‘To stay, serve and witness’ – church politics and British inner cities in the 1980s

By analysing the Church of England's 1985 report Faith in the City (FITC), this article demonstrates that the church played a decisive role in shaping the discourse on British ‘inner cities’. Following a brief historical contextualization, the article examines the FITC report itself, how it came about and what arguments the Church of England introduced into the national debate on inner cities, as well as the media and political discussion that followed its publication and the reactions in the religious field. The article argues that the publication was a turning point in the inner cities discourse of the 1980s. It examines how the church succeeded in (re)directing national attention to the topic thereby countering the territorial stigmatization and replacing it with a more positive view focused on the potential of the residents living in the inner cities.

A estratégia hegemônica do realismo na narrativa venezuelana e haitiana no início do século XXI / The Hegemonic Strategy of Realism in the Venezuelan and Haitian Narrative in the Beginning of the 21st Century

Resumo: O trabalho analisa dois textos realistas latino-americanos, Bicentenaire (2004) do escritor haitiano Lyonel Trouillot e Yo maté a Simón Bolívar (2010) do venezuelano Vicente Ulive-Schnell, como produtos simbólicos em circulação num campo comunicacional amplo no qual o sentido das obras como mensagens interage com o horizonte ideológico de época. A leitura literária da identidade dos personagens se fará tomando em conta o conceito de articulação de Gramsci (2011). A relação complementar entre obra e mercado se fará partindo do conceito gramsciano de hegemonia, revisado em sentido pós-estrutural por Laclau e Mouffe (2001), e também da leitura política da literatura proposta por Jameson (1994) e Rancière (2000; 2007). A tensão nas identidades marginalizadas e classes sociais articuladas nos romances aponta para uma exibição crítica da vida nacional e a desigualdade socioeconômica e, além disso, para a construção de uma nova hegemonia cultural. Porém, as obras e seus autores lidam com a frustração de observar os limites do mercado literário no debate nacional ao se deparar com o baixo índice de leitura de sociedades dominadas hegemonicamente por outros horizontes, mercados e suportes comunicacionais.Palavras-chave: romance; Haiti; Venezuela; articulação identitária; hegemonia cultural.Abstract: The article analyzes two realist Latin American texts, Bicentenaire (2004) by Haitian writer Lyonel Trouillot and Yo maté a Simón Bolívar (2010) by the Venezuelan Vicente Ulive-Schnell, as symbolic products in circulation in a broad communicational field in which the meaning of the works as messages interacts with the ideological horizon of the time. The literary reading of the characters’ identities will be done taking into account the concept of articulation by Gramsci (2011). The complementary relationship between literary work and market will be based on his concept of hegemony, reviewed in a post-structural sense by Laclau and Mouffe (2001), and also on the political reading of literature proposed by Jameson (1994) and Rancière (2000; 2007). The tension in marginalized identities and social classes articulated in the novels points to a critical exhibition of national life and socioeconomic inequality and, moreover, to the construction of a new cultural hegemony. However, the works and their authors deal with the frustration of observing the limits of the literary market in the national debate when faced with the low reading rate of societies dominated hegemonically by other horizons, markets and communicational supports.Keywords: novel; Haiti; Venezuela; identitary articulation; cultural hegemony.

Violeta Parra: Her Life, Work, and Legacy

Violeta Parra (1917–1967) was a multifaceted and talented musician and artist. A prolific songwriter, she composed more than two hundred songs as well as experimental pieces for guitar, documentary soundtracks, and music for ballet. Her most famous song, “Gracias a la vida,” has been performed by musicians the world over. In the realm of the visual arts, she was a ceramicist, sculptress, painter, and tapestry maker. In 1964, she became the first Latin American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Louvre Palace’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Parra was also an award-winning folklorist who collected hundreds of songs and other folklore from every region of Chile. Born in southern Chile, she moved to Santiago at age fifteen, where she spent two decades performing a mixture of popular songs from Latin America that is often referred to as música criolla. At age thirty-five she turned to the authentic, first as a folklorist and then as an artist. She was a leader of the Chilean folk revival of the 1950s and inspired the generation of Chilean musicians who formed the protest song movement known as nueva canción in the 1960s. A communist sympathizer, she traveled to Europe as a member of the Chilean delegation to the Soviet-sponsored World Festival of Youth and Students in 1955 (Warsaw) and 1962 (Helsinki). Each time she toured the Soviet Bloc, then made her way to Paris for an extended sojourn. Parra contributed a significant voice to the national debate over chilenidad (Chilean identity) during a critical juncture in Chile’s economic, social, and cultural development. Her biography sheds light on transnational cultural movements and competing notions of authenticity at the height of the Cold War. It is also the deeply human story of Parra’s tenacious struggle to be seen and heard as an artist on her own terms.

Composting arcadia: Stories from Pākehā women “of the land” in Wairarapa, Aotearoa New Zealand

<p>I suggest that this thesis is a compost pile from Wairarapa that slowly turns over harmful but potentially fertile tales of arcadia. I narrate this thesis drawing on the fleshly stories of ten Pākehā (colonial settler) women “of the land’ and the ethico-onto-epistemology of Donna Haraway’s compost making. Composting is Haraway’s (2016) latest feminist call to trouble and queer the self-contained secular humanism of Western modernity. Uprooting the Western separation of ‘nature’ from culture, Haraway’s philosophy provides an earthly foundation in which to compost arcadia. Arcadia is an antique ‘nature’ myth that has been enmeshed in the process of Western world making from Classical Greece to the European ‘Age of Discovery’. Arcadia was used by the British to colonise Aotearoa New Zealand in the nineteenth century. As a Pākehā, I have been compelled to explore this myth because of the way it has seeped into transcendent understandings of land for descendants of colonial settlers like myself. Commonly known as a rural paradise, arcadia was a strategy for ‘normalising’ and ‘naturalising’ European occupancy in New Zealand (Evans, 2007; Fairburn, 1989). British arcadianism arrived on the shores of New Zealand, Victorian and romantic. Therefore, in this thesis I posit that through both settler and romantic ideals, Pākehā continue to use arcadianism to relate to land. For example, presently in Aotearoa there is a populist national debate that has, broadly speaking, pitted farmers and environmentalists against each other. Sparked by recent situations such as the ‘dairy boom’ and the decline in New Zealand’s water quality, tensions have mounted between those wanting to increase agricultural production and those who believe more environmental preservation is needed. After pondering such issues I realised these positions both express contrasting sides to the New Zealand arcadian narrative: A settler arcadia that promulgates the establishment of a small family farm and a romantic arcadia that envisions a pristine ‘natural’ paradise. I worked through these issues on, in, and with, the ground of Wairarapa with Pākehā women who were engaged in various kinds of rural land practice. Using a critical autoethnographic voice and the idea of geography as ‘earth writing’ I draw on creative qualitative modes, visual approaches and ethnographic adventures to form fulsome stories that compost arcadia. The figure of Pan, the deity of the actual place of Arcadia, helps me with this composting project. Pan is a human-goat hybrid, queer trouble maker, and, as a trickster, has invoked in me my critical autoethnographic, fictional voice. My encounters with women and Pan showed me fertile ways in which Pākehā have inherited the histories of arcadia and how these histories are corporeally significant and fruitfully challenge the separation of ‘nature’ and culture. Such meaningful matter or matters have, in turn, provided verdant ways to discuss Pākehā becoming and response-ability. Through the material stories of trees, pasture, hills, mountains, waterways, animals and family, compostable arcadias emerged, yielding, what I call in this thesis, landhome making. Landhome making queers the essentialising qualities of ‘homeland’ and ‘homemaker’ but most importantly relates the significance of land in the making of home for the women of this thesis. Landhome making is about exploring, through everyday practice, what it means to be Pākehā for participants and myself that — resultantly — contributes to wider national discussions on how Pākehā might ‘become with’ land (Haraway, 2008; 2016; Newton, 2009).</p>

Composting arcadia: Stories from Pākehā women “of the land” in Wairarapa, Aotearoa New Zealand

<p>I suggest that this thesis is a compost pile from Wairarapa that slowly turns over harmful but potentially fertile tales of arcadia. I narrate this thesis drawing on the fleshly stories of ten Pākehā (colonial settler) women “of the land’ and the ethico-onto-epistemology of Donna Haraway’s compost making. Composting is Haraway’s (2016) latest feminist call to trouble and queer the self-contained secular humanism of Western modernity. Uprooting the Western separation of ‘nature’ from culture, Haraway’s philosophy provides an earthly foundation in which to compost arcadia. Arcadia is an antique ‘nature’ myth that has been enmeshed in the process of Western world making from Classical Greece to the European ‘Age of Discovery’. Arcadia was used by the British to colonise Aotearoa New Zealand in the nineteenth century. As a Pākehā, I have been compelled to explore this myth because of the way it has seeped into transcendent understandings of land for descendants of colonial settlers like myself. Commonly known as a rural paradise, arcadia was a strategy for ‘normalising’ and ‘naturalising’ European occupancy in New Zealand (Evans, 2007; Fairburn, 1989). British arcadianism arrived on the shores of New Zealand, Victorian and romantic. Therefore, in this thesis I posit that through both settler and romantic ideals, Pākehā continue to use arcadianism to relate to land. For example, presently in Aotearoa there is a populist national debate that has, broadly speaking, pitted farmers and environmentalists against each other. Sparked by recent situations such as the ‘dairy boom’ and the decline in New Zealand’s water quality, tensions have mounted between those wanting to increase agricultural production and those who believe more environmental preservation is needed. After pondering such issues I realised these positions both express contrasting sides to the New Zealand arcadian narrative: A settler arcadia that promulgates the establishment of a small family farm and a romantic arcadia that envisions a pristine ‘natural’ paradise. I worked through these issues on, in, and with, the ground of Wairarapa with Pākehā women who were engaged in various kinds of rural land practice. Using a critical autoethnographic voice and the idea of geography as ‘earth writing’ I draw on creative qualitative modes, visual approaches and ethnographic adventures to form fulsome stories that compost arcadia. The figure of Pan, the deity of the actual place of Arcadia, helps me with this composting project. Pan is a human-goat hybrid, queer trouble maker, and, as a trickster, has invoked in me my critical autoethnographic, fictional voice. My encounters with women and Pan showed me fertile ways in which Pākehā have inherited the histories of arcadia and how these histories are corporeally significant and fruitfully challenge the separation of ‘nature’ and culture. Such meaningful matter or matters have, in turn, provided verdant ways to discuss Pākehā becoming and response-ability. Through the material stories of trees, pasture, hills, mountains, waterways, animals and family, compostable arcadias emerged, yielding, what I call in this thesis, landhome making. Landhome making queers the essentialising qualities of ‘homeland’ and ‘homemaker’ but most importantly relates the significance of land in the making of home for the women of this thesis. Landhome making is about exploring, through everyday practice, what it means to be Pākehā for participants and myself that — resultantly — contributes to wider national discussions on how Pākehā might ‘become with’ land (Haraway, 2008; 2016; Newton, 2009).</p>

Before BBQ Becky

In 2018, a White woman called the police on two Black men who were holding a cookout on the shores of Lake Merritt in Oakland, CA. Branded “BBQ Becky” by Black Twitter, this incident ricocheted around the digital mediascape, contributing to a national debate about racist policing and the dangers of “living while Black.” Many commentators interpreted the struggle over Black cultural practices at Lake Merritt in terms of the now common, even generic, narrative of tech-induced gentrification in the Bay Area. But this elided the fact that the violence of BBQ Becky reproduced an enduring drive to regulate Black geographies and sounds as a means to control the post-emancipation social order. This article argues that scholars and activists need to attune to the “racial reverberations” that continue to loop in contemporary spatial struggles, especially ones involving sound. Drawing upon archival and ethnographic materials, it provides a recursive account of struggles over Black public cultures in Oakland from World War II until the present, thus suggesting that the racial/spatial control embodied in BBQ Becky can’t be reduced to the gentrification narrative alone. Ultimately, this article centers the temporalities of African American epistemologies and musics to realign U.S. gentrification studies with the haunting rhythms of geographic harm and repair experienced by those most impacted by urban dispossession.

Article 153 Of the Federal Constitution: Governing Principle for Affirmative Policy Against Social Injustice

The special position of Malays and Natives of Sabah and Sarawak remains a national debate despite the fact that its position has been lawfully accorded according to Article 153, Federal Constitution. Those who had significantly benefitted from the implementation of policies under Article 153 among non-Malays and non-Natives of Sabah and Sarawak, especially from an economic policy have yet turned up to defend many allegations thrown at the Government. As a matter of fact, many Malays themselves admitted that the Government had introduced many good programs to elevate the living standard of their community but yet to see much improvement across the country. On the contrary, the wealth accumulated by non-Malays as well as non-Natives of Sabah and Sarawak beyond RM1 billion personal net worth as shown in many popular magazines has proven to increase both in the number of individuals and its value. Hence, this paper aims to examine Article 153 and its governance on policies for affirmative action against social injustice using historical and legal analysis methods. The findings in this study could justify the position of Article 153 and evaluate the truth of so many allegations against it.

A qualitative exploration of young female Muslims’ perspectives of abortion and belonging following the 2018 Irish Abortion Referendum

Background: In 2018, Ireland conducted a referendum, ultimately supporting the legalisation of abortion. Views of religious minority groups can go unheard “by an insensitive majority” in national cultural debates. This study explores female Muslim university students’ perspectives on abortion and the impact of the national debate on their sense of belonging within Ireland. Methodology: Ten female Muslim university students completed semi-structured interviews. The interview comprised seven open questions examining perspectives on abortion and sense of belonging. A thematic analysis was carried out on the data.Results: Seven major themes emerged: (1) Particular Circumstances, (2) Islam, (3) Family, (4) Misuse of new laws, (5) Sense of belonging, (6) Consequences of traditional laws, and (7) Premarital sex. Participants were largely supportive of the legal changes, as it was in-line with their religious beliefs. Participants indicated that sense of belonging would have been affected if their religious beliefs had conflicted with the referendum outcome. Conclusions: Participants were largely supportive of the legalising of abortion in Ireland provided that the new laws were in line with their Islamic beliefs. Despite an increasingly liberal outcome of the 2018 Irish referendum, it was found that young Muslim women’s sense of belonging to Ireland was not affected

“War against the Constitution”

This chapter recounts the battles outside and within the Supreme Court over the five cases, first argued in 1952, argued again the following year, and decided in May 1954 under the caption Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The chapter draws on transcripts of the lawyers’ oral arguments, notes of justices from the Court’s closed-door conferences to debate and decide cases, and the Court’s unanimous opinion striking down public school segregation. Among the dozen-plus lawyers who argued the five cases, Thurgood Marshall as NAACP general counsel and John W. Davis, former Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. solicitor general, who both argued in the South Carolina case, presented a sharp contrast over the rights of states to impose segregation in public schools. The Court’s closed-door conference after these arguments exposed a rift, with at least one and possibly four justices unwilling to jettison the Plessy “separate but equal” doctrine. Concerned that a split decision would inflame the heated national debate, Justice Felix Frankfurter proposed a second round of arguments a year later; the sudden death in September 1953 of Chief Justice Fred Vinson led President Dwight Eisenhower to name California governor Earl Warren to replace him. Warren used his personal charm and political skills to cajole the Court’s holdouts to join a unanimous decision. However, a third round of arguments on “implementation” of integration allowed Jim Crow schools to proceed with “all deliberate speed” in complying with the Court’s decree, which led to decade-long foot-dragging by southern officials. The chapter concludes with an account of the Little Rock, Arkansas, integration case, Cooper v. Aaron, holding that state officials could not wage “war against the Constitution” by resisting the Court’s orders.

Washington Consensus in Latin America: From Raw Model to Straw Man

We take stock of three decades of a love–hate relationship between Latin American policies and the Washington Consensus, reviewing its implementation, national debate, and outcomes. Using regional data and case studies of Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, we discuss the various degrees of the Washington Consensus implementation and evaluate performance. We find mixed results: macroeconomic stability is much improved, but economic growth has been heterogeneous and generally disappointing, despite improvement relative to the 1980s. We discuss the risk that the region could revert parts of the Washington Consensus reforms, which are necessary building blocks for a new agenda more focused on social integration, a fairer and just society, and environmentally sustainable growth based on better education.