Digital activism and the political culture of trade unionism

The place of digital activism in relation to trade unionism is a crucial area of concern at a time when conditions of work, and the ability to protect workers' rights, have been transformed by a congruence of technological developments, neoliberal ideology and rising corporate power. In this brief essay, we situate digital activism in the context of the political cultures of trade unionism, highlighting in particular three fundamental divisions that have marked their development: 1) reform vs. revolution; 2) internationalism vs. nationalism; and 3) the relationship with political parties and business. Whilst this has meant that there have been elements of conflict and factional alliances within the labour movement, the dominant form of trade unionism, certainly in Europe and North America, advanced a position based on a corporatist model rooted in hierarchical structures, centralized control and formal routes of negotiation, most notably through collective bargaining agreements, and often centred on a strong sense of national identity. Digital activism and the uprisings of recent years have pointed to the possibilities for wider, societal and more militant forms of resistance to emerge that have also been reflected in changes in the labour movement. Only by integrating digital activism as part of more horizontal worker-driven forms of organization and articulating an alternative vision of society (including the organization of technology) in alliance with other communities and social movements, can the labour movement start to rise to the challenges of the current crises facing the world system

Digital activism and Hungarian media reform: The case of Milla

This article examines the rise of the Internet-based opposition group, One Million for the Freedom of the Press in Hungary (or Milla for short), and considers its impact as a form of digital activism in Hungarian political culture. Milla was founded in December 2010 as a Facebook group in response to the newly elected Fidesz government and its fundamental revision of the Hungarian constitution and, in particular, its media laws. Milla is a civil society group, based in Budapest, who saw the Fidesz government as a threat to the democratic freedoms set out in the post-communist settlement in Hungary. It emerged at a time when the mainstream Hungarian opposition parties were in disarray, and it took on the role of challenging the legitimacy of Fidesz actions. Milla is an important example of the idea of digital activism and virtual solidarity, and its experiences serve to illustrate many of the strengths and weaknesses of these notions. The article sets out the ways in which Milla has sought to generate support for itself and opposition to the government, how it has organized its activities and ultimately the specific problems that it faces in Hungarian civil society

Fractional quantum numbers via complex orbifolds

This paper studies both the conductance and charge transport on 2D orbifolds in a strong magnetic field. We consider a family of Landau Hamiltonians on a complex, compact 2D orbifold Y that are parametrised by the Jacobian torus J(Y) of Y. We calculate the degree of the associated stable holomorphic spectral orbibundles when the magnetic field B is large and obtain fractional quantum numbers as the conductance and a refined analysis also gives the charge transport. A key tool studied here is a nontrivial generalisation of the Nahm transform to 2D orbifolds

Every Day I Write the Book

The article examines the concept of geoculture understood as a form of dominant ideology in the twenty-first century. It situates this in the context of the attempt by conservative and liberal elites in the core states to frame a coherent understanding of the post-Cold War world with which to guide, justify, and legitimize policies and actions. The dominant geoculture has come to be framed by two contrasting grand narratives which establish a framework for legitimate intra-elite debate and understanding of the post-Cold War era: Neoliberalism and the Clash of Civilizations. The significance of these two intra-elite grand narratives is that they represent a break with what Wallerstein has called “centrist liberalism,” which has tended to dominate the geoculture of the modern world-system

Conditions of smoothness of moduli spaces of flat connections and of character varieties

We use gauge theoretic and algebraic methods to examine sufficient conditions for smooth points on the moduli space of flat connections on a compact manifold and on the character variety of a finitely generated and presented group. We give a complete proof of the slice theorem for the action of the group of gauge transformations on the space of flat connections. Consequently, the slice is smooth if the second cohomology of the manifold with coefficients in the semisimple part of the adjoint bundle vanishes. On the other hand, we find that the smoothness of the slice for the character variety of a finitely generated and presented group depends not only on the second group cohomology but also on the relation module of the presentation. However, when there is a single relator or if there is no relation among the relators in the presentation, our condition reduces to the minimality of the second group cohomology. This is also verified using Fox calculus. Finally, we compare the conditions of smoothness in the two approaches

Aristophanes' Critique of Philosophic Wisdom in Clouds, Women at the Thesmophoria and Frogs:

Thesis advisor: Robert C. BartlettThis dissertation seeks to understand Aristophanes’ critique of philosophic wisdom in three of his comedies: Clouds (423 BC), Women at the Thesmophoria (411 BC) and Frogs (405 BC). Written over the politically turbulent period of the Peloponnesian war (434-404 BC), these comedies navigate a generational conflict between conservative defenders of Athens’s customs, laws and gods and the younger generation influenced by the atheistic teachings of the sophists. This dissertation seeks to contribute to our understanding of Aristophanes’ critique by comparing his presentation of Socrates with that of Euripides, a tragedian who ingenuously fuses poetry with the new sophistic teaching. The first chapter considers Aristophanes’ representation of Socrates in Clouds as the sophist par excellence who replaces the gods of the city with natural causes, and respect for the city’s laws with rhetoric. Although the comedy looks like a conservative defense of traditional morality against the corrupting effects of philosophic novelty, the grounds of Aristophanes’ attack on Socrates are anything but clear. As Aristophanes’ depiction of the Clouds (strange airy deities worshipped by poets and sophists alike) shows, Socrates’ destruction at the end of the play occurs not because what Socrates teaches is false, but because his political isolation blinds him to the city’s demands and makes him vulnerable to persecution. Socrates’ failure in Clouds establishes the basis for considering Euripides’ (partially) successful confrontation with the city in Women at the Thesmophoria. The second chapter assesses the extent to which this hybrid of tragedian and sophist can be harmonized with the needs of the city without compromising his own integrity as a poet whose power lies in his psychologically accurate depictions of human nature. Aristophanes thus points to the superiority of Euripides the poet over Socrates the philosopher, at the same time as he exposes Euripides’ limitations. In Frogs, Aristophanes raises the stakes by pitting Euripides against another giant of tragedy, Aeschylus, in the Thunderdome of Hades with the god of the theatre, Dionysus, as judge. The comedy thus compares the two greatest poetic representatives of the generational conflict between conservative and sophist, old and new, common good and individual good, deciding at the last second in favor of Aeschylus. The chapter argues that Euripides fails because he cannot provide a sufficient political defense of his tragedy at the moment in which Athens faces imminent destruction at the hands of the Spartans. The conclusion reflects on Aristophanes’ implicit claim to teach justice and the good through comedy’s capacity to mediate between the demands of the city, on the one hand, and the insights on human nature afforded by philosophy, on the other.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Political Science

Transmission and Commoditisation of Medicinal Plant Knowledge in the Marketplaces of Oruro, Bolivia

This thesis analyses how Andean people’s knowledge of medicinal plants and the relationship between environment and health is represented, transmitted and commoditised in the marketplaces of the department of Oruro, Bolivia. Considering the increase in urban population and their dependence on marketplaces for medicinal plant remedies, this thesis examines the role of marketplaces and the importance of specialist stallholders in the transmission of knowledge. The central research site of Oruro is a multi-cultural city located on the Andean plateau in southwest Bolivia, a population of Spanish, Quechua and Aymara speakers with a pluralistic medical system. Fieldwork was carried out over 18 months with market stallholders in Oruro combining quantitative and qualitative methods with ethnographic documentation of knowledge transmission events. This thesis found that medicinal plant marketplaces in Oruro are highly regulated social systems that incorporate Andean socio-economic mechanisms, including ritual performance for the transmission of cultural knowledge, and the regulation of resource distribution and use. The development of a ‘chemical landscape’ model demonstrated that social exchange and trade between ecosystems and altitudinal zones broadens the spectrum of medicinal compounds available, contributes to the complexity of herbal mixtures and can limit exploitation of local plant populations. The market stallholders use specialist classifications that identify chemical properties, toxicity and variations between plant species and ecological regions. Plant classifications varied with the context and location in which they were used, and humoral classification enabled the selection and combination of plants in mixtures and justified remedy efficacy for specialists and non-specialists. Andean cultural beliefs including complementary opposites enabled transmission of knowledge on the medicinal properties of plants between highland consumers and lowland producers, and defined traditional Andean mixture efficacy. These findings demonstrate that, although state intervention and identity politics are redefining perceptions of medicinal knowledge, the market exchange system centred in Oruro city creates localised specialist knowledge and continuity of cultural knowledge transmission

Action of the mapping class group on character varieties and Higgs bundles

We consider the action of a finite subgroup of the mapping class group \Mod(S) of an oriented compact surface $S$ of genus $g \geq 2$ on the moduli space \calR(S,G) of representations of $\pi_1(S)$ in a connected semisimple real Lie group $G$. Kerckhoff's solution of the Nielsen realization problem ensures the existence of an element $J$ in the Teichm\"uller space of $S$ for which $\Gamma$ can be realised as a subgroup of the group of automorphisms of $X=(S,J)$ which are holomorphic or antiholomorphic. We identify the fixed points of the action of $\Gamma$ on \calR(S,G) in terms of $G$-Higgs bundles on $X$ equipped with a certain twisted $\Gamma$-equivariant structure, where the twisting involves abelian and non-abelian group cohomology simultaneously. These, in turn, correspond to certain representations of the orbifold fundamental group. When the kernel of the isotropy representation of the maximal compact subgroup of $G$ is trivial, the fixed points can be described in terms of familiar objects on $Y=X/\Gamma^+$, where $\Gamma^+ \subset \Gamma$ is the maximal subgroup of $\Gamma$ consisting of holomorphic automorphisms of $X$. If $\Gamma=\Gamma^+$ one obtains actual $\Gamma$-equivariant $G$-Higgs bundles on $X$, which in turn correspond with parabolic Higgs bundles on $Y=X/\Gamma$ (this generalizes work of Nasatyr \& Steer for G=\SL(2,\R) and Boden, Andersen \& Grove and Furuta \& Steer for G=\SU(n)). If on the other hand $\Gamma$ has antiholomorphic automorphisms, the objects on $Y=X/\Gamma^+$ correspond with pseudoreal parabolic Higgs bundles. This is a generalization in the parabolic setup of the pseudoreal Higgs bundles studied by the first author in collaboration with Biswas \& Hurtubise

The reverse Yang-Mills-Higgs flow in a neighbourhood of a critical point

The main result of this paper is a construction of solutions to the reverse Yang-Mills-Higgs flow converging in the smooth topology to a critical point. The construction uses only the complex gauge group action, which leads to an algebraic classification of the isomorphism classes of points in the unstable set of a critical point in terms of a filtration of the underlying Higgs bundle. Analysing the compatibility of this filtration with the Harder-Narasimhan-Seshadri double filtration gives an algebraic criterion for two critical points to be connected by a flow line. As an application, we can use this to construct Hecke modifications of Higgs bundles via the Yang-Mills-Higgs flow. When the Higgs field is zero (corresponding to the Yang-Mills flow), this criterion has a geometric interpretation in terms of secant varieties of the projectivisation of the underlying bundle inside the unstable manifold of a critical point, which gives a precise description of broken and unbroken flow lines connecting two critical points. For non-zero Higgs field, at generic critical points the analogous interpretation involves the secant varieties of the spectral curve of the Higgs bundle