Leisure activism and engaged ethnography: heterogeneous voices and the urban palimpsest

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Studying the conflictualities between leisure activism, understood as participation in events of dissent as a nonwork-based activity, and those tasked with ‘maintaining order’, requires techniques that can work with diverse voices and contesting world views. However, many of the methods familiar to us in the social sciences risk reinforcing relationships of power that can undermine such inquiry. Drawing on the conceptual work of scholars from the global south and the global north, we examine approaches to protests as event, the construction of urban space and the performativity of violence, in two democracies: Brazil and the UK. From that we were led to conclude such research requires a less canonical approach. It is through the adoption of a more engaged ethnography, one that establishes horizontal relations between researchers and participants that are drawn from backgrounds reflecting such conflictualities, combined with an understanding of the process of research as more like that of an event, that the diversity of the heterogeneous voices associated with dissent, within an urban palimpsest, can be heard

Disentangling Referendums and Direct Democracy: A Defence of the Systemic Approach to Popular Vote Processes

What is the relationship between referendum and initiative processes and democracy? The dominant understanding is that these popular vote processes are institutions associated with a model of direct democracy that stands in opposition to representative democracy. However, this pervasive approach is rarely justified and appears to limit the study of popular vote processes by focusing on implausible ideals, obscuring that many democratic institutions face similar challenges, and encouraging overgeneralising claims that neglect institutional variation in referendum and initiative processes. Previous criticisms of the association of popular vote processes with direct democracy have failed to clearly articulate an alternative. We trace the emergence of a democratic systems approach to popular vote processes and argue that it provides a better conceptual framework to empirically study and normatively discuss these processes

Fragments of an anti-fascist geography: interrogating racism, nationalism, and state power.

Extensive research exists in geography concerning racism and nationalism, yet there has been surprisingly little written on the far right, and even less on their anti‐fascist opponents. In the context of a resurgent far right, this paper draws together disparate work on this topic within geography to investigate the possibilities for the development of anti‐fascist geographies. While fascism and anti‐fascism have been chronically under‐researched in geography, I argue that there remains an insightful body of research in existence and that geographers are well positioned to undertake substantial work on the subject. Three connecting dimensions of an anti‐fascist geography are identified, namely, investigating not only racism but also the more‐than‐racist dimensions of the far right; their intersections with one another; and the development of anti‐fascist rationalities in geographical scholarship. Through this discussion, I suggest that the field of anarchist geographies offers a useful framework for these tasks, not only for empirical study but also for developing agendas to embed anti‐fascist principles into academic practices. By focusing in on the spatialities of far right and anti‐fascist politics, political geographers can position themselves at the forefront of this important area of work