This article assesses squatted social centers in London as a means to understand the cycles, contexts and institutionalization processes of the local squatters movement. This diffuse social movement had its heyday in the late 1970s and early 1980s when there were 30,000 squatters and still exists today despite squatting in residential buildings being criminalized in 2012. Analysis is based on a database of 245 social centers, which are examined in terms of duration, time period, type of building and location. Important centers are briefly profiled and important factors affecting the squatters movement are examined, in particular institutionalization, gentrification, and criminalisation.
The Baikal-Amur Mainline
Memories and Emotions of a Socialist Construction Project
Olga Povoroznyuk
The Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), a railroad in East Siberia and the Russian Far East, became the last large Soviet industrial project. Its construction in the 1970s and 1980s attracted migrants from across the USSR, who formed the bamovtsy, or group of BAM builders. They share a history of working and living along the BAM and constitute the majority population in the region. The article argues that emotionally charged social memory of the BAM construction plays the central role in reproducing and reinforcing the bamovtsy identity in the post-Soviet period. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus groups, the article examines the dynamics of both individual and collective remembering of the socialist BAM. It forms a vibrant discursive and emotional field, in which memories and identities are reconstructed, relived, and contested. Commemorative ceremonies such as the fortieth anniversary of the BAM serve as forums of public remembering and arenas for the politics of emotions.
The 2011 English Riots
A Contexualized, Dynamic, Grounded Exploration
Tony Jefferson
After a brief account of what happened, the question is posed of whether the idea of moral panic is the most revealing approach with which to understand the riots. Before answering, the question of how novel were the riots is addressed in relation to policing, social media, riot areas, the rioters, rioting behavior, the State’s response and the reaction of communities. The elements of a dynamic, grounded explanation are then tentatively offered, followed by an attempt to situate this explanation within the context of the contemporary lives of disadvantaged youth lacking both political support and an economic future. The conclusion returns to the question of moral panic. It suggests that since most of what happened had clear precedents in the series of urban riots since the 1980s, there is plenty of evidence to support the idea that the constructions of the 2011 riots are best understood as a moral panic. However, the small indications of new developments, namely, the sheer vindictiveness of the state’s post-riot response—hunting down the rioters, harsh sentencing, naming juveniles—as well as the spread of rioting to new areas and the practice of communities ‘fighting back’, are important to explore for what they reveal about the present neoliberal conjuncture. They seem to be morbid symptoms of an apparently intractable series of crises characterized by, among other things, an unprecedentedly grim situation for poor, unemployed, disaffected youth living in deprived areas.
Zilka Spahić Šiljak
and the 1980s, when Nada Ler Sofronić published her book. Like other Eastern European societies in the first half of twentieth century, Yugoslav society was agrarian, the rates of illiteracy among women were high, and they were excluded from public
Greagh Smith, Conal McCarthy, Bronwyn Labrum, Ken Arnold, Dominique Poulot, Jill Haley, Jun Wei, and Safua Akeli Amaama
). Since this criticism in the 1980s, museums and anthropology seem to have come together to address these concerns, and much has changed. At the end of the book, Kreps, who is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Museum of Anthropology at the
Women and Children in social reproduction and the global womb
Comment on Newberry and Rosen
Olga Nieuwenhuys
, intrigued me. The piece is interesting because it contributes to resuscitate social reproduction theory, a conceptual framework that has only recently been rescued from the academic limbo to which it had been relegated since the 1980s under the influence of
Afterword
The Work of Culture, Heritage, and Musealized Spaces in “Unprecedented Times”
Christina Kreps
reached on the form and content of the new definition. Difficulty in defining the museum is not new. Back in 1977, Kenneth Hudson, the renowned museum scholar and social historian, in his book Museums for the 1980s: A Survey of World Trends , submitted
Sharon A. Kowalsky
’: Disability Memoirs in Socialist Poland,” likewise draws on memoirs, published in the 1970s and 1980s, by two women who raised disabled children under state socialism in Poland. Pamula engages in a close analysis of the two memoirs, revealing the ways that
Writing the History of the Northern “Field”
An Introductory Note
Dmitry V. Arzyutov
statements, might be memory about Miklukho-Maclay, the knowledge about Arseniev’s experience, and only published handbook for field ethnographers ( Makar’ev 1928 ), Soviet ethnographers had not reflected on the concept of the field until the 1980s. This meant
Valentina Mitkova
theoretical and biographical issues, the second part of the book, entitled “Seminarut” (The seminar), references Nicolchina's research on the geo-cultural differences between the dreams and ideas of Eastern intellectuals of the 1980s (shared in the form of