Practices of solidarity in Athens: reconfigurations of public space and urban citizenship

The multi-faceted crisis that has hit Greece and other (southern) European countries has had severe consequences on people’s everyday lives. In an attempt to cope with, but also resist, dramatic changes in lifestyles, incomes and welfare, several initiatives have sprung up all over the country at many different scales, with diverse targets, varying actors and outcomes. Many people have abandoned their privacy to participate in public actions of solidarity, in initiatives that often involve new or alternative uses of urban space. It seems that practices of solidarity and claims around material spaces are becoming an important ‘laboratory’ for shaping a different public sphere. Drawing from relevant examples in Athens, the paper aims to reflect on the ways in which such practices and claims arise and develop; how different types of rights and forms of doing politics are enacted in situations of crisis and deprivation; and finally how such practices reconfigure public space and shape notions of belonging, which ultimately (re)define urban citizenshi

Classifying Like a State: Land Dispossession on Eastern Crete’s Contested Mountains

Despite the widespread attention to capital investments in land and property around the globe, the active re-regulating role of the neoliberal state in processes of “accumulation by dispossession” remains underexplored. Through an in-depth look at the dispossession of highly fragmented and loosely regulated private land for windfarm investments on Crete’s eastern corner, Sitia, this paper re-affirms the political nature of the forcible appropriation of land for large-scale investments; dissects the specific mechanisms in which the state dispossesses land on behalf of investors and promotes the forcible appropriation of land from below; and problematises the dialectic relationship of both rupture and continuity between crisis and inherited, path-dependent relations embedded in land. The transformation of Sitia’s loosely regulated, informal relations on land is made possible through the mobilisation of the state’s bureaucratic and normalising powers, which redefine the concept of forest and dispossess through classifying land as such

A new approach to migration: communities on the move as assets

The aim of this article (opening the special issue) is to examine the impact of migration on a specific set of issues at the regional level: innovation, entrepreneurship and economic performance. In particular, we look at migration through a new lens of analysis, which we have termed the “Communities-on-the-Move (CoM)” approach. In a nutshell, this approach focuses on migrant communities, emerging from the capacity of specific national/regional groups to carry the heritage of their social capital when moving from one place to another. More precisely, the CoM approach focuses on the social capital migrants can rely on to “bond” their in-group relations and to “bridge” with extra-group ones during the migration process. The CoM approach represents a different, though complementary approach to the analysis of diasporas in the migration literature. Indeed, CoM relates to diasporas similarly to how “clustering effects” relate to “networking activities” in the regional economics of innovation literature. CoM approach takes account of the local effects such communities generate in the localities they are embedded in (“clustering effect”), while the related ‘diaspora communities concept’ captures the non-local “networking activities” that connect ethnic communities across the world. As we will also maintain in the following, through this specificity the CoM approach is likely to capture a significant impact on innovation, entrepreneurship and economic performance, which would remain otherwise hidden by using more standard approaches to migration

The gendered impact of the financial crisis:Struggles over social reproduction in Greece

The global financial crisis has triggered a dramatic transformation of employment in the weakest Eurozone economies. This is evidenced in deteriorating work conditions, limited employee negotiating power, low pay, zero-hours contracts and, most importantly, periods of prolonged unemployment for most of the working population, especially women. We offer a critical analysis of the boundaries of formal and informal, paid and unpaid, productive and reproductive work, and explore how austerity policies implemented in Greece in the aftermath of the global financial crisis have transformed women’s everyday lives. In contributing to critical discussions of neoliberal capitalism and recent feminist geography studies, our empirical study focuses on how women’s struggles over social reproduction unfold in the public and private spheres. It proposes that women’s temporary retreat to unpaid work at home constitutes a form of resistance to intensifying precarisation, and, at times, contributes to the emergence of new collective forms of reproduction.</p

Family as a eudaimonic bubble:women entrepreneurs mobilizing resources of care during persistent financial crisis and austerity

Drawing on the conceptualization of family as a eudaimonic bubble the study explores how women entrepreneurs mobilize familial resources to navigate the gendered challenges faced during persistent financial crisis and austerity in Greece, a country affected by acute socio‐economic crisis. Through qualitative interviews with women who started their own business during the financial crisis it investigates how the allocation of resources and opportunities built on care enabled women to start and sustain their own business and achieve a degree of normative conformity, creating social cohesion in the here and now. The analysis reveals the transformational potential of familial care by illustrating three modes of resources of care that contribute to business viability, and positions the family, an organizing principle, in the centre of research on gendered mobilizations in crisis economies. In that way the study critically contributes to debates regarding gender, entrepreneurship, and austerity

Strange homelands: encountering the migrant on the contemporary Greek stage

This article examines three examples from recent Greek theatre which stage experiences of migrants and refugees against the backdrop of Greece’s growing internationalism and multiculturalism. In allowing migrants to author their own narratives of border-crossing and encountering their new “homeland”, those theatrical endeavours, I argue, attempt to break the monologism of Greek theatre and monolithic understandings of national identity thus opening up spaces for encountering diverse voices. In acknowledging the risks and tensions underpinning the migrant’s presence on stage, the article also applies pressure to questions of encounter, authenticity, representation and self-expression of migratory subjects and interrogates some ways in which they navigate their precarious space of belonging and author themselves in the context of contemporary Greek theatre

Mobility and Migrations in the Rural Areas of Mediterranean EU Countries

AbstractThis chapter focuses on the ambivalent nature of contemporary migrations in European rural areas. The growing presence of immigrants in these areas is a direct result of the restructuring of agriculture and global agri-food chains. Evidence indicates that while agricultural work and rural settings are decreasingly attractive to local populations, they represent a favourable environment to international newcomers, due to the higher chances to access livelihood resources. The non-visibility and informality that characterise rural settings and agricultural work arrangements provide on the one side opportunities for employment, while also fostering illegal labour practices and situations of harsh exploitation