‘We Want Freedom Not Just Safety’: Biography of a Girlfesto as a Strategic Tool in Youth Activism

Girls are increasingly visible as activists demanding social change, equity and justice. Yet communication between girls and policymakers is fraught with challenges over how to translate young people’s knowledge into policy change. This article traces the history of the manifesto as a form for the marginalized to articulate new social visions, drawing on the Riot grrrl manifestos as examples of this genre. It describes the creation of the first Girlfesto at the 2018 Circles Within Circles event that brought together girls, young people, activists, researchers, and policymakers from six countries in the Global North and South to consider the role of community art-based activism by girls and young people in challenging gender-based violence, concentrating on colonial systems of violence against indigenous women and girls in Canada and South Africa. We analyse the Montebello Girlfesto and the opportunities and challenges in using the Girlfesto model, with reflections from girl participants.

Modernist architects and the age of extremes in Eastern Europe, 1920-1950: Introduction

This article demonstrates the social and political impact of modernist architects in Europe’s age of extremes beyond the narrower confines of architecture. In East Central Europe with its ideological tensions, massive socio-political ruptures and eventually the establishment of communist regimes, architects’ social visions and the states’ aspirations led to intense interactions as well as strong controversies. In order to unravel these, we stress the relevance of modernism as a belief and knowledge system. In so doing we point to often unacknowledged continuities between the interwar and the immediate post-war period thus re-politicising the work of modernist architects as a project of worldmaking in the context of competing ideologies and sociotechnical imaginaries.

Sensuality, Spirit, and Society in The Dutch Courtesan and Lording Barry’s The Family of Love (1608)

This essay stages a dialogue between The Dutch Courtesan and the comparatively neglected The Family of Love by Lording Barry. It discusses the differing ways Marston and Barry deploy the Familist fellowship that had recently come under fire from England's reigning monarch. I juxtapose the dramatists' representation of sensuality and spirituality across a broad range of characters. By attending to their shared preoccupation with the humoral, excretory body, the essay proposes that these comedies leave us with divergent social visions.

Sustainable Development of the Mortgage Market in Azerbaijan: Commercial Risks of Housing Construction, Social Vision, and State Influence

The purpose of this study is to formulate a model for sustainable development of the mortgage market in Azerbaijan, taking into account commercial risks of housing construction, the risks of the construction industry, social visions of mortgages, state pressure, and support. The following five key research stages can be distinguished. Namely, identification of commercial risks of housing construction based on a survey; evaluation of the effectiveness of risk diversification strategy; determination of the social vision of a mortgage; substantiating the main directions of state pressure and support for mortgage market development; and creation of a model for sustainable development of the mortgage market in Azerbaijan. At the same time, it is proposed to use a methodological approach to assessing the effectiveness of the model based on the construction of the multivariate linear regression equation. The inclusive model of sustainable development of the mortgage market in Azerbaijan provides for the formation of a favorable institutional environment. Given the selected modules, forecasting the effectiveness of the proposed inclusive model demonstrates its effectiveness in the direction of enhancing mortgage lending based on interest rate regulation taking into account the benefits of green housing construction.

‘Who Is the Government? We Are the Government!’

Liberation Committees were most frequently local institutions of grassroots counterpower vis-à-vis traditional power brokers wishing to facilitate the smooth return to the status quo ante bellum or ante Mussolini. In factories, large offices, and rural areas characterized by the survival of semi-feudal production relations, the latter still a prominent feature in parts of rural Italy, Liberation Committees constituted prima facie challenges to the reestablishment of the dictatorial powers of proprietors and top-level managers. Nowhere did the competing social visions and political projects clash more thoroughly than in factories, offices, or the circumstances confronting landless labourers vis-à-vis traditional landed elites. Next to no serious attention has been devoted to this contentious feature of the moment of liberation until now. My description and analysis of Liberation Committees at the point of production reinforces the assessment of the moment of liberation as a transnational moment of crisis and opportunity when everything appeared possible.

The imaginary constitution of financial crises

This article proposes an alternative sociological framework for dealing with the imaginary constitution of financial crises. Theorisation of financial crises is often limited by dualistic juxtaposition of the rational and irrational, moral and immoral, calculative and intuitive, thus neglecting the imaginary structuring of such dyads in the construction of financial and fiscal realities. To address this lacuna, we introduce ideas from philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, and develop a framework that unpicks the often-suppressed, mediating and generative role of imagination in finance. On the one hand, we show how dominant forms of imagination enable the financialisation of contemporary societies, serving to sustain existing debt practices and lender–debtor relationships. On the other hand, we propose a re-animated ‘sociological imagination’ that offers potential avenues for establishing alternative social visions of the future that will enable re-thinking of the nature of debt, money and financial institutions.

Introduction: Education and the Long March through the Institutions

The Introduction presents the basic goals of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement’s agrarian reform struggle and explains how its educational proposal is part and parcel of achieving those goals. Then it outlines the three arguments of this book: engaging formal institutions can contribute to the internal capacity of movements; combining contentious and institutional tactics is an effective movement strategy; and the government’s political orientation, the state’s capacity for educational governance, and a social movement’s own infrastructure condition the possibilities for institutional change. The chapter argues for a Gramscian perspective on social movement–state relations, which views public institutions as an ambiguous sphere that protects the state from attack and is also an arena for resistance. Through the contentious co-governance of public education, movements can integrate more youth and women into the movement, equip movement leaders with professional degrees, and allow activists to prefigure their social visions.

Pigs and Positivism: Between Jurisprudence and Politics

Hendrick Hartog’s Pigs and Positivism is well known as an investigation of legal pluralism. The legal pluralism angle of the article focuses on the multiplicity of legal sources. In that sense, it reads “positivism” through the sources thesis: the idea that only those social facts recognized by the legal system as sources of law can exert an impact on the validity of a legal norm. This Essay highlights a different aspect of the article, which is the “definition of law as an arena of conflict within which alternative social visions contended, bargained, and survived.” Crucially, the alternative social visions at stake have different roles for the law itself. In other words, the conflict is not limited to a particular social arrangement (will there or won’t there be pigs on the streets); it is at least in part a conflict over the question of how law will fit into social conflict, or politics.

From Buddha Bones to Bo Trees: Nehruvian India, Buddhism, and the poetics of power, 1947–1956

In the first decade after Indian independence in 1947, the secular Indian state projected a vision of itself as being guided by universal ethics rooted in the nation's ancient Buddhist past. From the circulation of Buddhist relics in distant lands to the reinvention and incorporation of Buddhist symbols in contemporary state regalia, the government sponsored a wide variety of programmes in the name of world peace, Pan-Asian unity, and enlightened democratic values that promoted Buddhism both within India and across Asia. This more than decades-long effort was entirely the outcome of the political and social visions of India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and key members of his cabinet. In its most concise formulation, this Nehruvian-style Buddhism consisted of a two-pronged approach, one concerning the uses of Buddhism in the domestic sphere—that is, for domestic consumption by citizens of the new nation—and one concerning the uses of Buddhism as an instrument of foreign policy. At the heart of these projects was the dual effort to integrate a diverse South Asian populace into a wider national consciousness and yield influence among the post-colonial order in Asia. This article details the strategies and ideologies that Nehru and his cabinet employed vis-à-vis Buddhism from the mid-1940s to late 1950s when their Buddhist statecraft began to unravel due to geopolitical crises and the mass conversions of Ambedkarite Dalits. After tracing these developments, the article briefly considers the continued relevance of the Nehruvian engagement with Buddhism as it relates to twenty-first century Indian affairs.