Reading Katrina: Race,Space and an Unnatural Disaster1

Beneath the fleeting commotion of natural disaster, the events of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 revealed deep-rooted dynamics of racial and class inequalities. National media frenzy in the wake of the storm on the Gulf Coast reported on the plight of black poor populations, especially in New Orleans, as those worst impacted and also most neglected. The first part of this article elaborates on the contested concepts of “race” and “racism” in a contemporary context, in which popular visual and narrative representations inform contemporary racial discourses and the perpetuation, in turn, of a dominant neoconservative hegemony. A discursive reading, in part two, of emergent political and media narratives around Katrina reveals the processes and tropes operating to (re)construct “race” in dominant American culture. In this deconstructive analysis, the devastated urban space of New Orleans emerges as a physical as well as highly symbolic regime of knowledge in relation to which dehistoricized racial constructions are propagated and naturalized. Finally, hegemony is reconceptualized as an inherently contingent contemporary power. Discursive processes of racial domination reinforced by popular representations of Hurricane Katrina have been effectively subverted by activist movements in New Orleans which mobilize alternative, experiential and spatial narratives; signifying a grassroots politicization to counter the naturalized racial tropes of neoconservative discourse and intervene with more democratic processes in the ongoing reconstruction of the devastated city.     

The Elite Politics of Media Advocacy in Human Rights

ABSTRACT

Advocacy nongovernmental organizations based in the North adopt digital tools to bypass repressive regimes, raise awareness amongst global publics, sustain grassroots activists in the South, and engage in political action. Social media was expected to offer innovative platforms for mobilizing participants to act on behalf of “distant others.” But the practices of some organizations signal that something else is at play. Rather than empower individuals, digital campaigns reify elite politics, using outsider strategies to support insider lobbying. Through communicative processes of mediatization, organizations pay homage to the existence of a movement, but only afford thin forms of participation. Using the framework of media advocacy to explore Human Rights Watch and the Enough! Project, we argue that social media becomes a top-down platform that exacerbates the elite design of organizations, enabling them to assert legitimacy for political actions, while disingenuously marketing themselves as democratic with bottom-up credibility.     

Contested meanings,myths and hyperimages of the apocalypse: the Bakhtin Circle and the politicisation of catastrophism

This article considers the depoliticising effects of current images and myths of apocalyptic visions, such that the world faces a catastrophe whether this emerges from environmental degradation, mass migration, terrorism, or global financial collapse. In our digital media age, apocalyptic images are now also captured through the raw footage of actual disaster events. In the article we call such footage, “hyperimages”. The power of the hyperimage is not, as Baudrillard once said, that reality is “just like the movies”, rather, hyperimages demonstrate that the image captured and shown to others is all too real because they depict actual everyday disasters. Importantly, such is the power of hyperimages that they are often employed by the political right to help them construct a hegemonic project aiming to win state power and to influence state policies. Drawing on the Bakhtin Circle, however, we show that hyperimages are also mediated and circulated through a multitude of social groups and voices in society, which contain seeds of radical heteroglossic alternatives to that of the right. Following this, the article then examines how responses to apocalyptic hyperimages can be politicised in a progressive direction.     

An Insider's View of Athens Municipal Election Campaigns

Abstract

Political communications in Greece have developed over the last 20 years. Within this period, this development has been both rapid and “condensed.” The evolution between one election and the next is very obvious to the expert. The municipal elections, those “mini-confrontations,” became the testing grounds for techniques and methodologies to be tested before being used in national campaigns. Of those confrontations there is no more characteristic than those of Athens, the capital city of Greece in terms of political communications. Today, political communications in Greece have reached Western, European standards.     

Rousseaus Stellung zum utopischen Diskurs der Neuzeit

In the history of political ideas the position of Rousseau’s political theory is controversial. Many historians identify him with the utopian tradition since Thomas More stressed the collective elements in his writings. In contrast to this interpretation it is a widespread thesis that the author of the “Contrat social” must be considered as a representative of the individualistic natural rights. The following study starts with this issue. The authors show that the contractual dimension is predominant in Rousseau’s thinking but it is modified by utopian elements. So Rousseau’s “mixed paradigm” is characteristic for the second part of the 18th century when contractual realism and utopian fiction merged in the dawn of the French Revolution.     

Murder on the Tokyo Subway: Nerve Centres,Religion and Violence

Abstract

The 1995 Tokyo subway attack by the Japanese religious movement Aum Shinrikyō represents one of the most dramatic examples of violence by a religious movement in modern times. Initially urban-based but with a rural communal presence, Aum believed that it had a mission to transform the world and fight in an imminent apocalyptic war between good and evil, and it engaged in numerous conflicts with the secular world it despised. While emphasising the significance of religious visions in Aum's activities this article examines the degree to which Aum's associations with the city of Tokyo also featured as an element in its violence.     

The war on solicitation and intersectional subjection: quality-of-life policing as a tool to control transgender populations

Abstract

The selective enforcement of solicitation laws on transgender individuals—often referred to as “walking while trans”—has an especially pernicious effect on transgender people of color, immigrants, and the poor. Intersectional subjection—the interaction between multiple categories of identity and diffuse power and sources of authority within contemporary American society—facilitates processes of governmentality and makes some transgender individuals more vulnerable to forms of social control such as trans-profiling. Using intersectional subjection to analyze the selective enforcement of solicitation laws exposes how trans-profiling (1) works to marginalize and remove transgender people of color and transgender immigrants from public spaces; and (2) enforces raced and classed gender norms and reifies white cis-heteronormative privilege. The concepts of intersectionality, subjection, and governmentality elucidate the mutually constitutive relationships among informal and formal actors and institutions in sanctioning the profiling of individuals for “walking while trans” as a tool for mitigating the threat transgender people of color and trans-immigrants pose to dominant power structures and narratives.     

Red green prospects in Ireland

“Ireland is the “Emerald Isle” in popular imagination. There is certainly some truth in this, since of all European countries the Republic of Ireland is the least ecologically ravaged. Ireland has been spared many of the ecological problems that afflict other Western capitalist countries due principally to its relatively underindustrialized nature. It is therefore a rather special case in the general development of red!green political dialogue of the type that typifies the realignment of European oppositional politics along an emerging continuum stretching from red/green/new social movements to conservative/christian democratic/neo‐fascist parties. The decks have now been cleared for the construction of a viable Irish eco‐social politics.”     

How Japanese wallflowers turned into celebrities: self-mockery and self-revelation of the female comedy duo Harisenbon

ABSTRACT

This study examines the Japanese female comedy duo Harisenbon. By examining their approach to comedy and their reception by Japanese media and society, it discusses how they use their “ugly”, “fat” and “skinny” personas to expose Japanese social pressures upon women. It considers how both comedians present a self-image that apparently matches their stage characters, and how their interactions with mainstream media endorses the very social norms they ridicule, without directly challenging or satirising them, even if this leaves space for destabilising the assumptions on which they are based. It observes that one half of the duo, who is more successful than the other, might be due to her willingness to mock her own appearance more savagely.     

Homelessness old and new: The matter of definition

Abstract

The contemporary emphasis on the pathologies of shelter denizens and street‐dwellers tends to conceal the great variety of makeshift ways of life that have characterized “homelessness” over the centuries. Diversity notwithstanding, those considered “vagrants” were historically marked as suspect members of a poor apart, even when their numbers increased sharply. Because kin ties have consistently proven to be the first line of defense against “literal homelessness,” skid row researchers thought their absence (along with the lack of associated ties to work and community) to be diagnostic of the condition. Indeed, earlier research tended to see as “homeless” any “disaffiliated” persons, housed or not, who lived alone in unconventional dwellings. Not only have the new homeless poor, by contrast, proven to be more diverse—their geographic locus, age, gender, ethnicity, and signal disabilities having all changed—but their common element is less often ascribed to faulty social connectedness than to sheer absence of shelter. This paper discusses such changes and reviews definitions of homelessness and several approaches to its social construction. The paper argues that, although definitions owe as much to political as to logical considerations, it makes both practical and historical sense to view the streets and shelters as but one variant of a class of informal or makeshift residential settings that increasingly characterizes the marginally situated.     

Exploring the Consequences of Negative Political Advertising for Liberal Democracy

ABSTRACT

This paper explores existing thinking and research on the use of negative advertising strategies in political campaigning, and in particular examines their potential impact on liberal democracy. We ask what impacts negative forms of political communication may have on our system of government and democratic participation. Though political advertising makes up only a part of political discourse, an analysis of it is necessary given the increasing “marketisation” of political communication, coupled with concerns regarding the so called “democratic deficit.” In order to more truly evaluate its impact, the evidence pertaining to both the positive and detrimental consequences of employing negative ad strategies is examined. What emerges are some very real short-term benefits, some very real concerns over its use, and confusion over its “true” impact. Of particular note is the need for researchers and campaign managers to take a longer-term view of the potentially detrimental consequences of employing negative advertising strategies-to look beyond the short-term gains of winning elections and to consider the longer-term societal consequences of consistently employing advertising strategies characterised by the creation of doubt, fear, anxiety, violation and viciousness. We argue that the “winning” mentality of political ad campaigns needs to be balanced by a more “nurturing” orientation if the tenets of liberal democracy are to remain sustainable.     

Private finance for social housing in Australia

Abstract

A significant change in the finance of social housing in the 1980s was a movement to transfer responsibility for funding to the private sector. This article argues that governments must continue to be involved in social housing finance as this movement progresses. Financing initiatives undertaken in Australia are used to signal the risks associated with the provision of social housing finance, to illustrate the mechanisms employed to manage these risks, and to highlight the conflicts that arise when a mix of public and private funding is attempted.

The article proposes the introduction of “equity bonds” as an innovative way to raise funds for social housing and to overcome inefficiencies arising from the present complex and costly administrative structures. However, a commitment to ongoing subsidies to close the full rental gap is necessary for equity bonds to serve those most in need.     

Hope,Critique, and Utopia

Abstract

This paper assesses the extent to which the category of hope assists in preserving and redefining the vestiges of utopian thought in critical social theory. Hope has never had a systematic position among the categories of critical social theory, although it has sometimes acquired considerable prominence. It will be argued that the current philosophical and everyday interest in social hope can be traced to the limited capacity of liberal conceptions of freedom to articulate a vision of social transformation apposite to contemporary suffering and indignity. The background to these experiences is the structural changes associated with the injustices of globalisation, the mobilisation of the capitalist imaginary and the uncertainties of the risk society. The category of hope could assist in sustaining the utopianism of critical theory through con joining normative principles with a temporal orientation. Yet, the paradoxes of the current phase of capitalist modernisation have further denuded notions of progress. Since the theological background to the category of hope constitutes a major limitation, the utopian orientation of critique is clarified in relation to the antinomies of the turn to social hope and the potential of Habermas' discourse theory of democracy, law and morality. Despite Castoriadis' profound critique of the category of hope, its present usage in social analyses will be seen to have affinities with Honneth's conception of the struggle for recognition.     

Cheating death: the potency and perversity of Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple

ABSTRACT

Comic narratives provide an arena wherein the marginalised are centre stage, in the tradition of the carnival. This article examines Margaret Rutherford's performance in the role of Miss Marple in the 1960s MGM films, exploring how Rutherford's persona articulates complex discourses concerning age, gender and national identity, in the tradition of the contradictory nature of the trickster. The trickster tradition, in its evocation of a mythological resonance, creates a liminal space in the narrative, bridging life and death, male and female, chaos and order. Her narrative function is to restore social stability, to “cure” and “heal”, through chaos and cunning. Rutherford ultimately defies socially inscribed definitions of ageing femininity, inhabiting Agatha Christie's Miss Marple as a comic entity, whose ability to dissemble, impersonate and subvert makes her a potent and yet perverse force for good. Her performance as Miss Marple can be read within the social context of reconfigured discourses regarding age and gender in the second half of the twentieth century; greater life expectancy, social mobility and evolution of family structures challenged the traditional role of the ageing woman. She is a nostalgic articulation of Englishness which draws on the figuration of the village spinster.     

What Does Credibility Look like? Tweets and Walls in U.S. Presidential Candidates’ Visual Storytelling

This study considers the social media visual messaging of four candidates in the 2012 U.S. Republican presidential primary campaign. The analysis is guided by symbolic convergence theory, its method of fantasy theme analysis, and visual rhetoric theory. Using a schema of visual attributes, this study analyzes a rhetorical strategy of candidates' campaigns: the pictorial “public diary” found on their official Facebook and Twitter pages. It reveals how the credibility character traits of trustworthiness and expertise appear in the candidates' visual narratives, what messages dominate, and how candidates differ in succeeding or failing to visually communicate credibility. This study has important implications for how political management can use images in crafting and assessing messaging strategies in a competitive environment.     

Marcuse: A Critic in Counterrevolutionary Times

Abstract

As a critique of neoliberalism, this article considers Marcuse’s formulations on “paralysis of criticism” presented in his seminal text One-Dimensional Man. This is not a pessimistic perspective. Rather, the author promotes a social diagnosis on political struggles, considering the new challenges of advanced industrial societies to radical subjective experiences of emancipation. The article centers upon, it is important to note, a frequent question in Marcuse’s inquiries: How do we think critically in counterrevolutionary times? This is a question that mobilizes dialectics to revolutionary trends as it expresses an effort to re-think traditional categories of Critical Theory in their “obsolescence.” In a world of “no alternatives,” obsolescent categories are symptom of its diseases. Such obsolescence contrasts immediate relations of status quo with “radical” mediations of social forces. It mobilizes criticism in “catalytic” processes to emancipate “centrifugal social forces” from below, a qualitative leap to social changes able to face counterrevolutionary times.     

Social Policy by Other Means from a Comparative Historical Perspective Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Belgium (1800 ‒1920)

ABSTRACT

While social policies in the past are “by other means” if compared to traditional welfare states, historians have successfully established that they were much more conventional in their own time. Moreover, welfare states are historically grown constructs often still containing many pre-existing elements of precisely such social policies by other means, for example non-state provision. Belgium is an excellent example. Historically both nineteenth-century poor relief and early twentieth-century social insurance were mixed private/public forms of provision and funding. Today the Belgian welfare state still retains fundamental aspects of non-state provision not usually associated with “conventional” welfare states in the core OECD.     

The settlement utopia: brotherly love,discipline, and social critique

The Settlement movement, which originated in late nineteenth-century England, was a pioneer in bettering the conditions of the working poor. It pursued the utopian project of locating ‘settlements’ within poverty-ridden neighbourhoods where respectable students should meet slum dwellers on equal terms. This article explores the trajectory of the comparatively under-researched Danish offspring of the movement. It demonstrates the tempering and compromise that occurred when utopian ideals of ‘brotherly love’, ‘God’s Kingdom’, and ‘radical social change’ were realized in concrete social arrangements. Contradictions and ambiguities arose when utopian ideas were confronted with what could be done. The Settlement became a highly ambiguous space, a ‘heterotopia’. The roots of the contradictions cannot simply be identified in the external pressure of legal requirements and funding criteria represented by public welfare agencies. The contradictions can also be excavated from the Settlement’s own ideological doctrines and its historical development.