Petropoulou, Ch. – To Archeio

Urban and Regional Social Movements

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:32 +0000

The multilingual and interdisciplinary book Urban and Regional Social Movements includes 21 texts that explore theoretical issues of movement processes or focus on examining movements which have been developed in Greece and internationally (Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, India, Italy, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Turkey). It is a book that aims at being constantly “under construction” and as a consequence “alive”, up-to-date and dynamic. Hence the blog https://aoratespoleis.wordpress.com/ was also created which will be regularly updated with new links, studies and news from various urban and regional movements around the world. The book argues that urban and regional movements are interrelated as the regional movements are directly associated with the resistance to the looting and/or destruction of the natural commons in the name of serving a dominant uneven urban lifestyle. Thus, there is a feedback between the practices of social movements related to regional planning issues or simply to the exploitation and management of natural resources with these of urban movements. During the last years the discussion on the urban and regional social movements has been enriched with the notion of the so-called Common Space as an interpretative approach to the recent protests, riots and uprisings shortly before and during the current global and local crisis. At the same time, the easier, faster and in a wider – often global – scale dissemination of the information about the burst and the demands of the movements, through the contemporary alternative networks of information and action, underlines the emergence of new forms of communication which will be most likely these of the movements of the 21st century. Finally, the new urban and regional movements in which this book is interested are autonomous, massive and creative. They put themselves beyond a mere denial and confrontation to get in a collective creation and in radical changes of the space and everyday life.

Contested Borderscapes, Transnational Geographies vis-à-vis Fortress Europe

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:28 +0000

In 2016, Oxford English Dictionary declared “post-truth” the word of the year. In this Orwellian moment, the movement of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants across the increasingly militarised borders of Europe have instigated a socio-spatial debate about the limits of human rights, national sovereignties, continental values, precipitating and contributing to the ongoing condition of European crises. Although in the era of globalisation borders constitute porous passages for capital and commodities, at the same time they have hardened and ossified as “new enclosures” seeking to immobilise migrant and refugee populations. Fortress Europe emerges as a complex of new state control mechanisms, freshly erected border fences, newly built detention centres and improvised refugee camps; together, these technologies of migration management aim at the criminalisation, classification, stigmatisation, and biopolitical control of moving populations, fomented by xenophobic politics, and managed by humanitarian subcontractors. In this hostile climate, people on the move contest European border regimes, peripheries, and cityscapes by claiming spatial justice and political visibility while creating a nexus of emerging common spaces. They are joined by activists defending their right to movement, who are engaged in efforts to “welcome refugees” into a shrinking and contested public sphere, into alternative and self-organised social spaces, responding to the humanitarian crises wrought by militarism, violence, and structural adjustment with solidarity, stemming from a larger vision of sharing in each other’s struggles for survival and social transformation.

“Refugee tv” and “Refugees got talent” projects. Affective and decolonial geographies of invisible common spaces

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:27 +0000