Social Dynamics (Asynchronous Session)
Urban Development under Authoritarianism: Case Studies of Engagement in Urban Transformation in Kazakhstan View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sara O'connor
Activism in authoritarian countries conjures images of crowded streets and clashes with police. However, as encroachments on civil liberties increase across the world, movement towards effective change can be made in quieter spaces through targeted initiatives. Issue focused activism is occurring in urban spaces in Kazakhstan responding to centralized urban development schemes and local issues such as residential displacement, historic preservation, transportation accessibility, and green space preservation. Successful civic activism in Kazakhstan’s cities sharply contrasts with the concurrent arrests and detainment of protestors in the streets. This study focuses on the mechanisms of change by asking: how do civic activists in Kazakhstan impact urban development processes and outcomes under authoritarianism? Political participation scholarship has deemed participation at the urban level inconsequential “low politics” with no expected impact on national political culture or policy. However the close connection between politics at the urban and national levels under a centralized system provides a unique and rapid feedback loop between these spheres. This study examines citizen impact in urban development through a multiple case study comparison of development projects in three cities in Kazakhstan: Almaty, Nur-Sultan, and Shymkent. Drawing from interviews, participant observation and archival review conducted over three years, this study examines urban development processes and outcomes to uncover the mechanisms enabling citizen's impact on development. Preliminary results show that in the absence of civic and political freedoms, citizen are creating their own venues for participation, establishing themselves as legitimate participants in policy implementation processes and transforming state-society relations.
An Emerging Reactive Ethnicity Among 1.5- and Second-Generation Latinxs In Tennessee View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session James Chaney
Emerging Latinx communities in the U.S. South provide rich case studies for examining the identity formation and group consciousness of children of Latin American immigrants. This paper explores the identities and sense of belonging of 1.5- and second-generation Latinxs who have come of age in Tennessee, a state in the U.S. South that has experienced a surge in immigration from Latin America In-depth interviews with Latinxs who have grown up in Tennessee reveal how these individuals contemplate their identities in relation to questions of belonging to (and within) U.S. society. A shift towards developing a reactive ethnicity is evident as Latinxs convey how perceived interpersonal discrimination coupled with recent national and local anti-immigrant policies drive ethnic group solidarity. These factors influence individual life choices and encourage participation in social activism. Such reactions potentially have long-term sociopolitical ramifications for local host societies in the Southern United States.
Featured Postsocialist Dreams: Women’s Personal and Collective Struggle for Liberation in the South Caucasus View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gvantsa Gasviani
This project considers the “Lost Generation” of women who lived under the Soviet Union and survived its collapse—only to face new challenges in independent republics like Georgia. It concerns their personal, collective, and national dreams of freedom, and analyzes whether the political and social freedom that was brought about through their tremendous political efforts delivered true liberation. I employ the term "Lost Generation" to refer to women who spent most of their childhood and adulthood in the USSR, and then after its breakup found that their communist education, working experience and other skills and values had become irrelevant. My project offers an alternative feminist interpretation of postsocialism as a mobile force and concept that disrupts the static idea that global neoliberal capitalism is the only realistic outcome of postsocialism. This research project focuses on the lives of those women and the gendered dynamics between the state’s patriarchal dreams of domination (USSR) versus dreams of female empowerment (new democracies such as Georgia and Armenia). I argue that the experiences of post-Soviet women living in Georgia provide a microcosm of a new set of political conditions that they have been forced to contend with since the 1990s. This includes national (democracy) and related to that the emergence of a regional South Caucasus identity (development) and new international (globalization) challenges and processes.
Lives in Transit: Subaltern Transnationals and Indian Circus View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nisha Poyyaprath Rayaroth
This paper explores two significant happenings in India and Africa in two different periods, split by nearly one hundred years. Malabar region in the Southwest coast of the Indian subcontinent witnessed the emergence of circus kalaris (training centres) in the early twentieth century, from where women, men and youngsters from different communities got trained and went on to become renowned artistes in various companies around the world. This ‘new’ and ‘modern’ physical culture and the radical recasting of the body in a place where caste system imposed cruel restrictions of access to other bodies in terms not just in touch but even visibility and hearing was definitely one of the most significant historical moments in the subcontinent. In the second part, I look at the formation of several circus schools across East African countries such as Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia by the end of the twentieth century. I examine the various trajectories of inequality, labour, livelihood and dignity that have set in motion these transnational voyages of itinerant physical cultures and bodies to think through the global web of non-governmental capital, colonial, and postcolonial states and policy production in the Global South.
From Epigraph to Epitaph: Graffiti as Cultural and National Defacement in Exarchia, Thessaloniki, and Messolonghi's Garden of Heroes View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jonathan Gross
This paper explores the desecration of Jewish tomb stones in Thessaloniki during World War Ii and its relationship to the construction of national memory in Messolonghi's garden of heroes. Drawing on Devin Naar and Mark Mazower's historical account of the expansion of Aristotle University, the essay argues that Jewish Hellenism's effacement bears similarities to issues explored in Basquiat's "Defacimento", a graffiti work honoring the death of Michael Stewart. The sanitizing of political violence is exposed by defaced epitaphs, forms of writing that help explain the construction of national memory after the collapse of the Ottoman empire.
The Social Ontology of Fraser's Theory of Boundary Crises View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pat Hope
My paper is dedicated to clarifying the structural roots of contemporary social crises in the hope that it will help empower us to build that movement. To do so, I draw Nancy Fraser’s critical theory of capitalist society. I begin by presenting her theory of capitalism as an institutionalized social order composed of five interdependent spheres and subject to inter-sphere boundary crises. I then consider a limitation of Fraser’s theory: that it does not explain why the non-economic spheres are constitutive of but necessarily external to, the productive economy. In response, I develop Fraser’s ontology of capitalist to explain why the economic sphere presupposes, and yet necessary stands in tension with, its non-economic background conditions.
