https://toarcheio.org To Archeio project site Mon, 20 Apr 2020 16:49:12 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1 https://toarcheio.org/items/communal-performativity-a-seed-for-change-the-solidarity-of-thessalonikis-social-movements-in-the-diverse-fights-against-neoliberalism/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:52 +0000 http://arc.local/items/communal-performativity-a-seed-for-change-the-solidarity-of-thessalonikis-social-movements-in-the-diverse-fights-against-neoliberalism/ Continued]]> The debate on the financial crisis is at an impasse. Neoliberal austerity discourse is often positioned as an almost insurmountable barrier, its disciplinary power affecting even the most change‐oriented citizen‐initiatives existing today. Countering this, this paper highlights the transformative capacity of social movements in Thessaloniki. Drawing from Butler, Laclau and Mouffe, and Gibson‐Graham we develop the notion of “communal performativity” both as an academic and as a practical concept to understand and build trajectories of socio‐economic change. “Communal” denotes the drive of the movements’ participants to interconnect and (re)negotiate with a multiplicity of Others, curbing identity politics to articulate internal differences and Otherness. We see some hopeful signs of bridges being built towards shared trajectories of change that can be understood as different but concrete variations on the abstract counter‐narrative of “breaking with neoliberalism”. Some of these variations challenge, others diversify neoliberal discourses and practices.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/national-anti-austerity-protests-in-a-european-crisis-comparing-the-europeanizing-impact-of-protest-in-greece-and-germany-during-the-eurozone-crisis/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:51 +0000 http://arc.local/items/national-anti-austerity-protests-in-a-european-crisis-comparing-the-europeanizing-impact-of-protest-in-greece-and-germany-during-the-eurozone-crisis/ Continued]]> Protest and social movements are drivers for the Europeanization of national public spheres. This is suggested by the literature on the emergence of Europeanized public spheres and the Europeanization of social movements as well as the discussion about the politicization of the European polity. The article tests this assumption in a standardized content analysis for newspaper reporting on the Eurozone crisis in Greece and Germany. Focusing on the public attribution of responsibility, the analysis looks for horizontal Europeanization (senders/addressees from other EU countries), vertical Europeanization (senders/addressees from the EU level), and discursive Europeanization (similar topics discussed at the same time). The findings do not identify protest as a strong driving force towards vertical or horizontal Europeanization of the public spheres in Greece and Germany. There is a weak tendency towards discussing similar topics at the same time in German and Greek media reports on protest. Consequences for European democracy and crisis politics are discussed.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/hope-over-fear-social-work-education-towards-2025-esperanza-sobre-el-miedo-la-educacion-en-trabajo-social-hacia-el-ano-2025/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:48 +0000 http://arc.local/items/hope-over-fear-social-work-education-towards-2025-esperanza-sobre-el-miedo-la-educacion-en-trabajo-social-hacia-el-ano-2025/ Continued]]> Prediction of possible futures is fraught with dangers. Neither the global economic crisis which erupted in 2008 nor the political earthquake which shook Scotland over the issue of independence during 2014 was foreseen by many commentators, if indeed any. Given these experiences, predicting where social work education might be in 2025 is a potentially hazardous enterprise. Nevertheless, the recent resurgence of interest in utopian thinking reflects a widely felt desire to go beyond ‘capitalist realism’ and to envisage different possibilities – a desire also reflected in political developments in Greece and Spain. This development is primarily in reaction to the dominance of another form of utopian (or dystopian) thinking: neo-liberalism, with its message that ‘there is no alternative’. In this paper, I will argue that that search for alternatives has important implications for social work and social work education. Following a discussion of the ways in which neo-liberalism has shaped the profession over two decades, the paper will identify current challenges to neo-liberal social work and social work education and more widely, to the politics of austerity. Drawing on examples from different countries, I will argue that this ‘new radicalism’ points the way to a more politically engaged social work education.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/youth-heterotopias-in-precarious-times-the-students-autonomous-collectivity/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:43 +0000 http://arc.local/items/youth-heterotopias-in-precarious-times-the-students-autonomous-collectivity/ Continued]]> Under the structural restraints of the current financial, social and political crisis, I examine the case of a collectivity of students in Greece as an alternative small-scale form of political and cultural action, and I explore its dynamics and limits. I claim that the ‘collectivity’ is a form of heterotopia, that is, a specific social and cultural space, which somehow reflects and at the same time distorts, unsettles or inverts other spaces. In particular, I seek to uncover the rituals, practices and mentalities produced by the participants of this youth cultural space, and to understand how new subjectivities and collectivities come into being. In this context, I discuss some of the relevant literature on youth political participation. Furthermore, I illustrate the debate about ‘autonomy’ and ‘hegemony’ within social and political theory today.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-impact-of-the-greek-indignados-on-greek-politics/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:38 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-impact-of-the-greek-indignados-on-greek-politics/ Continued]]> The burden of this paper is to assert the significance of the 2011 movement of the Greek indignados for Greek politics during the Great Recession. Acknowledging the systematically feeble analysis of the nexus between non-institutional and electoral politics in social movement literature, the authors analyze the emergence, development, and heritage of the Greek indignados, focusing squarely on their impact on public opinion and the domestic party system, both at the level of interparty, as well as intraparty dynamics. The authors’ conclusions are drawn mainly from an analysis of political party discourse, public opinion data, and interviews conducted on the field, catering equally for the supply and demand side of the novel political claims that surfaced during the first years of the Greek sovereign debt crisis. The authors point to the crucial contribution of the movement’s discourse in facilitating voter defection from the traditional two-party system that ruled Greece for more than thirty years, and argue that the indignados functioned as a beacon of populist discursive tropes, which cemented the emergence of a new divide in Greek society between pro- and anti-bailout citizens. Conclusively, the authors take the position that the imprint of the indignados on the Greek psyche has had tremendous repercussions in consolidating a new party system, by undermining traditional political forces and legitimizing new, anti-establishment contenders.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/using-twitter-to-mobilize-protest-action-online-mobilization-patterns-and-action-repertoires-in-the-occupy-wall-street-indignados-and-aganaktismenoi-movements/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:37 +0000 http://arc.local/items/using-twitter-to-mobilize-protest-action-online-mobilization-patterns-and-action-repertoires-in-the-occupy-wall-street-indignados-and-aganaktismenoi-movements/ Continued]]> The extensive use of social media for protest purposes was a distinctive feature of the recent protest events in Spain, Greece, and the United States. Like the Occupy Wall Street protesters in the United States, the indignant activists of Spain and Greece protested against unjust, unequal, and corrupt political and economic institutions marked by the arrogance of those in power. Social media can potentially change or contribute to the political communication, mobilization, and organization of social movements. To what extent did these three movements use social media in such ways? To answer this question a comparative content analysis of tweets sent during the heydays of each of the campaigns is conducted. The results indicate that, although Twitter was used significantly for political discussion and to communicate protest information, calls for participation were not predominant. Only a very small minority of tweets referred to protest organization and coordination issues. Furthermore, comparing the actual content of the Twitter information exchanges reveals similarities as well as differences among the three movements, which can be explained by the different national contexts.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-crisis-and-its-discourses-quasi-orientalist-attacks-on-mediterranean-urban-spontaneity-informality-and-joie-de-vivre/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:27 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-crisis-and-its-discourses-quasi-orientalist-attacks-on-mediterranean-urban-spontaneity-informality-and-joie-de-vivre/ Continued]]> Mediterranean cities have always followed a path of urban development that diverges significantly from Anglo-American models. Spontaneity and informality have been deeply embedded in the cities’ roots since Gramsci’s time, but they have been transformed recently, together with urban development dynamics. A major rupture is observed in Southern Europe at the turn of the 21st century and especially the 2010s, when the region has been beaten by the force of the major global financial restructuring labelled the crisis, centralization/privatization and accumulation by dispossession. In anti-austerity social movements, popular spontaneity emerges as the par excellence force undermining neo-liberal hegemony and bringing to the surface niches of creativity of the urban grassroots, with the help of ICT (information and communications technology) dissemination. Focusing on Athens and two instances of massive mobilization in 2011 and 2013, we explore whether spontaneity and informality stamping urban development will manage to seep through structural readjustments, and how they will shape the future character of this and other Mediterranean cities during, but most importantly after, the crisis. Among alternative futures we discuss the darker one of quasi-Orientalist discourses by the European Union power elites, which undermine popular creativity and joie de vivre of the Southern grassroots and create urban dystopias; and the most optimistic one, which will be shaped by the emancipation of the currently vulnerable social movements and the emergent cooperative and solidarity economy, in a future eutopia.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-crisis-before-the-crisis-violence-and-urban-neoliberalization-in-athens/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:16 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-crisis-before-the-crisis-violence-and-urban-neoliberalization-in-athens/ Continued]]> The “Greek crisis” was officially inaugurated on May 2010 with the loan the Greek government took from the IMF-European Union-European Central Bank troika, the largest a country had ever taken (€110 bn). Since then, the social implications of this crisis have been dramatic. The form and the scale of social phenomena observed today in Greece and particularly in Athens–e.g., extreme poverty and inequality, profound police violence, organized racist violence–are unprecedented for the country. Nevertheless, a diachronic examination of some socio-spatial aspects of Athens reveals that the social character of the current crisis has been taking shape for some time. This article aims shed light on the social shape of the crisis by outlining three such socio-spatial dimensions as they materialized in the case of Athens during 1990s and 2000s: first, the emergence of new forms of social exclusion and inequality; second, the vast project of urban (re)development and the new spatialities it produced, and third the emergence of novel forms of political and xenophobic violence.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/athens-in-the-mediterranean-movement-of-the-piazzas-spontaneity-in-material-and-virtual-public-spaces/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:14 +0000 http://arc.local/items/athens-in-the-mediterranean-movement-of-the-piazzas-spontaneity-in-material-and-virtual-public-spaces/ Continued]]> Mediterranean cities are carrying Gramsci’s concept of spontaneity into the 21st century through massive social movements after the ‘Arab Spring’. This paper explores the ways in which the material and virtual cityscape interact with socio-political transformation during the ‘movement of the piazzas’ in Athens, Greece. After a discussion of the importance of urban informality, porosity and land-use mixtures for social cohesion, of creeping ghettoization in some enclaves and of the perils of urbicide, we proceed to an analysis of grassroots action in Athens in comparison with different cities of the Mediterranean and beyond. Social movements are placed in their respective local and global context—their recurrent material landscapes and their cosmopolitan virtual spaces of digital interaction. This analysis leads to reflections on the possible role of popular spontaneity in democratization and in European integration at the grassroots level, against the onslaught of neoliberalism and accumulation by dispossession.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/rebels-with-a-cause-the-december-2008-greek-youth-movement-as-the-condensation-of-deeper-social-and-political-contradictions/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:08 +0000 http://arc.local/items/rebels-with-a-cause-the-december-2008-greek-youth-movement-as-the-condensation-of-deeper-social-and-political-contradictions/ Continued]]> The events of December 2008 in Greece represent a turning point in social movements against neoliberalism and capitalist restructuring. They were the result of worsening employment prospects for young people, the aggressive restructuring of the educational system and concern about the effects of the current economic crisis. The originality of the movement lies in its unique scale, in the expression of a new unity of youth in struggle, in the demand for radical change and in its anti‐systemic character. It can be viewed as further evidence of the crisis of neoliberal hegemony and as a sign of growing hegemonic instability in European capitalist social formations. For this reason it poses both a theoretical and a political challenge.

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