Mobilizing At The Urban Margins

"This book uses the case of Chile to study how social mobilization endures in marginalized urban contexts, allowing activists to engage in large-scale democratizing processes. It develops a novel analytical framework called 'mobilizational citizenship' to explain people's engagement in durable and large-scale urban collective action"--

In October 2019, unprecedented mobilizations in Chile took the world by surprise. An outburst of protests plunged a stable democracy into the deepest social and political crisis since its dictatorship in the 1980s. Although the protests involved a myriad of organizations, the organizational capabilities provided by underprivileged urban dwellers proved essential in sustaining collective action in an increasingly repressive environment. Based on a comparative ethnography and over six years of fieldwork, Mobilizing at the Urban Margins uses the case of Chile to study how social mobilization endures in marginalized urban contexts, allowing activists to engage in large-scale democratizing processes. The book investigates why and how some urban communities succumb to exclusion, while others react by resurrecting collective action to challenge unequal regimes of citizenship. Rich and insightful, the book develops the novel analytical framework of 'mobilizational citizenship' to explain this self-produced form of political incorporation in the urban margins.

In October 2019, unprecedented mobilizations in Chile took the world by surprise. An outburst of protests plunged a stable democracy into the deepest social and political crisis since its dictatorship in the 1980s. Although the protests involved a myriad of organizations, the organizational capabilities provided by underprivileged urban dwellers proved essential in sustaining collective action in an increasingly repressive environment. Based on a comparative ethnography and over six years of fieldwork, Mobilizing at the Urban Margins uses the case of Chile to study how social mobilization endures in marginalized urban contexts, allowing activists to engage in large-scale democratizing processes. The book investigates why and how some urban communities succumb to exclusion, while others react by resurrecting collective action to challenge unequal regimes of citizenship. Rich and insightful, the book develops the novel analytical framework of 'mobilizational citizenship' to explain this self-produced form of political incorporation in the urban margins.

Urban studies of the global South have paid particular attention to megacities, such as Mumbai or Johannesburg, while more peripheral urban landscapes--including small and medium-sized towns as well as the margins of megacities themselves--remain overlooked. Emerging from the work of the Shehr Comparative Urban Landscapes Network, an academic initiative that seeks to further a social-historical and critical understanding of contemporary cities and urban practices, this special issue of Social Text takes up the question of marginality in contemporary urban cartographies in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. "Urban Margins" explores the complex processes through which citizens produce and negotiate these marginalized landscapes and in turn are informed by them. Focusing on Douala in Cameroon and Dakar in Senegal, one essay discusses how the state's failure to provide for its citizens has led many to turn to informal networks and affiliations--whether kin-based, local, translocal, gendered, religious, or secular--for survival. Rendering the urban landscape of these cities in terms of these networks and the ways that they shape a citizen's interaction with the city, the essay considers the political possibilities for African cities where diverse multilingual and ethnic populations face the challenges, pitfalls, and compromises of coexistence. Examining how female migrant workers negotiate various spaces within the urban landscape of the free trade zone outside of Colombo, Sri Lanka, another essay details how the city represents a site of personal autonomy and political possibilities for both women and men. One contributor addresses the city of Ramallah in the embattled West Bank--the de facto Palestinian capital and the only cosmopolitan space within the occupied territories--to consider how the Palestinian urban middle class remains haunted by the "unmodern" within its own history and present. Another surveys changes in the cultural significance of roads, forts, and town walls in Bahla, Oman, in the aftermath of the country's 1970 coup d'etat. Contributors. Kamran Asdar Ali, Allen Feldman, Sandya Hewamanne, Mandana E. Limbert, Rosalind Morris, Martina Rieker, AbdouMaliq Simone, Lisa Taraki

In this age of global transition, contemporary grassroots mobilization is the dominant form of resistance against the state available to the individual and the community. Using empirically-based case studies as well as theoretical essays, this volume offers suggestions for strategy, ideology and leadership that will enhance the potential of grassroots mobilization.

This title examines the causes, forms, and experiences of urban violence in the Americas. It does so through a series of theoretically informed ethnographic analyses of the role that violence plays in the lives of the urban poor in South, Central, and North America. It pays particular attention to the role gangs, illicit drugs, and state responses to drug-dealing play in sky-rocketing levels of violence, and to the responses ravaged communities devise to deal with them.

How xerography became a creative medium and political tool, arming artists and activists on the margins with an accessible means of making their messages public. This is the story of how the xerographic copier, or “Xerox machine,” became a creative medium for artists and activists during the last few decades of the twentieth century. Paper jams, mangled pages, and even fires made early versions of this clunky office machine a source of fear, rage, dread, and disappointment. But eventually, xerography democratized print culture by making it convenient and affordable for renegade publishers, zinesters, artists, punks, anarchists, queers, feminists, street activists, and others to publish their work and to get their messages out on the street. The xerographic copier adjusted the lived and imagined margins of society, Eichhorn argues, by supporting artistic and political expression and mobilizing subcultural movements. Eichhorn describes early efforts to use xerography to create art and the occasional scapegoating of urban copy shops and xerographic technologies following political panics, using the post-9/11 raid on a Toronto copy shop as her central example. She examines New York's downtown art and punk scenes of the 1970s to 1990s, arguing that xerography—including photocopied posters, mail art, and zines—changed what cities looked like and how we experienced them. And she looks at how a generation of activists and artists deployed the copy machine in AIDS and queer activism while simultaneously introducing the copy machine's gritty, DIY aesthetics into international art markets. Xerographic copy machines are now defunct. Office copiers are digital, and activists rely on social media more than photocopied posters. And yet, Eichhorn argues, even though we now live in a post-xerographic era, the grassroots aesthetics and political legacy of xerography persists.

Before the 2011 uprisings, the Middle East and North Africa were frequently seen as a uniquely undemocratic region with little civic activism. The first edition of this volume, published at the start of the Arab Spring, challenged these views by revealing a region rich with social and political mobilizations. This fully revised second edition extends the earlier explorations of Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and adds new case studies on the uprisings in Tunisia, Syria, and Yemen. The case studies are inspired by social movement theory, but they also critique and expand the horizons of the theory's classical concepts of political opportunity structures, collective action frames, mobilization structures, and repertoires of contention based on intensive fieldwork. This strong empirical base allows for a nuanced understanding of contexts, culturally conditioned rationality, the strengths and weaknesses of local networks, and innovation in contentious action to give the reader a substantive understanding of events in the Arab world before and since 2011.