau of civil affairs along with its centres for “custody and repatriation” and “assistance stations.” The study aims to understand how the state regulates panhandling and engages with beggars in public spaces. Exploring the internal logic of the state's approach and how it has changed during the 40 years of reform, it also considers the junctures at which contradictions and conflicts arise. Based on fieldwork data (2011 to 2014) and the analysis of government documents, yearbooks, academic and mass media discourses, I argue that the state's treatment of panhandlers poses a conundrum as welfare measures conflict with control. While several layers of state regulation and actors contradict each other and create grey areas of state-induced informality, people who beg for alms are continuously criminalized and excluded from public space.
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| 5 |
ID:
100293
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2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper looks at multilingual signs and what these signs have to tell us about multilingualism in Japan in general. Working with a larger sample of signs collected in central Tokyo, it is shown how these signs can be read to reflect larger transformations in Japanese society and its linguistic make-up at large. Four interrelated factors are identified as indicative of these transformations: (1) favourable attitudes toward foreign languages, (2) official internationalisation policies, (3) growing ethnicisation in some areas, and (4) a recent interest in Korean culture and language.
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| 6 |
ID:
161262
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| Summary/Abstract |
Guided by Michel Foucault's concept of “pastoral power,” this article examines the ways in which contemporary discourses within official narratives in China portray the state in a paternal fashion to reinforce its legitimacy. Employing interdisciplinary approaches, this article explores a number of sites in Urumqi, the regional capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), in order to map how a coherent official narrative of power and authority is created and reinforced across different spaces and texts. It demonstrates how both history and the present day are depicted in urban Xinjiang in order to portray the state in a pastoral role that legitimates its use of force, as well as emphasizing its core role in developing the region out of poverty and into “civilization.”
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| 7 |
ID:
131817
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Urban public space is a product of contestations by various actors. This paper focuses on the conflict between local level government and beggars to address the questions: How and why do government actors refuse or allow beggars access to public space? How and why do beggars appropriate public space to receive alms and adapt their strategies? How does this contestation contribute to the trends of urban public space in today's China? Taking the Southern metropolis of Guangzhou as a case study, I argue that beggars contest expulsion from public space through begging performances. Rising barriers of public space require higher investment in these performances, taking even more resources from the panhandling poor. The trends of public order are not unidirectional, however. Beggars navigate between several contextual borders composed by China's religious renaissance; the discourse on deserving, undeserving, and dangerous beggars; and the moral legitimacy of the government versus the imagination of a successful, "modern," and "civilised" city. This conflict shows the everyday production of "spaces of representation" by government actors on the micro level where economic incentives merge with aspirations for political prestige.
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| 8 |
ID:
140464
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| Summary/Abstract |
This essay suggests the expanded scholarly terrain created to analyse ‘the public’ that has been mapped between an initial special issue of the journal South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (published in 1991) and this current essay collection (of 2015). In the process, it suggests not only what new scholarly interests and skills, as well as new sites for analysis, have opened up, but also points to issues yet unaddressed, along with elements of visual culture that scholars interested in ‘the public’ could consider. For the realm of the visual remains, even after 25 years, largely unconnected to analyses of ‘the public’, despite its centrality to the ways in which public issues, enactments and interests are expressed and debated. To provide overarching ways to think about how the essays presented here treat ‘the public’, as well as to draw attention to issues still not addressed that offer future challenges, this essay suggests conceptualising the subject around four aspects that emerged when the authors met together: the public as enacted; the public as envisioned; public space, both rhetorical and actual; and concepts of the public expressed as belief, interpretation, understandings, values and ‘public opinion’—that is, as concepts understood to motivate and influence their audiences.
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| 9 |
ID:
119383
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
A range of studies have revealed the interrelatedness of identity construction, community formation and media among diasporas, mostly focusing on domestic contexts. Seeking to add further nuance to the understanding of the social lives of diasporas, we concentrate on media culture in the public environment of the film theatre. The significance of diasporic film consumption is investigated through a local audience study of Turkish film screenings in Antwerp. The phenomenon of the screenings was analysed through a multi-method approach, including 536 questionnaires among audiences, 19 in-depth interviews and 3 group interviews, along with previous findings (on distribution and exploitation) of the same project. The results show that Turkish films are almost exclusively attended by people with Turkish roots, creating a Turkish diasporic space within the boundaries of the urban and the public. The audience study shows that the screenings fulfil a major social role but also affect understandings of community.
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| 10 |
ID:
131538
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
These are critical times for democratic politics from Morocco to Iran, as heterogeneous popular movements for greater representation and social justice increasingly challenge established authorities. It is not surprising that these struggles have laid claim to symbolic urban places in the process of claiming their collective political demands. Politics is not purely discursive or institutional; it always has material and spatial dimensions, which for democratic politics is manifested through public space. For all the recent enthusiasm about the emancipating possibilities of the digital media, the fact remains that Tahrir Square (Cairo), Gezi Park (Istanbul), Revolution Street (Tehran), and Pearl Roundabout (Manama) are not virtual locations on the Internet.
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| 11 |
ID:
108793
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2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this article I consider recent homeless activism in Tokyo's Miyashita Park, including the celebration of 'vacant lots' (akichi), and what this can tell us about notions of publicness in Japan. We can provide further depth to the discussion of publicness by situating recent activism in the context of the work of historians such as Amino Yoshihiko and Higashijima Makoto and their recovery of indigenous Japanese conceptions of 'publicness' and 'the public sphere'. The implications of formulations of 'the public' based around terms such as oyake/ko and alternatives including muen are examined, as well as meanings historically ascribed to the Zen concept of 'lakes and rivers' (goko/koko). I also trace Japanese responses to classical Western notions of the public sphere, as well as some challenges to them in Western scholarship, including the notion of 'counterpublics'. Whereas in Western modernity the bracketing of social inequalities was considered a prerequisite for the deliberative function of the public sphere, in premodern and early modern Japan there were spaces which allowed for the bracketing of differences even where the function of deliberation was not emphasised.
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| 12 |
ID:
147009
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Using the case study of Derry~Londonderry and its designation as ‘UK City of Culture 2013’, the primary objective of this research paper is to critically analyse the challenges associated with the production of a year-long cultural programme in a culturally and politically divided place. Given that Northern Ireland’s second largest city has been understood in terms of a conflict between ‘two traditions’, Irish/Catholic and British/Protestant, we critically assess the dialogue and policy negotiations with reference to public places as well as representations of collective memory and traditional music during the year. Fieldwork over two years has enabled us to investigate how culture and identity politics are played out in the context of a city undergoing a process of reconciliation. Placing our case study in a strongly comparative context, we argue that cultural concerns are pivotal points of (re-)negotiation in any society transitioning from conflict to ‘peace’ and that this issue, therefore, is of vital concern to academics and policymakers alike internationally.
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| 13 |
ID:
161695
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| Summary/Abstract |
What is ‘early modern’ about religion in South India? In theorizing early modernity in South Asia, the category of religion has been viewed with scepticism, perhaps to avoid painting India as the exotic ‘Other’ that failed to modernize in the eyes of Western social theory. And yet, Western narratives, drawn from secularization theory, fail to do justice to our historical archive. As a vehicle for approaching the experience of religion in early modern South India, this article invokes the category of space as a medium for the publicization and contestation of meaning across diverse language, caste, and religious publics. In the process, it excavates the codification of the ‘Sacred Games of Śiva’ as public religious canon of the city of Madurai, exemplifying the distinctive role played by religion in public space in early modern South India.
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| 14 |
ID:
182473
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| Summary/Abstract |
Against the background of the solution-defying incidence of child labourers in Nigerian cities, this study examined the relationship between public spaces and incidence of child labourers in Ibadan Municipality, Nigeria. Data were obtained through direct counting of child labourers and cursory observation of the physical and environmental compositions of their places of operation. The direct counting was conducted for seven days of the week in the morning, afternoon and evening within defined activity-nuclei purposively selected across three densities of residential areas of the municipality: high, medium and low. The data collected were subjected to descriptive statistics. Findings showed that the incidence and categories of child labourers varied with public spaces and density of residential areas, and also followed the concentric, sector and multiple nuclei theories of urban land use. The study, therefore, recommended that urban planners and government have roles to play in offering lasting solution to the menace of child labour.
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| 15 |
ID:
112106
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
As the world's population moves from rural regions to urban centers, it is imperative to design policies and physical environments that can accommodate such a massive influx. In response, many countries have been building cities from scratch, clearing greenfield sites and building at an extremely rapid pace. Additionally, existing urban centers have been slow to respond, instigating suburban sprawl. A new conceptual framework is needed, one in which existing buildings and infrastructures can be seen as spaces for grafting and injecting additional density and public space. A marriage of the philosophies of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses is required, recognizing important cultural centers and economies, while allowing new buildings, infrastructures and ecologies to be incorporated in harmonious coexistence. In order to create alternative urban-design strategies, it is beneficial to study Spain, whose history and architectural philosophy has promoted a healthy relationship between the urban-planning policies of the past, present and future.
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| 16 |
ID:
141773
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article focuses on the Shanar revolts, a series of subaltern uprisings in nineteenth-century South Travancore, for the right to wear upper clothes over the bosoms of Shanar women. In the parlance of official accounts and modern histories, these revolts are mere disturbances or controversies and the subaltern rebels in these struggles were always pretenders. Contrary to this, an attempt is made here to document and explicate the becoming of the pretender and to demonstrate that historiography may well be implicated, all too easily, in generating the very precarity of the pretender by opposing any movement towards reform.
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| 17 |
ID:
163821
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Drawing on a new digital collection of oral interviews, this essay examines the place and meaning of the state in Bengali thought. In the immediate aftermath of decolonisation, East Bengal intellectuals, without substantial pre-engagement with the colonial state, favoured forms of political action or praxis that longed for a new state—a longing that culminated in the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. Intellectuals connected to West Bengal, already entrenched in their own economic and social multiverse, never entertained the idea of a new state outside India. Instead, a Foucauldian irreverence for the state and its elite became more dominant there, flourishing through Subaltern Studies. Despite these differences perceptible synergies in the Banglaphone thoughtscape took root in the 1980s that spoke to late Cold War anxieties about the future of participatory democracy and the public good. This convergence of thought across Bangladesh and West Bengal reflected the emergence of an intellectual who elided the notional boundaries of the post-colonial state, yet stood ambivalently before the crucible of neo-liberal temporality, exposing the limits of the discursive subject in the late twentieth-century Global South.
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| 18 |
ID:
107276
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2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this article, I explore the subject of Switzerland's nationhood in light of a theoretical approach based on normative principles. This approach has the advantage of avoiding the definitional conundrum arising from the plurality of purely descriptive (often historical) definitions of nationhood. Instead, in accordance with certain normative inferences concerning what the nation ought to be given the principles of democracy, law and inclusion, it portrays the nation as a political entity having the largest possible group of individuals instituting a space of public discussion within a state. In this normative definition, attention should be drawn to the concept of 'space of public discussion', which, to my mind, entails the existence of a common public language used by its citizens - something notably different from either the multilingualism of the elite or a common parliamentary language. Proceeding in this way, I will defend the idea that Switzerland is a multinational state on the basis that cantons may be considered small nations, although certain pressures on the boundaries of the cantonal public spaces tending to expand them to the whole of the linguistic region must also be taken into
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| 19 |
ID:
149778
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Successive Indian governments have attempted to tackle the formidable task of creating a clean India, with varied results. With the country's rapidly growing middle class eager to participate in a sanitised global consumer capitalism, many Indians are becoming frustrated with the ‘unruly’ nature of their urban landscape, its dirty streets and public spaces. This is particularly discernible amongst India's middle-class youth, who seem impatient with the state's apparent inability to manage waste and disorder, and it is clear that several civil society campaigns designed to promote a clean India explicitly target Indian youth. In this paper, I explore what the ideological premise of cleansing initiatives reveals about the aspirations, needs and anxieties of India's youth.
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| 20 |
ID:
100298
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2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper discusses the Japanese language used by JSL learners in Japan, while examining JSL classrooms as public space. It draws upon JSL literature, Japanese textbooks and their discourses to find the kinds of Japanese that are taught and used in JSL classrooms and how they are presented and consumed, and it observes how diversity in learners' language is dealt with inside and outside of JSL classrooms in Japan, keeping in view the danger of 'colonisation' of classrooms. It will then study new developments where JSL speakers are participating in development of their own 'third space', which values hybridity more than diversity, and in turn the continuous re-construction of the public space.
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