https://toarcheio.org To Archeio project site Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:49 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1 https://toarcheio.org/items/the-crisis-generation-the-effect-of-the-greek-crisis-on-youth-identity-formation/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:49 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/the-crisis-generation-the-effect-of-the-greek-crisis-on-youth-identity-formation/ Continued]]> This study aims to explore the impact of the Greek Crisis on the ways young Greeks form their identities. The prolonged effects of the Greek crisis (2008-today), have been undoubtedly experienced by all Greeks (regardless of class, age, gender, location, occupation). However, older adolescents/younger adults (born between 1995 and 2000) constitute the first generation (termed Crisis Generation) to be raised during the Crisis and form their identity within this district social, political and economic reality. This study focuses on the subjective experiences of 20 participants born during this period, in an attempt to reveal their perceptions of how the crisis has contributed to their own identity formation. This study proposes that the Crisis Generation is characterised by a unique process of identity formation consisting of: a misleading passiveness, profound lack of apathy, misread and hopefully ephemeral sense of being trapped in a social and political reality which was not formed by them and explicit ability of planning a future identity away from the crisis through personal and social accounts of action.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-causal-powers-of-social-change-the-case-of-modern-greek-society/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:47 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/the-causal-powers-of-social-change-the-case-of-modern-greek-society/ Continued]]> This article provides an empirical exploration of social change, by assessing subjective experiences and evaluations in relation to social alterations in Modern Greek society. The investigation concerns whether change in everyday life deriving from the Greek crisis also involves an alteration in the ways that Greeks perceive and consider social reality and themselves within it. This article supports the view that social change is related to agency in terms of reflexivity and that Greeks have contributed to social change through the alteration of their ways of thinking and behaving. Participants reported that practices, norms and mentalities inhereted by previous generations are no longer helpful. Customs (such as clientilism) and mentalities (such as prioritizing the personal over collective interest) must now change and be reformed as the new reality demands different ways of thinking and rapid adaptations to a new way of living which has become economically restricted and politically unstable. In this sense, Greeks are becoming reflexive towards the present situation and themselves within it and critical towards the past and future, as they consider what part of the older generation’s established mentalities to retain and what aspects of their way of living will alter.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/dismantled-spatial-fixes-in-the-aftermath-of-recession-capital-switching-and-labour-underutilization-in-the-greek-capital-metropolitan-region/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:46 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/dismantled-spatial-fixes-in-the-aftermath-of-recession-capital-switching-and-labour-underutilization-in-the-greek-capital-metropolitan-region/ Continued]]> The article offers a fresh, empirically grounded look at the spatialities of crisis triggered employment forms––a largely overlooked issue in contemporary critical geography literature. Specifically, it discusses the interconnection between investment flows from manufacturing to the built environment (capital switching) and underemployment in urban metropolitan regions to substantiate its impact on emerging spatial fixities. The article, which is based on an empirical analysis informed by a radical political economy, investigates changing fixed capital formations in Greece over an extended period prior to and during the recession, from 1995 to 2012. It traces the evolution of part-time waged work in the capital metropolitan region of Attica (Athens) vis-à-vis the rest of the country’s regional labour markets, focusing on the polarized 2005–2012 period and the demise of the construction industry. The article highlights that ‘disrupted’ capital switching that occurred in Greece, closely associated with recalibrated sectoral priorities and institutional interventions, resulted in the uneven sprawling of underemployment. Our findings offer insight into how the dismantling of spatial fixes within core metropolitan regions of the southern European Union (and beyond) are connected to labour surplus and successive slumps in manufacturing and construction. The article closes by calling for new theorizations of contemporary urban regional unevenness and its spatiotemporal fixities, which account for the role of changes in labour turnover time.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-biopolitical-border-in-practice-surveillance-and-death-at-the-greece-turkey-borderzones/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:39 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/the-biopolitical-border-in-practice-surveillance-and-death-at-the-greece-turkey-borderzones/ Continued]]> This paper examines biopolitical control practices at the Greece–Turkey borders and addresses current debates in the study of borders and biopolitics. The Greek and Frontex authorities have established diverse surveillance mechanisms to control the borderzone space and to monitor, intercept, apprehend, and push back migrants or to block their passage. The location of contemporary borders has been much debated in the literature. This paper provides a nuanced understanding of borders by demonstrating that while borders are diffusing beyond and inside state territories, their practices and effects are concentrated at the edges of state territories—ie, borderzones. Borderzones are biopolitical spaces in which surveillance is most intense and migrants suffer the direct threat of injury and death. Applying biopolitics in the context of borderzones also prompts us to revisit the concept. While Foucault posits that biopolitics is the product of the historical transition away from sovereign powers controlling territory and imposing practices of death towards governmental powers managing population mainly through pastoral, productive, and deterritorialized techniques, the case of the Greece–Turkey borderzones demonstrates that biopolitics operates through sovereign territorial controls and surveillance, practices of death and exclusion, and suspension of rights. This study also highlights the fact that, despite the biopolitical realities, migrants continue to cross the borders.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/urban-planning-and-revolt-a-spatial-analysis-of-the-december-2008-uprising-in-athens/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:36 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/urban-planning-and-revolt-a-spatial-analysis-of-the-december-2008-uprising-in-athens/ https://toarcheio.org/items/reimagining-a-transnational-right-to-the-city-no-border-actions-and-commoning-practices-in-thessaloniki/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:26 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/reimagining-a-transnational-right-to-the-city-no-border-actions-and-commoning-practices-in-thessaloniki/ Continued]]> Although there is extensive literature on State migration policies and NGO activities, there are few studies on the common struggles between refugees and local activists. This article aims to fill this research gap by focusing on the impact of the transnational No Border camp that took place in Thessaloniki in 2016. The border region of northern Greece, with its capital Thessaloniki, is at the heart of the so-called refugee crisis and it is marked by a large number of solidarity initiatives. After the sealing of the “Balkan corridor”, the Greek State relocated thousands of refugees into isolated and inappropriate camps on the outskirts of Thessaloniki. Numerous local and international initiatives, with the participation of refugees from the camps, self-organized a transnational No Border camp in the city center that challenged State policies. By claiming the right to the city, activists from all over Europe, together with refugees, built direct-democratic assemblies and organized a multitude of direct actions, demonstrations, and squats that marked the city’s social body with spatial disobedience and transnational commoning practices. Here, activism emerges as an important field of research and this article aims to contribute to activists’ literature on migration studies after 2015. The article is based on militant research and inspired by the Lefebvrian right to the city, the autonomy of migration, and common space approaches. The right to the city refers to the rights to freedom, socialization, and habitation, but also to the right to reinvent and change the city. It was recently enhanced by approaches on common spaces and the way these highlight the production of spaces based on solidarity, mutual help, common care, and direct democracy. The main findings of this study point to how the struggle of migrants when crossing physical and social borders inspires local solidarity movements for global networking and opens up new possibilities to reimagine and reinvent transnational common spaces.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/punitive-inclusion-the-political-economy-of-irregular-migration-in-the-margins-of-europe/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:21 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/punitive-inclusion-the-political-economy-of-irregular-migration-in-the-margins-of-europe/ Continued]]> Focusing on the treatment irregular migrants have received in Greece since the early 1990s, this article seeks to advance critical scholarship on how European countries have responded to migration from impoverished or otherwise disadvantaged parts of the globe over recent decades. The article first draws attention to ways in which purportedly exclusionary approaches to irregular migration control may be imperfect by design, insofar as restrictions are imposed on outflows to secure an exploitable workforce that serves important labour market needs and, by extension, dominant political interests in the ‘host’ state. Moving on to address the precise ways in which labour exploitation of irregular migrants is brought into effect, the article demonstrates how seemingly unrelated state policies and practices regarding matters of migration, welfare, employment and criminal justice, as well as certain manifestations of anti-migrant violence by non-state actors, may act in combination with one another to this end.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/crisis-austerity-measures-and-beyond-archaeology-in-greece-since-the-global-financial-crisis/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:19 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/crisis-austerity-measures-and-beyond-archaeology-in-greece-since-the-global-financial-crisis/ Continued]]> This article, covering the roughly decade-long ‘Greek crisis’ (2008–2018), uses official statistics in order to examine the effects the prolonged recession has had on archaeology in Greece. As the data show, although revenues from museums and archaeological sites have risen considerably (a side effect of ‘crisis tourism’, among other factors), state spending on archaeological research is insufficient. Furthermore, the steady collapse of the state apparatus during this long decade has seriously affected archaeology and the ways it is practised in the country, ultimately leading to the loss of an entire generation of Greek archaeologists.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/we-owe-ourselves-to-debt-classical-greece-athens-in-crisis-and-the-body-as-battlefield/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:18 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/we-owe-ourselves-to-debt-classical-greece-athens-in-crisis-and-the-body-as-battlefield/ Continued]]> Since 2009, Greece has been hit by a severe economic recession followed by harsh austerity policies, gradual impoverishment, and ultimately social collapse. This article investigates the cultural landscape of the so-called ‘Greek crisis’, focusing on Athens,the nation’s capital, and the ways the crisis discourse employs biopolitical technologiesof dispossession and displacement in order to generate an intensified breed of body-politics. The article’s main case study is documenta 14, a blockbuster exhibition ofcontemporary art organized in Athens in 2017, seemingly elaborating on the ideasof debt – classical and modern – though in fact promoting neoliberal approaches topublic economy and life. The idea of ‘classical debt’, the article concludes, continuously reiterated by both Greece’s defenders as well as its most unforgiving critics, rather than acting as an emancipatory force, ends up producing a public consisting of silent bodies, trapped in highly romanticized discourses of the past and ultimately unable to defend themselves. This tension, however, also provokes narratives and gestures made of contradictions and ambiguity, difficult to map and monitor according to established research protocols.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-populism-anti-populism-frontier-and-its-mediation-in-crisis-ridden-greece-from-discursive-divide-to-emerging-cleavage/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:09 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/the-populism-anti-populism-frontier-and-its-mediation-in-crisis-ridden-greece-from-discursive-divide-to-emerging-cleavage/ Continued]]> Along with other South-European countries, since 2008, Greece has experienced deep economic and social dislocation, leading to a crisis of representation and triggering populist mobilisations and anti-populist reactions. This article focuses on the antagonistic language games developed around populist representations, something that has not attracted much attention in the relevant literature. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, focusing on their mutual constitution from a discursive perspective, it articulates a brief yet comprehensive genealogy of populist and anti-populist actors (parties and media) in Greece, exploring their discursive strategies. Moving on, it identifies the main characteristics this antagonistic divide took on within the newly contested, crisis-ridden sociopolitical field, highlighting the implications for a contemporary understanding of cleavages, with potentially broader implications

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