Space Making as Artistic Practice: The Relationship between Grassroots Art Organizations and the Political Economy of Urban Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1142-1161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shira Zilberstein

Standard narratives on the relationship between art and urban development detail art networks as connected to sources of dominant economic, social, and cultural capital and complicit in gentrification trends. This research challenges the conventional model by investigating the relationship between grassroots art spaces, tied to marginal and local groups, and the political economy of development in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. Using mixed methods, I investigate Do–It–Yourself and Latinx artists to understand the construction and goals of grassroots art organizations. Through their engagements with cultural representations, space and time, grassroots artists represent and amplify the interests of marginal actors. By allying with residents, community organizations and other art spaces, grassroots artists form a social movement to redefine the goals and usages of urban space. My findings indicate that heterogeneous art networks exist and grassroots art networks can influence urban space in opposition to top–down development.

2019 ◽  
pp. 61-85
Author(s):  
Brandi Thompson Summers

This chapter highlights the relationship between race, diversity, belonging, and urban development in the historical devaluation of H Street as a Black space, and its revaluation as an emerging multicultural neighborhood. In light of H Street’s violent past, the narrative describing its history reinvents itself in order to write the violent times away and repurpose the neighborhood for a new market and a new time. The chapter also focuses on local programs with intended race-neutral policies that have racial consequences. The chapter further explores how “diversity” is institutionalized as a valuable social commodity to market and constitutes the political economy of the corridor. In other words, the aestheticization of blackness and space contribute to the structuring of H Street as both universal and exclusive. Corporate brands, as well as local public/private partnership organizations, strategically incorporated “diversity” as part of their official language to justify their introduction to the space – signaling affective cohesion with the neighborhood.


Author(s):  
Ralph Henham

This chapter argues that the relationship between penal policy and the political economy provides important insights into the political and institutional reforms required to minimize harsh and discriminatory penal policies. However, the capacity of sentencing policy to engage with this social reality in a meaningful way necessitates a recasting of penal ideology. To realize this objective requires a profound understanding of sentencing’s social value and significance for citizens. The greatest challenge then lies in establishing coherent links between penal ideology and practice to encourage forms of sentencing that are sensitive to changes in social value. The chapter concludes by explaining how the present approach taken by the courts of England and Wales to the sentencing of women exacerbates social exclusion and reinforces existing divisions in social morality. It urges fundamental changes in ideology and practice so that policy reflects a socially valued rationale for the criminalization and punishment of women.


Author(s):  
Michitake Aso

Plantation regimes encouraged knowledge production about plant and disease ecologies and the relationship among organisms and their environments more generally. More detailed knowledge about newly introduced plant species, plant and human diseases, and their shared environments was a key ingredient of better, more profitable management of rubber plantations. Chapter 2 explores the process by which agronomy came to support the burgeoning rubber industry after rubber arrived in Indochina in 1897. The French colonial government was not the first to encourage agricultural improvement on the Indochinese peninsula, but the qualitative and quantitative investment that it made in these projects set it apart from previous states. Encouraged by the success of their British and Dutch neighbors, French planters envisioned turning biologically and culturally diverse landscapes into neat rows of hevea. Plantation agriculture also played an important role in defining the political and intellectual scope of the science of ecology in Indochina, encouraging agronomists to direct their energies toward transnational businesses and the colonial project. The process of integrating the efforts of scientists, officials, and planters was not always smooth, however, and this chapter highlights the conflicts and tensions generated by a political economy of plantation agriculture.


Author(s):  
Gökhan Bulut

This article is an attempt to reestablish the linkage of the political economy of communication with the field of social classes and class relations. Studies in the field of political economy of communication are mostly shaped within the scope of instrumentalist explanation: Social communication institutions such as communication and media are perceived as a very homogeneous structure and these institutions are directly considered as the apparatus of capital and capitalists. However, in this study, it is argued that in capitalist societies, communication, and media should be understood as a field and medium of class struggle loaded with contradictions. Another point is that the political economy of communication is mostly limited to media studies. However, in today's capitalist societies, the media is not the only structure and actor in which communication forms. In this study, communication practices in capitalist society are discussed in the context of class discussions and the relationship between class struggle, culture and communication is discussed.


2020 ◽  
pp. 213-224
Author(s):  
Silvia M. Lindtner

This concluding chapter reviews the labor and sites that have long challenged the inevitability of technological progress and its violence. The socialist pitch and the production of hopeful anticipation depend on happiness labor — the labor that produces a feeling of optimism and hope despite the proliferating sense of rising precarity. If one attends to the labor and the instruments of affect that finance capitalism needs, one notices the vulnerability of capitalist production — that is, one notices that the relationship between technology, life, and markets can be otherwise. The chapter then argues that if we attend to the labor that is necessary to nurture and sustain entrepreneurial life, we can mobilize other feelings to subvert the political economy of affect that runs on the promise of happiness. We can subvert the seemingly endlessly spiraling displacement of technological promise if we reframe what counts as intervention by moving away from the ideal types of countercultural heroism.


Author(s):  
Manuel Iturralde

In both criminology and the sociology of punishment there has been a rebirth of the political economy of crime and punishment, where the relationship between these phenomena and levels of inequality within a given society is a key aspect, to assess the transformation and features of the crime control fields of contemporary societies and to relate them to different typologies. This chapter will discuss and problematize this perspective through the analysis of Latin American crime control fields. Considering the flaws of general typologies, usually coming from the global north, the chapter will stress the need for a more detailed comparative analysis of the penal state and the institutional structures, dynamics and dispositions present in every jurisdiction, in both the global north and south, that have a direct impact on penal policy and its outcomes.


Author(s):  
Nicola Phillips

This chapter focuses on the political economy of development. It first considers the different (and competing) ways of thinking about development that have emerged since the end of World War II, laying emphasis on modernization, structuralist, and underdevelopment theories, neo-liberalism and neo-statism, and ‘human development’, gender, and environmental theories. The chapter proceeds by exploring how particular understandings of development have given rise to particular kinds of development strategies at both the national and global levels. It then examines the relationship between globalization and development, in both empirical and theoretical terms. It also describes how conditions of ‘mal-development’ — or development failures — both arise from and are reinforced by globalization processes and the ways in which the world economy is governed.


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