https://toarcheio.org To Archeio project site Mon, 20 Apr 2020 13:38:03 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1 https://toarcheio.org/items/contentious-spatialities-in-an-era-of-austerity-everyday-politics-and-struggle-communities-in-athens-greece/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:46 +0000 http://arc.local/items/contentious-spatialities-in-an-era-of-austerity-everyday-politics-and-struggle-communities-in-athens-greece/ Continued]]> Opposition to austerity politics manifested through mass mobilizations and the ‘squares’ movement’ in Athens over the past few years constitute key ‘moments’ in contemporary social movement debates. Nevertheless, the dispersal and grounding of an emergent bottom-up democratic politics in everyday life contexts and across neighbourhoods in the following period still remain analytically nascent. This paper addresses the key role of everyday politics in broader contestation and articulations of alternatives to austerity through the notion of ‘struggle communities’. First, it shifts the analysis of social movement, from ‘moment’ to ‘process’ and the quotidian, constructed at the neighbourhood level. Second, through a case study of a local campaign in the neighbourhood of Exarcheia, it locates the spatiality of struggle communities and their processual, often contradictory, constitution. Third, it discusses the possibilities and limitations for an alternative community politics to emerge and potential links to broader struggles in an era of deepening austerity in Europe and beyond. The paper methodologically draws on participatory ethnographic research conducted in Athens, Greece between 2012 and 2013.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-spatiality-of-counter-austerity-politics-in-athens-greece-emerging-urban-solidarity-spaces/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:38 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-spatiality-of-counter-austerity-politics-in-athens-greece-emerging-urban-solidarity-spaces/ Continued]]> Grassroots responses and alternatives to austerity that have emerged in Athens and Greece call for a re-thinking of the recent neoliberal crisis through articulations of contestation ‘from below’. This paper addresses this yet nascent theoretical debate through the notion of ‘urban solidarity spaces’, focusing on the spatiality of counter-austerity politics that emerges in and out of places and expands across urban space and beyond. From survival tactics grounded in Athenian neighbourhoods, such as local solidarity initiatives; to solidarity structures and cooperatives; and broader strategies of transformation and alternatives, such as the formation of a solidarity economy. These aim to constitute an empowering process of solidarity-making ‘from below’, and open up spaces for the practice of bottom-up democratic politics vis-à-vis austerity, a ‘politics of fear’ and crisis. The arguments raised here methodologically draw on activist ethnographic research in the ‘Athens of crisis’, between 2012 and 2013.

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