10 Lefebvre's comprehensive theory of "production of space" lends itself to understanding relations between space and social change (Buser 2012:2). He presents a conceptual triad which expresses the interaction between spatial practices, representations of space and spaces of representation to trace the production of space (Buser 2012:6). Articulating these three aspects of the "production of space" along with techniques of governmentality not only allows us to understand the spatial effects of governmentality, but also expands the The Production of Space and Governmentality in the Urban Poor's Claim over La...
Municipal solid waste management (MSWM) has become one of the most pressing environmental issues in South Asian cities, the more so as it is closely linked to drinking water quality, sanitation and human health affecting mostly the urban poor, as well as to global climate change. Looking at recent governance initiatives in three South Asian cities developed in the wake of natural or human-induced crises, the project will focus on how to render MSWM improvements politically feasible and socially acceptable, which is a pre-requisites for functioning SWM systems, and thus for (environmental and social) sustainability more generally. The goal of this project, therefore, is to identify, analyze and promote the political and sociocultural processes that are necessary to enable the functioning of MSWM systems. In particular, alternative practices and systems are promoted, whereby institutional hierarchies are decentralized, favoring horizontal accountabilities and whereby waste chains are shortened and transformed into closed loops implying a more circular waste economy in which both environmental and local livelihood benefits would accrue. The project puts emphasis on mutual learning through horizontal South-South partnerships between local authorities, civil society actors and researchers across South Asia.
"Putting Social Movements in their Place" by Doug McAdam and Hilary Schaffer Boudet is not only a conventional research monograph but also a strong plea to put social movements "in their place" in terms of social phenomena, literature and scholarship. On the one hand they argue for a more humble place of social movements events and on the other hand they portray convincingly the evolution of the field of study over 40 years that has become increasingly narrow and self-referential. To challenge these tendencies is the rationale of the book. It reports the findings of a comparative qualitative study of twenty communities that are earmarked as "risky" by an official Environmental Impact Statement for siting energy facilities in the United States. The research questions guiding the enquiry are: How much oppositional mobilization does one actually witness across those twenty communities? What "causal conditions" explain the variation in mobilization? What are the outcomes of mobilization and finally, why did wider regional movements develop in some parts of the country and not in others -wanting to explain the mechanism of scale-shift. The answers to these questions do not only illuminate the socio-political forces within the mentioned context, moreover they serve also as a signpost, cautioning and redirecting social movement scholarship for the future -a future that shall be increasingly Copernican rather than abiding to Ptolemy.Analogies to cosmology are the enveloping argument of the authors. The authoritative first chapter consisting of a literature review begins on an anecdotal note situating the social movement field (in the 1970ies) within the studies of 'irrational crowd behaviour' (p.4) in the discipline of psychology. The scholarship has indeed come a long way since then: Starting within a Copernican perspective drawing from various fields and accounting of larger socio-political and economical factors towards a Ptolemyian spirit of movement-centric preoccupation. They commendably demonstrate the development of social movement theories being paralleled by historical events mainly in the USA and Europe. The physical space of movements study is not given the attention it deserves, as "putting in their place" mainly refers to the trans-Atlantic sphere until now. Within the review the authors not only dissect particular theories pinpointing the lacuna, rather they argue with a solid grip over the entire scholarship. Their conclusion: First, the frequency and importance of social movements is distorted, as scholars tend to select on the dependent variable being successful movements. Second, actors are narrowed down to social movement activists. Third, broad national movements are studied to the detriment of local emergent contention. To challenge these observed conceptual shortcomings the authors come up with a theoretical approach and methodology that deserves special attention, as it is innovative, inventive and inspiring for further research. The authors try to overcome the narrowness at a conceptual level in...
New York, Springer, 2007, vii þ 326 pp., index, £144.00, ISBN 978-0-387-70959-8 (hardback), £67.99, ISBN 978-0-387-76580-8 (paperback) Type in 'Handbook of the Sociology of' into Google and its autocomplete feature offers up a bounty of options: morality, health, religion, education, gender, or finance, to start. Due to trends in academic publishing, the age of pricey handbooks intended to be definitive references in their field is upon us. Of course, this proliferation challenges the notion that any one is truly essential for institutional collections. At their worst, these doorstoppers contain 30-plus disconnected chapters of wildly uneven quality and uniformly slapdash editing. A time-pressed academic will skim the introduction and contents for a useful cite and move along to more rewarding reads.All of which is to ask, is the Handbook of Social Movements across Disciplines one of these groaners? I am delighted to report that this is a very different kind of handbook, and one that merits more attention than it seems to have gathered thus far (a quick search reveals few, if any, English-language reviews). Bert Klandermans and Conny Roggeband have assembled a tight collection of six essays on disciplinary approaches to the study of social movements. A chapter each is devoted to perspectives from political science, history, anthropology, and social psychology. Two chapters cover structural and cultural approaches within sociology.The chapters differ in style but are consistently thorough. Jackie Smith and Tina Fetner provide a comprehensive survey of structural approaches (I counted over 250 citations for this chapter alone), while James Jasper offers a lively account of cultural approaches and their shortcomings, beginning not in the expected 'cultural turn' of the social sciences, but in ancient Greek and Roman interest in rhetoric. Interestingly, the only chapter that does not provide an intellectual history is the one by Brian Dill and Ronald Aminzade on historical approaches. The authors, instead, sample 60 articles by historians on social movements over three decades, and analyze prevailing tendencies in this work-a choice that reveals much about the rhetorical proclivities of historians.Lengthy and exacting, the chapters read less as state-of-the-field pieces and more as exemplary field examinations penned by experts who are well versed in the intellectual ancestry of recent scholarship. According to Jasper, 'Each intellectual fashion inspires a backlash, in what looks like a repetitive cycle but is more of a spiral: we never quite return to the same place' (p. 61). Taken together, they produce a systematic understanding of the idiosyncratic and differentiated development processes of social movement research in the disciplines. David Meyer and Lindsey Lupo, for instance, argue that political science has
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