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- Convenors:
-
Marion Hamm
(University of Klagenfurt)
Johanna Stadlbauer (University of Klagenfurt, Austria)
- Discussant:
-
Klaus Schönberger
(Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt)
- Stream:
- History, politics and urban studies
- Location:
- A105
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the dynamics between radical memories and imagined futures by examining the everyday practices in social movements. It invites contributions on narrative, visual, musical, corporeal or archival practices of producing new social imaginations looking to both past and future.
Long Abstract:
Social movements are suspended between radical memories and imagined futures. In their everyday realities, they prefigure alternative futures (Maeckelbergh), and construct radical heritages which ground them in history. As moments of collective creation they provide societies with new forms of social imagination which circulate in embodied and digital forms.
The panel explores performative processes of radical mythmaking (Wu Ming) in social movements. It invites contributions on narrative, visual, musical, corporeal or archival practices of making cultural memory and visions of the future. How do practices of historical and prefigurative meaningmaking pan out in different stages of social movement cycles? How are futures prefigured during hot moments of struggle and confrontation; how do these translate into radical memory? What happens when active movements slide into a state of submerged networks?
Contributions can explore one or more of three key avenues:
- Reading movement's own media productions as symbolic, aesthetic or performative practices of memory and prefiguration
- Informal or institutional archival practices regarding radical histories digitally and conventionally; e.g. Undercurrents (UK), Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv (CH); Archiv der Jugendkulturen, Umbruch Bildarchiv (DE)
- Biographical practices and subjectivities: How do these relate to collective imaginations of radical pasts and futures?
The panel provides a platform to reflect on existing and emerging cultural approaches to social movements, based on empirical research. As cultural analysis is gaining currency in research on social movements, the panel aims to harness the methodological and epistemological expertise of scholars of culture (visual, material & digital culture, ethnography).
Accepted papers:
Session 1Marion Hamm (University of Klagenfurt) Johanna Stadlbauer (University of Klagenfurt, Austria)
Paper short abstract:
Social movements are suspended between radical memories and imagined futures. They produce new social imaginations looking to both past and future. In their everyday realities, they prefigure alternative futures (Maeckelbergh), and construct radical heritages which ground them in history. As moments of collective creation (Eyerman/Jamison), social movements provide societies with new forms of social imagination which circulate in embodied and digital forms. This panel introduction outlines concepts to study the radical production of social imagination with a focus on biographical and collective practices of memory and prefiguration.
Nela Milic (University of Arts, London)
Paper short abstract:
The Serbian upraising in ‘96/’97 was an attempt to overthrow Milosevic dictatorship after he annulled elections won by the opposition. Ashamed by the unsuccessful protest, Belgraders have never produced an archive of artefacts which emerged during these demonstrations. My project is that archive.
Paper long abstract:
The narratives of Belgrade protest in '96/'97 known as "The Winter of Discontent" have been locked within the community and there are only odd visual references hidden in people's houses. My research generated those artefacts through interviews and image elicitation that looks at the uprising by analysing the accumulated historic relics. Presented in sections on the website (dates, artists, routes) and pages of art formats (poems, photos, badges), this overview of the geographical, political and social circumstances within which the protest's artwork was produced demonstrates how it influenced the actions of the citizens.
My methodology - visual ethnography, assembles and interprets private and public realms, the human interaction and the spatial ground, Serbia's history and the new protest's culture to explore home and community and local and the global society, which emerged during the demonstrations. The purpose of the project is to develop the storage of cultural memory and collect images that people responded to sentimentally, which sustained this urban spectacle and enthused creative participation that became the force of the protest, exchanged between artists and other citizens. These were exposed on the streets during the walks of the masses, which symbolised reclaiming of streets as a public arena.
This online package for capturing the past (hi)stories shifts the official narratives into only one possibility among others. It captures the failed revolution in Serbia under Milosevic since its beginnings, revealing the accomplishments of the academics, artists and citizens buried under the war stories...
Deniz Günce Demirhisar (EHESS (Paris) & Associate Researcher Institut Français d'études anatoliennes (Istanbul)) Lorenzo D'Orsi (University of Foggia)
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on the collective thereness experienced in the protests for Gezi Park analysing it as a prefiguration of a life imagined in the moment it was lived. After the protest this experience oriented ordinary practices but the latter also reintroduced those boundaries overcome in the park
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes the "collective thereness" in the protests for Gezi Park in Istanbul and its aftermath. We argue a new collective imaginary was produced during the occupation and continued to evolve. In an abandoned area took place an alternative social life between people who had never met each other before due to life styles, political views, religious choices. Our ethnographic research shows how the Park became an utopic but real "space of experience", not as the result of a common political ideal but of an affective bond and a new way of "doing-together". The experience of living together in the park was a space for transgression of symbolic boundaries and cultural codes, disrupting the categories on which the perception of world is built and opening the plot of social script towards new possibilities besides the cultural and political divergences. It was the prefiguration of a life imagined in the same moment it was lived, stimulating creative connections with the others. Through the invention of a bond of biographical memory with the park, occupiers filled Gezi with a new collective imaginary, a repertoire of practices and subjective affirmations with a high level of reflexivity for the actor. The impact of Gezi is above all in the biographical level. On the one hand, everyday life became the place to reproduce and connect with this extraordinary experience. On the other hand, the everyday practices inscribe into an ordinary timeline and slowly re-established those cultural, social and political boundaries overcome during the occupation.
Jacob Geuder (University of Basel)
Paper short abstract:
The research of my phd-project analysis the overlapping of urban and digital spaces in political struggles that are claiming the right to the city. The paper presents the first step of the empirical analysis: the role of YouTube as a dispositive which frames a visual regime of protest portrayals.
Paper long abstract:
Few months before May 1968 in Paris, Henri Lefebvre wrote his essay "The Right to the City". Since then neo-liberal politics have tightened their grip on urban spaces and investments in urban assets have become a major spot for global financial speculations. Thus it comes at no surprise, that many of today's political resistances are not only staged in urban environments, but explicitly make references to the "Right to the City" especially in the "global South". Simultaneously technological innovations like the internet have triggered a "digital revolution" which exert profound impacts on urban spaces, everyday-life and political forms of organization. The claim is that increasing mutual infiltration of urban and digital spaces reflects in the relation of protests and their video images.
My dissertation researches the "spatial politics of the digital-urban-nexus" by analyzing the YouTube-videos that portray Right to the City Protests on the streets in Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro. The paper presents the findings of a first step of analysis of this research project: How does YouTube function as a dispositive for the presentation of videos of protests that claim the Right to the City? By explaining the dispositive of YouTube it should be made clear, what remains invisible on the "open video platform", what powerful processes shape video representations of political protests and how the audiovisual representations of protests are contextualized in the digital spaces of YouTube.
Marcel Wrzesinski (Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Humboldt University Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
In her "SCUM Manifesto" (1967) Valerie Solanas advocates radical dis/identification and envisions an odd future. This paper measures the impact of "SCUM" within radical feminist memory and traces its ideas back to Druskowitz's "Pessimistische Kardinalsätze" (1905).
Paper long abstract:
US radical feminism (1967-1975) was a memorable period in the post-war Women's Movements. It provided the "feminist" with groundbreaking activist practices (e.g. "consciousness raising"); it also deprived the Women's Movements of its myth of unity. While criticizing the conciliatory tone of the so-called "liberal feminist", these radicals established fringe groups and published manifestos, which promptly became notorious.
One of the most infamous is Valerie Solanas's "SCUM Manifesto" (1967): she showcases key radical issues such as the dis/identification with the concept of "woman" and the critique on male epistemology. Eventually, she envisions a future society, which is liberated from patriarchal dominance through the extinction of the male race. By all means, such a society is composed ahistorically and will vanish itself in the end.
This paper addresses the desire for imagining the future by analyzing the mnemonic context of the manifesto. A dense description of the text and the circumstances surrounding its production enables us, on one hand, to trace its semantics back to Helene Druskowitz's manifesto "Pessimistische Kardinalsätze" (1905). While her challenging thoughts have already been part of the 1960s radical memories, Solanas's invoking of them, on the other hand, constitutes another important mark in the cultural memory of the second wave feminism.
Solanas's and Druskowitz's interventions can be read as performative gestures that deal with unbearable social circumstances. They thereby became founding myths and historical benchmarks used to measure the impact of radical feminist thought from the 1960s onward.