What is Flint? Place,storytelling, and social media narrative reclamation during the Flint water crisis

ABSTRACT

The Flint Water Crisis became a national news story in January of 2016, when major publishers such as The New York Times began covering the story. In the same month, an influx of social media activism occurred in response to the crisis, with citizens developing hashtag campaigns such as #FlintFwd in order to disseminate news and stories from a citizen’s perspective; these campaigns often positioned Flint positively ? as a recovering community ? rather than a city in the middle of a public health crisis, and often addressed not a national public but a local audience. This paper considers Flint-based social media activity to investigate the emergence of place-based activism within the ostensibly global network of social media. In doing so, it identifies three key themes; 1) leveraging social media to forward a critique of deficient journalistic storytelling; 2) using the affective process of storytelling via social media to claim authority over their own material offline existence, and 3) using place-based storytelling to implicate others as witnesses via the global network of social media. These themes coalesce around a distinctly critical logic of connectivity. This logic extends the notion of connectivity articulated by Van Dijck and Poell [2013. Understanding social media logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2–14.] and the strategies of platform activism explored by Tufekci [2017. Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. New Haven: Yale University Press.] to explain how social media works to expose discrepancies between the public story of the water crisis and material, lived conditions of Flint, rendering visible a discursive identity of Flint thus far unrecognized.     

Absent bodies and present memories: marking out the everyday and the future in Eastern Sri Lanka

Drawing from ethnographic work carried out between 2005 and 2007, this article considers the ways in which a women’s network has developed strategies to find meaning around the absences of loved ones, killed or ‘disappeared’ during the decades of conflict in Sri Lanka. For most of these women, the fate of their husbands, brothers, sons and fathers is not known and the lack of answers means that they are unable to fully grieve and find closure. In order to survive, they must find ways to deal with the absent bodies and present memories of those who may never be located and accounted for. These strategies include tree-planting ceremonies carried out as a way of not only remembering and mourning loved ones but also asking questions about how one makes sense of loss and what it means to carry the burden of unanswered absences through everyday life and into the future.     

“Who generates this city”? Socialist strategy in contemporary London

This essay, based on a “militant ethnography” of the attempts of the small radical grassroots activist group, Our London (a pseudonym), to mobilize a collective oppositional politics through activities around an election campaign, engages critically with E. Laclau and C. Mouffe's arguments on discourse and collectivity in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). I argue, on the basis of my findings, that while their model does provide insights that help describe the process of building collectivity from among disparate perspectives and identities, we need to go beyond a focus on discourse alone and consider the ways politics is shaped by material contexts. This is necessary if we are to understand the continued appeal of class politics as well as the difficulties in mobilizing collectivity in highly unequal and fragmented cities. From an activist perspective, the essay also highlights how developing a conception of collective interests and a critique of overarching systems of exploitation can be important in building political unity.     

冷战后的中美政治安全关系

冷战结束十年以来 ,美国的对华政策依然摇摆不定。之所以如此 ,是因为十年来美国视中国为敌还是为友 ,或者非敌非友 ,至今还未定性。而美国难于在其国际政治安全战略中给中国定性的原因 ,则与以下的三个层次密切相关 ,即美国的国内政治层次、中美关系的发展层次和全球层次。     

谈激发大学生政治理论课的学习兴趣

政治理论课是大学生必修的一门课程,它不仅向学生讲授马克思主义的理论知识,还要帮助学生树立科学的世界观、人生观和价值观。政治理论课的教学质量如何,不仅影响到每个学生的未来,而且关系到国家的前途。所以我们要大力改进课堂教学,用教学的高质量来培养学生的高素质。如今大学生普遍不喜欢上政治理论课,极大地影响该课程的教学效果,更难以实现政治理论课的智育和德育双重功能。我们认为,针对目前大学政治理论课的低效性现状,可以通过激发学生的学习兴趣来提高政治理论课的教学效果。     

Korean ethnic education in Japanese public schools

Korean ethnic education in Japanese public schools has played an important role in the persistence of Korean ethnicity in Japan. In Osaka Prefecture, it began as an educational movement at the end of the 1960s. Japanese and Korean activists who led the movement had different political commitments and developed two approaches. Those interested in Korean homeland politics stressed the importance of teaching the ethnic culture of the homeland and tried to develop an ethno-national identity among Korean children. Those involved in civil rights politics in the context of Japan focused on the problem of ethnic discrimination and facilitated the formation of a political subjectivity among Korean children. The old practice of Korean ethnic education is a form of multicultural education and provides many useful ideas for today's multiculturalist teachers in Japan, who are dealing with children of newcomer foreigners.     

国家权力与城市空间:当代中国城市基层社会治理变革

确立和调整城市治理的空间策略是现代国家的重要任务。改革前中国的单位体制,使国家能够依靠单位实现“单元分隔”式的治理模式。改革以来,这种整齐划一的空间战略无法适应新的城市社会变迁。在城市社区管理体制改革中,出现了三种不同的国家空间战略,即“政党国家”,“行政国家”和“社会化国家”模式。当前城市社区改革的困难和复杂性体现了以上三种空间战略的对立和冲突。     

Social identities and political cleavages: the role of political context

Summary. Using a novel method, the paper investigates the influence of social group identities on attitudes and on voting in a variety of political contexts. Examining the major regions of Britain, Canada and the USA, we find considerable national and regional diversity in the nature of social cleavages. For example, social class and race had widely different effects across societies, but within societies their effects on attitudes and on voting were very similar. However, despite that, age and religion had a similar effect on attitudes across societies; the effects on voting varied considerably. The significant within-country differences underline the importance of using region, rather than country, as the unit of analysis. More importantly, these results highlight the role of political context, especially competing cleavages and the structure of party competition, in the establishment of politically relevant social cleavages.     

从反封建的提出到政治体制改革——邓小平与中国民主化进程的运作

过去我们常常把国体和政体看成是一个紧密的联结体,其实,国体和政体是经常分离的,政体和社会形态也是经常分离的.民主政体可以和奴隶社会、中世纪的城市、资本主义社会、社会主义社会结合起来;专制体制也完全可以和奴隶社会、封建社会、资本主义国家的个别时期、社会主义国家的个别时期结合起来.在我国改革开放的初期,邓小平清醒地认识到我们在国体上实现了人民当家作主,但是在政体上存在着封建主义,我们还面临着反封建的重要任务.为了顺应反对封建主义残余这一任务,为了更有操作性,他又不失时机地提出了政治体制改革的伟大目标.他为中国的民主化进程指明了可操作的路径.