Introduction:

Alexandrakis, Othon

doi:10.2307/j.ctt2005rdp.4

Cited by 3 publications

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“…The massive reaction of protest against Dobbs —like other cases involving civil rights, voting rights, environmental justice and more—also teaches us something about how law becomes political, not just in advocacy before the fact but in its consequences as a horizon where people identify (or re‐identify) their own response as political agency. Ethnographers working around the world are showing us conditions along these lines—emergent and that might yet emerge, in relation to abortion or not—that keep the very idea of fresh political possibility alive while also sometimes making it difficult even to recognize politics in practice once it departs from conventional forms (Alexandrakis, 2016, 1; see also Musallam, 2020).…”

Section: Dobbs In Theory Methods and Communitymentioning

confidence: 99%

After Dobbs: Reflections on political and legal anthropology

Greenhouse

2023

PoLAR

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The majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization declares its ruling to be an optimum result of separating law from politics. "After Dobbs" examines that claim's provocations for anthropologists interested in the ethnography of politics and law. I begin with the court's paradoxical rendering of United States democracy-an algorithm of electoral power that is eliciting unanticipated forms of agency extending well beyond partisan party politics. As such, those new forms are especially instructive, and in their pursuit, I consider them in a broader context. The next part of the discussion turns to recent work by ethnographers in situations in which people identify their own experience as political in new ways or for the first time. Finally, reflecting on that body of ethnographic work in relation to Dobbs and its after-effects, I identify through-lines connecting law(s) and politics in practice (as well as in ethnographic practice): indeterminacies of scale, the dynamic instability of juridification and the creative openness of political agency. These points also serve as prompts to rethink the conditions of law's availability to ethnography.

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Section: Dobbs In Theory Methods and Communitymentioning

confidence: 99%

After Dobbs: Reflections on political and legal anthropology

Greenhouse

2023

PoLAR

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The missing builders: craftwork and crafty resistance in the “eco-metropolis” of Copenhagen

Ebsen

2022

JOE

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PurposeThe paper ethnographically explores modes of urban resistance emerging in tandem with climate change mitigation programs in Copenhagen.Design/methodology/approachBuilding on 11 months of fieldwork with a Danish construction enterprise, the paper examines the politics of urban climate change mitigation programs through the lens of a group of builders' struggles to rethink and resolve dilemmas related to environmental concerns in construction and urban development.FindingsBased on an analysis of a specific construction project connected to a larger urban climate change mitigation program in Copenhagen, the paper shows how the builders deliberately move between different perspectives and positions as they navigate the shifting power relations of urban planning. The paper argues that this form of crafty resistance enables the builders to maneuver the political landscape of urban planning as they seek to appropriate the role of “urban planners” themselves.Originality/valueTaking up recent discussions of “resistance” in anthropology and cognate disciplines (e.g. Theodossopoulos, 2014; Bhungalia, 2020; Prasse-Freeman, 2020), the paper contributes an ethnographic analysis of struggles between diverging and, at times, competing modes of engagement in urban climate change mitigation programs and thus sheds light on how professional actors negotiate the ambiguity of “sustainability” in urban planning.

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‘Failure in the air’: activist narratives, in‐group story‐telling, and keeping political possibility alive in Lebanon

Musallam

2019

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Failure is often taken as an endpoint: anathema to political organizing and the death knell of social movements. To the degree that radical movements themselves dwell on failure, participants often consider the focus pathological. This article explores how, in the aftermath of the falling apart of long-term initiatives, Lebanese political activists were able to maintain their capacity to engage in transformative action. At a time when activists felt 'failure in the air', narrating prior political experiences communally, in formal and informal contexts, became crucial to (re)imagining one another as activists. Such stories narrated failure to compel collective action in the future, making failure itself a political resource; not the end, but a beginning. Throughout, this article engages in an affirmative anthropology that keeps alive the costs of failure even as it shows how radical political actors generate their capacity to act and their potential to imagine otherwise.'Our protests don't really matter to those in charge -the police just leave us to it' . It was December 2013, and I was sitting with David 1 in the run-down garden behind Captain's Cabin, a cheaper bar in the west Beirut neighbourhood of Hamra where we both lived, and an area that acted as a home space in the city for left-wing and independent activism. It had been a quiet few months for my interlocutors. I asked David whether the recent spate of car bombs, one of the many ways that the conflict in Syria had made itself felt in neighbouring Lebanon, had deterred public protest. Though the bombings had mostly been concentrated in Beirut's southern suburbs, a car bomb had recently exploded in Downtown, and there had been police controls of suspicious parked cars in Hamra itself for the last few weeks. 'Of course not' , David replied. 'That's not why. We would never be the targets, because those who do the bombings don't see us as a threat' . I nursed my beer as he lit up another cigarette. 'Protesters blocking the roads are like vegetable sellers. People walk around' .In this article, I explore how political activists maintain the capacity to engage in transformative action in a context where the potential for demobilization and despair engendered by failure is pervasive. The opening dialogue offers a sense of the 'failure' through which activists in Lebanon persevered. The past ten years have seen an uneven

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Introduction:

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

After Dobbs: Reflections on political and legal anthropology

After Dobbs: Reflections on political and legal anthropology

The missing builders: craftwork and crafty resistance in the “eco-metropolis” of Copenhagen

‘Failure in the air’: activist narratives, in‐group story‐telling, and keeping political possibility alive in Lebanon

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