Conviviality-Inequality during the Pandemic: The Case of Berlin

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected conviviality and inequality in societies worldwide. This research article examines the dynamic interplay between these dimensions in Berlin, Germany, during the pandemic. The study’s main question explores how the relationship between inequality and conviviality evolved in the context of the pandemic and the correspondent containment measures. Four sub-questions address specific aspects: 1) the hierarchy of infection and disease trajectory based on access to protection, 2) the effects of containment measures on income, education, and well-being among various social groups, 3) changes in conviviality at the micro-level (households, neighbourhoods, etc.), and 4) shifts in virtual interaction and media usage during “social distancing”. The survey in Berlin involved 2,502 households and spanned three collection periods. Computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) was used, ensuring representative responses. The findings are analyzed through Goran Therborn’s three levels of analysis: resource, vital, and existential inequalities (Therborn 2013)

The precarious conviviality of water mills

Social institutions such as the water-powered grain mills of Ottoman Cyprus are elaborately interconnected with a wide range of human and non-human players, from millers and villagers to water, gradient, stone and climate. When participants recognize their mutual dependencies and operate according to social and environmental limits, then following Ivan Illich we can call these watermills convivial tools. The European-owned sugar plantations, mills and refineries of medieval Cyprus, by contrast, divided and alienated their workforce, and their demands for water, labour, soil and fuel surpassed what their landscape and society could provide. They are, then, unconvivial tools. Conviviality is always precarious: it needs continual negotiation, conflict and compromise, as well as an acceptance of the mutual dependence of all participants, non-human and human. This politics of conviviality is particularly urgent in times of social and ecological crisis

Biocultural Community Protocols: Dialogues on the Space Within

This paper starts by explaining "the space within" -- the ethical grammar and code by which indigenous peoples use and steward nature. It then explains the inextricable links with nature demonstrated by a number of communities with which we have worked, and their experiences in the ABS context. It discusses the importance of processes of prior informed consent, before then discussing the possibility of "tools of conviviality" that may act as bridges between the fundamental ecological principals of indigenous peoples, and the researchers and companies that seek to utilize biodiversity and knowledge within community control.In the final sections, we explore the use of both community protocols and Ethical BioTrade, with some examples, and their potential role as tools of conviviality -- opening up dialogues between actors from vastly different worldviews. While we do not see community protocols as a panacea for the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, we have seen them act as an important step towards the protection of indigenous knowledge and the recognition of legal pluralism

Jiwar: from a right of neighbourliness to a right of neighbourhood for refugees

In this paper I make the case that a closer examination of the tradition of jiwār or neighbourliness can help unsettle the binary of citizen and migrant that forecloses the possibility of accessing rights for the latter. Here, insights from human geography and social anthropology pertaining to understandings and practices of conviviality are mobilised to ask what contemporary readings of jiwār can tell us given that the nation-state dominates modalities and practices of locality production. Mobilising interview and ethnographic research material produced in partnership with Palestinian, Syrian, Sudanese, and Iraqi forced migrants over the past 8 years across multiple sites, this paper draws attention to the significance of creating and maintaining neighbourly relations and spaces as an ethical position contrasted against exclusionary nation-state and sectarian discourses and practices. Here, I draw on the Turkish state response to on-going Syrian displacement and the Syrian state’s response to the earlier displacement of Iraqis (2005-11) to illustrate how the sedentarist logic of the nation-state impedes practices of conviviality that emerge from the lived realities of encounter between those already resident and those who newly arrive

Rederijkers, Kannenkijkers : drinking and drunkenness in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Low Countries

This article discusses drinking practices and conceptions of drunkenness in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Low Countries from the perspective of the rederijkers or guildsmen who would regularly gather together to practice the vernacular art of rhetoric. The essay surveys the regulations and accounts of the chambers of rhetoric in which these gatherings took place, as well as the literary texts the rederijkers produced (including poetry, songs and theatre plays). It also examines the intersections with contemporary genre painting. The central argument of this paper is that drinking, and even drunkenness, was an essential aspect of rederijker culture and the urban middling groups represented by this culture. This argument nuances the influential thesis of the pervasiveness of a Dutch burgermoraal or bourgeois morality. Even though they created comical caricatures of drunkards, rederijkers indulged in heavy drinking themselves. These guildsmen were well aware of the need for moderation, but their regulations and literary texts go beyond moral didacticism and often reveal double layers and self-parody

Ecoso exchange newsletter 2/5; Aug. 1989

In this Issue: Pages: 1. Cluster and Connect - The Nunawading Energy Study 3. 2020. A Sustainable Healthy Futures 4. Question of Greenhouse - Public Health Association 5. Rainbow Sustainable Society Seminar - Two Scenarios 5. Obstacles to Urban Reform (Talk at Rainbow Seminar) 5. Rainbow Day of Action 6. Traffic Calming (Report by a Brisbane Action Group) 6. Local Democracy at Work (A New Video) 7. New Left Party - Ideas on Sustainable Societies 9. Franchise Child Care - A Warning from USA 9. Victorian Public Library and D.A.T.E. 9. Subscription Form for New Subscribers 10. A Government Glossy - "Housing for All" 10. Melbourne in Crisis - Public Forums 10. Olympic Games and the Multi-Functional Polis (MFP) 10. Mark August 20th in Your Diary Now! 11. Olympics and Economics, Ecology, Employment, and Equit

First Cross-cutting Plan for the Conviviality and Prevention of Violent Radicalisation in the City of Malaga 2017-2020

El objetivo primordial de este Plan es desarrollar una serie de investigaciones, prácticas y acciones que favorezcan la cohesión social, mejoren la convivencia y el respeto a la libertad religiosa y de culto y eviten la marginalización y el radicalismo violento

Understanding Concerns about Community Relations in Calderdale

•This study examined attitudes and dispositions towards greater ethnic and religious diversity, as well as community relations more generally, among residents of predominantly white British neighbourhoods. It also examined people’s attitudes and responses to anti-minority protest by groups like the English Defence League (EDL)and towards cohesion policy and practices. A mixed methods design was used combining a (non-representative) household survey (n=212) in three selected research sites (Illingworth, Sowerby Bridge and Todmorden) with eight key informant interviews (across key institutions) and nine focus group discussions (across age-ranges and localities) with local people

Violence and Democracy in Colombia: The Conviviality of Citizenship Defects in Colombia’s Nation-State

This essay aims to utilize the concept of conviviality for connecting the coexistence of seemingly contradictory phenomena in Colombia. It argues that while conviviality implies a normative content – a society in which members do not slaughter each other is better than one in which members resort to violence – the meekness of that normative claim suggests that it is better used as an analytical tool that seeks to connect the contradictions that coexist in the real lifeworld. Colombia’s history of violence and democracy is such a contradictory case. Comparativists have situated Colombia’s deficits on the “extra-institutional playing field”, lamenting that it is a “besieged” or “threatened democracy”. Conviviality helps us to specify these “extra-institutional” defects by suggesting impediments exogenous and endogenous to the state-building logic of the Colombian nation-state

GREEN REPUBLICANISM AS A NON-NEUTRAL AND CONVIVIAL POLITICS

O republicanismo verde pode ser descrito como um ramo da teoria política republicana que visa promover o florescimento humano garantindo uma república não dominadora e ecologicamente sustentável. Expandindo a ideia republicana de interdependência social à natureza, torna-se uma teoria em que a autonomia se exerce dentro dessas interdependências, devendo ser protegida e promovida. Como tal, o republicanismo verde concentra-se em afastar-se da atual situação de insustentabilidade ecológica enquanto protege a liberdade como não-dominação. Neste artigo, ofereço uma justificação republicana verde para a não-neutralidade, se bem que permanecendo não-perfecionista. Continuo argumentando que participação e deliberação são essenciais na definição das políticas concretas que devem guiar o republicanismo verde. Para isso, analiso a ideia de convivialidade e defendo que o republicanismo verde é a teoria política mais bem posicionada para assegurar os objetivos deste conceito: permitir que os indivíduos confrontem pontos de vista e cooperem, reconhecendo a finitude dos recursos naturais do planeta.Green republicanism can be described as a subset of republican political theory that aims to promote human flourishing by ensuring a non-dominating and ecologically sustainable republic. It expands the republican idea of social interdependence with the natural world, and therefore requires promoting and protecting the autonomy within those interdependencies. As such, green republicanism will focus on moving away from the current situation of ecological unsustainability while protecting freedom as non-domination. In this article, I offer a green republican justification for non-neutrality while remaining non-perfectionist. Furthermore, I argue that participation and deliberation is essential in defining the concrete politics that should guide green republicanism. To do so I examine the idea of conviviality and argue that green republicanism is the political theory best placed to ensure the objective of conviviality: it allows individuals to confront their views and to cooperate, acknowledging the finitude of the planet’s natural resources