Social TextPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9631145
J. Sánchez Cruz
{"title":"Debility, Negative Affect, Mobility","authors":"J. Sánchez Cruz","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9631145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9631145","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article proposes that the undocumented as a valence of difference expands on queer studies’ turn to a subjectless critique and how debility and negativity become part of the discussion of an objectless critique. In examining Alan Pelaez Lopez's “sick in ‘america,’” Julio Salgado's oeuvre, and Yosimar Reyes's #UndocuJoy, it is argued that undocumented queer subjects living under a landscape of debility and a climate of negative affect diagnose contemporary tactics of debility deployed as frames of illegality, securitization, and biopoliticization, and simultaneously reflect how the production of negative affect leads to feelings of nonbelonging, of being off. This article goes on to suggest that debility is conjoined to negative affect, arguing that in spite a continual state of debility and a dispersion of negativity, the undocumented thrive in the practices of the everyday, presented here as another lens of thinking mobility, a recalibrator to the debility/capacity/(dis)ability imaginary.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46577189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9631103
J. Nash
{"title":"Slow Loss","authors":"J. Nash","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9631103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9631103","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article develops the idea of slow loss as a relationship to time, space, and feeling that Black feminist theory has described in distinctive ways, helping readers to consider both Black female subjectivity and the stakes of Black feminist theory anew. This article travels with the central and undertheorized place of slow loss in the Black feminist theoretical archive at least in part because of a desire to emphasize Black feminist theory's long-standing investment in understanding and describing the subject position of Black woman.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47273429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt1mtz7sv.6
M. Velikonja
{"title":"“New Others”","authors":"M. Velikonja","doi":"10.2307/j.ctt1mtz7sv.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1mtz7sv.6","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article deals with mostly negative ideological images of refugees, as they erupted in political graffiti and street art (stickers, stencils, various inscriptions) in Slovenia during the so-called refugee crisis from the fall of 2015 on. Its basic questions are three: How is the ideological process of othering the refugees constructed in political graffiti? How does this relate to dominant discourses and practices in Slovenian society (from official politics to mass media)? What were the reactions against such sprayed hate speech (so pro-refugee graffiti)? The process of othering progresses in two steps: refugees are first imagined as an unified mass that is radically different from imaginary notions of “Slovenianism” and “Europeanism,” which then serves as the basis for differentiation between more and less acceptable of them. On these grounds, four different ideological images are created: a refugee as a criminal, a refugee as an uninvited visitor, a refugee as a powerless victim, and a refugee as a global proletarian. About 150 original photos of anti- and pro-refugee graffiti, mostly from Slovenia (but for comparative reasons also from the whole region), are analyzed using the semiotic method as developed by its classics and finally interpreted with Theodor Adorno and Alexander Mitscherlich's concepts of “displacement of hatred” and Seymour Martin Lipset's concept of “extremism of the center.”","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41569550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9495117
M. Armiero
{"title":"From Waste to Climate","authors":"M. Armiero","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9495117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9495117","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 It has often been said that the problem with climate change is its invisibility. People do not mobilize about climate change because they cannot see it; even less can they see CO2 emissions—that is, the most relevant material element causing climate alternations. Although I would argue that for some people climate change is more visible than for others, it remains a global environmental problem not easily felt on the ground. On the other hand, waste appears to be an incumbent presence, almost impossible to avoid; it also seems more localized than global climate change. People mobilize around waste because it stands in front of their eyes and noses. This is how the story has been told so many times. This article instead tells another story, one in which climate activism is rooted in struggles against waste contamination. In Naples, Italy, twenty years of mobilization against toxicity—which, by the way, is much less visible and much more harmful than the urban garbage in the streets—has generated an epistemic community trained to understand the invisible connections linking local problems, global issues, and socioenvironmental inequalities. Their original elaboration of biocide as the theoretical framework explaining the production of toxic communities provided them with an equally original framework to understand climate change and its unequal impacts on people and ecosystems. In moving between waste and climate, local and global, those epistemic communities have not only changed the ways in which climate activism has been conceived but have also changed themselves.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47402908","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9495174
M. Armiero, Salvatore Paolo De Rosa
{"title":"Climate Insurgency between Academia and Activism","authors":"M. Armiero, Salvatore Paolo De Rosa","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9495174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9495174","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This interview focuses on a spectrum of urgent challenges facing marginalized human and other-than-human communities, including the intersecting crises of global anthropogenic climate disruption and state and institutional racist violence. We discuss and consider the opportunities, limits, and contradictions of pursuing transformative, intersectional political change and scholarship through efforts to bridge community activism and academic labor. We also critically engage questions concerning the role of the state in the context of racial capitalism and the production of environmental and climate injustice, and how grassroots movements have responded to these concerns. Specific movement formations included in this discussion include the Central Coast Climate Justice Network of California, the Movement for Black Lives/Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, and multispecies abolition democracy. The importance of radical, multi-issue politics and cross-movement solidarities is also given serious attention.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45975713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9495160
Salvatore Paolo De Rosa
{"title":"Breaking Consensus, Transforming Metabolisms","authors":"Salvatore Paolo De Rosa","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9495160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9495160","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article discusses the politics of direct action against fossil fuels put forward by climate justice movements, focusing in particular on the tactic of the blockade. Drawing on the conceptual toolkit of urban political ecology, the argument moves from a critique of the consensual regime of climate change governance to highlight conflict and dissent as central forces for the transformation of the socioecological metabolisms structuring the capitalist urbanization of nature—of which fossil fuels constitute the lifeblood. This approach shifts the debate around climate change politics from an issue of technological transition to one of metabolic transformation. On this basis, the article proposes a characterization of direct action against fossil fuels as expressions of metabolic activism: instances of grassroots ecopolitical engagement that aim to break consensus by disrupting capitalist-driven metabolic relations while also experimenting with alternative values, knowledges, spaces, and sociomaterial relations. To ground these reflections, the article offers an account of the Swedish climate justice coalition Fossilgasfällan and its successful three-year campaign, culminating in a blockade to halt the expansion of the gas terminal of Gothenburg port.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44440096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9495146
Sinan Erensü, Barış İne, Yaşar Adnan Adanalı
{"title":"From the Occupied Parks to the Gardens of the Nation","authors":"Sinan Erensü, Barış İne, Yaşar Adnan Adanalı","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9495146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9495146","url":null,"abstract":"Ever since the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul in the summer 2013, defending and reclaiming the city parks, market gardens, public squares, and urban forests has become a mainstream act of defiance and a symbolic rejection of an intensifying authoritarianism, neoliberal urbanism, and exclusionary planning practices. Growing interest in the mobilizing capacity of the emerging urban-environmental imaginary, however, has not remained exclusive to the opposition. Rather than dismissing the critique entirely, the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) has most recently embraced the politics of urban greenery and strived to mold it in its own image. This article focuses on the contentious politics of urban greenery in Istanbul and examines how the city's green public spaces have come to proxy a larger struggle over the future of Turkey. By discussing the possibilities, challenges, and limits of the politics of urban greenery, this article examines how the government has attempted to absorb an emerging urban-environmental objection into its fold. To do so, the article traces the genealogy of Istanbul's park politics in the last decade and most specifically focuses on the latest iteration of the urban greenery frenzy: the Gardens of the Nation. By studying how this nationwide urban greenery drive has been designed, promoted, discussed, inaugurated, and used, this article provides an account for the critical role green aesthetics play in conjuring up alternative environmental imaginaries and communities against the backdrop of a populist authoritarian climate.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49184543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9495089
AbdouMaliq Simone
{"title":"Majority Urban Politics and Lives Worth Living in a Time of Climate Emergencies","authors":"AbdouMaliq Simone","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9495089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9495089","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Majority lower-income and working-class districts in the Global South have long relied on an intricate interweaving of diverse practices. This has been complemented by strategic engagements with the ambiguities inherent in governing the dispositions of land and municipal services. These processes of majority-inflected urbanization are being substantially constrained both by the restructuring of urban rule and economy and by the exigencies of climate change. At the same time, there are often undue expectations that grassroots movements will be critical drivers of urban transformations capable of enduring climate change. But the collective actions of many low-income districts are seemingly indifferent to such expectations. Both the endurance of long-honed political practices and their substantive adjustments are explored here in order to revisit fundamental questions about how to generate lives worth living without valorization of the human.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41857255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social TextPub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/01642472-9495075
A. Dawson, M. Armiero, Ethemcan Turhan, Roberta Biasillo
{"title":"Urban Climate Insurgency","authors":"A. Dawson, M. Armiero, Ethemcan Turhan, Roberta Biasillo","doi":"10.1215/01642472-9495075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-9495075","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Urban climate insurgency refers to the ensemble of grassroots initiatives aiming to tackle climate change from a radical point of view. Insurgency in this case does not imply violence but rather refers to the radical rejection of the current socioecological system. While explicitly challenging planetary ecocide and climate-change effects, these forms of insurgency target all policies that make the urban condition yet more precarious, demonstrating that climate mobilization is inherently intersectional. The focus here is on the urban dimension of this global climate insurgency that unsettles the dichotomy between rural and urban. It is on the urban terrain, already fissured by racial capitalism but also traversed by antiracist and promigrant movements, that the climate emergency becomes a climate and social justice issue. This introductory essay offers a fresh approach to the new municipalist project and digs into its environmental agenda. From New York to Mälmo, from Rio de Janiero to Istanbul, passing through Jakarta, Bangalore, and Naples, this special issue explores the articulation of radical climate-change politics, the materialization of climate injustices, and grassroots reactions to these injustices in the urban sphere.","PeriodicalId":47701,"journal":{"name":"Social Text","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46688250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}