Community leaders in Colombia have historically suffered processes of microaggressions and intimidation that threaten the free exercise of their voice in the processes of production of knowledge and in the participation of the planning of their territories. In this article, we explore the case study of the Network of Community Researchers (NCR), also known in Spanish as Red de Investigadores Comunitarios, promoted by the University of Antioquia, Colombia. The NCR is a commitment to the co-production of knowledge about human security (...) from below between community researchers and academics. This article analyses the contribution of the NCR to the human security of Medellin and a specific collection of capabilities for epistemic liberation of community researchers: the capability to be recognised as a producer of valid knowledge, to do through communicative openness, to learn from collective knowledge and to transform through collective action. The expansion of these four capabilities evidence processes of resistance and hermeneutic insurrection of some community leaders and activists who participate in the NCR. The analysis shows the contribution of the NCR to facilitate and generate a safe space in which community researchers communicate knowledge and practices and share experiences, risks, struggles, fears and collective dreams of transformation. (shrink)

Daniel Bensaïd’s meditations on utopia and revolution assume a materialist form in his grasp of the non-linear temporalities of value relations in capitalist society. The result is a dialectical understanding of time as irregular and prone to ruptural transformations. Bensaïd’s unique reflections in this area open up a ‘strategic sense of time’ as the space of revolutionary politics.

Traducción del texto José Itzigsohn, "Class, Race, and Emancipation: The Contributions of The Black Jacobins and Black Reconstruction in America to Historical Sociology and Social Theory". The CLR James Journal, 19-1/2, 2013, pp.177-198. (DOI: 10.5840/clrjames2013191/211.) Traducción de Laura Judit Alegre, incluidas las citas bibliográficas. Publicación debidamente autorizada por la revista. Se respeta el sistema de citación de la edición original. Este texto tiene leves modificaciones propuestas por el autor del texto original.

This article attempts to create the space for rethinking the politics and ethics of consumption by initiating dialogues with Swadeshi movements and Gandhi in order to transform the spaces ofproduction transcending the concern for consumption choices. Analysing the history of Swadeshi movements in pre-independence India, especially Bengal, and drawing inspiration from Gandhi 's Swadeshi movement and his principles of swaraj and satyagraha, an attempt has been made here to provide an aesthetic, ethical and spiritual foundation for the present version of (...) the Swadeshi drive in India, which is substantively immersed in the logic of market capitalism and mindless consumption. The article explores pathways of improvement of quality of life, experi ences in happiness and fulfilment, both individual and collective, by creating a culture of self-development, responsible consumption and community building efforts on the basis of sharing and concern for others. (shrink)

Review Essay: `No, We Have Not Finished Reflecting On Communism':1 Beyond Post-Socialism: Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Zižek , Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth ; Cornelius Castoriadis, The Rising Tide of Insignificancy ; Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable ; Filip Kovacevic, Liberating Oedipus? Psychoanalysis as Critical Theory ; Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy.

William Morris, author of the famous nineteenth-century utopian novel News from Nowhere, thought it both possible and desirable to develop a utopian vision that could be affirmed by many individual...

Although Utopia makes reasonably frequent appearances within humanities and social science teaching (at least as a topic, even if only to be denounced), it remains at best at the far periphery of architecture education. Thus, any essay proposing the relevance of utopic pedagogies for architecture education, and its subsequent professional practice, must come to terms with the strange absence of Utopia from the heart of the curriculum (and from the concerns of most architecture students, educators, theorists, historians, and practitioners).It is (...) with such a pervasive absence in mind that in this article I will first offer a brief overview of how and why Utopia has become anathema for architecture education .. (shrink)

. Books Received. Ethics, Place & Environment: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 77-78.

. Books Received. Ethics, Place & Environment: Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 291-293.

Employing the case of theredwood Headwaters forest in rural NorthernCalifornia, this paper investigates the extentto which an anti-corporate progressive alliancebetween labor and the environmental movement ispossible in contemporary global capitalism.Progressive alliances between labor and theenvironmental movement have been historicallydifficult. This has been particularly the casein the timber industry, where companies havebeen able to mobilize workers againstenvironmentalists' designs. The caseillustrates the events that led to the purchaseof the Headwaters Forest by the state ofCalifornia and the Federal Government fromPacific Lumber. This is (...) a subsidiary of Maxxam,a corporation with interests in a variety ofeconomic sectors. The objective was to haltMaxxam's rampant deforestation of old growthredwood. Though conflict between labor andenvironmentalists existed, the casedemonstrates that the labor and theenvironmental movement were united againstMaxxam. They, however, were not completelysuccessful in their struggle as Maxxam greatlybenefited from the state-sponsored landpurchase. Maxxam gained economically, was ableto shape the ideological framework throughwhich the purchasing agreement was achieved,and extended its hegemony over the state. Thisoutcome cast doubts on the possibility thatcurrent forms of environmental protection couldtranscend commodified and reductionistpostures. Simultaneously, the existence of acommon anti-corporate consciousness among largesegments of labor and the environmentalmovement makes the environment a contestedterrain and allows for some optimism about thefuture of the struggle for ecologically soundsocial arrangements. (shrink)

In recent years, feelings such as melancholia, paranoia, despair and political depression have been deemed distinctive political moods, also within critical theories. This, the author argues, is the affective landscape for understanding and situating new materialist endeavours. As much as new materialist approaches have been praised and even celebrated lately, they have also provoked highly controversial reactions and evoked questions, such as: Why a new materialism, why at this historical moment? And what is so attractive about this material turn? In (...) this article, the author argues that new materialist approaches seek to oppose the contemporary affective condition of political depression, despair and hopelessness by desiring and mobilizing to achieve a different political future, one that ultimately relates to care and commonality as well as to modes and modalities of political agency. However, while new materialist approaches doubtlessly provide engaged and powerful inventions and interventions within contemporary struggles for agency, the author also demonstrates the risk of depoliticization inherent in this longing for something different, which can ultimately even compromise opening up possibilities for agency. This article, thus, aims to discuss new materialist concerns within the context of contemporary political and theoretical landscapes in order to better decipher the new materialist signals of our times, but also to critically push further the possibilities for political agency within feminist theory, at times even against all odds. (shrink)

The phenomenon of the proliferation of holiday homes, particularly in remote and isolated areas, has provoked widespread concern regarding the fate of the indigenous rural community. The central concern of this thesis is to investigate how the rural community is adapting to the presence of the outsider as both a temporary and permanent resident, by examining the interaction between local and outsider resident in order to get a sense of the dynamics involved in the restructuring of the rural community. The (...) study approached this central problematic, by looking at how rural space is being socially constructed as a result of this interaction, and how rural space is determining the dynamic involved in this interaction. The two rural villages which were chosen for this study, are located in regions of unique cultural and historical interest: Dunfarraig in the Burren region in the west of Ireland, and Gireux in the Cathar region in the south of France. Despite their empirical similarities, these villages have demonstrated quite different responses to the presence of the outsider, which has become apparent through a comparative analysis of the way in which concepts such as ‘community membership’ are played out in either context. The central findings of this research, has been to show how the landscapes of Dunfarraig and Gireux are being symbolically constructed as ‘suburban’ through the social practices of its residents, taking an abstract or social form in the French context, and a material form in the Irish context. Further, how these practices are appealing to a vocabulary of ‘suburbia’, located in the suburban imaginary of residents. These findings of ‘suburbia’ are premised on the theory that residents are constructing a view of the physical landscape for private consumption in the Irish context, and a view of the social landscape, for private consumption in the French context. However, the thesis ultimately defends the rural character of these two villages, maintaining that this interpretation of the ‘suburban imaginary’ is one way of understanding the complexity of these social practices. (shrink)