scholarly journals The Noborder Movement: Interpersonal Struggle with Political Ideals

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Gauditz

Over the last decade, self-organized refugee protests in Europe have increased. One strand of activism in Europe, noborder, involves a transnational network of people who are heterogeneous with regards to legal status, race, or individual history of migration, but who share decolonial, anti-capitalist ideals that criticize the nation-state. Noborder activists embrace prefigurative strategies, which means enacting political ideals in their everyday life. This is why this article asks: How do noborder activists try to meet their political ideals in their everyday practices, and what effects do these intentions entail? Noborder practices take place at the intersection of self-organization as a reference to migrants’ legal status or identity, on the one hand, and self-organization as anti-hierarchical forms of anarchist-autonomous organization, on the other. On the basis of empirical findings of a multi-sited ethnography in Germany and Greece, this article conceptualizes that noborder creates a unique space for activists to meet in which people try to work productively through conflicts they see as being produced by a global system of inequalities. This demanding endeavor involves social pressure to self-reflect and to transform interpersonal relationships. Broader society could learn from such experiences to build more inclusive, heterogeneous communities.

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Miasol Eguíbar-Holgado

This article offers a comparative study between two novels by Nova Scotian writers: George and Rue (2006), by George Elliott Clarke, and No Great Mischief (2000), by Alistair MacLeod. The main purpose of this analysis is to transform some of the pervasive assumptions that dominate interpretations of diasporic ontologies. Most conceptual contexts of diaspora, constructed around the idea of a homeland that is located elsewhere, can only partially be applied to historically long-established communities. Clarke’s and MacLeod’s works emphasize “native” identity, the historical presence of Africans and Scots in Nova Scotia and their ensuing attachment to the (home)land. The novels illustrate how the hostland may be transformed into a homeland after centuries of settlement. The favoring of routes over roots of many current conceptualizations of the diaspora thus contravenes the foundations on which these groups construct a “native/diasporic” identity. However, in settler colonies such as Canada, identifying these groups as unequivocally native would imply the displacement of the legitimate Indigenous populations of these territories. A direct transformation from diaspora to indigenous subjectivity would entail the obliteration of a (however distant) history of migration, on the one hand, and the disavowal of Indigenous groups, on the other. For these reasons, new vocabulary needs to be developed that accurately comes to terms with this experience, which I propose to refer to as “settled diaspora.” In settled diasporas, the notions of attachment to a local identity are reconciled with having distant points of origin. At the same time, there is conceptual room to accommodate claims of belonging that differ from those by Indigenous populations. Thus, the concept of the settled diaspora redresses critical restrictions in diaspora theory that prevent discourses of migration from being applied to spaces of settlement.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Nikolay A. Vlasenko

A quarter of a century has passed since the adoption of the Constitution of the Russian Federation by a national referendum. The jubilee gives a reason to talk about the optimality of constitutional provisions, their effectiveness, and somewhere practical expediency. The article aims to analyze the points of view expressed in this regard in the scientific press, newspaper periodicals and other media. However, the author first refers to the history of the emergence of the Constitution of the Russian Federation in 1993. It is noted that the Basic Law, on the one hand, was a result of military-political compromise between supporters of the parliamentary vision of the future structure of the country and supporters of a strong presidential power, on the other hand, allowed ultimately abolish the Soviet system and traditions. The mentioned situation and the factor of haste and hurry could not but affect the content and technical and legal quality of the document. The author has reduced the opinions expressed on the issue of modernization of the Constitution of the Russian Federation to three main positions: 1) The Constitution has not exhausted its potential and there is no reason to change its text; 2) a full-fledged constitutional reform is required, the current Constitution has exhausted its potential; 3) there is a need for precise partial changes and additions that can improve the Constitution. The article argues that the last position of the so-called precise partial changes is the most productive and allows to make the constitutional document adequate and relevant. In this regard, it is proposed to hold several round tables at the initial stage on the development of concepts for improving the constitutional foundations. One of them, the author calls promising and offers to prepare a list of proposals for the removal of ideologically and actually not confirmed in practical life provisions. These are provisions about Legal State (excluding the principle of separation of state power), Welfare State, etc. Another concept that also needs to be developed is institutional (the concept of the legal status of public authorities, their powers, checks and balances, etc.). These ideas, the author believes, should be a compromise between scientists, then become public and be implemented in the practice of constitutional construction.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 56-59
Author(s):  
I. V. Oktyabrskaya ◽  
◽  
Z. M. Chirkina ◽  

The Anastasia movement (“Ringing Cedars of Russia”, the Anastasians) was born in Russia in the mid-1990s under the influence of the publication of V. Megre’s works. It developed from reading clubs and festivals to big projects of family estates and the form of political party. In the Altai region (Altai krai) we can registrate 12 settlements at different stages of formation. In religious studies, the anastasians are considered as the one of the new religious movements that is based on the ideology and practices related to Slavic neo-paganism. In Russian Ethnology/anthropology there are attempts to characterize the Anastasians in terms of subculture, as a community with a complex identity that includes a quasi-ethnic plane. Their culture is based on the natural peasant economy. The main concept of self-organization is the idea of family estates.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 3490
Author(s):  
Fei Liu ◽  
Qing Huang

The evolution of the urban agglomeration is a significant development in urban geography. Determining its spatial range for effective measurement remains a challenge for researchers. In previous studies, determining spatial range has primarily been done through distinguishing the cities that should belong to urban agglomerations from among other cities by using various indicators. Both the selection of indicators and the standards used for calculation and identification have been based on subjective choices, and have not considered spatial distribution or morphology. The urban agglomeration can be regarded as a self-organized space, and spatial features of the fractal can be regarded as one of the morphological characterizations of spatial self-organization. From the perspective of the assumption that the space of urban agglomerations is molecule like assembled, and through the extraction and analysis of spatial fractals, we present an objective method to determine the “spatially contiguous zone” of urban agglomeration, particularly the spatial range in which the urban agglomeration is able to exercise jurisdiction within the radius of its capacity, rather than in the administrative division. Our method is applied in this paper to the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei urban agglomeration and produced the following results: (1) the existence of spatial fractals and the theory of space unit molecule like self-organization or assembly in the morphology of urban agglomerations has been proved; and (2) a spatially contiguous zone could be identified for the urban agglomeration has been confirmed. Compared with previous methods used for determining space, this method is centered on the spatial morphology of urban agglomerations; the recognition of a spatially contiguous zone liberates the geographical limits of the result from city boundary restrictions. Concurrently, by considering the linkages within the city as a self-organizing black box, we can circumvent the one-sidedness involved with the selection of indicators that has biased previous studies, thereby avoiding having to focus on the specific mechanism of urban dynamics, and coming much closer to its self-organizing dynamic inner nature. This approach will prove to be a useful reference for the identification of spatial ranges in future studies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-269
Author(s):  
Alexandra Pletneva

To create the social history of Russia and the history of everyday life, one needs a description of local everyday practices. This article focuses on the everyday practices associated with the birth of a baby and care for it. The author proceeds from the fact that the 18th and 19th centuries in Russia saw the coexistence of two cultures and two household traditions – the culture of the educated classes and the peasant culture. At the level of everyday practices, they made a certain influence on each other. On the one hand, ethnographic materials were used as sources, and on the other hand – popular medical literature of the 19th century. The article analyzes the practices themselves and the mechanisms of their influence on each other, while it appears that the effect of the practices of educated social groups on people’s life was a conscious Kulturtraeger activity. The influence of peasant household traditions on the lifestyle of educated classes was carried out primarily through direct impact. The ubiquity of nurses who belonged to a different social group than the child’s parents, led to the fact that, despite the parents’ resistance, peasant childcare practices (baby-rocking, pacifier, sleeping together, etc.) were used quite actively.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 1965
Author(s):  
`Neusa Torres ◽  
Vernon Solomon ◽  
Lyn Middleton

Background: Antibiotics are the most frequently used medicines worldwide with most of the countries defining these as prescription-only medicines. Though, dispensing non-prescribed antibiotics represent one of the chief causal factors to the irrational use of antibiotics that paves the way to the development of antimicrobial resistance. Objective: We aimed at describing the practices and the enablers for non-prescribed antibiotic dispensing in Maputo city, Mozambique. Methods: A qualitative study was conducted, between October 2018 and March 2019, in nine private pharmacies randomly selected across Maputo city. Eighteen pharmacists were contacted and seventeen enrolled through snowball sampling. In-depth interviews were conducted, audiotaped, and transcribed verbatim. Transcripts were coded and analysed though thematic analysis with guidelines from Braun and Clark. The Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Studies (COREQ) checklist by (Tong, 2007) was performed. Results: Out of seventeen, fifteen pharmacists admitted non-prescribed dispensing of antibiotics. Common antibiotic dispensing practices included; dispensing without prescription, without asking for a brief clinical history of patients, without clear explanation of the appropriate way of administering, without advising on the side effects. Reasons for non-prescribed antibiotic dispensing are linked to patients’ behaviour of demanding for non-prescribed antibiotics, to the patients expectations and beliefs on the healing power of antibiotics, to the physicians’ prescribing practices. Other reasons included the pressure for profits from the pharmacy owners, the fragile law enforcement, and absence of accountability mechanisms. Conclusions: The practices of non-prescribed antibiotic dispensing characterize the ‘daily life’ of the pharmacists. On the one hand, the patient’s demand for antibiotics without valid prescriptions, and pharmacist’s wish to assist based on their role in the pharmacy, the pressure for profits and on the understanding of the larger forces driving the practices of self-medication with antibiotics - rock. On the other hand, pharmacists are aware of the legal status of antibiotics and the public health consequences of their inappropriate dispensing practices and their professional and ethical responsibility for upholding the law - hard place. Highlighting the role of pharmacists and their skills as health promotion professionals is needed to optimizing antibiotic dispensing and better conservancy in Mozambique.


Author(s):  
Pamela Ballinger

This chapter explores the history of migration in Italy. Migration has preoccupied both the Italian state and students of Italy since Italian unification in 1861. From almost the beginning of its existence, the Italian state had been concerned with protecting its emigrants, on the one hand, and seeking to contain the potentially disruptive effects of migration, on the other. As life for Italians in former territories in Africa or the Balkans became untenable, the Italian state found itself tasked with humanitarian and political responsibilities defined in contradistinction to and in dialogue with those assumed by the postwar intergovernmental refugee regimes. At the same time, however, the Italian state's response to flows from the lost possessions involved nongovernmental and intergovernmental actors—often in novel ways. The chapter then brings the insights of international history and recent findings on internationalisms to bear on understandings of Italian state-making in both its national and imperial forms. It also looks at the competing and entangled models of colonialism.


Author(s):  
Andriy Martynov

Modern theoreticians of Global History differ in opinion as to the definition of Globalization and up till now there is no single definition, which would satisfy most scientists. Some of them believe this phenomenon to be irreal because it is impossible to clearly separate it from other social processes and phenomena or because it do not has clearly defined place in the geographical space. In most cases Globalization are understood as: We are living today in an age of rapid globalization. Its pace has accelerated in the past several decades, particularly since the end of the Cold War. The main thrust for globalization involved a high degree of Westernization, it by no means resulted in homogenization but everywhere produced diverse responses to the West rooted in indigenous cultures. In fact, we have witnessed homogeneity resulting from processes of globalization and at the some time increasing heterogeneity. Globalization thus is extremely complex and variegated, on the one hand indeed leading to high degrees of homogeneity in economic organization, technological and scientific developments and even lifestyles following Western patterns, on the other hand to marked divergences from Western outlooks and practices and even to pronounced resistance to Western influences. In this article we intend to examine the transformation of historical thinking and writing within this larger global context. Globalization is realized in the form of bilateral, multilateral and collective relation. Global System is usually understood as hierarchically structurized integral complex of actors of international relation, which are interconnected by constant relations. Until the early 21th century the investigation of Global History was performed within a whole number of social science: philosophy, history, sociology, legal and economic sciences. The theory of globalization is a science, which tries to logically and reasonably interpret the most essential phenomena and processes as well as interrelation between them using its own methods. Conflict and cooperation are the most important manifestation of the state of international relations and logically proceed from structural peculiarities of current global system.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.


Author(s):  
Colby Dickinson

In his somewhat controversial book Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben makes brief reference to Theodor Adorno’s apparently contradictory remarks on perceptions of death post-Auschwitz, positions that Adorno had taken concerning Nazi genocidal actions that had seemed also to reflect something horribly errant in the history of thought itself. There was within such murderous acts, he had claimed, a particular degradation of death itself, a perpetration of our humanity bound in some way to affect our perception of reason itself. The contradictions regarding Auschwitz that Agamben senses to be latent within Adorno’s remarks involve the intuition ‘on the one hand, of having realized the unconditional triumph of death against life; on the other, of having degraded and debased death. Neither of these charges – perhaps like every charge, which is always a genuinely legal gesture – succeed in exhausting Auschwitz’s offense, in defining its case in point’ (RA 81). And this is the stance that Agamben wishes to hammer home quite emphatically vis-à-vis Adorno’s limitations, ones that, I would only add, seem to linger within Agamben’s own formulations in ways that he has still not come to reckon with entirely: ‘This oscillation’, he affirms, ‘betrays reason’s incapacity to identify the specific crime of Auschwitz with certainty’ (RA 81).


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