•Rural sustainability debates need to be resituated into a broader agenda of democracy.•Land grabbing, agricultural subsidies and commodity sales fuel authoritarianism.•Alliances, counter-knowledge ...and diverse subjectivities drive rural emancipation.•Emancipatory processes are sometimes ambiguous and can create new exclusions.•Farmers and consumers need to build a political community aimed at food democracy.
Constructing environmentally sustainable and democratic political regimes constitutes the most important political project of our times – an era characterised by the proliferation of authoritarianism and the growing effects of climate change. Through the case of Hungary, an example of a modern authoritarian regime, this article discusses how agricultural initiatives such as Community Supported Agriculture, permaculture, and small-scale and regenerative farming can help situate questions of sustainable rural politics into a broader agenda of democratic governance. Building on qualitative interviews conducted in Hungary and the literature on socio-environmental transformations, authoritarian populism, authoritarian neoliberalism, and emancipatory politics, our aim is to envision emancipatory rural politics grounded in democratic societal projects and sustainable ways of producing and living with the land. After laying out what we identify as the three rural pillars of the Hungarian authoritarian regime – unequal land relations, agricultural subsidies and agricultural commodity sales –, we argue for attention to what could become the rural pillars of sustainable democracy: emancipatory alliances, counter-knowledge claims, and emancipatory subjectivities. Efforts at building the latter aspects can help Hungarians (and others) reimagine democracy from the countryside, establish new collective relations, and embrace the unavoidable ambiguities of emancipatory rural politics.
The relation between racialization and neoliberalism is relatively unexplored in urban geography, especially in the context of social democratic welfare regimes. This article aims to bridge this gap ...by applying the concept of racial neoliberalism, here referring to a co-constitutive relation between racialization and neoliberalism, to Denmark. Conceiving the country's so-called ‘ghetto’ politics as an expression of racial neoliberalism, the article retraces the development of this politics over the first two decades of the 21st century. I argue that territorial stigmatization and commodification of marginalized non-profit housing areas have been two co-constitutive expressions of racial neoliberalism that have intensified during this historical period. Examining three key policy moments through various grey literature, the article demonstrates how stigmatization has served to justify commodification, while the failure of the latter has been followed by intensified and bureaucratized stigmatization leading to new commodification efforts until culminating in the infamous 2018 ‘Ghetto Law’.
Postfeminist media culture Gill, Rosalind
European journal of cultural studies,
05/2007, Letnik:
10, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The notion of postfeminism has become one of the most important in the lexicon of feminist cultural an alysis. Yet there is little agreement about what postfeminism is. This article argues that ...postfeminism is best understood as a distinctive sensibility, made up of a number of interrelated themes. These include the notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification; an emphasis upon self-surveillance, monitoring and self-discipline; a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover paradigm; and a resurgence of ideas about natural sexual difference. Each of these is explored in some detail, with examples from contemporary Anglo-American media. It is precisely the patterned articulation of these ideas that constitutes a postfeminist sensibility. The article concludes with a discussion of the connection between this sensibility and contemporary neoliberalism.
In pointing out the exclusionary and nondemocratic reconceptualization of states following the financial and Eurozone crises, research by geographers and critical political economists on ...authoritarian neoliberalism (AN) has shed light on key state transformations. Exploring the criminalization of council estates and the policing of three austerity-ridden south London districts, this article contributes to efforts to expand the concept of AN further by centering questions of violence and physical state power in the form of discourses and practices of (criminal) punishment and policing. Building on qualitative work with local young people and interviews with former police officers, community leaders and activists, I demonstrate the spatial dimension of AN and the role of policing logic and mechanisms for its administration in south London. I argue that through post-crisis austerity measures and long-term mechanisms of criminalization, young people perceive their home neighborhoods as insecure and alter how they navigate them. Further, I show that spaces of inclusion and welfare, such as social housing estates and schools, have been reimagined as sites of exclusion and punishment, often administered by police.
•Authoritarian Neoliberalism is a key concept to grasp recent state reconfigurations.•Increased reliance on policing logic and mechanisms are key expressions of it.•In London, the criminalization of council estates is particularly important.•In the UK, the increased role of the police due to austerity cuts is also crucial.•Increased policing alters youth's perception and navigation of their home areas.
This article traces the state takeover and neoliberal reconstruction of a mid-size urban school district in the California Bay Area. Aligning with research on social networks in school reform, it ...identifies three organizational nodes of power operating within the takeover and post-takeover landscape: venture-philanthropic capital, the Teach for America organization, and a local intermediary organization that acted as a hub for the capital and labor flowing from these organizations. Their story demonstrates the concrete ways in which an increasingly globalized funding and policy network converged at the district level in order to implement a unified policy agenda. The network's role in school politics, real estate, and gentrification provides a template for the transnational work of school reformers and their role in creating the neoliberal 'global city.'
Chile has always been presented as a laboratory for neoliberalism. In this article, we go beyond this generally accepted consideration. We defend the thesis that it is more a Hayekian model in ...essence. Based on a reflection of political theory informed by the field, our rationale is divided into two parts. The first shows that the Constitution of 1980 was kneaded by the legal, political and economic doctrine of the Austrian-American intellectual. The third argues how the shadow of Hayekian philosophy has obscured the democratic transition and still emerges empirically in technocratic overvaluation, in mass incarceration as a substitution for the social state, and in a decidedly regressive tax structure.
This paper argues that, as alternatives to neoliberal policies are developed, the need for new institutions must not be neglected. Alternative and repurposed institutions should be designed to ...protect progressive policy advances while extending democracy, rather than diminishing it as neoliberalism has done. The paper outlines how these might be based on revamped notions of popular sovereignty rooted in broader concepts of functional and experiential representation, and on institutional mechanisms designed to produce greater accountability to the society in which states are rooted.
Purpose
The purpose of this manuscript is to examine the negotiations of health among low-wage migrant workers in Singapore amidst the COVID-19 outbreaks in dormitories housing them. In doing so, the ...manuscript attends to the ways in which human rights are constituted amidst labor and communicative rights, constituting the backdrop against which the pandemic outbreaks take place and the pandemic response is negotiated.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is part of a long-term culture-centered ethnography conducted with low-wage migrant workers in Singapore, seeking to build communicative infrastructures for rights-based advocacy and interventions.
Findings
The findings articulate the ways in which the outbreaks in dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers are constituted amidst structural contexts of organizing migrant work in Singapore. These structural contexts of extreme neoliberalism work catalyze capitalist accumulation through the exploitation of low-wage migrant workers. The poor living conditions that constitute the outbreak are situated in relationship to the absence of labor and communicative rights in Singapore. The absence of communicative rights and dignity to livelihood constitutes the context within which the COVID-19 outbreak emerges and the ways in which it is negotiated among low-wage migrant workers in Singapore.
Originality/value
This manuscript foregrounds the interplays of labor and communicative rights in the context of the health experiences of low-wage migrant workers amidst the pandemic. Even as COVID-19 has made visible the deeply unequal societies we inhabit, the manuscript suggests the relevance of turning to communicative rights as the basis for addressing these inequalities. It contributes to the extant literature on the culture-centered approach by depicting the ways in which a pandemic as a health crisis exacerbates the challenges to health and well-being among precarious workers.
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