Caring through art: Reimagining value as political practice

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-174
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Millner
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Social Bonds ◽  
Self Care ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Economic Production ◽  
Alternative Ethics

Recent feminist critiques of neo-liberalism have argued for care as an alternative structuring principle for political systems in crisis and have proposed that the transformation of the existing capitalist order demands the abolition of the (gendered) hierarchy between ‘care’ ‐ the activities of social reproduction that nurture individuals and sustain social bonds ‐ and economic production. Key to answering what it might mean for care to become the central concern or core process of politics is imagining alternatives outside deeply ingrained and guarded conventions. It is in this imagining that artists have much to contribute, more so still because for many artists, maintaining a practice in neo-liberal contexts demands nurturing collectivities, sensitivities and resourcefulness ‐ essential aspects of care. By focusing on recent Australian examples, this article examines what role artists can play in engaging with, interpreting or enacting care in practices ‐ such as works of self-care, care for country and the environment, care for material culture and heritage, care for institutions and processes, and care for others ‐ which might help forge an alternative ethics in the age of neo-liberalism. This exploration is driven by the need for a contemporary values revolution as we ‐ as a species, as a planet ‐ face existential threats including climate emergency and terminal inequality. Can art be a generative site to work towards alternative ethics that privilege trans-subjective relations predicated on attentiveness and tending, on spending time, on holding space?

Theorizing socio-environmental reproduction in China’s countryside and beyond

2020 ◽  
pp. 251484862097012
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Lord
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
The Past ◽  
Environmental Objectives ◽  
Rural Environments ◽  
Environmental Work

Over the past four decades, pollution and other forms of environmental degradation have radically transformed China’s landscape. So have the ambitious greening policies implemented to tackle these problems. During the same period, an enormous gap in wealth and amenities has arisen between the modernizing cities and rural areas, the latter playing an important, and often ignored, role in China’s environmental project. This paper identifies two paradoxical processes transforming rural environments: the mobilization of rural efforts to green the nation and the ruralization of pollution. While seemingly contradictory, both processes illustrate how the rural is expendable and malleable to state interests. This article proposes the concept of socio-environmental reproduction to theorize the environmental paradox in which many rural communities find themselves in contemporary China, as their environmental work and sacrifices sustain economic and political systems. This concept builds on the work on social reproduction by feminist scholars, particularly those who have sought to integrate the environment into their analyses. This paper proposes to expand the concept to include all the environmental work and sacrifices that certain people are asked to make to fuel the economic system, preserve political stability, and protect privileged spaces from pollution. As a whole, this article shows how China’s rural–urban divide is constitutive of the country’s environmental project and how national greening initiatives enable uneven development. Furthermore, this case foreshadows what will likely occur elsewhere as countries seek to green themselves. As the ecological era unfolds in China and elsewhere, it exposes how deep social divides are mobilized to fulfill environmental objectives. This paper theorizes the environmental work and sacrifices that risk falling on the shoulders of the most vulnerable.

scholarly journals Enabling Participation Income for an Eco-Social State

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Francesco Laruffa ◽  
Michael McGann ◽  
Mary P. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Capability Approach ◽  
Policy Framework ◽  
Basic Income ◽  
Social State ◽  
Economic Production ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Questions ◽  
The Capability Approach

We revise Atkinson’s concept of a ‘participation income’ (PI), repositioning it as a form of green conditional basic income that is anchored in a capabilities-oriented eco-social policy framework. This framework combines the capability approach with an ‘ethics of care’ to re-shape the focus of social policy on individuals’ capability to ‘take care of the world’, thus shifting the emphasis from economic production to social reproduction and environmental reparation. In developing this proposal, we seek to address key questions about the feasibility of implementing PI schemes: including their administrative complexity and the criticism that a PI constitutes either an arbitrary and confusing, or invasive and stigmatising, form of basic income. To address these concerns, we argue for an enabling approach to incentivising participation whereby participation pathways are co-created with citizens on the basis of opportunities they recognise as meaningful rather than enforced through strict monitoring and sanctions.

Things Are the Way They Are: A Typology of Reification

2020 ◽  
pp. 073112142092189
Author(s):  
Ryan Gunderson
Keyword(s):  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Emotional Engagement ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Economic Production ◽  
Human Formation ◽  
Experiential Mode ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday

This project clarifies the notoriously ambiguous concept of reification through analytical descriptions of reificatory modes of experience in social context. The experience of social constructions as fixed and unchangeable (“subjective reification”) is manifest in four interrelated experiential modes: (1) doxa, taking the social world for granted; (2) identification, experiencing abstractions as realer than particular objects; (3) enframing, the experience of means (technology and economic production) as ends and ends (humanity and life) as means; and (4) detachment, experience after suspending genuine emotional engagement. Each experiential mode is rooted in historically contingent yet objective social conditions (“objective reification”) and, thus, has a degree of validity – hence the power of reification, in comparison to legitimation, in social reproduction. Methodologically, the difficult path remains theorizing society as a totality without losing sight of its human formation with due attention to the everyday actors who reproduce and, every so often, challenge this totality.

Europe’s Debt to Refugees

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-79
Author(s):  
Eugenia Siapera ◽  
Maria Rieder
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Social Bonds ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
Public Media ◽  
Temporal Horizon ◽  
Historical Past

Focusing on Germany and Greece, this chapter examines the mobilization of the historical past in connection with the refugee issue. Based on an empirical analysis of news and digital media, we found that in Greece, the issue of refugees is understood through the prism of debt to humanity in general, to past generations of Greek refugees, and to Syrian people. The past debt can never be repaid but must be rolled over to future generations. The temporal horizon within which it unfolds enables social reproduction in the form of the maintenance of social bonds, among generations of Greeks and between Greeks and present-day refugees. In Germany, the debt to the past is never clearly articulated and the public/media discourse is denying that there is a debt. Germany’s concern is to liberate itself from its past and establish a relationship with refugees on a different basis. However, this ends up transferring the refugee issue from the realm of social relationships to the realm of management and logistics. In cutting off present-day refugees from those in the past, any relationship needs to be created anew, without the benefit of historical continuity. While for Germany this may have a liberating effect, for refugees the only role available is that of an eternal debtor.

Comparing Youth Transitions in Europe

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Jacqueline O’Reilly ◽  
Janine Leschke ◽  
Renate Ortlieb ◽  
Martin Seeleib-Kaiser ◽  
Paola Villa
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Youth Unemployment ◽  
Early Career ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Labor Market Transitions ◽  
Economic Production ◽  
Youth Labor Market ◽  
Inclusive Analysis ◽  
Market Transitions

This introductory chapter outlines the key trends and debates concerning the rapid growth of youth unemployment and early career labor market insecurity in Europe. It discusses new forms of segmentation and the distinction between “poorly integrated youth” and those “left behind” in relation to gender, ethnicity, and class inequalities. The chapter begins by contextualizing European youth employment trends. Subsequently, it examines how European countries have performed in relation to integrating young people into work, as captured by the use of different indicators and typologies in comparative research on youth transition regimes. It points to how these types of analysis affect policy debates. Providing an overview of the contributions to this volume, it suggests that an inclusive analysis of both the sphere of social reproduction and economic production are required to improve our understanding of youth labor market transitions and insecurity since the Great Recession.

Regional influences, economic adaptation and cultural articulation: Diversity and cosmopolitanism in fourteenth-century Singapore

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 476-488
Author(s):  
Derek Heng
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Consumption Patterns ◽  
External Trade ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Common View ◽  
Economic Production ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
History Of

Studies on the international history of fourteenth-century Singapore have been hitherto limited to external trade conducted by local inhabitants, and material consumption patterns that this trade enabled them to develop. Broader regional cultural influences have been postulated though not clearly demonstrated, given scant textual records and limited material culture remains. This article seeks to examine the external influences, adaptation and assimilation in the production and consumption of fourteenth-century Singapore. In particular, it looks at three aspects of Singapore's pre-colonial existence — modes of economic production, patterns of consumption of international products, and the articulation of high culture vis-à-vis external entities. By examining available archaeological, epigraphic, art historical and cartographic data from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries, this article postulates how distinct consumption patterns may have developed among different riverside populations living north of the Singapore River. This study also questions the common view that Singapore developed as a cosmopolitan port-city only after the advent of British colonialism, demonstrating that its diversity and openness was likely a feature centuries before.

Between Prophecy and Apocalypse: Buber, Benjamin, and Socialist Eschatology

2020 ◽  
pp. 009059172093904
Author(s):  
Asher Wycoff
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Entry Point ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Central Concern

Martin Buber’s political thought has enjoyed renewed attention lately, particularly his concept of “theopolitics,” a type of political practice that recognizes God as the ultimate political authority. In Buber’s biblical exegesis, theopolitics is a condition of everyday life in premonarchical Israel, but following the installation of the monarchy, it becomes a specialized activity of prophets, consisting chiefly in divinely commanded intercession against state actions. Buber suggests that a version of this prophetic activity is manifest in present-day socialist cooperatives, especially the kibbutzim. Indeed, for Buber, these cooperatives can be seen as laying the groundwork for messianic redemption. This essay probes some potentially troubling implications of Buber’s theopolitical framework, taking objections raised in Walter Benjamin’s correspondence as an entry point. A central concern for Benjamin is Buber’s nationalist articulation of Jewish identity, which appears all the more problematic when considered in tandem with the teleological view of history evident in Buber’s framework.

Observations on Latin American Constitutionalism

1967 ◽  
Vol 24 (01) ◽  
pp. 46-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Busey
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Substantial Agreement ◽  
The World ◽  
Wide Gap ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
Great Stress

Scholars are in substantial agreement that Latin American constitutionalism leaves much to be desired. First, there is the wide gap between constitutional formulations and actual political practice. No one would contend that any constitution, Latin American or otherwise, corresponds exactly to reality. There are provisions in the United States Constitution which are no better observed than are those of the Latin American documents. Even so, there can be little doubt that the gulf between theory and reality is far wider in much of Latin America than it is in many other parts of the world. Though many provisions of other constitutions do not correspond to actual political practice, Latin American stipulations on significant principles of government are often so much at variance with reality as to be totally misleading for the description of their political systems. Professor Martin C. Needler puts it quite bluntly: Quite clearly, many constitutional provisions are honored only in the breach; and yet great stress is placed upon constitutional forms and procedures, even where these mask political realities quite discordant with their intent.

scholarly journals Does Political Ideology Affect Social Bonds Among College Students in India Today?

2021 ◽  
Vol 04 (08) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maheshwari Rawat ◽  
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Social Bonds ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Political Opinion ◽  
Social Circle ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

Political ideology has played a significant role in shaping humans and their interactions with other humans since the emergence of modern political systems around the world, however, it may not have been as ubiquitous as it is in today’s day and age. These days, political ideology may affect people’s everyday choices, even what kind of people they want in their social circle. In college spaces where people engage in political discourse actively; it may impact the already existing bond among peers or lead to a dissociative behaviour. It may also have no impact at all. In this research we try to study the extent to which someone’s political ideology governs their choice of selecting or dissociating from certain social circles based on similarities or differences of political opinion. The existing literature is mostly centered on people being divided into political cleavages for elections or how family and friends play a role in shaping one’s ideology. In this research we try to study how political ideology is always at work and how it can impact the way the youth bond with their peers.

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