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Copyright of Antipode is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Antipode is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The culturally and ecologically diverse Pacific lowlands of Colombia are both the locus and product of key political economic and cultural political conjunctures. Twenty‐five years after they emerged in their current form, Afro‐Colombian ethnic and territorial struggles have become important icons of resistance to development and struggles for social change. But in Colombia as in other parts of the world, the rapid and violent expansion of capitalist accumulation and state power have had devastating consequences for the region's forests and communities—literally and epistemically fragmenting both. Based on long‐term fieldwork, this paper examines the ongoing and contentious co‐production of the Colombian Pacific region amidst the increasingly violent forces of neoliberal governmentality in the 21st century. It shows that the Pacific lowlands are an example of "political forests" in the sense that they are a contested site and product of Afro‐Colombian cultural politics and state territorialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent awareness of the role of neoliberalism in fostering tactics of de‐politicisation has cultivated recognition of a narrowing of democratic possibilities. Disaster, as a time of disruption can provoke a heightened awareness of dynamics of power and contestation. This provides a fertile ground to understand the possibility for de‐politicisation alongside that of resistance and hope. This paper weaves together and contextualises these ideas within a case study of community‐led disaster recovery in the city of Ōtautahi Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand following a series of devastating earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. In exploring the entangled relationship between crisis and hope I discuss how forms of de‐politicisation can emerge in the disaster context as well as the resistance that also emerges at the grassroots and everyday scale. I emphasise the need to see post politics as present‐yet‐incomplete alongside the potential for participatory and radical forms of social change at the grassroots scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Antipode is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper proposes a holistic framework called dynamic resistance for analysing and animating third-sector organizations' contestations of neoliberalization. It argues that the third sector constitutes a rich terrain for transforming neoliberalization processes to promote human flourishing and social justice. Dynamic resistance comprises four elements-rejection, resilience, resourcefulness, and reflexive practice-within a cyclical process which can occur simultaneously at different organizational scales. Four vignettes, drawn from participatory action research, illustrate these processes at Oblong, a grassroots community group in Leeds which now runs a community centre. Despite engagement with neoliberal mechanisms, Oblong provides an example of dynamic resistance in practice, avoiding 'mission drift' and prioritizing self-defined core values of equality, collectivity, empowerment, sustainability, respect and care, and being community led. Dynamic resistance suggests third-sector organizations' capacity to construct transformative social empowerment through ever-changing practices which are proactive and self-directed as well as responsive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to think differently about possibilities for feminist organizing in cities. We use a current experiment with city-based feminist organizing to explore how it can be possible to work with the local state while at the same time challenging and disrupting understandings and practices that marginalize the diversity of women's needs, contributions and concerns. Trying to work 'inside' the local state while maintaining an 'outside' critical perspective involves a tricky balancing act between being inside enough to have credibility and effectiveness within the business of city politics and administration, and outside enough to maintain strong connections with the community and grassroots support. In managing this balancing act, we argue that the organization enacts a strategic use of prefiguration both within the organization and when engaging the local state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethical labeling campaigns have become a central means for diffusing and negotiating conflicts between social movements and market actors. Fair Trade was a pioneering ethical label and, by many accounts, a success. For nearly a decade, United Students for Fair Trade (USFT) activists worked to build the reputation of the Fair Trade Certified (FTC) label, but in Fall 2011 they withdrew their support and urged ethical consumers to do the same. This paper is an urgent reflection on USFT's trajectory from guerrilla marketing to boycotting FTC products. While their actions may appear shortsighted and contradictory, their decision to withdraw support from the FTC label has roots in a long struggle for control of Fair Trade. We argue that their actions signal a new stage in consumer action, as activists lose faith in the legitimacy of ethical labels and instead target the agencies that own the ethical brandscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the contested construction of more relational urban imaginaries within a movement that is simultaneously committed to enhanced systems of care for distant places/others, and intensified regimes of (re)localisation. Transition Culture initiatives explore 'how to prepare for a carbon constrained, energy lean world' and stem from a concern for a post peak-oil global future. While the radical political openness of Transition Culture is in keeping with the vision of a more diverse polity imagined by advocates of relational space (for instance Amin, 2004), we argue that this openness is predicated upon an apolitical pragmatism that masks latent tensions between an environmentally benign localism and an ethics of care at-a-distance. If a transitional ethics of space occupies the uncertain ground between a relational and territorial geographical imagination, the Transition Culture movement provides a rich context within which to explore the ethical conundrums that stem from different tactics of place-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an exploration of problem drug use in the urban environment, connecting with broader concerns about the progress and contradictions of city redevelopment and change. The discussion is situated within some recent theoretical debates about the political economy of uneven development, urban restructuring and neoliberal governance. The empirical discussion is based on studies of economic and social change, conflict and grassroots praxis in the inner city of Dublin, Ireland, wherein a heroin crisis has impacted for the last few decades, affecting in particular working-class communities disadvantaged by broader patterns of economic restructuring and urban renewal. This provides some important analytical and political insights from a city that has undergone rapid and intense transformation and deepening patterns of inequality over recent decades, alongside the emergence of new forms of urban governance and community organization and contestation. The paper concludes with some considerations about the place and meaning of problem drug use in the city based on the foregoing theoretical and empirical discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working in the wake of theoretical tendencies that became prominent within geography during the 1980s, many studies of resistance have either bracketed or ignored structural power, with some versions of poststructuralism simply denying that structural power is a useful concept in a world where power is putatively highly fluid and dispersed. These sorts of approaches, exemplified by the recent works of J K Gibson-Graham, Stephen A Resnick, and Richard D Wolff (GGRW), limit the ability of studies of resistance to articulate the conditions under which political and social struggles might transcend resistance and succeed in liberating groups of humans from the oppressive conditions against which they struggle. In this paper, I discuss issues surrounding analysis of structural power in the wake of poststructuralist critiques of “structural Marxism,” presenting an alternative to GGRW's interpretation of Louis Althusser's concept of “overdetermination.” Overdetermination is a crucial concept, because it is rightly seen as the key to a noneconomistic Marxism and has been championed as such by GGRW. I re-examine the roots of Althusser's concept in the writings of Lenin and Mao, arguing for a way of reading overdetermination that is both noneconomistic and compatible with a notion of structural power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discuss the neoliberal university administration response to the activities of the SIGJ2 Writing Collective, a group of radical academics that embraces political activity in the form of providing services for immigrants, writing for activist publications, and engaging in public speaking. Some of the topics considered include competing pressures experienced by academics between fulfilling required tasks placed by universities and promoting radicalism for social change through political action, academic freedom, and free access to scholarly publishing.

Abstract: The notion of transformation is gaining traction in contemporary sustainability debates. New ways of theorising and supporting transformations are emerging and, so the argument goes, opening exciting spaces to (re)imagine and (re)structure radically different futures. Yet, questions remain about how the term is being translated from an academic concept into an assemblage of normative policies and practices, and how this process might shape social, political, and environmental change. Motivated by these questions, we identify five latent risks associated with discourse that frames transformation as apolitical and/or inevitable. We refer to these risks as the dark side of transformation. While we cannot predict the future of radical transformations towards sustainability, we suggest that scientists, policymakers, and practitioners need to consider such change in more inherently plural and political ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with the politics of class struggle and state formation in modern Bolivia. It examines how current forms of political contestation are shaped by the legacy of the Revolution of 1952 and the subsequent path of development. In so doing, we therefore explore spaces of uneven and combined development in relation to ongoing transformations in Bolivia linked to emergent class strategies of passive revolution, meaning processes of historical development marked by the overall exclusion of subaltern classes. With this in mind we argue that state formation in Bolivia can be read as part of the history of passive revolution in Latin America within the spatial conditions of uneven and combined development shaping the geopolitics of the region. However, the expansion of passive revolution as a mode of historical development has been and continues to be rigorously contested by subaltern forces creating further spaces of class struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates that Gramsci's concept of passive revolution can be utilised to help unearth some of the contradictions of participatory development within neoliberal governance systems in the global South. I argue that some approaches to 'participation' within neoliberal governance systems can, in part, be understood as moments within a protracted process of passive revolution. The argument is traced through eThekwini municipality's Community Participation Programme and the related extension of Free Basic Water (FBW). This article contributes to existing scholarship by demonstrating how a Gramscian analysis is indispensable to understanding the way in which state-civil society relations are conceived in participatory development strategies and the implications this might have for radical social change. I argue that a Gramscian approach compels us to reconsider current understandings of state-civil society relations so that we might overcome the impasse of passive revolution and move towards a more progressive form of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the mechanisms that construct and maintain the taken-for-granted, “common sense” understandings of everyday life is an essential prerequisite for reconfiguring conditions in more progressive directions. Highlighting particular moments, when these processes can be made visible, and drawing appropriate insights from such interrogations is useful not only for illuminating the fundamental malleability of “common sense” (itself a crucial element of change), but also for providing suggestive strategies and tactics for effectuating change. Here the construction and reconstruction of the “common sense” around tobacco is offered as an instructive case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over Antipode's 40 years our role as academics has dramatically changed. We have been pushed to adopt the stance of experimental researchers open to what can be learned from current events and to recognize our role in bringing new realities into being. Faced with the daunting prospect of global warming and the apparent stalemate in the formal political sphere, this essay explores how human beings are transformed by, and transformative of, the world in which we find ourselves. We place the hybrid research collective at the center of transformative change. Drawing on the sociology of science we frame research as a process of learning involving a collective of human and more-than-human actants—a process of co-transformation that re/constitutes the world. From this vision of how things change, the essay begins to develop an “economic ethics for the Anthropocene”, documenting ethical practices of economy that involve the being-in-common of humans and the more-than-human world. We hope to stimulate academic interest in expanding and multiplying hybrid research collectives that participate in changing worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports within the issue including one by David Domke on the contributions of public scholars in social developments and another about the activism of several public scholars.

The article relates the author's participation and work in the Children's Urban Geographies project relative to his engagement in public scholarship. The author notes that being both a mother and a professor, one of her greatest challenges in the project was the struggle to move away from the constant teaching moments and didactic mode of interacting with children that comes to her most naturally. While working with the project, the author realized that public scholarship need not necessarily be about large-scale or rapid social change. The value of listening to people, and of the small, incremental steps that may take years to lead to something more, but that often lead to something better, are far more important.

An essay is presented describing the stand of the author as a desk-bound radical. He notes that while he is an activist for homelessness, he does not work with homeless people, either as a worker in a shelter or as an activist in anti-homelessness movements. He explains that while it is easy for someone like him to feel guilty for not fighting for his advocacy actively, it is also important to recognize that his intellectual work and bureaucratic work are both vital parts of any activism.

The author reflects on the disjuncture between activism and academia, relative to her work as an academic and her passion as an activist. The author admits that when she accepted her work as a teacher, she began to struggle internally with whether her job precluded her from herself as an activist, who wants to get involved with social change, or helped her in continuing her activism. However, she realized that academia has simply enabled her to follow her passions.

Focuses on how to approach the cultural turn in human geography. Manifestations of the cultural turn; Reorientation of human geography's interdisciplinary concerns toward the field of cultural studies; Mediation of reorientation by commercial academic book publishing.

Abstract: In the contemporary neoliberal urban dynamics, those agencies that are on the margin of society constantly disrupt the boundaries of civil representation and forge new institutional relations within the dynamics of urban governance. I explore how this process was enacted at the turn of the century in Barcelona, looking at two coeval social mobilisations: the lock‐in of undocumented migrants in the Iglesia del Pi (2001), and the project of las agencias at the Museum of Contemporary Arts (1999–2003), both of which unfolded in the central neighbourhood of Raval. The invasion of the boundaries of civil society emerges here as a double phenomenon—one that develops both within society and in relation to institutions, instituting new modes of urban politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]